A CONVERSATION WITH LEDA HARTMAN - ASSIGNMENT EDITOR of WORLD VISION REPORT
Conversation from Summer 2006 with NPR Liaison to Independent Producers, Paul Ingles

This is the third of a three part series spotlighting three U.S. reporting outlets that are keenly interested in reporting that crosses international borders. Stories that find that local/global connection and/or stories that bring listeners ears into other countries.

Remember that as NPR Liaison to Independent Producers, I'm available for questions about pitches, possible outlets for stories, or general advice about maneuvering through the public radio landscape. E-mail first please: paul@paulingles.com

LEDA HARTMAN

Who produces the World Vision Report?

The World Vision Report is sponsored by a Christian humanitarian group called World Vision, which is the world's largest privately funded non-governmental organization. There is no editorial control that the World Vision organization exercises over the World Vision Report - there is a good firewall between the sponsoring organization and the news program. The news program is produced by a staff of about a dozen of us, many of whom have come from public radio or the BBC. Our host, Peggy Wehmeyer, comes from ABC. She was the religion reporter for ten years working with Peter Jennings. So we are a veteran, cosmopolitan news staff with people in many parts of the country.

How is the program financed?

Right now the show is funded completely by the World Vision NGO. It raises its money from donors. In my mind, this is not unlike how the Christian Science Monitor is funded - and the Christian Science Monitor is a pretty fine news product. So to me, there's a real parallel there. We are also now just starting an effort to apply for foundation money for specific projects, to diversify our funding. Keep in mind that our show is only about three years old so we're still developing our funding base and working on marketing. And we're still re-evaluating the show and improving it weekly.

So you generate a half-hour weekly show and a daily module program?

We are primarily a half-hour weekly show. It's up to each station when they air it but we gear our production to be aired on the weekend - either Saturday or Sunday. A good number of those stations carry the half-hour show but a great many more carry a two-minute host wrap that is compressed from a full-length feature that is on one of our half-hour shows. What we are intent on marketing to public radio is our half-hour weekly show.

Tell me what the typical program consists of?

Our theme is to cover poverty and justice issues worldwide, with a particular emphasis on the developing world. We cover those issues with a very particular approach, which is to get at this through the personal stories of ordinary people on the ground, rather than talking to policy wonks or officials or politicians, necessarily. We try to address larger issues by looking at personal stories and profiling communities, that sort of thing. So it's not your usual breaking news story.

We try to give our stories a particular flavor with a lot of human depth and storytelling. Our stories are sound-rich, a lot of scenes in there, and we want listeners to feel like they're there, on the ground with the reporter. In terms of what we would get in a typical news show, we have your typical feature, with ACTS, TRAX and NAT SOUND. But we also have more creative segments that are sort of outside the box of that conventional format. We have "Day in the Life" stories where we shadow any kind of ordinary person in a remarkable situation, for a morning or an afternoon or an entire day. For example, reporter Suzanne Marmion spent 24 hours with a family in Malawi that is so poor that they live on a dollar a day - the whole family. So that's a "day in the life" piece.

Then we have trackless children's segments, where we have 60 to 90 seconds of children from around the world just talking about their lives and their situations. For example, we had a children's segment featuring a 13-year-old girl who was selling corn cakes outside the airport in Monrovia, Liberia, to finance her schooling. She's in the third grade. And her goal was to be "a good girl for her family," that's what she said.

We also do "Reporter's Notebooks," which are really wonderful because they offer listeners a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what it's like to do this kind of work. One example is a piece from a reporter in Kabul, Afghanistan, Will Everett. He was eating lunch in a restaurant and he saw a woman begging for food from the people eating lunch there. She was wearing a burkha, so he couldn't even see her face. But he felt so badly for her situation that he ordered special dishes for her, to-go, so that she could take them out. It turned out that her husband had been injured in some of the violence they've had there and they had many mouths to feed, so that's why she was begging. She accepted the food, almost wordlessly. Her only communication was crying. She was about to leave when she realized she had forgotten her own bag of food scraps that she had already collected by begging before. She went back for that, that's how much she needed the food. So we have these moving personal accounts from reporters who've experienced some remarkable things.

And we also try to do music segments too, from musicians who come from countries that are facing certain challenges. We look at what their music can say about the cultures where they come from and the challenges there. We also do occasional soundscapes.

