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The CGD Podcast
On Journalism and Global Development--Nicholas Kristof
00:31:18
My guest on the Wonkcast this week is New York Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof. Nick’s incisive reporting on the lives of poor and vulnerable people—especially girls and women (see, for example, Half the...
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- [00:10]
A
Welcome to the Global Prosperity Wonk cast. I'm Lawrence MacDonald, and I'm delighted to welcome to the show today Nicholas Kristof. Nick Kristof is, as our listeners all know, columnist who, according to the Washington Post, has transformed opinion writing. And in particular, Nick, you have been outspoken about women's rights, human rights, and I think from our point of view here at the center for Global Development, done a terrific job in helping Americans to understand just what it means to be poor in a developing country. So I'm delighted to have you here on the show.
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B
I'm delighted to join you.
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A
We have a special partnership with you, Nick. For four years now, we have had the privilege to screen the candidates for your Win A Trip contest, one of the number of things you do to help bring home the reality of a wider world to Americans. And each year we forward to you. We have the, I think, very difficult job, which my colleague Katherine Ahn has been overseeing of coming up with a short list. And then you have, I suppose, the even harder job of choosing a winner. The winner this year is Erin Lumen. Do you want to tell us a bit about her and what she's been doing since she won the contest?
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B
Yeah. And I should say that I'm really grateful to you folks both for going through all these applications and also for giving me an out. So Erin is a, she's a graduate student in journalism at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And she's a little bit unusual in that for my picks in that typically I've tried to pick people who really haven't had much international experience. She actually is a former Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan, and she's done a lot of writing, a lot of blogging. And her life ambition is ultimately to go abroad and help train overseas journalists so that they can reach a more global audience, kind of connecting the need here for international information with those who are living embedded in foreign, foreign countries and maybe can help bridge that gap.
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A
And has she had a trip yet?
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B
No, I think we're probably going to go in July. And I'm thinking about maybe some of the Sahel countries, maybe Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso.
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A
I think it's interesting that in your advertisement for this trip, it's basically, I don't know that you use this language, but it's basically win a trip to hell. You've got all of these people competing. I think it says something about your magnetism and maybe the way you make a tough time sound adventurous, that you take them to some pretty difficult places.
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B
The joke within the New York Times is that first prize is indeed a trip with me. Second prize is two trips with me.
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A
You know, that comes to the thing that we set out to talk about on this show. I first met you when I was wrapping up my time as a correspondent in China. If I remember correctly, you were newly arriving and together with your wife, Cheryl wudun won a Pulitzer for your coverage of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement. Since then, the world of journalism has come crashing down around our ears. When I left, I still hadn't quite got it out of my blood. I spent some years when I was at the World bank doing policy communications, wishing I was back in journalism. More recently, I kind of feel like I am doing journalism here at the think tank. A lot of my day looks remarkably like the day of an editor. I'm getting to do these interviews. I'm doing policy analysis. That's not so different from writing op eds. And there's a space that the think tanks have moved into partly because of the vacuum created by the collapse of the the old model. You're somewhat insulated from that at the Times, but I imagine, like me, you have plenty of colleagues who are superb journalists who are looking for a second or third career, not because they're tired of journalism, but because the jobs are disappearing.
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B
Yeah, I mean, you have a better business model than we do right now at the moment. And yeah, it's ironic that I'm often writing about nonprofits because these days news organizations for the most part are kind of inadvertently nonprofit as well. And I am deeply concerned about the collapse in coverage of global news. It's particularly striking in the case of television, but also in newspapers and news magazines. The Times is a little bit of an exception because we see ourselves as having a comparative advantage of continuing to cover the world as other people drop that coverage. But I think your average news consumer is much less exposed to international stories, and those that they are exposed to are particular segmented stories. It's the selection of a new pope. It's a crisis in the Korean Peninsula, but it in particular tends not to be development stories. And I think this is going to be real blind spot for in the US and also to some degree globally. I think the same has been true to some degree for news consumers all around the world. And in that context, indeed, think tanks are picking up or filling some of that vacuum, whether it's center for Global Development or the Human Rights Watch monitors. You know, they are providing really serious kind of long form what we would think of as news coverage. And I think that is filling a crucial gap, but the problem is that it's not reaching the general reader. If you are fascinated with what is happening in Syria, you can find some amazing coverage from Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, but your average news consumer is not going to see that on the evening news or on the Today show.
