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Journalism in the Age of the Quick Take · Journalism 2050

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome back to Journalism 2050.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Our listeners might have noticed an absence of new episodes, but we hope you didn't think we'd taken a break.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: We've actually been very busy.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: For us, discussing the past, present, and future of journalism is work that is never finished.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Before we return with a whole new series of guests though, we wanted to share some of what we've been up to.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Earlier this summer we traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia, to attend Zeg, a storytelling festival, and interviewed some incredible people fighting for journalism's future against all kinds of enemies, authoritarians, tech moguls, misogynists, you know, the usual.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: We speak to Lika Antadze and Nino Bakraza from Sinatlay Media about how independent news organizations joined forces in Georgia to fight back against attempts to cut off their funding and silence them.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: We host the inibitable Razia Iqbal, who spent three decades at the BBC and now teaches at Princeton University, to talk about how much journalism has changed over her career and her advice to young journalists today.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: We speak to Natalia Antilava and Simon Allison about building new networks for journalism in an age dominated by increasing concentrations of wealth and power.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Natalia is the editor-in-chief of Coda Story and the co-founder of ZEG.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: And Simon is the co-founder of The Continent, Africa's most widely distributed digital newspaper.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, we interview our good friend, the formidable Julie Pazzetti, award-winning journalist and researcher on all threats confronting women journalists in the digital age.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: We hope you find these conversations as interesting as we did.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we look forward to resuming the series soon.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_04: I'm the singularity disappeared.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_04: And I believe has produced such a medium as Eastern.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to a live recording of our podcast, Journalism 2050.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Emily Bell.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm director of the Tau Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School in New York.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm Heather Chaplin.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: I am the founding director of journalism and design at the New School, also in New York.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Journalism 2050 is a podcast about the future of journalism, though Heather and I like to make it a bit broader than that, as you'll find out, produced in collaboration between the Tau Center for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we're really delighted to be alive at the Zeg Festival in Tbilisi, Georgia, an annual incredible gathering of storytellers from all walks of life.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm thrilled that we have with us today one of the great forces in, I was going to say British broadcasting.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's so wrong because it's associated with the BBC, but in journalism and particularly in broadcasting, Razia Upal.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Razia, welcome.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's great to be here.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: There are so many things that I want to hear from you on.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: I should say that I bumped into Razia and she said to me, I hate being asked questions, which is actually what journalists don't like being asked questions.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to let Razia introduce herself by telling us, tell us the story of how you became a journalist.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And now you're at Princeton University.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you've joined that very, very elite band of people who've gone from British media organizations to East Coast Ivy League universities.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: We can talk a bit about the although not to teach journalism.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I teach in the School of Public and International Affairs.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: So the story of me and how I got into journalism.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to be a journalist since the age of 14.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: Just rewind a touch before that.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: My father was born in Delhi.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: His family moved to Pakistan after partition.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: He was a teenager, we think, didn't have a birth certificate when partition happened.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: And he then moved to Nairobi for work, worked on the railways in Nairobi.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: And when his residence permit came up for renewal in 1970, he decided to leave for London rather than go back to Pakistan.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: So we moved to London when I was eight years old.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I often wonder how my life would have been different had he made a different choice of going back to Pakistan instead.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, I went to school in London and I loved reading.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's probably the only thing I loved at school.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: And an English teacher started talking to me about journalism.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, What you should do is read a newspaper every day.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: And my mother used to give me a small amount of money.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: We were working class family, didn't have very much money at all, but she gave me a small amount of money to buy sweets once a week.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: I spent that money on buying the first newspaper I ever bought, which was The Guardian.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that was completely by chance.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: I just I think it might have just been the headline that day or a particular picture.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: That day, there was a column in the paper by a man called James Cameron.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I started buying the newspaper every Tuesday because I figured out that that's when James Cameron wrote his columns.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: And James, at the age of 14, opened the world up to me.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I had a very strong sense of the world being much bigger than South London, because I knew my father had moved from India to Pakistan, Pakistan to Nairobi, and then London.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I knew that I had come from a much bigger sensibility, I suppose, rather, you know, the world is the shape that it is, right?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: The size that it is.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: But I was aware that there was a sensibility that was different.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: So I started reading this and I thought, this is what I want to do.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: I want to, you know, I learned about the Vietnam War from those columns.