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>>Joris Luyendijk: My name is Joris Luyendijk. I'm Dutch so you won't waste the next ten
minutes guessing where my accent is coming from.
If you are a banker, five minutes later, you can be an exbanker. Just imagine if you're
all returning to your jobs tomorrow and you go to your desk and opposite you, your colleague
is just gone. Stuff is cleared out, just gone. Nobody talks about the colleague. It is just
poof. This is what it's like to be a banker, is
every quarter people start talking sort of like, Do you think it is today? Do you think
it is today? Do you think it is today? And then Tuesdays, because human resources never
does it on a Monday, Tuesdays people sit down and suddenly the phone rings and somebody
gets up, picks up his stuff, and walks towards human resources and people realize it is beginning.
So this sort of wave of panic washes over the trading floor, and all day people just
sit there by their phone. When it says "undisclosed number," they are like no! They pick it up,
and it is a client. Oh, sorry.
It is a client. It is not human resources. But a little later, it is human resources.
Five minutes later, they are marched out of the building by security. Their phone is blocked.
Their security pass is blocked. Their email is blocked, and they are never talked about
again. Now, this is an example of something that
is new to me and I think new to most people who don't know anything about banking. Maybe
if you're -- I'm told Americans actually think it takes such a long time to get rid of people
in England. So Americans are used to even more -- even less job security.
But to me, from the Rhineland model in the Netherlands, this was shocking and it completely
changed my perception of the news. Whenever I see bankers now, whenever I hear
talk about financial reform, I think, yeah, but they can be fired in five minutes. So
how can you expect bankers to take the long view if they can be out of the door in five
minutes? How can you expect them to sort of sound the alarm about risks if there are regular
cullings every quarter? And people are just -- human resources just goes down the list
and says, This one goes, this one goes, this one goes.
So, this example between news and new is, I think, one of the sort of really exciting
new developments in journalism. And I'm incredibly lucky to be with the Guardian, which is really
-- which may be outsold by The Eye because it is free -- almost free. And it is run by
a trust, so we have more money to experiment, which is great. So I do not wish in any sort
of way to belittle other organizations that have to deal with major cuts.
But what's fantastic about the Guardian is they sort of said, Okay, Joris, why don't
you come work for us? And why don't you stop thinking out of the box? Because there is
no box. We have to think beyond the box because every side of the box that defined journalism
has collapsed. Audiences cannot participate. Everything we write is in one place, on the
Web. We can work for the long tail. So just sort of -- try to think as disruptively as
you can. That has been what I've been trying to do.
And I feel a bit like we're in the -- news organizations are like steamships and we've
just entered the age of aviation. And this really gets my colleagues riled up. You think
about yourself as a steamship. You think around you, And you we're the Guardian. We are ahead
of the other steamships until you look up and you see the planes going overhead.
I think what happened to mobility, thanks to aviation, will happen to information. We'll
just have a lot more and a lot better stuff, and we'll still have the steamships.
And so I feel a bit like the very early days of aviation you had these guys who glued feathers
to their arms and went like this (indicating and furiously flapping, and it usually didn't
work. But at the end of the day, we had a plane.
When you see somebody flapping like this don't ask him, Great, how are you going to monetize
that? Because you are never going to think beyond the box if somebody pulls you right
back into the box and says, How are we going to monetize that within the box?
Now, this was the plan. We take a really interesting subject that is highly inaccessible laden
with jargon and TLAs, three-letter acronyms -- ha, ha, yeah.
Can we make it accessible to outsiders, using everything that technology can do for us now?
And, basically, I just sat down and I realized, Okay, I know nothing about finance, which
is where you are. You don't know anything about finance either. Reading the Financial
Times, you pretend. But unless you are a really insider, you don't really know what all these
terms mean. So I can go the old route, which is to become
an insider offline and then start writing for other insiders. But it's actually now
with the long tail, what I can do is I can start to document my own journey from outsider
to insider. I'm just going to start with a question that
every outsider probably wants to know. Interview lots of bankers, post all these interviews
online and then start writing wrapups and thereby sort of documenting a learning curve
about the world of finance. And we'll see where we go, and so this job security thing
came up. How it worked, in the beginning, I would go
to ten bankers and say, Okay, everybody hates you.
I know there are a few bankers here. Sorry. Everybody hates you.
Do you hate yourself? No. That's called cognitive dissonance.
[ Laughter ] >>Joris Luyendijk: No. You don't hate yourself.
Why don't you meet with me and tell me why you don't hate yourself. How can bankers live
with themselves, and what kind of people are there they?