How would you say that this construct for a program is meant to impact listeners?

By approaching stories this way, we're hoping to get beyond and behind policy. We want to look at how policy affects people's real lives where they live. In doing so, of course, we'd hope to illuminate these issues for listeners and also to instill in them a sense of compassion and understanding and empathy, perhaps, that they might not have had before - if, for example, they hadn't gotten to know the family in Malawi who's living on a dollar a day or the 13 year old girl who's selling corn cakes to pay her way through school. We don't issue a call for action to listeners in any way - any more than any other news program would. But we do also, in our show, focus on solutions. We have a segment called "The Power of One," which is a profile of someone who is thinking globally and acting locally, so to speak. Somebody who is doing whatever they can, in their own small way, to make the world a better place. We very often have interviews with people who do good work because they're motivated to, whether through faith or any other reason. We have segments that emphasize positive action and could be used as examples for people who are helping themselves and each other.

Is it important for the reporter and the show to contextualize the typical vignette in a set-up that does hint at the policy that's the catalyst for the story?

Exactly. We try to look at the microcosm to address what's happening in the macrocosm.

And you anchor the piece in a basic understanding of the macrocosm before you take listeners there?

Yes. We definitely provide a framework and context so that people can understand why this personal story took place. And what the larger picture is behind the people that we're profiling. Recently we ran a story by reporter Prue Clarke on rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - rape used as a weapon of war. Within that, we give the context of the warring factions who have been at each other for 15 or 20 years and why women were victimized especially in this way - and what is being done to help them. And whether the upcoming elections can offer some stability in the country, so that you won't see this kind of epidemic of rape happening again in the future. So yes, we definitely try to give the larger picture around the personal story to make the issue accessible to listeners.

I would imagine that your biggest challenge is to find skilled reporters in far-off places. Tell me a little bit about that.

First of all, I have to say that I have tremendous admiration for reporters who are working under such difficult circumstances. Oftentimes people are operating in areas where there is such little infrastructure. There's no internet cafe. There maybe isn't even a proper road. It might be a dangerous war-torn area. Those people are really serving the cause of journalism in the highest way. I have nothing but the highest respect and gratitude for what they do.

Secondly, because the areas that we tend to be most interested in are those developing nations without much infrastructure and without, perhaps, the kind of education or professional resources as a "first world" country, it's harder to find skilled free-lancers who can do the high level of work that a show like this calls for. We work with stringers who file for NPR, PRI, the CBC, the BBC, the ABC in Australia, the Voice of America, all of those outlets. But in some parts of the world, finding good people is really a challenge.

Especially in Africa. There are some excellent stringers in Africa and some of my favorites work in Zimbabwe, where the conditions are so dangerous because they virtually operate in a police state. And they have to file under fake names and they have to operate under conditions where they often have to work under cover. I admire them tremendously. These are African reporters who could work elsewhere. But they choose to stay in a country where it's so difficult to operate. They could be jailed or tortured or killed at any point for the slightest misstep. But they choose to stay there and work so the story of their country gets out, so the rest of the world knows what's happening there. So in Africa, especially, we always have more story ideas that we want to do than we have reporters who can do them. So I'm constantly looking for good folks who can operate out of there.

Another area where we have lots of stories and could always use more reporters is Latin America - and, of course, the war zones of the Middle East. We just work real hard to give them all the support that they need. Having been a free-lancer myself for eight years working for NPR and PRI programs, I have a good understanding of what a reporter needs to do their work well and to be supported and to be understood. We try to bring out the best in a reporter so that they do really high quality work, and at the same time we let them know how grateful we are for that work and we support them the best that we can.

I would gather, then, if you're speaking to independent reporters based here in the U.S. who might be traveling overseas to keep World Vision Report in mind as a possible outlet for their material.

Exactly. And although our focus is international, we definitely do domestic stories. Those can be some really excellent stories. Last year we did a 5-part series on rural poverty in the U.S. because it turns out that 90% of the poorest counties in this country are very rural. What we did was go to the five poorest sections of the country where poverty was endemic and had been there for years. We profiled communities in each of those five areas and explained why things were they way they were and whether there were any possible solutions for making things better on the horizon. That series was a finalist for a national award.

