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Cristi Hegranes, "Journalism, Social Enterprise, and the Essential 'F' Word"
>>EMILY WESTERGAARD HAMILTON: Good evening. I feel sorry for Cristi because she doesn't
have ice cream to pass out, so thank you for coming. Like Sarah said, I'm Emily Hamilton.
I graduated from Grinnell in 2002 and I am so fortunate to be a member of the Grinnell
Prize Selection Committee.
We have the incredible responsibility of reviewing hundreds of nominations and sifting through
literally thousands of pages of information on these candidates that truly embody the
spirit of young innovators in social justice. We spend a lot of time grappling with, "what
is social justice?" "What is innovator?" Fortunately, Melisa has defined "young"
for us, so we have one criterion taken off the table already, but it's an incredibly
daunting task. And all the while, while we are having these conversations, people like
Cristi and all of our other winners are quietly, persistently, selflessly working away, doing
what they're doing, while we're sitting in a room debating all of this.
I'm very pleased to introduce Cristi Hegranes. She is recognized for her to establish the
Global Press Initiative [sic]. What stood out about Cristi and GPI to me when I was
reading through these nominations, was the way that she was addressing two very significant
issues: the dwindling quality of that international journalism, and at the same time, women's
economic empowerment. Both are worthy endeavors, but together, the committee really felt like
she truly earned this distinction.
Cristi has always had a passion for journalism. She started a paper at her elementary school.
She took over the paper at her middle school. And in high school, she very confidently approached
the school administrators to say that the high school paper was actually junk. She told
them exactly what they could do to fix it, and they complied. This has always been a
passion of hers, and she has always pushed those boundaries.
At lunch today she told us that at Loyola College, she brought Larry Flint to campus.
You can ask her how that went over at a Jesuit college. And she'll talk a lot today about
how she ended up creating Global Press Initiative [sic], and the path that she took to get here.
GPI is an organization that not only empowers women by investing in them and in their training
and education to help them earn those living-wage jobs, but they also work to create and elevate
international reporting in a time when foreign news is declining precipitously.
The foreign news that is shared is probably from men, so Cristi is working to change that
as well. GPI is now operating independent news desks in twenty-six countries complete
with training and educational staff. Cristi has created a unique training-to-employment
model that is truly the embodiment of that social justice innovation that we look for.
I'm very please to introduce Cristi and look forward to her talk and we'll have a question
and answer session afterwards. Thank you very much.
[applause]
>>CRISTI HEGRANES: Thank you so much everyone. This has been just a fabulous week. I could
not be more impressed with the staff that put everything together and the student body.
So it is absolutely my pleasure to be here to talk with you guys tonight about my great
love, Global Press Institute.
Tonight we're going to be talking about journalism, social enterprise, and the essential
"f" word. People have been asking me all week what the "f" word is. Both my parents
are here, so clearly it's not the one you think it is, okay?
[laughs]
And I was very heartened to see that it's a word that has come up many times in the
course of conversation this week.
I want to start by telling you about these people. Two weeks ago I was in Ethiopia to
launch Global Press Institute's twenty-sixth news desk. While I was there, I had what is
my favorite part of this job, which is the opportunity to meet the women who show up.
When we put out calls for applications and recruitment, they come. I was fortunate enough
to meet the three young women in Addis Ababa, and the three young women in Debre Zeyit,
a rural part of Ethiopia, who heard the call in their communities for change makers and
storytellers, and volunteered themselves for service. Just as I had been twenty-five times
before, I was absolutely blown away, so struck by the diversity, the tenacity, the passion
of these women.
These are the trainees in Addis Ababa. A brilliant Muslim college student, a feisty five-foot
tall eighteen year old that asks endless questions, more questions than I ask, and that's a
lot of questions. But then I noticed that the third was different. Quiet, serious. She's
twenty years old. She goes to school in the evenings, where she's in the eighth grade.
She's from the far western part of Ethiopia, and like many young girls in the far western
part of Ethiopia, she was forced to quit school at the age of twelve to get married.
After four years of marriage, she ran away from her husband. She fled the far west and
came to Addis Ababa, the capitol.
Today, she still lives in a temporary plastic shelter in the streets. She's homeless.
But when through our network of NGO partners, she heard of this opportunity, the opportunity
to become a professional journalist, an opportunity where someone like her could have the opportunity
to produce print and radio pieces that would be shared with the entire country, and in
fact the entire world, she knew she had to do it.