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A
Well, you know, that goes to my next question. Some people would say, maybe the optimists would say you and I are just old school and the world is more tightly connected than ever before, that people are learning about Syria through Facebook and Twitter, that there's, you know, been a shift and in fact, people are better informed, I guess, sort of. I have two questions. Have you. Do we have any data on this, you know, or is it just sort of speculation? Have you seen studies that would suggest one way or the other? My sense matches yours that people are less well informed and that they are just catching the few high points. I mean, you mentioned the Korea peninsula. You know, if you listen to NPR in the morning, you'll know that there's, you know, some saber rattling there, but you probably won't know that much about what's going on. More deeply, I should have said wtop, if you're listening to all news radio, which is what some people are listening to, you're just getting the headlines right.
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B
And probably much more likely you're listening to a top 40 music station. Here's how I see it. There is indeed much more news available because of the web, so that if you are an interested news consumer, then you can find much more about the world than you ever could before. For those people, it is just fantastic. It used to be that if you were interested in whatever, Kenya, then there really wasn't going to be very much in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. These days you can read the Kenya newspapers online. So in that sense, it's just terrific. But the average person, of course, if you're looking at kind of the lowest common denominator of news, I think that is significantly shrinking. I don't think that the average person, average news consumer in the US Is getting much from social media because they're following Justin Bieber, they're not following npr. And I think that they're also. One of the basic problems is that news organizations used to kind of feel that they filled a special role, that they had an obligation to provide spinach in their broadcast, to tell people things that maybe they didn't really care about. And these days, given the crisis in the financial model in journalism, news organizations are dropping the Spinach, and it's all.
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A
Dessert, dropping the spinach, all dessert. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I'm going to tell you something that strikes me as a small horror story. Though other people probably think it's just fine. This is the Global Prosperity Wonkast. From the center for Global development, I'm Lawrence MacDonald. My guest today, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times will be back in just a bit.
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B
SAM.
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A
Welcome back to the Global Prosperity Wonkast. NICK I said I was going to tell you a horror story, and it's just a quote in which they were interviewing people about news and a 20 something or 30 something says, I figure if it's news, it will find me. So you were talking about informed consumers, you know, who can go out and now read the Kenyan newspapers. But I think that this person probably reflected much more the typical attitude, maybe not just of young people, that if it's news, it will find me one way or another, I'm going to hear about it. I don't have to have a strategy for finding information.
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B
I think that is I think that is exactly wrong and in fact, that the mainstream news organizations have truly dropped the ball on this. LAWRENCE One of the things I found just most depressing in the last few years was that ABC News had a grant from the gates foundation, a $1.5 million grant, which was essentially kind of a bribe to cover global development issues. The grant paid for ABC News to cover global nutrition, global health, and they did some terrific stories with that about biofortification, about maternal mortality. They won prizes. It seemed to be working all around. It was a little bit controversial within the aid community about should should the Gates foundation really be paying ABC News to be doing its job?
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A
Well, and I was one of the people who was a little skeptical because I worry that one of the big stories in development and philanthropy that nobody writes about is the role of the Gates Foundation.
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B
Yeah, well, and that's a legitimate concern. But at the end of the day, it seemed to me that that experiment that year actually worked pretty well. And then the the saddest thing was ABC News decided unilaterally not to renew it. They decided that even though they were being bribed to cover these kinds of issues, that it still wasn't worth it, that people were when they saw those segments, they were taking advantage of that moment to go to the bathroom, go to the kitchen. And so they bailed out of that agreement. And it's just a, you know, a reminder of how difficult it is for news organizations to try to find an audience for these kinds of stories.
