Rial Profile

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“Are Americans interested in international reporting? My scary answer is not as much as they need to be,” said Kenny Irby, the Visual Journalism Group Leader at the Poynter Institute. “I am really appalled by the provincial thinking of many of the Americans I meet.”

To Irby, international reporting “is an important component of the daily report.” The question is whether or not media companies will invest in sending their own staffers abroad, or rely on exclusively on wire services. Successful domestic reporting on foreign news, he said, almost always includes a link back to the local community.

“Martha, when she came to us with the Africa story, she said ‘I really don’t think America has an understanding of the Holocaust happening in that part of the world,’” editor Ross said.

But Ross remembers thinking “how can we make this interesting to Pittsburghers, most of whom don’t know Africa from Asia?”

The answer, for Ross, was the local connection of Rial’s sister. She also liked Rial’s idea to focus on women and children in order to humanize the depressing sweep of the geopolitical dimensions of the story.

Rial’s photographs from the camps were intimate, vividly colorful, often quiet, and emotionally accessible. One image depicts the migration of a river of people, belongings sagging on their heads, marching through the lush green rapids of the African hillscapes. Another is a tight image of a 7-year-old girl crying from post-traumatic nightmares. Aid workers believe the girl witnessed the murder of her parents. Other moments are domestic: dancing, a haircut, a bath in a rubber peach-colored basin, and mealtime on a bright blue floor.

These pictures, which the Pulitzer committee called “life affirming,” ran in the Post-Gazette. By all accounts the response was positive. “People that you would least expect to care about the story were writing in, calling, saying where can I send money,” Ross said.

From the day she received her 1998 Pulitzer until the day she left the Post-Gazette in September 2006, Rial shot photographs in twenty different countries for the newspaper. Getting approval for international stories “was never easy, but they did let me continue doing it, largely because of the Pulitzer,” she said. “I also think they got feedback from readers, or maybe they wanted to get rid of me for a few months a year.”

“I really felt that I had a lot of support in the community for those projects, and that’s what kept me going. That’s what made me feel alive. People are more curious about the world, you know, they want to know more. The interest in Africa has continued to grow, and that’s in part because of the photo essays that have been done there,” said Rial.

But are readers truly interested? Rial likes to recount how once, as she walked down the street in Pittsburgh, a man she had never met pulled up in his car, rolled down the window, and said ‘Hey Martha, where’s your next trip to?’ Yet for all the positive response she received individually from her stories, there is no evidence that international reporting leads to any palpable gains for newspapers beyond the abstract dignity of journalism’s mission.

“Did circulation jump when she ran her [Tanzania] story? No. Did advertising jump up and bang down our door? No,” said Ross. That newspapers are increasingly profit driven has been well reported. San Jose Mercury News publisher Jay Harris famously resigned after Knight Ridder demanded he make cuts that he felt would ruin the quality of the newspaper. “How do you balance maintaining a strong business with your responsibilities as the steward of a public trust?” he asked in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 2001. For domestic media companies concerned with profits, it is not a question of public trust but a question of what the payback will be. “If they aren’t sure that kind of coverage will attract advertisers of a bigger audience, it’s sunk,” said Ross. “To me, the payback is in the integrity of the mission.”

Which leads to the question of whether local American journalists are the best equipped to cover international stories. “I had done some reading before I left but I didn’t feel like I understood it fully,” said Rial of her Pulitzer Prize winning trip. Author Philip Gourevitch, in his book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, criticizes media in general for focusing on the suffering in Hutu refugee camps when it was the Hutus themselves who were the main aggressors in the genocide.