Human Interest in the Global South: The Gemini News Service (1967–2002)

As a metaphor, Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ has seen better days.¹ During optimistic times, it succinctly conveyed the image of an ever more closely connected world in which people separated by vast distances could easily have a chat, as if across the garden fence or at the local pub. Nowadays, however, it is described at best as a pastoral front for enduring colonial power structures in the global media system, and at worst as inspired by colonial warfare.² Yet during the second half of the twentieth century, the villages of the world were central to journalistic projects that sought to change the colonial structure of the global media system.

Such alternative journalistic projects play a key role in my research, which is concerned with the ways in which media grappled with decolonization by proposing new models for relating to faraway, unknown people. The journalistic projects I focus on were part of a wider movement of alternative global media critique that took shape from the 1960s onwards.³ Its logic was representational. Much of what counted as world news came from cities and relied on male voices from the Global North, so a more balanced world required an increase in reports about—and by—groups that had been left out of focus: women and people in the Global South, especially its villages. Together, after all, these people constituted the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. The innovations in reporting I investigate were related to human rights discourses of the era, in that they emphasized equality and similarity over older modes of framing the faraway in terms of exoticism, difference, and suffering. In contrast to what was labelled ‘parachute reporting’, whereby Western correspondents only briefly paid attention to the Global South when natural disaster or war struck, it was felt that non-Western journalists should write about their own countries to provide a much richer and not merely negative image.⁴

The Gemini News Service

One of the alternative news organizations I investigate, the Gemini News Service, was based in London and operated from 1967 until 2002. It was set up by Fleet Street journalist and Commonwealth enthusiast Derek Ingram (1925–2018), who used his connections with reporters, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, to create a news agency that drew ‘unreported’ news stories from across the Commonwealth and supplied these to  newspapers in all of its corners. Gemini’s archives are based in London, at the Guardian News Media office, where the intrepid archival explorer can hope for a chance encounter with admired journalists and editors (or at least a dashing restaurant critic). The archives are much better preserved than those of other alternative news agencies (such as the Inter Press Service, founded in Rome in 1963) for the simple reason that almost until it stopped functioning in 2002, the agency only used paper. Correspondents mailed their stories and pictures to London, and twice a week, an envelope containing two feature stories was mailed to each of Gemini’s customers across the world. These customers numbered at least one hundred newspapers in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, North America, and Europe. Timelessness’,  as the journalists called it,  was a key aspect of the stories, which did not address current affairs but took a longer view—a necessary approach given that they had to travel first to London to be edited and then away from there again. Another reason Gemini’s archives are well preserved is that the agency, which generally operated under significant financial constraints, was acquired by the Guardian in the 1970s, and could from then on rely on its infrastructure.⁵

The articles, correspondence, and reporting manuals held at the Guardian News Media (GNM) archives show that Gemini saw itself as an agency mediating between the Global South and North (with a respectable Commonwealth/colonial hangover) by trying to ‘humanize’ the many people in the South who eluded the attention of the established media. Gemini editors and journalists tried several models for doing so, and from 1985 projects on rural reporting became a central avenue for giving a face to the Southern masses. Stories of the countryside became central to the alternative image of the world conveyed by Gemini to its subscribers (and which it hoped would gradually change that world for the better). Villages, it reasoned, were both the same and entirely idiosyncratic everywhere, providing a perfect mix of novelty and relatability, and so their ordinary course of life would be interesting to faraway readers. Additionally, Gemini argued, village reporting was key to spotting slow-moving but momentous trends in demographics, food production, environmental degradation, and economic development—provided reporters were trained to notice these.⁶

The Global Countryside

Rural reporting first involved Gemini sending its reporters to the countryside— emphasizing that hardly any journalists ever left their capital cities in case they needed to take notes when the president held a speech. Gemini paid correspondents in the Global South to visit villages in their own countries, staying for at least two months at a time, and reporting on what they learned. Correspondents were urged to avoid statements from aid workers and local authorities, and to focus on the views of villagers. Much of the correspondence between the London editor and village reporters was taken up with the hardships of travelling to rural areas, the lack of food encountered there, and mistrust from villagers. The editors’ practical advice ranged from encouraging a Chennai (then Madras) correspondent to bring her 4-month-old baby on her village assignment (‘[i]n a way her presence will help because villagers, especially women, accept you so much more easily then, and that’s half the battle’)⁷ to suggesting to another Chennai correspondent that his counterpart in Tanzania had been equally mistrusted by villagers and had won them over by volunteering ‘to teach a few classes at the local school (not that you have to go that far).’⁸

The exchange of practical advice and the writing of manuals for global rural reporting point to a tension at the heart of Gemini’s plans to diversify journalism—globally. Trying to write about so many places meant that individual villages around the world could end up looking the same. As soon as the rural reporting programme kicked off, one white Canadian editor began complaining to correspondents and warning them that many stories coming in from all corners of the earth nevertheless covered the same topics, such as alcoholism and the plight of women, as well as traditional healers: ‘. . . so far everyone has wanted to write at least one story about the local medicine man. Please don’t do this to me—I know all of the best concoctions for curing gout, lumbago and dysentry [sic] by heart already.’⁹ The stories submitted by Gemini’s insiders did not always correspond to the image of the world that the editors wanted to portray, lacking the kind of diversity they had in mind.