In her recruitment interview, she confessed to loving poetry, even recited one of her own
original poems. She told us that if she was given the chance, she would dedicate her career
as a journalist to writing about social justice issues that affected the girls in
her community. Given the chance, she said, more than anything, she wanted to write about
education. In hopes, she said, of motivating parents throughout Ethiopia to keep their
girls in school. She is among the newest members of Global Press Institute, but she is...has absolutely
found her family. Her passion for storytelling is palpably strong, and her determination
to stand on her own two feet is fierce. Hers is truly the spirit of GPI, a spirit that
is contagious, and is in fact spreading across the entire world. So these are the newest
members of Global Press Institute.
Among all things, Global Press Institute is a testament to the power of story. Over the
last nearly seven years, we have demonstrated that sharing human stories can change minds,
it can change countries, it can change the entire world. But before we talk about why
and how GPI is creating all these world-changing stories, first, there's my story.
As was just said, I have long believed that I was born to be a journalist. I have been
asking questions and writing and reporting since I can remember. It is true that I have
worked in every school newspaper of any school I have ever been in. It is also true
that I have caused a fair amount of trouble in those various school newspapers. After
I graduated from Loyola Marymount University, another amazing institution with a proud record
and history of social justice initiatives, I immediately went to the Poynter Institute
for Media Studies, and from there I went directly to NYU to pursue my graduate studies.
As my tenure at NYU was ending, a new opportunity presented itself, the opportunity to go abroad
to report. I was so excited to become a stringer, to cover the civil war in Nepal. I was twenty-three.
(And I look exactly the same. I know, I've looked like this since I was twelve.)
Being a foreign correspondent was everything I had always wanted to do. I was so excited
about traveling to distant places to tell other people's news. It didn't take long
though after I came to Nepal and started my work that I came to a harsh and unpleasant
realization. I was the wrong person to be telling their stories.
What we often don't think about is that the discipline of foreign correspondence makes
little logical sense. You're dropped into a place where you generally don't speak
the language. You're dropped into a place where often your coverage, your actions, your
very movements are monitored by governments. So working through a translator, in a place
where your movements are even restricted, you lack access to real people. And you lack
the trust of these real people too, because these real people, they've seen themselves
portrayed in our news, right? Poor, hungry, disease, disaster-ridden people. Hopeless, penniless,
but pitiful. You lack the trust of these people. They don't want to share their stories.
And I realized, those are not the kind of stories I waited my whole life to tell.
But I continued with my work all the while starting to question the basis of my knowledge.
I had long been a news junkie, reading any and every newspaper magazine I could get my
hands on. I realized that the majority of what I knew about the world was derived from
journalism. So I began to wonder, is everything I believe to be true actually true? Or was
it a translated version of an outsider's story?
I continued my work, and as I trekked and travelled throughout the country in search
of these deeper stories, eventually, I got lucky. Eventually, I met Pratima. Pratima
was the matriarch of a small village where I found myself in the course of these travels.
And over the course of my days there, I watched her. I watched as she negotiated small conflicts
among neighbors. I watched as she took in silent confessions. And I listened as she
spoke deeply, knowledgably, about the realities of her community, the state of her country's
politics, the state of the war. She shared inside information I would have never had
access to as a foreign correspondent.
She told me why the nearest health clinic was so far away, and the devastating health
consequences it was having for people, especially for women in her village. She told me about
why good education was so difficult to access. She told me about how devastating it was that
all of their young men had been recruited by the rebels, and those that weren't recruited
by the rebels, left the community and the country in search of higher wages.
At first, I planned to write Pratima's story. But then I realized she was more than a story.
She was the potential for a revolution. What if, I allowed myself to wonder in these very
uncomfortable nights sleeping in what was to me a very strange village, what if someone
like Pratima became her community's most trusted source for news? What if she became
the world's most trusted source for news about Nepal? Someone like her who had the
social, historical, cultural, political context that you actually need to tell a real and
full story.
It was then that I realized that I had just two things that Pratima didn't: professional journalism training,
and a credible, global platform where my stories were published. She had everything else. So
then I began to think, how can I create those two little things so Pratima can tell big
stories?
A new model for international journalism I became convinced would do three extraordinary
things for the world. First, it would increase access to education locally. In the communities,
where these stories would be produced, local people and local governments could have access
to ethical, authentic information, so governments could theoretically make better decisions,
and people could theoretically make better choices. And with a more transparent, well-informed
government and people able to make better choices, freer, fuller lives are the likely
result.