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: I learned about the Biafran War from those columns.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: I learned about every place that James had reported from.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: And he was a sublime writer, really astonishingly beautiful writing about brutality.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: And that struck a chord with me, obviously not articulated in the way that I just have now.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: But at the time I remember thinking, I want to be in that world, I want to be out there.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so I started thinking about wanting to be a journalist, but really had no clue how to do it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: I did zero journalism at university.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, I got into university by the skin of my teeth.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: I failed every exam.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I think part of that is to do with my family background.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: My parents had zero expectation of me to go to college.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think I had a really loving family growing up, but there was there were cultural issues that made them think the most important thing is that she should get married.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: I was the youngest of three.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was the kind of impulse for them to keep us safe and happy and able to live in a country which in the 1970s in London was really pretty difficult and racist.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I think my father genuinely believed that the way he could protect us was to keep us in a community.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so he didn't really want us to kind of leave and go to university.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the first thing he said to us when my sister and I said we wanted to go to college was, you're only going to end up taking drugs and sleep with white men.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: And the sleeping with white men did happen, the drugs did not.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: I've never been a drug taker, so whatever.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: What do you what do you think it was in you that wanted to go beyond?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: I I think, and I don't want this to sound anything other than the absolute truth of what it was.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: I loved words.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: I really, really only loved reading books.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: It was the so I I'll tell you a tiny little anecdote.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: I used to go to the library in Tooting in South London, which is where I grew up, and I would read everything in the children's library.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: So by the time I was 12, I had read everything in the children's library.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: I went up to the librarian and I said, I've read everything in the children's library.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: What would you recommend?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: She gave me, much to my surprise in retrospect, Persuasion by Jane Austen.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: At the age of 12, Persuasion is a great story, but really difficult to understand the language, right?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: I had not come across that kind of language before, but I raced through it.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: I completely adored it.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: I went back and I said, I really love this.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: Has she written anything else?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, Come with me.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: And she showed me all of Jane Austen's books.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, okay, this is great.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I went through Jane Austen, and she was a fantastic teacher for me.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the librarian just would say to me, Okay, read this, read this, read this.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_02: So by the time I got to university, the single thing I knew how to do was be a good reader.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Which is important in universities.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's really important.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it gave me a critical sensibility as well.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to get on to journalism, but I think that's so fascinating as well because I read Jane Auster.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: I like you, I was a precocious reader and I lived in a part of the country which was rural northeast Lincolnshire, very just anyway, Brexit land basically.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that my first book, when I went to the school librarian and said, I've read everything, they were like, You like horses, which I don't know if it was true.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: And they gave me the biography of a racehorse, uh, Red Rum, um, who won the Grand National seven times.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: And do you know what?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: I read it, and I thought, oh my god, this is great.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's like biography, it's memoir, etc.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: But Jane Austen is so sophisticated.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: When I read her later in life, so when I was reading in my teens, I was like, Who is this posh white woman?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I didn't do white because everybody was white where I lived.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but like, who who is she?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then why does everyone think she's a great writer?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then in my like 20s, I was like, she's actually, you can read this as class, manners, relationship, but you were getting that like at 12.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I was getting that at 12, but remember, I grew up in a Muslim South Asian household, right?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: And to read Jane Austen as a Muslim girl really, really opens your eyes to how universal the idea of family relationships are, right?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: People, people got married for money, people got married, and this is what happens in South Asian culture, right?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: Arranged marriages are marriages of families.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so 19th century life in Bath or in England generally was not that dissimilar.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I was not, I recognized that.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Not at any sophisticated level, but I recognized that these were people that weren't that dissimilar to me, which I think that's what I mean when I talk about critical sensibility, right?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: It allowed me to think that there are universal things that that apply even if the the landscape is completely different.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: And that really excited me.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you're also making a very good argument for the humanities, and it makes a lot of sense why the current regimes are trying to destroy it all because it reminds us of our humanity.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_03: But that's jumping ahead of the story.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: So let's go back, let's go back to the the the drugs and the sex and drugs.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say the drugs and the sexuality.