Journal / Investigations / Manchester

It’s Not Journalism: How “Street Content” Turns Manchester’s Vulnerable into Entertainment

Filming in public isn’t the same as reporting in the public interest. And when misery becomes a business model, it’s never the people behind the camera who pay the price.

By Sharmaine Entwistle
Visual journalist and photographer (MA Visual Journalism & Storytelling)

Manchester city centre has never hidden its social problems. Homelessness, addiction, mental ill health and survival sex work happen in plain sight — on main roads, in public squares, outside the same shops the rest of us walk past every day.

What has changed isn’t the existence of these issues. It’s the way they’re being consumed.

Across YouTube, TikTok and Facebook, a fast-growing genre of “street interviews” and “street documentaries” is turning vulnerability into online spectacle. Clips are filmed at close range, narrated in real time, and edited for maximum reaction. Creators call it “raising awareness”. Some call it journalism.

It isn’t journalism.

I’m not saying this from a distance. During university, I began documenting Palestine protests in Greater Manchester. At first it felt like witness work: record what’s happening, build a public record, make the unseen visible. But after 7 October, something shifted. Cameras multiplied. You could see the hunger for virality: the angles, the captions, the performative confrontation, the follower-chasing. It stopped feeling like documentation and started feeling like content.

That’s the moment I stopped recording. My instinct was simple: I didn’t want to become someone making money out of misery.

And once you’ve clocked that shift in one place, you start seeing it everywhere.

Journalism isn’t a camera. It’s a duty of care.

“Journalist” isn’t a protected title. Anyone can claim it. But journalism is a practice with responsibilities: verification, context, accountability, and a duty to minimise harm.

Real reporting doesn’t just point the lens at suffering and call it “truth”. It asks: who holds power here? What systems created this situation? Who benefits from the status quo? What would it take to change it?

That’s the crucial distinction. Ethical journalism points the lens upward — at policy, institutions and structural neglect. Street content points it downward, at people with the least power and the least protection.

Instead of interrogating housing policy, treatment provision, safeguarding failures or austerity, it presents personal crisis as the story. The city becomes a plotline about “decline”. The subject becomes a character. The audience is invited not just to watch, but to judge.

This isn’t new. The collapse of oversight is.

Britain has always had an appetite for poverty as spectacle — from Victorian slum tourism to tabloid moral panics to “poverty TV”. What’s changed is the collapse of editorial control.

There’s no commissioning editor. No legal desk. No safeguarding lead. No serious conversation about risk. There’s just a platform economy where anyone can build a channel, any crisis can become content, and the public consumption of suffering gets rebranded as “awareness”.

That absence matters, because safeguards exist for a reason: not to protect institutions from criticism, but to protect vulnerable people from being turned into collateral.

The myth of consent

A common defence goes like this: “It’s filmed in public. They agreed. They’re on camera talking. They accepted help.”

But consent is not a clip of someone saying yes.

If a person is intoxicated, in withdrawal, mentally unwell, frightened, or living day to day in survival mode, consent becomes ethically complicated. If the exchange involves money, food, cigarettes, attention or “help”, it becomes transactional. Someone might agree not because they want to be filmed, but because refusing means losing something they desperately need.

That doesn’t make it ethical. It makes consent questionable at best.

And even when a creator sounds sympathetic, the harm can still be real. The upload is permanent. Families see it. Children see it. Future employers see it. Someone can stabilise, recover, rebuild their life — and still find their lowest moments searchable for years.

A vulnerable moment becomes a lasting label.

“Awareness” — or feeding the algorithm?

Even when creators insist they’re trying to raise awareness, social media doesn’t reward awareness. It rewards reaction.

Platforms reward shock, conflict, spectacle and extremes. The algorithm trains creators to chase the most dramatic footage and the most sensational framing, because that’s what performs.

The logic is simple: bigger reaction, more reach; more reach, more monetisation.

Once that logic takes hold, the genre stops being documentation and becomes a business model. Crisis is mined for content. The same people are filmed repeatedly. Their struggles become recurring episodes.

Vulnerability becomes a product.

When filming gets in the way of emergency response

There’s a consequence here that’s immediate and harder to argue with: Manchester is a place where emergencies happen in public.

Overdoses. Collapses. Fights. Distress. Psychosis.

When incidents occur, the response is visible: paramedics working on the pavement, police officers trying to de-escalate, outreach teams supporting someone through crisis. Increasingly, this work happens in front of an audience.