So, I did ten interviews anonymously so they wouldn't get fired immediately. And I posted
these ten plus a kind of wrapup piece, like, wow, this is actually quite interesting.
And then I supplied an email address for new volunteers. And the first ten were all men
because they are risk taker they dared to speak to a journalist.
And they were all very positive. They said, I have a great job. I'm doing really well.
I'm a happy banker. And then lots of women starting writing in,
I actually also work for a bank but I hate it. I'm not in the "I love my job" camp at
all. As one of those bankers, technically not a
banker, was in H.R. and she sort of wrote in to the Gmail account and said, Look, if
you want to meet and hear what it is like to fire these people all the time, I'm ready
to go if you can guarantee my anonymity. The interview is now online, of course, forever.
She describes what it is like to have people in every five minutes and tell them that their
life is over and that they can go home and tell their kids that the private school fees
can no longer be paid and how these people react and how you sort of go down the list
and say, Okay, this one is probably going to blow up so we need security. If we fire
them a little later, then we can pull it with the other guy who is also probably going to
blow up. This one will probably take it well. That's how it works. This sort of stuff could
never go into a newspaper because if you put in a newspaper, what's the chance of somebody
sort of wanting to read this at that day? And it would be printed. The next day it is
fish wrap. But now with the long tail, they are sitting,
just waiting with audiences. You can suddenly do all kinds of interviews and produce all
sorts of information that would never qualify for a paper but would certainly find its audience
over time. And thanks to social media, over time, these
interviews collect a lot of views, especially thanks to the social network that dare not
speak its name here. Suddenly, you see the Facebook "recommends"
shoot up and even the Google+ "recommends" sometimes --
[ Laughter ] >>Joris Luyendijk: Because people alert each
other to a story. This is how it's been going. It has been sort of a running conversation
between insiders and outsiders in finance. And you can never have done this, say, 20
years ago if only because you need a special email account.
So most bankers make a special email account to get in touch with me, and we meet in secret.
I write it up from notes. I send it to them and check for accuracy, omissions, and identifiable
detail. Then it goes online. Then people start commenting,
and then the interviewee can jump in, too, and begin -- -- carry on the conversation.
And it is incredibly exciting, and it is also very different.
In the old days as a journalist, you had to sort of pump yourself up and pretend you know
everything, you know? I got the story first! And now I'm the facilitator and I can sort
of share my amazement. I say, Look, I can't believe you people have no job security. What's
it like? And then new information comes in and so you're -- slowly this whole thing is
filling up. I have sort of -- because you need -- if you
are sometimes on the speaker circuit, you need a few catch phrases. I call it sharing
my learning curve and whether you can learn by seeing other people learn.
And, yeah, it's great fun. I have now been doing it for nine months. I will be doing
it for another year and sort of getting ready for the next step, which is to sort of turn
it into a department store of brain food. One of the most interesting things about what
hasn't happened yet in journalism is that we still write one version of an article.
And so if you know more than the journalist about the article, it is really boring because,
say, for Syria, you know that Assad is an Alawite and you know that the Russians have
a naval base in Tartus and you know about the Israel occupation of the Golan Heights.
You know all these things. Where is the good stuff? Whereas, outsiders, they don't know
all these things. And so they need to be served, too, with the same article.
I think the next -- the future is to have a department store of brain food and ask,
Okay, what is your level of prior knowledge? What is the your level of engagement? And
depending on it, would you like a five-minute piece or a 10-minute piece or a 20-minute
piece? Depending where you want to go next, now already
on the blog you can go these are the most popular interviews by Facebook, by Twitter,
most commented upon, most read. These are my own favorites and this is why.
So, basically, what you, I think, can get is a personal shopper. So you sort of say
you want to know more about climate science or about world of finance or about Islam or
about Kabul, and there somewhere on the Web, somebody will be sharing his or her learning
curve. If you go there, the author of the learning
curve will say, Look, you want to know more about climate science, you don't know anything.
I was where you are now a year ago. And this is where you can go next depending on how
much time you have and what you want to do. And so to me, also, as a user, I would think
that would be just fantastic. And, yeah, that's it.
I remember when Lehman Brothers crashed in 2008. I'm self-employed and I was really worried
about my savings because I realized it was actually a misnomer. They weren't safe. And
so I went online and I started reading about the financial sector, and I got only more
confused. And I thought, if only there would be a personal
shopper for me, saying, Hi, Joris. You are worried about your savings. I was worried
about my savings. And, so, where do you want to go next?
It is great fun. I'm still flapping furiously. And who knows, next you will have one about
the EU, about climate science, and these sort of things.
Yeah. I wish I had a great sentence to end it with, but I don't. Thank you.
[ Applause ]