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: Let's go back to the sex with white men.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: The sex with white men.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: Tell us a little bit about maybe some of the practical steps from being a reading-loving college student to being one of the leading journalists in the BBC.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_03: How does that happen?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I think, and this might surprise people listening to it, and it shouldn't really, because I think so much of journalism is chance.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_02: And it's possible that people say to you, Oh, you make your own luck.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that is also true.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: You can place yourself in situations where chance might present itself.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: But I do think that luck plays a huge, huge part.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: So when I graduated, I did not know what I wanted to do.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody had told me that in order to become a print journalist, which is what I wanted to be, you know, James Cameron was my hero at the time, right?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: They said the only way you're going to get into newspapers is if you do one of, at the time, so we're talking 1985, I graduated, two courses that are offered as postgrad journalism courses.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: One was in Cardiff in Wales, and the other one was at City University in London.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't want to stay living at home with my parents because I'd had four years away.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: So in that four years, I went to the United States for a year.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: So that kind of completely changed my life as well.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: I understood, I also studied American studies and American literature.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: So for me, the world of America opened up in a very different way for me at university.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so I applied for the course in Cardiff.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: Much to my surprise, I got in.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: So that opened another door, which meant on my CV, I could say I had got a Bachelor of Honors, a very bad one, and I got a postgrad in journalism at Cardiff.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: So that allowed me to apply for jobs, which I did in earnest and with a frenzy.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: At the time, and Emily, you will remember this, Mondays in The Guardian, there was a supplement, Guardian Jobs.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: And it was the only place where you could actually apply for media jobs.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I would buy The Guardian every Monday.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: I would apply for at least three or four jobs every week.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I got to the stage where I had applied for a hundred plus.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: And very often I would get to the last six or maybe the last two if I was lucky.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I just wouldn't get the jobs because I had zero experience as a journalist.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd done the course, but really that wasn't enough.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then I applied for a job.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: This again, luck.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: I happened to apply for a job at the BBC World Service, which was something that I used to listen to at home.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's a kind of throwback to growing up in Kenya.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: And the job was for a sub-editor in the world newsroom.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know what a sub-editor was.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't really know what that international newsroom did.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: But the application involved a three-hour exam on a typewriter, a manual typewriter.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: 1989.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there was one woman who came in, it was massive.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: The room was twice this size with people all sitting that exam.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I taught myself how to type.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I went, I sat the exam.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: It was all an international current affairs exam.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: And this woman walked in and she just went, fuck.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: She'd been using electric typewriters.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: She was ahead of the game and she couldn't cope with it, so she left.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, I did the exam.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, am I allowed to swear on a podcast?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: You are in fact it's mandatory.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: We forgot to tell you about that.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and um, so I did the exam, I passed the exam, I then got an interview.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: But because I didn't have any experience, I did a really good interview by all accounts.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: I got a six-month contract.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: So that was the beginning of my career at the BBC.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I did not think that it would become anything more than that because I didn't have the experience.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: But the six months, within that six months, again, here's another story about chance.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'd finished a shift, a pattern of shifts, three, maybe five days on, three days off, four days on, four days off.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's what it used to be.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: I was in the lift, going home, and there was an editor in the lift, and he said, What are you doing tomorrow?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, I said, Oh, you know, I don't know, domestic shit, laundry.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: Why are you asking?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: He said, Would you like to go to Pakistan tomorrow?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my God.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: In the lift.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, um, yeah, yeah, I think I would.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: I think I would.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: I stayed in the lift.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: We went back upstairs and we talked about applying for a visa, et cetera, et cetera.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I went to Pakistan in that first six months to cover for the great Lise Duset, who is a correspondent there at the time.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: And Lise said to me, I said, I said, Oh my god, I'm terrified.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: I've never held a microphone.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: I've I don't know what to do.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: This is really, I'm I'd want to take this, I want to do it.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, It's so fine.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's so quiet in Pakistan.