Sometimes it’s ordinary bystanders with phones. Sometimes it’s creators who understand that emergencies create dramatic footage. Either way, the result is the same: filming at close range during live incidents, crowds gathering, a person in crisis becoming a scene for spectators.

Emergency response is not a performance. Ambulance crews and first responders need space to work, privacy to treat patients, and calm to stop situations escalating. Filming crowds can make that harder.

And crucially, a person receiving medical attention is in no position to consent to being recorded.

The backlash is growing. And the backlash becomes content too.

You can see a backlash building online, including from people who say they’re sick of Manchester being used as a stage set for monetised misery.

One prominent critic is Lee Marvin Hitchman, who posts regularly about “street content” and describes what he sees as a culture of “ambulance chasing” and the monetisation of vulnerable people. His language is often blunt and confrontational, but the central point reflects a wider concern: crisis now attracts cameras as predictably as it attracts emergency services.

The darker twist is that the backlash itself becomes part of the content machine. Arguments about exploitation turn into entertainment. Feuds generate engagement. Comment sections fill with insults, threats, loyalty tests. The critique becomes spectacle too.

Everything gets swallowed by the same economy.

Manchester has already told us what ethical coverage looks like — not through abstract theory, but through the words of people living it.

Manchester already has ethical guidance. Street content ignores it.

This isn’t a vacuum. Manchester’s homelessness sector has been explicit about what ethical storytelling should look like.

In 2019 and 2020, the Booth Centre Media Group discussed the damage caused by sensationalised media coverage of homelessness and the way it reinforced stereotypes and “othering”. That experience contributed to the development of an approach rooted in dignity and accuracy — portraying individuals rather than stereotypes, and empowering stories rather than narratives of victims and saviours.

In 2020, the Booth Centre Media Group — endorsed through the Manchester Homelessness Partnership — published “Manchester’s pledge to improve representation of homelessness in the media.”

The pledge commits signatories to informed consent and dignity, and its principles cut directly against modern street filming culture.

It states clearly that:

People heavily under the influence of drugs or alcohol cannot give informed consent
Safety and wellbeing must be prioritised at all times
Imagery must preserve dignity and avoid sensationalising or stereotyping
Background filming should only happen when people understand what it’s for, where it will be used, and have the option not to be included
Individuals should have the right to a worker with an established relationship present to support and advocate
Storytelling must include the possibility of stopping altogether — the individual retains the right for their story to be told, or not told

This isn’t idealism. It’s safeguarding.

There’s a second layer here too: official filming guidance. If you’re filming legitimately as a production in Manchester, you’re expected to follow codes of practice around public safety, keeping emergency access clear, and ensuring residents and businesses are informed and disruption is minimised.

That’s the point: when people do this properly, there are standards. The “anything goes because it’s public” mindset is a choice, not an inevitability.

Legal action exists. Enforcement exists. Street content creators operate outside it.

Manchester didn’t just issue guidance. It took action.

In 2023, the city renewed its Public Space Protection Order (PSPO) for three years. While designed primarily to tackle antisocial behaviour, it provides legal grounds to address conduct that prevents people from safely enjoying public spaces.

By early 2026, courts had issued Criminal Prevention Orders against some “accountability” creators and auditors, explicitly restricting where they could go and what they could record. This wasn’t a theoretical concern — it was harm serious enough to trigger judicial intervention.

Greater Manchester Police have also made clear that while public filming is not automatically illegal, they can act when it crosses into harassment, stalking, intimidation or public disorder.

And there’s increased scrutiny of covert recording technology — including discreet devices such as “smart glasses” used to film people without their knowledge. GMP encourage anyone who feels alarmed or distressed by this kind of filming to report it.

The framework exists. The enforcement exists. Some creators simply operate outside it — and frame accountability as persecution.

When profit becomes the moral defence

What I find most disturbing is how widely this genre is now defended.

Some viewers argue creators are “just making a living”. Others treat any criticism as jealousy. If money is handed over on camera, it’s framed as proof the filming is benevolent.

But that’s not awareness. It’s humiliation repackaged as charity. Poverty turned into content and then defended because it “pays the bills”.

The moment profitability becomes the moral defence, ethics collapses into algorithm logic: if it performs well, it must be acceptable. If it’s public, it must be fair game. If it makes money, it must be legitimate.