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A
They couldn't make people eat spinach, huh?
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B
They couldn't. Spinach is just, you know, and so they don't want to have it in the buffet. Another and I remember in 2006, in the Congo election, landmark Congo election. So Anderson Cooper went with crew to Congo to cover the story, and they did live satellite broadcasts. It was a very expensive undertaking. I suppose it involved a certain amount of risk and the ratings fell. And so, of course, the next time a Congo election rolled around, you know, CNN did not send Anderson Cooper in. And I think that, you know, I get very frustrated with the way television has dropped the ball on covering the world. But I also do see that if I were executive producer of a morning show, that then my choice is to send people out to cover some of these global stories, and then my ratings will dip. Or I can put a Democrat and a Republican in a studio together and have them yell at each other, and my ratings will go up.
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A
You know, one of the I guess it's among the bright spots the NewsHour and I should, you know, full disclosure, I'm friends with Jeffrey Brown, one of the three anchors there. He's the dad of my son's best friend. I think that they do an excellent job. But I've said to Jeffrey Brown, you know, why don't you guys run some more itn? You know, there's amazing footage out there available, and, you know, they'll cover the news. I think they do a pretty good job. But then they'll have a long interview with, you know, some talking head. And it seems to me that part of the value of TV is what does the world look like? You know, what does it sound like? Maybe it's unfair because most of the consuming I do of NewsHour is actually on the audio because I listen on the radio rather than watch tv. But still, I get the sense there's an awful lot of talking heads. It can't be that hard to just harvest this footage that is being provided the way Al Jazeera does. I mean, tell me what you think about Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera and English. Are they. A lot of people say they're the place to watch these days.
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B
I think they do some very solid stories, and there is always going to be a niche for some of these stories. But I do think that the big problem is people who are not particularly interested in global news. And how do you reach them? I think that Al Jazeera is reaching the kind of audience who already cares about these stories and would be finding it on the web otherwise. So I commend them for that kind of coverage, but I, I don't think they're really addressing this basic problem that there are an awful lot of Americans who are not interested and as a result are not seeing those stories on the evening news or on the morning shows or on cable television, for example. I mean, one of the, you know, if you look at both MSNBC on the left and Fox News on the right, one of the things that they have in common is that they essentially largely don't cover the world.
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A
Hmm, I hadn't thought of that similarity. That's discouraging. We're going to take a second break and then because like a lot of broadcasters, I don't want to leave my listeners entirely discouraged. I want to ask you if there are any encouraging new models on the horizon. This is Lawrence McDonald from the center for Global Development on the Global Prosperity Wonkast. We'll be back in a bit. Welcome back to the Global Prosperity wonkast. I'm Lawrence MacDonald. I'm delighted to be talking today with two time Pulitzer Award winner Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. As a recovering journalist talking to a current journalist, we are jointly wringing our hands about the sorry state of journalism in the world. Nick, there are some new models out there. You mentioned the Gates grant to abc, but there's a number of sort of mixed profit for profit models out there. Do you see any that you think are especially promising?
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B
There are a few things I think going on that are promising. First of all, my hunch is that news organizations are going to be groping toward a new business model that ultimately is going to pay for content. I do think end of the day content is important enough that, that there are going to be ways found to pay for it. Since we both worked in China, you probably remember the Chinese saying to cross the stream by feeling the stones with your bare feet. I think that's the way journalism is right now. And then there also, and I should.
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A
Maybe say, you know, we jumped right into this. I think everybody knows. But it's collapsed because the old model was I gathered content, I got money from advertisers, and I forced you to either watch the ads or turn the page past them. If you were looking at a print product and then the advertising subsidized my work on the web, you can skip the ads and therefore the model is broken.