Second, I became convinced that this new model of international storytelling would elevate
global awareness. The very act of changing the storyteller would fundamentally change
the story of places like Nepal and other developing countries communities. Local people would
obviously not seek to victimize their neighbors in their coverage. People just like them,
who were striving to take care of their families in difficult situations. While mainstream
media tells us that people in these communities are victims, local people could humanize these
people. They could tell us the realities of these countries. But beyond that, our understanding
of these places would elevate beyond what we know.
Two years ago, the International Women's Media Foundation produced an amazing report
that revealed that ninety-seven percent of foreign correspondence deals solely with four
topics: war, poverty, disease, disaster. That's why our most famous news anchors go to Haiti
only after it's been destroyed. That's why they talk about places like Egypt and
Libya only after they're in chaos. And that's why they cover a revolution, like the one
in Tunisia, and say it's because of Facebook, because that's something that we can understand, right?
Given the opportunity for local people to learn how to professionally tell their own
stories, they could tell the stories about how local people were building their own futures.
How local people were igniting their own change. How local people were innovating new solutions
to problems so that they could build better futures for their families. It became a social
justice imperative, I thought, that the world understands its neighbors in fuller terms.
And finally, I thought about how this new model would change the lives of the women,
now employed and empowered as professional journalists, which I can tell you from personal
experience is one of the most empowering and inspiring jobs that there is. To know
how to ask questions that demand answers, to hold the powerful accountable, and to share
human narrative that can truly change minds, it's a powerful profession. So to share
this with women throughout the developing world, I knew would be incredible.
What I didn't know then that I do know now, is that women in developing countries have
access to skills training and sustained employment, every single health, welfare, poverty, education
indicator for the entire community goes way up. Why? It's pretty simple. Because women
in developing countries reinvest eighty to ninety percent of their incomes back in their
local communities. So at GPI we don't train and employ women because of politics or charity.
We train and employ women because it's the right thing to do for the whole community.
We're so fortunate that today world leaders are starting to stand up and say, "If you
want to change the world, you've got to start with women." So that was the third
thing. It really did change these women's lives. I thought it could, anyway.
Soon after leaving Pratima's village, I returned to New York, and then moved to San
Francisco, where I took a pretty cool job as a feature writer at SF Weekly in San Francisco.
As I headed west, the idea, still rattling around in my brain, and the idea of Pratima's
potential, was still fresh in my mind. So, as the months went by, the idea went from
a subtle tap at the back of my mind every now and again, to a pounding in the front
of my head that I knew I could no longer ignore.
So I did something extremely crazy and enormously stupid, by the way. I quit my job, a good
paying job as a feature writer in a major American media market. Quit. This was February
of 2006. Over the next months, I spent my time immersed in books on "How to Form a
Non-profit Organization," and "The Wiles of the IRS."
A good friend of mine tells a super embarrassing story that I'll tell you now, which is
shortly after I quit my job, I met him for lunch in San Francisco and I was carrying
a Nolo press book, which is like a "learn how to do anything when you don't have enough
money to hire someone better than you" series. I was carrying a Nolo press book of how to
file your paperwork for 501c(3). And I was like, "yeah, this is what I'm doing now."
During those months, those first initial months, I was endlessly researching. My skills as
a journalist came in so handy, as someone developing a new business plan. I looked into
so many international non-profit training models, and what other NGOs were doing. What
worked, what didn't work? What worked, but cost a million dollars? What were they doing
for a million dollars, how I could do it for a hundred dollars? Really basic concepts of
possibility thinking. When you run into something you think is impossible, dissect the problem
and start from scratch.
I interviewed dozens of people, took up far too much of other people's time, asking,
I'm sure, far too many questions. I scoured books and journals and websites for information
about developing countries, and media markets, and media laws, and safety and security, and
women's rights, and all of these things. Then I began to draft a new curriculum that
would become the basis for how to train women around the world like Pratima to become professional
journalists.
Eventually, I realized that I would need to learn to fundraise too. So I wasted a lot
of time trying to learn how to write grants, and meanwhile hitting up everyone I had ever
known for money. And, I admit I spent a lot of nights bartending. I quit my job, remember?