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: Just travel the country, get to know what it means to be a foreign correspondent.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: It'll be so easy.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Okay, okay.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I felt good about that.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Two days after I arrived, Ben Zebuto was dismissed from office.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: I was on air for 72 hours, zero sleep.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: Did you love it?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: I loved it.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: That's the test.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: I loved it.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: I just thought this was the most astonishing thing to do.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I realized something that became super important to me after that, which was that the World Service, the place of the World Service in 1990, was just astonishing.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody in Pakistan listened to the 1800 news bulletin, which was half an hour long.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: It was a news bulletin plus a kind of current affairs program.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then the Islamabad office, the BBC office, would ring non-stop, arguing with the correspondent about what had been reported.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so you had this sense that people were listening.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: This mattered to them.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: They cared about it.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that relationship completely sealed my desire to work inside international broadcasting.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I did a stint in domestic news at the BBC, but primarily I would say so 10 years, I was at the BBC for 34 years.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: The first 10 years I was in international news.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: The second 10 years I was in international news, but I was the BBC's arts correspondent.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so I did that for 10 years, traveling all over the world, both radio and television.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then I came back to present the flagship program for the World Service News Hour, which I did for 13 years.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm going to reveal something about Emily and I's relationship now, which is Emily wants to know something, but she doesn't want to ask you because you said you don't like to answer questions.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think we've established that I'm going to carry on talking, whatever happens.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: No, I think it actually she didn't want to ask you as you said you didn't want to talk about the BBC.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: No, she didn't say that, but this is misrepresent fake news.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I was we we bumped into each other and and I said, Oh god, BBC.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you were like, when people say to, and I'm in good standing with The Guardian, but when people say to me, Oh, what about the Guardian?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: I have that.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_03: Like, oh leave me alone.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: God, do I have to talk about that?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: I've been tasked with asking.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's fine.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: There's been some recent news of the BBC, including the uh canceling of The World Tonight, which is what you were mostly assuming about.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: Is a program that I used to present for 10 years, yeah.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: And then we debated, is the question how do you feel about that, or is the question, what does this mean for the BBC?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: And we kind of want to know both.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think I think the cuts are devastating for the BBC and for BBC News.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the BBC hasn't quite absorbed itself the need to have to make these cuts.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the cutting of The World Tonight, so for those who have never heard of The World Tonight, which is probably every single person in this room, The World Tonight is a 45-minute news program that goes on air at 10 o'clock in the evening on the national network.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I used to present that program and the international one.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: That was a program that by the end of the day, whatever had happened in the world, there was a sense that at 10 o'clock at night, whether you were having a bath, getting ready for bed, brushing your teeth, you would get this kind of very calm, reflective distillation of what had happened during the day.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and quite often there would be breaking news stateside, because it was five o'clock in the afternoon on the East Coast.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that would come into it, but it was very much a kind of calm program that really was counterintuitive to what we expect news to be as well.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: And also it was the last news program before six o'clock the following morning.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: And in that context, I think it was it it is a really important program.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I I used to love presenting it.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: Probably the biggest breaking news story that happened when I was presenting it was, and it was very early on in when I was starting to do it, was the attacks in Paris, including the Batterclan.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: And we had fixed for that evening a really interesting big discussion.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: It was going to take seven, eight minutes of the programme, about the illegal uh shooting of the one of the jihadi John.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so we were going to do a big ethical debate about that.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then this happened, the news started coming in.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: And the producer looked at me and she said, We can't drop the discussion.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, You have no idea what this is going to be.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: This is so this could be really big or it could be nothing.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then we got the mayor of Paris on the line.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: We did a pre-record.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: She said, This is in three different locations.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: We already know that this has happened.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: We don't know how many people have been killed.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I just said, We have to drop the discussion.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: We have to drop the discussion, which is something that never happens on the world tonight, right?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_02: These are thoughtful producers who think about these things.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: So that's just to give you a sense of the tenor of the people who work for it and and what it meant for the news agenda.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I do think that in some, you know, on some very basic level, it's a denial for the audience of something that became quite critical, you know, the way in which news was presented.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: And what does it mean for the BBC?