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B
You know, just as we were beginning to kind of figure out ways of getting some revenue from online. So now people are moving to mobile in a big way. And in mobile it's even harder to figure out ways of making advertising pay for content. For example. There are also some. There are a number of models where kind of very low cost, purely online models where people go and they send young reporters inexpensively out with a video camera and do some reporting and file back reports. And they have done some very fine work. I think that the problem with it so far has been that it again, by and large appeals to those who already are interested in these issues that it's not reaching the large mainstream audiences.
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A
Are you thinking here about vice? There seems to be. It's sort of been on the periphery of my vision. But recently there was a very interesting profile you may have seen in the New Yorker. And then I think as a result there's been some broadcast coverage. I gather it's based in New York, it's by and for young people. And they're the ones who sent Dennis Rodham to North Korea, as I imagine, you know. Well, so they're doing some really irreverent stuff. I was a little ambivalent in reading about the coverage. I guess I should become a consumer of it and then decide. Have you been following them at all?
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B
A little bit. And I share some of that ambivalence. But I do think that we in mainstream journalism need to figure out more ways of being creative, irreverent, sometimes funny that we've got to experiment with coverage in new ways. And I think that we tend to be very protective of our brands, of our flank in ways that make us somewhat risk averse. And I think we indeed need to be much more willing to experiment with new forms, figure out ways of telling storytelling in ways that are really going to resonate well.
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A
Certainly you have experimented, I think, to very good effect. And the experiments that we've noticed, including the win a trip, have been, I think, hugely successful. I'm going to put you on the spot here. If they're really experiments, then some of them go awry. Have you tried some experiments that you decided in the end were probably not promising?
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B
Oh yeah, plenty. My blog I'm doing less with now than I used to, partly because social I'm using more putting more of the time into social media and less into the blogging. I tried periodic experiments with a situation where I would encourage people to write their own stories based on kind of information set. I had a contest like that that never seemed to work out particularly well as a way of engaging more people. And I must say that I've been, you know, that even though I wrestle with these issues, I can't figure out ways of connecting some of these global stories to an American audience. When I write about South Sudan, for example, my readership plummets. I get many, many, many more readers if I'm writing about, whatever, the Republicans versus Obama, than if I'm writing about global health, global nutrition. And so it's, you know, it's a code that I haven't cracked either in this regard.
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A
I'm thinking about your wonderful book with Cheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky, which, you know, even though I know these things, both working in development and having spent a lot of time in the developing world, it was such an incredible page turner. I think I, you know, sat down and I probably didn't stand up until I finished it practically. I read it straight through in a weekend. And it was because it was stories of these remarkable individuals who struggled against incredible odds, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. And then I know you went on, there's been either a film version, whether it's video or movie, there is a video game. It looked to me sort of watching it out of the periphery like you were sort of building it into a multimedia brand. Has that worked the way that you hoped? Has it reached more people?
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B
Yeah, that was kind of a case study for us in trying to experiment. So we did a PBS documentary and we brought in celebrities to mostly celebrity actresses, although we also brought in George Clooney for an element of that. And that was kind of a calculated risk, an effort to see if we could get more of an audience. We were also concerned, frankly, this would cheapen coverage of issues that we care very deeply about. I think that that worked, that people did tune in to see the actresses and then got hooked in the content. Then we did a Facebook game, a Half the Sky Facebook game, and that. That's just underway right now. So we don't have a definitive version of how successful that has been, but it seems to have reached a lot of people. It may be preaching to the choir. 80% of the people playing the game are female. We'd love to have more football jocks playing it, but that's another of these kind of experiments. And we're. And now Cheryl and I are working on another book and again, absorb some of those lessons from Half the Sky to figure out how to reach an audience. By the way, one thing that I think we would do differently if we were doing Half the Sky today is I think we Scared off some people with the fear that it was going to be an upsetting and a grim book. And I think that if we were doing it again, we would probably try to make the COVID look more uplifting, look happier, maybe have a first chapter that was, again, more emphasis on uplift, inspiration, and a little less on the terrible things that happen. Because I do think that we lost some readers who were just kind of scared off by the material.