I also remember thinking that it was absolutely no coincidence that the song that was on top
of the charts and often stuck in my mind while I was doing this work was this, and I kid
you not, this song was stuck in my mind for six months straight:
[Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy"]
This song was actually number one on the charts the entire summer that I was building the
foundations of what would become Global Press Institute.
So yes, maybe I was a little bit crazy, but I have some great news. It worked. By September
of 2006, we were ready to launch our first program. By March the following year, things
were going so well we were ready to launch a second.
Now I had originally wanted the first GPI news desk to be in Nepal, the place where
the idea was founded. But cost, always a factor the new entrepreneur learned, made it that
Southern, indigenous Mexico was a much more viable option. But the program there went
extremely well so by March 2007, I was back in Nepal, the place where it all began.
When we began recruitment for the journalists in Nepal, it was the first time that I had
been a part of the full recruiting process. More than three hundred women turned out for
five spots in this program. Eventually, we made the difficult decision and chose just
five: Anju, Kamala, Kalpana, Sonny, and of course, Tara, those women who you met in the
video, the Grinnell video.
But before the training program began in Nepal, I made my way back to Pratima's village.
I wanted to see her. I wanted to tell her what she inspired. Truthfully, I wanted her
to join my training program. When I arrived, I learned that she had passed away, just a
few months earlier. She died after complications from uterine prolapse, which is a preventable
condition. In the end, I learned, she died on the long walk to the health clinic, just
he problem she had told me about the last time I was there.
I was heartbroken. I thought, if she had been able to tell that story then, her life could
have been saved. Her story could have spurred the action of local governments, NGOs, international
health workers. I left her village with a very heavy heart but an even more determined
spirit. I knew that we were too late for Pratima, but I was thrilled that our time had come.
So this is the point where my story blurs and merges with the stories of a hundred and
thirty-three women from throughout the world. As I said last night, it has to be the most
amazing feeling on earth to be a twenty-five-year-old idealistic journalist. And to have an idea
that probably had a one in a billion shot of working, but to know that it does work,
and it continues to work today because these brave, bold women from all over the world
stood up and said, "Yeah, I want to do this too."
So let's talk about how this works, because that's a lot of the questions that I get.
Before we talk about how we know that it is working, in terms of the higher-level social
justice questions, let's talk about the nuts and bolts of how it works. Can you guys all see that?
The first thing we do when we start to think about expanding is we do really in-depth research
on these countries. The primary focus is a safety and security analysis that looks at
constitutional law, it looks at police practices, it looks at media law both how it's on the
books but also how it's practiced in the community, which are usually very different
things. It looks at all of these things also from the very unique lens of gender, which
is a type of reporting, analysis, and study that didn't currently exist. Today, GPI
shares its safety and security reporting model with dozens of NGOs all over the world, specifically
those that are working with women.
Once we've identified a country and determined that it's safe to operate there, you will
notice that if you look at the GPI map that we do operate in a few tricky, shall we say,
media environments throughout the world. But we don't operate in any active conflict
zones, and we don't operate in any countries where our reporters are considered to be in
imminent danger.
After we select a country, we go to the next step, which is we build an extensive partner
network. It's so important to say that GPI news desks on the ground are run one hundred
percent by local people, and we are able to achieve that by building robust partnerships
throughout the entire community.
We do it for three reasons. One, we do it to build credibility. We're a new organization
coming to town and the more partners we're able to make makes us more credible. We do
it for very practical reasons, which is that we very often end up sharing costs with other
local NGOs. For example, we share space in more than half of GPI news desks. And we split
costs on things like Internet access, or other things that are extraordinarily expensive.
The third reason that we build such a wide network of partnerships is because when it
is time for us to recruit, the next step, we want to throw as wide a net possible. At
GPI, our reporters range in age from sixteen, I'm sorry, from fourteen to sixty-five.
One of our latest reporters in Rwanda is fourteen. Fourteen to sixty-five. They speak thirteen
languages. They represent tribes, castes, religions. Some are physically disabled. Some
are members of the LGBTI community. They are literally the most diverse group possible.
Just like I shared with you in Ethiopia, we have a bright college student and a homeless,
child-bride in the same program. But that's come to be the beauty of GPI. This opportunity
translates itself across all of those barriers and all of those different bridges.
After we build the partnership networks and we begin to recruit the journalists, they
go through an application and an interview process. We can usually take one to five percent
of the people that apply, which is generally heartbreaking. So after we recruit the journalists,
we're also at the same time, recruiting a trainer and an editor. That trainer goes
through a train the trainer process with me, and then becomes a hundred percent responsible
for the reporters in her news desk.
