We need to do better when it comes to reporting on migration
While around the world, journalists are finding new perspectives for telling the migrant story from the inside, Australian journalism remains mired in the post-Tampa Canberra political news cycle.
“Why do we live in a van?” asks Romanian journalist Elena Stancu of her unusual now decade-long lifestyle choice. “So we can be journalists, doing the sort of journalism that matters, documenting long-term subjects that rarely attract funding… extreme poverty, racism, school dropout, prisons, domestic violence, hospitals — and emigration.”
It’s a response that’s part business model (how do we pay for journalism?) and part journalistic practice: how do journalists report the current wave of global mass movement of peoples from the outside in?
Stancu and her photographer partner Cosmin Bumbuț figured the only way they could report (and afford to report) the big inside story of the mass emigration of 20% of working-age Romanians was to join them on the road, living and working across Europe in a six-metre-long van.
Read more about Australian journalism’s attitude towards migration…
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