Another domestic story that we liked a lot was a profile by reporter Cathy Duchamp of this retired guy in Seattle who made it his avocation to collect furniture, fix it up, and then give it to immigrant families for free. And in the course of doing that, he established long-term friendships with them. So it was a really beautiful story about someone who was just trying to help and he wound up getting riches he didn't anticipate getting. So stories like that. The bar's a little higher for domestic stories but we'd definitely be open to getting those pitches too.

Why do you like working with World Vision Report?

I love this work. I like it because, being a reporter, I like relating with other reporters. There's kind of a natural camaraderie and sense of being in the trenches together. I love the intellectual stimulation and just helping people do their best. It's a very rewarding feeling - it's satisfying to help other people get what they need to do the work that they love. The other thing is that these stories are fascinating. You hear stories on our program that you wouldn't normally hear on your typical hard news show because we don't do hard or breaking news most of the time - the tsunami in Indonesia, the earthquake in Pakistan and Hurricane Katrina being obvious exceptions. Instead, we get that local flavor of what it's really like to be there and live somewhere. To me, it's like armchair traveling. It's just fascinating.

And working with reporters all around the world, you really get a sense of what things were like. Like my guy in Zimbabwe, he was dealing with a power outage one day, and another day he couldn't have a shower because the water was out. He couldn't go to that interview he'd planned one time because it was too dangerous - there were policemen on the street and he couldn't be seen interviewing anybody. You really get a window onto the world in a different way. And for me it's been an education and a way to make really positive and professional friendships.

I feel like the show is really complementary to the public radio shows that are out there now. It's adding a different texture and a different emphasis that doesn't really duplicate what's already out there.

I understand you're starting a new initiative to get more carriage among public radio stations outside of the Christian network that the show is currently on.

This is a great thing. We feel that our show is a natural for public radio - it's really a public radio kind of animal. At this point we have carriage on several hundred Christian stations. The World Vision organization and certainly the staff of the World Vision Report recognize that it's a natural for public radio. We use the same reporters - people like Miranda Kennedy, Janet Heimlich, Josh Levs, Michael Kavanagh. We have the same sensibility, we certainly have the same high standards and production values and approach to content. So we recently hired a marketer named Sue Shepherd, who was the marketer for Living on Earth, and she is handling our marketing campaign for public radio right now. So far, after just a few months, we've been picked up by two public radio stations. One is the community station in Bend, Oregon and the other is the secondary station of KUOW in Seattle - KXOT. We are feeling like this is the beginning of expanding our carriage in public radio.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

The World Vision Report is a nationally broadcast, half-hour weekly radio program that focuses on issues of poverty and social justice worldwide. We are particularly interested in reports from the developing world but we'll consider reports on related topics from the U.S. and other developed countries. The program is funded by World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization. The program does not focus on issues of faith, but highlights them where it's relevant, and seeks to cover every issue in an unbiased way that upholds the highest journalistic standards. We do not promote the World Vision organization on the program in any way. We are looking for in-depth sound-rich features (BBC or NPR style) that use ordinary people's personal stories to highlight a variety of issues -- including poverty, human rights, refugee situations, immigration, social justice, environmental justice, health care and economic development.

We also welcome:

* Reporter's notebooks -- behind-the-scenes essays on a notable experience you had while covering a story;

* 'Power of one' stories -- profiles of individuals who are making a positive difference, on a scale large or small;

* 'Day in the life' stories -- profiles of ordinary people in extraordinary situations;

* Children's segments -- 60-90 seconds of audio from a child in a challenging or remarkable situation.

We pay $450 for a 3-4 minute piece; $650 for a 4-6 minute piece; $750 for pieces over 6 minutes. We also pay travel expenses, as long as they're approved in advance. We are interested in stories that you may have filed for other news outlets. It's also fine with us for you to re-sell story ideas that we've generated, as long as we get first airing rights.

Pitch: If you're pitching for the first time, please tell me about your experience, what you are doing now, and whether you have the ability to digitally edit sound files and send them by FTP or other means over the Internet.

Also - very important - please send me some audio samples of your work, either by email or audio links. For archives, visit our web site at http://www.worldvisionreport.org/ and click on Archives.

For story pitches, contact: Leda Hartman, Assignment Editor ledahart@mindspring.com: 919-542-0008.