As was said earlier, the heart of Global Press Institute is it's training-to-employment
model. In my preliminary research and my original research when I was building my first business
plan, I found that there were literally tens of thousands of international training programs.
But when I went in country, I was seeing people with resumes this long that had taken every
training that had ever come to their town or their village, but they were still unemployed.
They never had practical application for these skills. I knew that what we wanted to create
at GPI was a training-to-employment model.
"The Principles and the Practice" is what we call the first six months of our training,
and anyone who completes that first six months receives a job offer from Global Press Institute,
either full or part-time employment, whatever suits their individual needs. Once that happens,
they begin the business of reporting. Day in and day out, telling stories. And as they're
telling stories, they're working in what is a very sophisticated editorial network.
This is the thing that ensures such high-quality journalism produced by GPI.
Every desk has trainers, editors who do story coaching. They have mentors, there are translators,
and there's deep, deep fact checking, both at the local level, and when the stories come
to the global level at the San Francisco headquarters.
And finally, the results of all of their work is that their work is published on an award-winning,
online newswire that's accessed by millions.
It's really important to say that English is not a requirement for our program. The
majority of our news is being produced in two languages. The reporters write the news
in their local language, and that local language version is also edited to the same levels,
and disseminated and distributed--That's my Skype. Someone, one of my reporters might call in, right now! So we're disseminating and distributing the content
locally for free, and then the English version goes up on the GPI newswire, where it's available for
free for individual readers. It's also available for syndication via our syndication platform,
but we'll talk a little bit more about that later.
So that's how it works. Now let's talk about how we know that it is working. Not
just working to create exceptional journalism, but working to actually create systemic local
and global change.
Earlier I told you about the three things that I had envisioned that this new model
of international journalism would create: increased local access to information, elevated
global awareness, and empowerment opportunities for women throughout the developing world.
Now this is my favorite part. I get to tell you the stories of not just the content, but
the impact this content is making.
In August, one of our newest reporters in our Rwanda news desk, Ritha Bumwe, wrote a
really brave piece about sex corruption. Turns out that a tiny, local NGO had done a study
over a few years and released the results, to very little fanfare, that revealed that
eighty-four and a half percent of Rwandan women admitted to sleeping with a boss in
order to get a job. Ritha took this research and did what all good journalists do, which
was created a fact-based narrative to actually tell the human version of this story.
Ritha found brave young women and one brave young man throughout Rwanda to tell their
stories. Shortly after the story was published, we were contacted by a member of parliament,
which is not always a good thing when that happens by the way. We were contacted by a
member of parliament who said that they wanted to invite Ritha in. They wanted to have her
speak to a roundtable of women in parliament in Rwanda. And she did. And it turns out that
Ritha's story, it turns out, currently, as we speak,is being used as the basis for writing a new
law that criminalizes sex corruption in Rwanda.
In 2010, Tara Bhattarai, who is also known in the office as the "world's greatest
human." True fact, wrote a really, again brave, incredible piece about violence and persecution that
was being experienced by people in inter-caste relationships. These were people who were
choosing to marry between castes, rather than opting for the arranged marriage within a
caste that their families would generally arrange for them.
The story is extremely powerful and tells some pretty violent stories of what was happening
to people who did choose love marriages outside of their caste. Again, because these stories
are both distributed locally in local language, but also globally in English, they tend to
apply a very unique kind of local pressure to decision makers in these countries.
A few members of parliament got a hold of Tara's story. This time we are contacted
by the Prime Minister's office. Just a few short months after Tara's story was published,
the parliament in Nepal passed a new law that criminalized this kind of inter-caste discrimination.
Their constitution had previously had different types of discrimination outlawed, but this
specifically said inter-caste discrimination and violence was against the law. It was a
felony that came with jail time and heavy fines. After that, a member from the Prime
Minister's office went on camera and credited Tara and GPI for forcing this conversation
into the national dialogue.
Those are a few examples of how we know that local, ethical, investigative journalism is
provoking change. As a result of just these two stories, literally millions of lives were
changed. Millions of people previously facing hardships in their community are now seeing
greater forms of justice.