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: I do find, like you, Emily, I do find it hard to be a representative of an organization.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I was gonna say actually, uh, it's just occurring to me now what I think the question is, which is neither your personal feelings or what it means for the BBC, but what does it mean for us?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_03: What does it tell us about the world that the BBC cancelled this show?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I think what it tells us is that the BBC is finding it really difficult to navigate how it competes in a new world of journalism, right?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: And for anyone who, you know, loves strictly come dancing or traitors or you know, BBC drama.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: I love strictly.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: I can see smiles traitors strictly.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, that's it.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so for all of those people who love all of those things, a lot of money goes into those, but the BBC News Division is the biggest and the best resourced thing inside the BBC, right?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really important for all sorts of different reasons, not just historically.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: But also for reasons of perceived objectivity and neutrality.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I use, I kind of caveat that because I personally, even though I've been in the BBC for 34 years, I don't believe that news can be objective.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: I find it really problematic because I go in, I used to go in at nine o'clock every morning before I presented NewsHour, which was a program that was heard on the East Coast by millions of people.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: And it is the reason why I have the job at Princeton that I have now.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: The job was something I didn't apply for.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: I was given an endowed chair based on my reputation on air.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so that gives you a sense of how important that program was and how important the BBC is in the lives of people who really don't engage with the BBC on any other level except maybe entertainment and news, the desire to be told factually accurate things about the world.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: I have to say, and actually he's not in the room, I don't think, at the moment, but we were talking yesterday with Simon Allison, who's South African and starting a new media venture, and just at the end of it, we got to the cancellation of The World Tonight.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he was uh he said, I am shocked.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: And we're both shocked because I've been in the States for 16 years, and it's the single most important program to me, because there's so little distillation of what is happening in the world right now, from a kind of it's not even a BBC perspective, I think, but it does have a lens on it.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's that that idea that that lens, I think maybe isn't as relevant as it was, but yet the function of telling you what the priorities could be or ought to be, and giving you as I say a calmness, and it's this relates directly to the subject of the podcast, which is like this is the so I know what the BBC are thinking, which is this has run its time.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think, and talking to your students at Princeton now, do we think that this journalism has run its time?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because I just think it's coming into its own in a way.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think in some ways it's kind of this is such a is it coming into its own or has it run its time?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: That type of journalism, like a flower.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Do you look at Heather Cox Richardson?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I know that we all like to see ourselves reflected in our media.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: She is a 64-year-old history professor from an American university.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if anyone subscribes to or listens to Heather Cox-Richardson Letter from American.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: Again, it's very much a distillation of what has happened in America during the day, which I have to tell you has been quite busy.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: But it's distilled through a calm historic lens of where the violations against constitutional law might sit.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: I was listening to it the other day at the table that everybody eats and works on in our household.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: My husband, who works at the BBC for quite a long time, he said, God, who is this?
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then he said, Why aren't there more programs that help us just think through what's happening?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what I mean.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I think So not the international so much as the the sort of nuanced perspective, the the kind of the shape of it.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's a format, yeah.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about quick takes here, and it's not replacing everything.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think there are lots of different things that are happening that indicate that the pendulum may be swinging back a little bit.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, I mean, Natalia's venture with Atlas, right?
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: This idea of kind of trying to counter this notion that we only have a minute's attention span.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: This new magazine, which if you haven't come across, really interesting to look into, Equator, which is an attempt post-October the 7th to look at the world through the lens of the global south.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: And it has some, you know, unbelievable people behind it, but they're also introducing us to writers and thinkers from the global south, which, from my critical sensibility, feels super important.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: There are things going on, even though they're happening in kind of small metropolises or kind of intensively in some particular areas.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think for my students at Princeton, I don't teach journalism, I teach international affairs.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the things that I ask, because I guess journalism is in my DNA, I do ask them what they read and what they listen to.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: And not surprisingly, the kind of executive functions that are required to get into a university like Princeton are pretty high.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: So these are kids who can organize their time, they know how to absorb information, they know how to write essays, all of those things are true.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: What they don't really know how to do is how to think critically about what they're consuming.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that feels to me like this massive space that they need to, we need to collectively, faculty, society, civil society, the mission of the university, it seems to me, is to attempt to create citizens that are thinking.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I don't care how they vote.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't matter to me how they vote.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: What matters is that they vote being well informed.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're only going to read The New York Times and The Economist occasionally, you might think you are well informed.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: And indeed you will have absorbed writing that is polished.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: All of those things are true, but you are also getting a worldview that predominates capitalism only as being the only thing that works.