It has been much in the news that journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were detained and sentenced to 12 years of hard labour in North Korea. Much less discussed, however, is their network, an internet-TV hybrid called Current TV, and its citizen-oriented journalism.
About one-third of content consists of user-generated 'pods', short segments voted on by users and approved by station editors. The New York Times has compared the network to 'a cable channel dedicated to high-quality YouTube videos'.
Using small crews and small digital cameras, Ling - one of the first to join Vanguard Journalism, Current's division for global investigative reporting - and her colleagues have been able to penetrate deeper into both news zones and stories, from interviews with Malay pirates and Moroccan marijuana farmers to tagging along with a Las Vegas constable as he evicts 20 households a day in the wake of the US credit crash.
North Korea was hardly the first time Ling's coverage involved risk. After the Haitian government collapsed in 2005, the Taiwanese-American drove through Haiti's most violent slum, Cite de Soleil, a no-man's land UN peacekeeping forces were afraid to enter.
Though Ling has the on-camera cogency of any TV journalist, in the end she comes across as a citizen as much as a journalist. For a news reporter, she is relatively laid-back, and reporting tends to focus on human consequences of big-picture trends. The total package is easy to relate to, and both Ling and her network have in fact described it as part of their mission; they want to make global news more relevant to young viewers.