As far as global awareness, this one takes many shapes and forms, and actually, thanks
to meeting Jane sand Linus from Embrace this week, this story and its impact will hopefully
soon take on another form. This summer GPI reporter Aliya Bashir produced this amazing
story, one of the best stories in the seven-year history of Global Press Institute. Aliya discovered
that between January and June, more than five hundred infants had died at a Kashmir hospital,
an average of thirteen per week.
Upon extensive investigation, where she was interviewing parents, nurses, doctors, technicians,
staff, janitors, anyone she could get her hands on, she came to realize that in ninety-eight
percent of those deaths, the cause of death was asphyxiation. The equipment wasn't working.
In the days just after this story was published, it was picked up by some of our syndication
partners, and just days after that we got word that two international organizations
pledged the donations of new equipment.
Armed with kind of powerful human narrative, alongside extraordinary research and deep,
deep facts, we are prompted to act. We are moved in act. In fact, in many times when
we talked to people who have acted as a result of GPI content, they say they felt like they
had no choice. I will tell you though, that in conversations with Jane and Linus over
the course of this week, I realized that the story of impact in this particular case is
not done.
Upon learning that so many international organizations donate equipment like this to hospitals and
then people don't know how to use them, I spoke with the reporter via Skype two nights
ago, on Monday night, and asked her to please go to the hospital and ensure that A, these
machines were being used and used correctly and that people in the hospital were trained
to use them. If in fact we find out that they're not, we'll take steps to reach out to our
local NGO partners to make sure that the people in this hospital are trained to use this new
equipment.
So, just another example of how by bringing Prize winners together in this Symposium,
greater change is actually possible as a result of these stories.
And finally, the women of GPI. I will admit to you that I stared Global Press Institute
out of my love for journalism, and I never, ever anticipated the deep, deep impact that
these women would have on each other, on their communities, and truthfully, on me.
Global Press Institute reporters, as I was saying earlier, are an extraordinarily diverse
group of people. People with bachelor's degrees and master's degrees who come from
families with means, but happen to live in countries where unemployment is fifty-five
percent. There are also people who are former sex workers. Two GPI reporters are former
sex workers. Literally stopped their career in sex work in order to become professional
journalists. One of those two is now an internationally award-winning journalist.
She's actually really funny. She said in the interview training one time, we were talking
about negotiating access to interviews, and she was like, "Oh, I got this. This part's
easy."
[laughs]
Education is another major indicator. Together, GPI reporters have literally spent thousands
of hours in training. Learning not just the nuts and bolts of journalism, but the women
in our program are learning how to type, they're learning how to use software for the first
time. They're learning life skills as well. Financial literacy, how to open a bank account,
how to do your own budgets, things like that. The number of hours these women have spent
in training is just incredible.
By having sustained employment over the course of, for some of our reporters, going on six
years, the stories they tell about being able to better care for themselves. One of our
reporters in Kosovo went to the dentist for the first time last year. She was thirty-six
years old.
They're not only able to take better care of themselves, but also their families. Sometimes
the way they share information with us is so hysterically casual that it just makes
it all the more honest and heartwarming.
A couple of weeks ago, I was up and had my email open and so on G chat, I try to be on
G chat or Skype like twenty hours a day, literally, it's kind of sad. And I get a G chat from
one our reporters in Cameroon, who had just become a senior full-time reporter two months
earlier. Oh, there's one of them now. Just two months earlier, she had become a senior full-time reporter. So she
sent a quick G chat to say, "Hey, with my new salary I was able to get a better house."
And because she got a better house, she was also able to travel back to the village where
her young son was living with her parents. She couldn't afford to care for her young
son and live in a city where she could actually be employed and have a job. So she said, "I
got a new house." And she said, "I got my son back. It feels really good to be a
responsible parent thanks to GPI. Gotta go!"
[laughs]
Those stories, those are the ones that stick with us. A student asked us at the luncheon,
I think it was, a couple days ago, what keeps us motivated. I mean, things like grant reporting
and that kind of stuff can be incredibly tedious, but you just have to think about someone like
this reporter in Cameroon, who's life is so fundamentally changed for literally hundreds
of dollars a month.
And finally, general empowerment is something that has been so fun to watch. When we were
in Nepal in July, we went to an event celebrating the opening of one of our partner NGO's
new offices. My favorite part about that event was watching Tara. When I first met Tara,
going on almost six years ago now, I always knew she was brilliant, but she was shy, she
was quiet. To see her walk into this space filled with NGOs and journalists and foreigners,
her power is palpable. People wanted to shake her hand. People stepped out of her way and
gave her a polite bow and Namaste.