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: You then have students who think, well, what's the app that I can produce that is going to make me a million bucks?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: Within this world of I need somebody who can kind of distill the economist or distill this and distill that.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: So that really concerns me.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: What I want them to do is walk out of classrooms, anyone's classroom, and be able to say, I read such and such, and this is what I think about it, as opposed to regurgitating what they have read.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's what universities at this level teach you.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: They teach you how to regurgitate.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that's not true for every student, obviously, but I do feel that this kind of grade inflation and the culture of elite universities is such that they care so much about what things look like on their resume.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I had a guest in my class this last semester.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: I taught a class which is connected to journalism because they asked me to teach the students how to improve their writing.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Oh my god, don't make me teach journalism.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think I can do that.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: So they said, That's your only note.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: Go away and come up with a syllabus.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: So the syllabus I came up with was looking at long-form narrative nonfiction, with the view that if you read good writing, your writing will improve.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that is as a rule, that is true, right?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: You become a better writer if you are a good reader.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of the books we read was Nathan Thrall's A Day in the Life of Abd Salama.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: If you haven't read it, it is a book I would press in everybody's hand.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: When people say the Middle East is really complicated, this is the book that will make it easy for you to understand.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very particular story about a man whose son dies as a result of a bus accident in the West Bank, but he unpacks the architecture of apartheid inside Israel.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that tells you more than any New York Times article will ever tell you.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: So Nathan was a guest in the class.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_02: After he left, a student said to me, You know, I find it really extraordinary that he managed to meet the most articulate parent who has lost his child and the one that has the perfect memory.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I looked at her and I said, 90% of journalism is luck.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: He spent days speaking to all the bereaved families.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: He alighted on Abd Salama because Abd Salama and he had a connection.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: Part of your job is that she wants to be a journalist, this woman.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: Part of your job is to learn how to persuade people to tell you their story.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: That takes time.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: That takes intentionality, that takes a deliberate act of wanting to listen to somebody, as opposed to, I think I know this story, I'm going to write it now.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's such a great point.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I teach a class which I'm going to make you come to next year, called Information Warfare Reporting, which is about how to teach people to think about how to report on what you're seeing, and how to teach a kind of literacy in breaking down why am I seeing this message, who sent it to me, etc.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: We had John Ronson come to class.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't know, does anyone you're all nodding and so John Ronson is just a sort of a person I used to work with at The Guardian, and he does a wonderful podcast called Things Fell Apart, which is talking to crazy conspiracy theorists, often people have been involved in very weird situations.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: On the BBC.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: On the BBC.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Why do you want me to come to class?
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because he he's very good at asking questions.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Because I think often now, as journalists, we have to talk to people who have done pretty terrible things or think pretty terrible things, or don't really live in a reality.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you have a way of doing it which doesn't shame or confront them, but pulls out of them insights that I don't think you get in a lot of the reporting that our students will be going on to do.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the one thing that John said, who's just a brilliant guy, he said exactly what you said, which is he said, I really care about writing.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I think writing is the core of this.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: And you sort of see people like you, people like John, who have very different views, I think, about traditional views in journalism, coming back to that idea of like how do you ask questions and get people to talk to you?
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a period of study and time.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And we're talking about quick takes, quick takes in journalism.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think so.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: My controversial opinion is I don't think there is a quick take in good journalism.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think you can distill it to a quick take.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that we're in danger, if you like, of losing the grounding, however we present it, of losing that grounding of spending days and weeks and years building knowledge and thinking about how do I convey this best?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: My quick take answer is we are in danger of it, but I think these things can be rescued, you know, and I and I think they can be rescued because I know the response that this small group of students, you know, I have like 14 students in my class, that they had to these books that I asked them to read.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I got them to read Svetlana Alexeyvich.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: They'd never heard of her, and her, you know, her process of putting together a story is in and of itself extraordinary.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: Some would argue unique, but I don't think it is unique.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: I just think that what she does with what she gets from people is unique, and I think she creates what she calls, she describes her writing, which is non-fiction, she describes it as a novel in voices.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that there are so many interesting things that we can teach students.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I think ultimately I'm an optimist because I now am involved in teaching 20 somethings.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I teach master's students too, but because I'm involved in teaching now, I think that you kind of have to just hope that you make these connections with people and you're creating new Nathan Thralls and new John Ronsons and new, you know, that there is this possibility that it isn't going to be students who are only going to be interested in making a living out of journalism in a quick, quick, quick way, right?
