3 ways to fix a broken news industry | Lara Setrakian

101,624 views ・ 2017-03-09

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Five years ago, I had my dream job.
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I was a foreign correspondent in the Middle East
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reporting for ABC News.
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But there was a crack in the wall,
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a problem with our industry,
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that I felt we needed to fix.
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You see, I got to the Middle East right around the end of 2007,
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which was just around the midpoint
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of the Iraq War.
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But by the time I got there, it was already nearly impossible
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to find stories about Iraq on air.
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Coverage had dropped across the board,
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across networks.
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And of the stories that did make it,
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more than 80 percent of them were about us.
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We were missing the stories about Iraq,
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the people who live there,
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and what was happening to them under the weight of the war.
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Afghanistan had already fallen off the agenda.
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There were less than one percent of all news stories in 2008
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that went to the war in Afghanistan.
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It was the longest war in US history,
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but information was so scarce
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that schoolteachers we spoke to
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told us they had trouble explaining to their students
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what we were doing there,
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when those students had parents
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who were fighting and sometimes dying overseas.
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We had drawn a blank,
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and it wasn't just Iraq and Afghanistan.
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From conflict zones to climate change
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to all sorts of issues around crises in public health,
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we were missing what I call the species-level issues,
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because as a species, they could actually sink us.
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And by failing to understand the complex issues of our time,
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we were facing certain practical implications.
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How were we going to solve problems
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that we didn't fundamentally understand,
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that we couldn't track in real time,
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and where the people working on the issues
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were invisible to us
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and sometimes invisible to each other?
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When you look back on Iraq,
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those years when we were missing the story,
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were the years when the society was falling apart,
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when we were setting the conditions for what would become the rise of ISIS,
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the ISIS takeover of Mosul
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and terrorist violence that would spread
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beyond Iraq's borders to the rest of the world.
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Just around that time where I was making that observation,
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I looked across the border of Iraq
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and noticed there was another story we were missing:
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the war in Syria.
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If you were a Middle-East specialist, you knew that Syria was that important
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from the start.
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But it ended up being, really,
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one of the forgotten stories of the Arab Spring.
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I saw the implications up front.
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Syria is intimately tied to regional security,
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to global stability.
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I felt like we couldn't let that become
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another one of the stories we left behind.
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So I left my big TV job to start a website, called "Syria Deeply."
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It was designed to be a news and information source
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that made it easier to understand a complex issue,
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and for the past four years, it's been a resource
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for policymakers and professionals working on the conflict in Syria.
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We built a business model
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based on consistent, high-quality information,
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and convening the top minds on the issue.
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And we found it was a model that scaled.
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We got passionate requests to do other things "Deeply."
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So we started to work our way down the list.
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I'm just one of many entrepreneurs,
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and we are just one of many start-ups
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trying to fix what's wrong with news.
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All of us in the trenches know
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that something is wrong with the news industry.
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It's broken.
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Trust in the media has hit an all-time low.
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And the statistic you're seeing up there is from September --
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it's arguably gotten worse.
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But we can fix this.
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We can fix the news.
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I know that that's true.
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You can call me an idealist; I call myself an industrious optimist.
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And I know there are a lot of us out there.
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We have ideas for how to make things better,
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and I want to share three of them that we've picked up in our own work.
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Idea number one:
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we need news that's built on deep-domain knowledge.
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Given the waves and waves of layoffs at newsrooms across the country,
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we've lost the art of specialization.
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Beat reporting is an endangered thing.
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When it comes to foreign news,
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the way we can fix that is by working with more local journalists,
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treating them like our partners and collaborators,
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not just fixers who fetch us phone numbers and sound bites.
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Our local reporters in Syria and across Africa and across Asia
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bring us stories that we certainly would not have found on our own.
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Like this one from the suburbs of Damascus, about a wheelchair race
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that gave hope to those wounded in the war.
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Or this one from Sierra Leone,
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about a local chief who curbed the spread of Ebola
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by self-organizing a quarantine in his district.
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Or this one from the border of Pakistan,
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about Afghan refugees being forced to return home before they are ready,
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under the threat of police intimidation.
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Our local journalists are our mentors.
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They teach us something new every day,
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and they bring us stories that are important for all of us to know.
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Idea number two:
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we need a kind of Hippocratic oath for the news industry,
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a pledge to first do no harm.
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(Applause)
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Journalists need to be tough.
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We need to speak truth to power,
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but we also need to be responsible.
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We need to live up to our own ideals,
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and we need to recognize
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when what we're doing could potentially harm society,
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where we lose track of journalism as a public service.
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I watched us cover the Ebola crisis.
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We launched Ebola Deeply. We did our best.
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But what we saw was a public
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that was flooded with hysterical and sensational coverage,
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sometimes inaccurate, sometimes completely wrong.
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Public health experts tell me that that actually cost us in human lives,
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because by sparking more panic and by sometimes getting the facts wrong,
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we made it harder for people to resolve
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what was actually happening on the ground.
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All that noise made it harder to make the right decisions.
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We can do better as an industry,
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but it requires us recognizing how we got it wrong last time,
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and deciding not to go that way next time.
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It's a choice.
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We have to resist the temptation to use fear for ratings.
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And that decision has to be made in the individual newsroom
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and with the individual news executive.
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Because the next deadly virus that comes around
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could be much worse and the consequences much higher,
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if we do what we did last time;
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if our reporting isn't responsible and it isn't right.
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The third idea?
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We need to embrace complexity
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if we want to make sense of a complex world.
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Embrace complexity --
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(Applause)
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not treat the world simplistically, because simple isn't accurate.
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We live in a complex world.
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News is adult education.
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It's our job as journalists to get elbow deep in complexity
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and to find new ways to make it easier for everyone else to understand.
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If we don't do that,
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if we pretend there are just simple answers,
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we're leading everyone off a steep cliff.
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Understanding complexity is the only way to know the real threats
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that are around the corner.
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It's our responsibility to translate those threats
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and to help you understand what's real,
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so you can be prepared and know what it takes to be ready
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for what comes next.
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I am an industrious optimist.
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I do believe we can fix what's broken.
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We all want to.
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There are great journalists out there doing great work --
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we just need new formats.
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I honestly believe this is a time of reawakening,
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reimagining what we can do.
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I believe we can fix what's broken.
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I know we can fix the news.
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I know it's worth trying,
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and I truly believe that in the end,
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we're going to get this right.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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