Today Tara can get interviews in any government ministry. She can tell sorties in a way that
even reporters who have been working in Nepal for decades say she's the best. She's
literally the best reporter in the country. So to watch that personal transformation is
absolutely amazing.
So now we know that yes, journalism is in fact a development tool for these women, for
these communities, and in fact, for the whole world. But now the question becomes, how do
we create a sustainable model here? How do I make it so that I can keep my commitment
to employing these hundred and thirty- three women year after year after year? How do we
continue to build our brand, so that we can continue to make a huge impact on the face
of international journalism in a larger, more sustained, more powerful way?
I fully admit that I'd never, ever heard the term "social entrepreneur" when I
founded GPI. In fact, I would say that it wasn't even until 2009, that I'd begun
to hear it on a regular basis. And it wasn't until pretty recently that I actually began
to identify as a social entrepreneur myself.
The definition of a social enterprise is simple. It's a business also dedicated to doing
social good. I really think it's the first part of that sentence that's most important:
it's a business. GPI is, and always has been, run like a business. This is not charity.
The women of GPI have to work hard. They go through an intensive training. Every single
story they're going back and forth with editors, and it's a difficult process. They
are not getting handouts, and this is not charity. And our books are run like a business
too. Lean in expenses, but fat in impact.
But looking towards the future, I know, that simply relying on fundraising to keep this
thing going is neither smart nor sustainable. So just as I did back in Nepal years ago,
I begin to think about the business of journalist. And I'm really sorry if I shock anyone in
here when I tell you that the business of journalism is dying, and has been struggling
for decades. I want to follow that sentence though by saying, you will never meet a bigger
journalism optimist than me.
The profession has been slowed to adapt. This pesky little thing called the Internet
came around and nobody thought it was going to change much. The future of the industry
is absolutely in question. But it's not if it will survive, it's how much it will
change and adapt.
One of the things I find that is so interesting, is that years ago, in my first go as a foreign
correspondent, it took me matter of days to realize that foreign correspondence was an
impractical means of storytelling. Over the last about twenty years, majority of foreign news
bureaus have closed around the world. Newspapers and wire services, can't afford them. So
it's not only an impractical method of storytelling, it's an impractical business model too.
So what are we left with? We have a shaky, mainstream media commitment to foreign correspondence
that's too expensive. On average, a piece of feature news that runs in a mainstream
newspaper can cost up to ten thousand dollars for one article.
In response to this, social media, citizen journalism, have emerged, but not without
their own problems. Blogging, citizen journalism, lacks credibility. It lacks a sophisticated
editorial structure. In fact, it lacks any editorial structure at all. Its relationship
with fact is slippery, and that's being polite. It's just not credible. It's appealing
because they have the feet on the street. You have the diversity of people being able
to bring in information, but at what cost?
We see GPI emerging as a third way. We have the credibility, based on our training-to-employment
and editorial structure, and we also have an extraordinarily diverse population of employers
currently producing news that most other news organizations are not even in these countries.
Places like Zambia. (When I used to teach at a university in California, my biggest
pet peeve was that people used to refer to Africa as a country. I used to make them point
to countries on a map, and I didn't even like take the words off, you know, they were
like still there, but it would still take them forever to find these places. Although
embarrassingly, two days ago my dad asked me what state was above Iowa and I didn't
know.)
[laughs]
So, where social media and citizen journalism provide these eyes and ears on the ground
and around the world, they lack the editorial structure. And foreign correspondence, as
we know it, is not going to survive, in fact it's already dying. So, now we know that
this is a potential new, third way. But how will we ensure our sustainability?
I've been so inspired this week to learn about Embrace and how they've had the foresight
and the vision to split their company into two parts, and that's a direction that GPI
is moving. Our first step though, is building a new syndication platform, technology that
didn't currently exist for small journalism organizations. As I said earlier, we will
always continue to disseminate our news for free in local language in the countries where
we operate. And it will always be free for individuals like you who want to go on the
website and read it.
But by the very nature of our programs, we produce a sailable commodity. So this syndication
platform will allow us to form partnerships with mainstream media, corporations, and educational
uses as well, people who can pay to utilize our content.
Now while a subscription to a major newswire service for a midsize newspaper would cost
thousands of dollars per month, the GPI subscription will cost between forty and sixty-five dollars
depending on the size of the news organization. So it's not an expensive proposition, but
over time, and within the next five years, it will make Global Press Institute one hundred
percent sustainable.
