the_uma•27d agoProlific Poster

My article about a landslide in Myanmar got ghosted by three major US outlets

I spent two weeks putting together a piece on a massive landslide in a jade mining region of northern Myanmar that killed around 150 people back in July. The local press covered it for a day or two, then it just vanished. I sent my story to three big U.S. news sites, all of which said they 'appreciated the reporting' but never ran it. One editor told me plain as day that 'readers aren't interested in mining accidents abroad.' That rubbed me the wrong way, considering the military junta there actively blocks satellite images of the area. I ended up posting the whole thing on a small independent platform, where it got maybe 200 views. Has anyone else run into this wall where outlets just won't touch stories from certain countries?

2 comments

2 Comments

robin_wright27d ago

Play the other side here and admit the editor kind of had a point. U.S. readers barely know where Myanmar is, and a mining accident without dramatic video or a clear villain doesn't grab anyone. I've ghostwritten for a travel blog, and we killed a piece on a cholera outbreak in Haiti because our traffic data showed people just scrolled past anything without "beach" or "resort" in the title. Your 200 views on that indie platform kind of proves the editor wasn't wrong about demand, even if the ethics of it stink.

phoenix_campbell8827d ago

Those 200 views are the real kicker. I've seen it myself running the school paper - we ran a piece on the water crisis in Flint a few years back and got maybe 50 clicks, but a fluff piece about a local petting zoo got 400. Numbers don't lie about what people actually want to read. The editor might be cold about it, but he's looking at the bottom line. If a story doesn't get eyes on it, what's the point? It's like that Myanmar piece - without a dramatic rescue or a clear bad guy, most people just don't care enough to click.