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: Or thinking the only thing that matters is that I have to be able to pay the rent, so I'm going to go and work for the New York Post.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_03: And it's also just so nice to hear that sort of hopeful perspective.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I also, I just to say one other thing about what I think journalism can be as well.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: I would like to think, and I think this is controversial, and perhaps people will disagree, but I think that given that we are facing autocracy in so many different countries, if you argue that democracy, I taught a class on democracy at Princeton in my first semester there.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: If you argue that democracy has as one of its absolutely essential, crucial pillars, is the Fourth Estate and journalism and a free press.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: All of those things really matter.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: And if they really matter, journalism needs to shift.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: It is, in my view, really important for journalists to consider, maybe it's the wrong word, but they should consider becoming activists.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: Because you cannot, you cannot say you believe in a free press because and this is how you can fight autocracy without activists to man the barricades as well, on that basis, right?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, journalists hate being the story, they hate being activists, they hate the idea that somehow they will become partial.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I always want to say to them this is something I used to say to my editors at the BBC when we were told after George Floyd was murdered that people of colour could not attend rallies, Black Lives Matter rallies.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I asked a very simple question in an open discussion.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: I said, What are you saying?
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: That the BBC is pro-racism?
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: You kind of need to make a fucking stand every now and again.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: And we I feel like we are in a clarifying moment where we need to make a stand.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: If you believe in journalism, I still only just believe in journalism.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: I tell you why, because I've just finished rereading for the third time Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer, because I was thinking I might teach it in in my class next year.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I just there is a really big part of me that feels that corporate media has sullied itself so much that it is not possible for journalists who work for corporate media to continue to say, we're the noble ones, we shine the light in the dark places, etc.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: etc.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's true for many individuals, and I know a lot of them, and I applaud them and so on, but I still think that there is this trickster relationship between journalism and point extractive, too.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: Carlos uh Dada from El Faro said something really profound in surprisingly enough at Reuters' memorial nature the other day, but he said the craft of journalism and the business of journalism is getting so far apart that I don't recognize that relationship.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I, as soon as I read that, I thought this is exactly what you're talking about, which is that, and what gives me hope is that the craft now I think is being practiced by younger journalists in smaller newsrooms doing incredible work.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: My my area of 404 media, which I keep talking about, I just think wouldn't have existed five years ago.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_03: Can can I I really want to follow up on this?
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_03: So let's even put away the word journalism for a minute.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_03: Do you have some sort of vision or idea?
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_03: Let me step back for a second.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_03: The answer to that is gonna be no.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_03: Vision, idea, no, no, no, no.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_03: If we agree that democracies require some system for reliable news and information to circulate and to reach people, what might that look like in the future?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: I really can't answer that question.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_02: This was the reason I didn't want to do this podcast.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: She doesn't like questions.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: I think you didn't know.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, if I don't have answers, can I change that?
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_03: Can I change is that the right question?
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's a much better thing to say.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the right question?
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think a question would be do we think journalism is worth saving?
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, see that, see, that's I think so.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: No, I think the answer to that is yes, but there has to be a follow-up.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, we have to say what do we mean by journalism?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: So Because do we mean these corporate people or do we mean a system?
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think you can dismantle the corporate side of journalism anymore, right?
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: I really don't think you can.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_02: And how we dismantle the impact of Barry Weiss at CBS and what Trump has done to the relationship between the state and journalism is a really, really critical question that journalists need to grapple with, and they don't.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Trump, Trump, first time round, I was so disappointed that journalists didn't act collectively.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: And they are paying the price collectively as a tribe in Trump point two, right?
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: I just think that there is something so because of the model, because of the corporate model, because it's competitive, there is a reluctance to act collectively.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and the obsession with objectivity and the fear of being an activist means they forget that they are inherently part of a pro-democracy movement.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_03: And at some point they don't organize and stand up for themselves, they're gonna be gone.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I agree.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I would also like to say that I think that that again, in hope, we talk like a monolith about journalists.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's not the case.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you see incredible movements here.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: We heard about how actually Georgian journalists are really standing up in favorite models.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think again, kind of our own obsessions with like, oh my god, those assholes at where it's etc.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: We we also have a job, I think, to platform the really exciting stuff that's going on.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think that's what motivates my students and and and yours.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_03: I think uh we have to see if there's some questions from the absolute.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_03: You've been too scintillating.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_03: You're too scared.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_03: We forgot, we forgot.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_03: We were like, nope, this is ours.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, open it up.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_03: Hi.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: Journalist and editor from Ukraine with like near 20 years experience in this profession.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I have a key question: where do you see the hope for journalism?