But the trick when you're a social entrepreneur is that you're business model has to match
your mission. When we think about syndication, we don't think about "oh, we gotta make
money, we gotta make money." We think about syndication as an extension of our mission.
We're currently measuring our syndication in three ways. The first is what I, somewhat
crudely, call the "eyeball metric." It goes without saying that when just thirty
thousand people a month are accessing the GPI newswire and using our stories to take
action that create social change, if we can get our content in front of millions and millions
of people every month, those impact indicators will automatically go up.
And yes we are looking at revenue as a metric, but not so much as dollars in the bank, as
time created by having this money through syndication as opposed to fundraising, where
I still spend up to fifty percent of my time in given weeks or months. So by generating
this revenue it will allow us to do more of what we do best.
And the third thing that we're going to continue to track through local distribution
and the free syndication model will continue to be local impact as well.
As I said, with this new platform we will be one hundred percent sustainable within
five years. As a result of this syndication initiative, GPI will continue to grow and
to thrive. Five years from now when we're sustainable, when the Grinnell community is
here welcoming its seventh Prize winners, GPI will be operating in more than a hundred
countries, and will employ more than a thousand women. Because I've come to learn that that's
what social enterprise is. It's continuing to build and to grow and to innovate and to
sustain. And coming up with a good idea one time isn't enough. You have to be willing
to continue to do that.
I think I wouldn't be doing my job tonight if I didn't share what has been perhaps
one of the most important lessons of my life. There is one essential ingredient to entrepreneurship
and innovation that I have not yet mentioned.
Now, as I said, this is point where the people who know me in the audience are probably closed
to mortified, especially because I admit I do have a bit of a potty mouth. But as promised,
I'm not going to stand up here and talk to you about the virtues of profanity. Unfortunately
though, I am going to talk about another "f" word, one that's even more taboo. This "f"
word is so powerfully negative that brilliant men and women have lived their entire lives
on the sidelines for hopes of never encountering it. And this "f" work is so offensive,
that when human beings are caught in the act of it, the natural response is to lie. To
blame someone else, or just to pretend that it never happened.
So tonight I hope that I can end by decriminalizing and demystifying this terrible "f" word.
[laughs]
The problem with talks like the one that I've just given you, is that I've told you less
than half the story. I told you about all the times that my ideas were good ones. I
told you about all the times that my ideas were right. I told you about some of the GPI
stories that have made the most impact. I didn't tell you about the typos. I didn't
tell you about the stories that aren't so good. I didn't tell you that for every grant
we've ever received, I've been rejected from hundreds. I didn't tell you that for
every amazing night like this one, I've been up all night in front of a budget that
I couldn't make right. With a problem, with a fear. I didn't tell you about the bad
decisions that I've made. Or my stupid mistakes, the things I wish I could take back. Ugh that
cost six months of my time and GPI's life because I made a bad decision.
As we were talking about earlier, sometimes the process of making of decisions in an environment
like this, particularly in the developing world, you lack both data and time, and so,
we make bad decisions.
But let's call failure out tonight. Shine a big, bright light on it, kind of like that
one.
[laughs]
And let's actually talk about it for what it is, which is essential, and mandatory,
honestly. For someone like me who has long been a classic type A overachiever, failure
was my biggest fear. I think most of us think about failure as disappointment. It's falling
down, it's regression, it's moving backwards. But we have to think about it in a new way.
And learning to think about it in this new way has been one of the most inspiring and
transformational points in my life and my organization's life.
Fail forward. In my work I am now actually intent on failing forward. With every new
growth spurt and every new initiative, nothing is going to go perfectly, especially when
you work in the developing world. Sometimes things go right and I'm like, "oh did
something go wrong that I didn't notice or know about?"
Without a deep, clear understanding of our failures, it's impossible to move forward.
And by pretending like it didn't happen or it doesn't happen, all we do is put obstacles
in our own way, and believe me when I tell you there are enough obstacles out there already.
If you think about it, my journey here tonight began with failure. I failed at my job in
Nepal as a foreign correspondent. So without failure, none of this would have happened.
So that's the message that I want to leave you all with tonight. That entrepreneurship,
enterprise, innovation, failure is a key ingredient.
So please. Fail forward, fail fearlessly, and fail well, so that you too can achieve
absolutely your wildest dreams. Thank you so much.
[applause]