DIY publishing?

With the convenience of Internet access, many journalists nowadays have their own self-published venue; for example, Clive Thompson, a writer for the New York Times Magazine who mainly discusses topics like technology, science and culture, has a blog that allows him to further dive in his researched fields. Likewise, DIY publishing ventures not only allows one to explore one’s interests, but it also opens one’s fields of researches, which are especially useful to journalists, who usually stay within one beat for long periods of time.

If I were to start my own publishing venue, I would use it to complete my lifetime dream: reporting human stories for developing countries. Presently, we understand the developing world as a general picture of sufferings – hunger, thin children, disease, war – or meaningless lists of statistics. Since these incidents occur on the other side of the world, they, somehow, seem unrealistic to us and could trigger nothing but a flash of pity at these images or stories.






Although I do not wish to convert my readers into activists, I want to paint them a human picture in order to instil a greater emotional element and to prove to them that these incidents are not unrealistic despite the distance between us: these people are also human like you and I, their sufferings are not less real because misfortunes surround them daily, and, like us, they also hope to step out of their living situations.

That being said, putting more feature-length profiles into our current news outlets would help attach the human face upon these global phenomenons. Though current newspapers also tackle the softer sides of these issues, such as adding the anecdotal twist on the India organ trade stories, their emphasis remain on the event itself instead of the people involved. By inserting these emotional stories, not only can we paint a more vivid picture for the readers, but can also draw the readers closer to the issues.

image from google images