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Most journalists would be very wary of accepting a free trip from a political, business or PR source - but would not necessarily think there was anything wrong with accepting a free trip to a disaster/humanitarian crisis area from an aid agency. And some aid agencies are only too happy to provide that trip in return for coverage. This was just one of the many interesting things covered by Glenda Cooper in yesterday's Guardian Lecture at Nuffield College, titled "Anyone Here Survived a Wave, Speak English and Got a Mobile? - The Media, Aid Agencies and Reporting Disasters since the Tsunami". A copy of the lecture was also published in yesterday's Guardian, here. The "cosy" relationship between aid agencies and journalists was something that Cooper returned to several times in her speech, and ended her talk by highlighting that disaster reporting needs as much critical distance and rigorous adherence to journalistic standards of objectivity as any kind of reporting - a provocative statement as most would consider aid agencies to be "the good guys" (as opposed to political PR flaks, who are clearly "bad guys"). Cooper also countered a popular myth, namely that user-generated content in disaster reporting just provides even more images of white tourists in swimming trunks, i.e. that reporting based on user-generated content will still be vulnerable to cultual bias when images are selected (the big coverage of Thailand compared to other countires hit by the tsunami has been explained by the larger tourist presence in Thailand, for example). But not so, according to Cooper: new technologies and user-generated content provide a real opportunity for different voices to be heard - she uses the South Asia Earthquake in 2005 as an example of a disaster widely covered by and through user-generated content despite the lack of white tourists in the area. Cooper predicted Africa being the next site of disaster reporting mainly defined and generated by citizens, and cited the phenomenal spread of mobile phone technology in sub-Saharan Africa as the main reason for this. According to Cooper, journalists and aid agencies both need to be on their toes when faced with a rising number of "citizen disaster journalists" around the world - citizens that are becoming increasingly adept at generating coverage and shaping public opinion.