I wanted to add a little bit to my last post, Reporting and Idealism. Katherine sent us one of Nicholas Kristof’s columns, “Save the Darfur Puppy,” at the beginning of the week to read for lecture. In it, Kristof cites a study that states people are more willing to donate to one suffering person than they are to many.
He continues:
Advocates for the poor often note that 30,000 children die daily of the consequences of poverty — presuming that this number will shock people into action. But the opposite is true: the more victims, the less compassion.
People are more willing to donate money when they read a story about an individual who is suffering than they are when they read statistics. In the article I linked to in the last post, “North Korea Won’t Be Liberated in a Day,” writer Mike Deri Smith retells what Sokeel Park, an analyst for Liberty in North Korea, a group that helps get refugees out of the country, told him when he asked what he could do to help sufferers in North Korean concentration camps:
Sokeel Park had told me to find one person and help them.
(Emphasis mine.) I think reporters tend to use this strategy when writing stories. At the Missourian, we publish a lot of ledes that focus on one person’s particular story before we get into the bigger theme, the multiple perspectives and the numbers.
So, hopefully, by using this technique we hold people’s attention to keep them interested in the things we report on.
Behind Blue Skies 