That isn’t how ethics works. It’s how platforms train us to think.

What ethical reporting actually looks like

Manchester is full of people doing real work: outreach teams, harm reduction workers, shelters, charities, volunteers — people trying to keep neighbours alive. Their work rarely goes viral because it’s slow, complex and human.

Ethical reporting sits alongside that work. It doesn’t extract from it.

It centres safeguarding. It protects identities where needed. It doesn’t treat crisis as content. It gives people dignity, autonomy, and context.

It also points the lens where it belongs: upward — towards institutions, policies, funding decisions, and failures that create the conditions for visible hardship in the first place.

Manchester has examples of ethical alternatives.

Unseen Voices: Fairytales from the Edge uses art, film and poetry to let people with lived experience tell their own stories, on their own terms.

DRY26 at MMU explores addiction and recovery through artistic and clinical lenses that foreground dignity and context, not spectacle.

These aren’t viral. They’re slow, careful, human. That’s exactly why they matter.

The damage to journalism itself

Beyond the harm to individuals filmed, this trend damages journalism as a profession.

It erodes public trust. When creators label themselves journalists while producing sensationalised crisis content, the public begins to associate journalism with exploitation. People start believing: journalists fabricate stories, journalists profit from suffering, ethics don’t matter, it’s all content anyway.

It damages access. Charities, outreach teams and vulnerable communities become wary of anyone with a camera. They struggle to distinguish ethical journalists from exploitative creators. That creates barriers for legitimate reporting on homelessness policy, addiction support gaps and systemic inequality.

It normalises the collapse of safeguarding. Journalists follow protocols for a reason. Creators who ignore them contribute to an environment where humiliation is normalised and consent is treated as optional.

And it rewards harmful incentives. Quality journalism is slow. Platform content is fast. Ethical reporting becomes harder to fund and harder to surface, while extreme content rises.

What can people do about it?

One of the reasons “street content” survives is because it depends on public resignation — the belief that if something happens in public, you’re powerless.

You’re not.

Filming in public is not a free-for-all. You don’t lose your dignity because you’re on a pavement. And you don’t become content just because someone can upload a video.

If you see predatory filming happening — or if footage of you or someone you know is published — there are steps people can take.

Challenge the “it’s public, so it’s legal” myth. Public filming isn’t illegal in itself. But behaviour around filming can be. If someone is following a person, targeting them repeatedly, provoking them, refusing to leave them alone, or causing alarm and distress, that crosses into harassment and public order territory.
Report it — especially if it’s persistent. If someone is repeatedly targeted or pursued, that isn’t “content”. It can meet harassment thresholds. Police reports also create a record that helps establish patterns of predatory behaviour.
Report creators for harassment — not just videos for “offensive content”. This matters. If you report only the video, it gets treated as content moderation. If you report the creator for harassment, intimidation or exploitation, it becomes a behavioural issue — which platforms are increasingly required to respond to.
Use Manchester’s ethical pledge as evidence. Manchester’s pledge to improve representation of homelessness in the media explicitly states people heavily under the influence cannot give informed consent, and that dignity and safety must be prioritised. When creators claim “they agreed”, you can point to this and say: no — this isn’t informed consent.
Protect vulnerable people in the moment. If someone is in crisis — overdose, collapse, distress — the priority is always space, safety and emergency access. Sometimes the strongest intervention is simple presence, creating distance, or saying directly: “Back up. This isn’t a performance.”

The public is not helpless here. This behaviour survives because it’s normalised — not because it’s inevitable.

Manchester’s vulnerable people are not content

Manchester is not a theme park for social decay.

The stories worth telling aren’t just the most shocking images of poverty. The work is explaining why it’s happening, and who is responsible.

You don’t have to abandon storytelling to do it ethically. But if your income depends on filming conflict or vulnerability, you’re not raising awareness. You’re selling a product.

And the difference matters — because when we allow humiliation to masquerade as awareness, it is never the people behind the camera who pay the price.

But nor should the rest of us accept it as unavoidable.

Manchester’s vulnerable people are not content. And they are not powerless.

About the author
Sharmaine Entwistle is a Manchester-based photographer and visual journalist with an MA in Visual Journalism & Storytelling. She runs Shoots Photographs from 1853 Studios in Oldham and has worked across boudoir, documentary, and commercial photography. Her work focuses on ethical storytelling and community representation.
Website: shootsphotographs.co.uk