Where Nothing Ever Happens

The sort of diversity alternative editors wanted from their correspondents seems to have been shaped by the fears they had about rural material. The risk of readers getting bored, or of stories being ‘stodgy’, was never far off when writing about unfamiliar people in places that were not constantly plagued by prominent news events. And on top of a tendency to become boring, rural stories had another problem: they could be very bleak. Notes to correspondents from the 1990s include repeated requests such as:

Please, remember, too, that Gemini is anxious for more copy on development and on success stories and personalities. We are still getting too much politics and downbeat (not to say depressing) stories. Look for the good things that are going on as well as the bad things. There are plenty.¹⁰

To encourage the kinds of stories desired, correspondents were instructed not to look for ‘issues’ (even though this was acknowledged to be good journalistic practice) but rather to sniff out ‘colourful characters’ to write about, as well as ‘human interest stories’ that would delight urban readers.¹¹ Such readers were presumably completely unfamiliar with all aspects of village life, making it inherently worth reading about, even if nothing newsworthy happened. So, the aim was to educate the reader as well as to visibilize and humanize the subject.

Together, the efforts of Gemini journalists and editors suggest that behind their battle against stereotypical kinds of reporting on the Global South—that is, reports which emphasized people’s difference—lay the perhaps greater fear of readers’ indifference. Possibly, the problem was not merely that the world’s media structure prevented news from certain areas being noticed and reported, but also that the potential audience simply did not care to read about it. Making them care was a central challenge for an organization such as Gemini. One way in which it attempted to solve this problem was related to the desire of alternative media more broadly to go beyond disaster reporting: they also wanted to provide good news from the Global South. But rather than providing fresh kinds of good news, global villages often became sources of feel-good news. The desire for humanizing news stories meant that much of what came out of the rural reporting project was flat, as it avoided politics and instead emphasized universally relatable human experiences.

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Feature Image: Newspaper vendor. London Paddington Station. By KF at English Wikipedia, public domain.

1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, reprint (Cambridge, MA and London, 1994 [1964]), 34. [↩]
2. See Ginger Nolan, The Neocolonialism of the Global Village (Minneapolis, MN, 2018). [↩]
3. Such efforts found a theoretical culmination in the UNESCO debates on the ‘New World Information and Communication Order’, including a commission that published its conclusions in 1980 and was meant to include Marshall McLuhan as a member. See Jonas Brendebach, ‘Towards a New International Communication Order? UNESCO, Development, and “National Communication Policies” in the 1960s and 1970s’, in Jonas Brendebach, Martin Herzer, and Heidi Tworek (eds.), International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Exorbitant Expectations (London, 2018), 158–81, at 159–60. [↩]
4. Self-critical memoirs by two such reporters are Reuters journalist Edward Behr’s Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? (New York, 1978) and Coups and Earthquakes: Reporting the World for America (New York, 1979) by the AP’s Mort Rosenblum. [↩]
5. Histories of Gemini include Ashley Michael Crowson, ‘The Gemini News Service: Journalism, Geopolitics and the Decolonisation of the News? 1967–2002’ (unpublished PhD thesis, King’s College London, 2018); and Richard Bourne, News on a Knife-Edge: Gemini Journalism and a Global Agenda (London, 1995). [↩]
6. ‘Views from the village’ rural journalism workshop, New Delhi, 2 Feb. 1987, GEM/7/1/1/3, Gemini News Service Archive, GNM, London. [↩]
7. Letter from Kelly McParland to Shyamala Nataraj, 15 May 1987, ‘Views from the village’ correspondence file, GEM/7/1/1/2, GNM. [↩]
8. Letter from Kelly McParland to Thomas Abraham, 15 July 1986, ‘Views from the village’ correspondence file, GEM/7/1/1/2, GNM. [↩]
9. Letter from Kelly McParland to Francis Mwanza, 17 June 1986, ‘Views from the village’ correspondence file, GEM/7/1/1/2, GNM. [↩]
10. Letter to correspondents 12 Dec. 91, Notes to Correspondents, 1990s, GEM/4/2/8/1, GNM. [↩]
11. Letter from Kelly McParland to Thomas Abraham, 22 May 1986, ‘Views from the village’ correspondence file, GEM/7/1/1/2, GNM. [↩]

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