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A
I'm sure your analysis is correct. I have no reason to doubt it, but I'm reminded of this Time magazine joke cover when. I don't know if they still do it, but they had the. These little turnover corners with the little upbeat thing. And so this joke cover is, you know, World War 3 breaks out, thermo nuclear war, and the flip on the corner says the Muppets new show. I mean, sometimes things really are grim, but, you know, you can't make people eat spinach unless you make it tasty. So, you know, that's, I guess, part of the dilemma.
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B
That's the challenge. I mean, another thing that I always worry about in my coverage is that in the case of Africa, for example, that I tend to focus on the problem. So the places I cover disproportionately are Sudan, Congo. Well, AIDS in southern Africa, for example. And I do worry sometimes that my focus and in general news focus on the problems leaves readers with this misimpression that the whole continent is like that.
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A
Much as people don't want to read about Africa, they'd rather read about severed limbs and blood diamonds than they would about decentralized solar power.
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B
Yeah, I think part of the problem is that this is just what we cover. We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off. And I also do think that at the end of the day, the big problem with coverage of eastern Congo is that we haven't covered it enough. That the ratio of column inches per million lives lost is worse in that war than any other modern war I can think of. But I think problems like that tend to be under covered, not over covered. But I do think that there's also this risk that we end up discouraging investment in Africa, discouraging tourism, and leaving people with a sense of sort of hopelessness that is counterproductive.
- [26:29]
A
Well, it's been a real pleasure having you on the show, Nick. I don't have a clever last question, so I'm going to just turn it back to you maybe for the last word. Where do you see this? You said feeling your way across the stream with bare feet, there may be some new models emerging. Do you think if we have this conversation again in four or five years that we're going to still be wringing our hands and worrying about the state of international coverage in journalism, or will we have turned some kind of a corner?
- [27:00]
B
I think that in the next few years, I think the problems are going to get worse rather than better. I think that the US Is also turning more inward, that there was this unusual period after 9, 11 when we were unusually attuned to the world. And I think now, partly because of the economy and partly because of a sense of exhaustion, the US is reverting to its more historical, insular, inward looking role. And I think that on top of the problems with news organizations, facing financially is going to mean less coverage. I think maybe if we have the conversation a little further away another 10 years, another 15 years, then I'm a little more hopeful that there are going to be some ways of figuring these challenges out, that there will be an increasing recognition that young people's future is going to require greater knowledge of the world, greater facility with languages, this kind of thing. But in the coming few years, I fear that the problems are going to get worse before they get better.
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A
You know, you've touched on something which is an entire other conversation, but this sense of the relative diminished role of US leadership, which is partly, maybe diminished capacity, but I think often, as you say, exhaustion, and certainly in our work here at the Center, I know it's something that our president, Nancy Birdsel, has been writing and speaking about, is we sometimes get the sense that we're now in the world of the G0. You know, for a while people were talking about the G20 or the G2, US and China. But there's a real problem that the world has become quite accustomed to U.S. leadership. And there's an increasing sense that the United States is either unable or unwilling to shoulder that mantle, and yet nobody else is stepping forward. And so I think the problem we've been discussing about lack of a declining volume and quality of international coverage is a subset of this much larger and very worrisome issue. Certainly, Nick, you have done more than your fair share to address both of these problems in your work. And it's a real treat for me to get to talk with you, a former journalist colleague, and it's nice for us to be working with you on the Win A Trip contest. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [29:17]
B
Hey, thank you, Lawrence.
- [29:19]
A
This has been the Global Prosperity Wonkcast from the center for Global Development. My guest today, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. We've been talking about the mostly sorry state of journalism and the prospects for improvements and more broadly, about US Leadership in the world. You can find the Wonkast online on itunes and on Stitcher. Just search for wonkcast or CGD and subscribe to hear a new interview every week. Until next time, I'm Lawrence MacDonald. Thanks for listening.
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B
Sam.