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because you know, my favorite joke about profession that I always share on all professional holidays that it is kind of uh low-paid job, but from the other side everyone hates you.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a bit like academia, actually.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: So appealing.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I see uh I'm uh talking with young journalists, people really writing a few articles or making a few stories after they face huge hate from social media and they don't want to continue.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: They say that I can't handle this, especially women.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so here's my answer to where is the hope, right?
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think if you decide you want to be a journalist, I never thought I would have the career that I have had.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_02: But I think if you want to be a journalist, you need to ask yourself two things.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: Are you curious enough about the world to sustain your interest in it?
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_02: Because curiosity is fundamental to being a journalist.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_02: And secondly, how do you want to live your life?
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: How do you want to spend your time?
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_02: I say this: I have two children, they're 28 and 25.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: They don't really know what they want to do.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: And my son says to me, I mean, my son's a Marxist revolutionary, he knows exactly what he's gonna do.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you know, they they my son said to me when he was in his early 20s, he said, You were so lucky you knew what you wanted to do when you were so young.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: And and I thought, oh, that's interesting.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: But I I do think it is about what you want to do when you wake up every morning.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: How do you want to spend your days?
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: Because jobs, our careers, whether they are jobs or whether they are careers, take up a big chunk of a 24-hour period, right?
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: And if you don't want to spend it doing something interesting, you know, choose choose something else.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: So my son is a journalist.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: So he's reporting on private equity, and he is also a Marxist revolutionary, of course.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, I was talking to a colleague at the garden who said, that's great.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: We actually need journalists who care to learn about these things, etc.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then I said to him, Well, I'm sorry, he said, You people had a great time in newsrooms.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're actually the the the requirements on us is to to do more.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Well, have you thought about a career change?
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he went, Everything else like really sucks as work.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Why would I want to do that?
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this kind of my students, we get fewer students, but we get really mission-driven students.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I do like mission's the wrong word because that's like puts it up here.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, they have an idea of what they can do.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's that you you have this time on earth, and what are you gonna spend those hours doing?
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think actually Ukraine helps encourage journalists to say this matters.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: Friends of mine who probably the same as Tri Razi of you and Hezre of you, going back to 1930s Germany, one of the things that I've been making my students read is the history of the editor's laws in 1930s Germany.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when people can see that repetitive pattern and realize that the journalists would like these heroes who were absolutely Jewish journalists were not believed by the BBC, by CBS, etc.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it I think that it's like this is a long game.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: Being hopeful is like we have to recognize that those patterns need correction.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_02: So the other thing that I think would uh gives me, would give me more hope in the context of the kind of collective reaction of journalists is, you know, what happened in in Gaza over three years and the number of journalists who were murdered by the Israeli army.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: The fact that journalists did not as a tribe stand up for those people, I mean, you know, pockets of organizations did, and and there were people who spoke out.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: But the fact that people didn't, and that there is a different reaction to journalists being killed in other countries, in other, not least in Ukraine, in other arenas, I just think is just so redolent of a kind of fear, uh complacency, uh fear, a fear of feeling somehow that we will stop being neutral, we'll stop being objective.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_02: No, these are your people.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: They are your people.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: And if you really believe in the craft, and because I don't think journalism is a profession, it's a trade.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: If you believe in these as your tradespeople, stand up for them for God's sake.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I really like what she said that sometimes you just have to take a stand.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, take a chance, you know, because in a way that also goes to the heart of your question about what hope is there, right?
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's about taking risks with the possibility of things, right?
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_02: What else is there in this world except the possibility of things?
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: And we don't know what those things are.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's the possibility that's really, really alluring, I think.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: And journalism is one of the few things, one of the few trades and um vocations that allows you to explore the possibility of things.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_03: And that we're ending there.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's just too good, right?
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: We're out of time.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we're also out of time, but like if that's not the place to end, I don't know where it is.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_03: Questions you'll have to approach.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: You can ask me questions in the so much for your time.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: So much really great conversation.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: Really fantastic to have you here and scenting the knowledge economy still teaching and motivating students.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for so many fun.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_04: And I believe it's produced such a medium as it turns the use of any other language models.