'Reporting on the women the pandemic left behind' | RISJ seminar with Ryan Lenora Brown, journalist, The Continent | Otter.ai

'Reporting on the women the pandemic left behind' | RISJ seminar with Ryan Lenora Brown, journalist, The Continent

Reuters Institute51min

Meera Selva

00:06

Hello, and welcome to the Reuters Institute for the Study of journalism, the global journalism seminar series. We're going to look today at what it means to be a foreign correspondent, a freelancer and also to report from Sub Saharan Africa. And we're really pleased to have with us today Ryan Brown, a freelance reporter and researcher based in South Africa. She writes for a huge range of publications, including the Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, AP and The Guardian amongst several others, and until recently, she was Joburg chorus bureau chief for the CES monitor, formerly the Christian Science Monitor, and work has won awards from the overseas Press Club of America and the Society of Professional Journalists. Ryan is really interesting because she has a master's degree from African Studies from the University of Oxford and a bachelors from Duke University in the US, and has lived in Joburg for nine years now and plans to stay there forever. I think. Brian, thank you so much for joining us today.

Unknown Speaker

00:59

Thanks for having me.

Meera Selva

01:00

Thanks. I'm gonna start with kind of one of your most attention grabbing stories in in recent months, which is your reporting and Adela suit to garment industry was left in complete tatters, so to speak, and by COVID, and it was part of a year long series by AP, covering the impact of COVID on women. And it was highlighted by the Pulitzer Center and it was a cover story for the continent. So it's a story in a theme that has really made waves everywhere. Could you talk us a little bit about about the story what what drew you to it? And what kind of the process of writing it? Yeah, sure. Thanks.

Speaker 1

01:33

So this is part of a broader project that I'm working on about the many lives of our clothes, you know, sort of from the moment they're cut and sewn in the factory, through to the moment they end up in a landfill, often in a country very far from where they were purchased and worn. And I'm interested in particular in the role that Africa is increasingly playing on both ends of this cycle that many African countries are now becoming garment producers, the sites of garment factories, and also that Sub Saharan Africa is the largest destination in the world for secondhand clothes cast offs, and is really sort of where most of our clothing has its final resting place. And so I'm interested in what the effects effects of that have, you know, all of that is on this region. And the reason I'm interested is because sort of on a general level there's been a really, really brisk rise in the past couple of decades in the amount of clothing in the world global clothing production has doubled in the last 20 years Americans now buy something like five, six dozen new items of clothing in a year and dispose of them sort of equally quickly. And it's an industry that has a sort of enormous effect on people and on the planet. It's responsible for 10% of global emissions, which is more than flights. So it's this hugely important industry. And then, you know, more recently, I was also interested in what's happened in the last couple of years with the pandemic, as you alluded to, and the fact that people's sort of clothing consumption habits changed really rapidly factories started, brands started canceling orders. factories started shutting down, you know, and what happens if we treat clothing to supposedly is that the people who make the clothing also become very disposable. And so I want to do some reporting and with Su two, which is this little country that's entirely inside of South Africa and has become a country of 2 million people has become a sort of leading garment producer in Africa. And I wanted to look at the lives of the women who are Suso are close there and how they were affected by by the pandemic and by the sort of changing whims of what people wanted to wear on the other side of the world. So that was the that was the project I was working on and listen to

Meera Selva

03:53

it's very much because the story of Mattoon bass College in Kenya, the country's the discarded clothing is one that correspondents have been writing for years and it's always framed a lot of these countries as passive recipients of the masses of clothing coming from the west and crashing their textiles industry. And, again, when we're talking about framing Africa as a foreign as a foreign correspondent, how much did you have to work to say? It's not it's not just that kind of inward flow that there is also the growing textiles industry that was that was that kind of something that your editors understood? Instinctively? Or did you have been pushed more to report on that? But

Speaker 1

04:35

I mean, I think luckily, like sort of generally with international reporting, the stories that are the easiest sells are always the ones that have a connection to the place, you're selling the story, the people in the place where you're selling the story. And so if you can start name dropping your Reeboks and Adidas and Levi's and Wrangler, then suddenly this little country in southern Africa that maybe people can't pronounce people have never heard of people don't know where it is, you know, who lives there. Suddenly, there's a direct tie to people on the other side of the world. So in some ways, actually, this this story was, you know, something of an easy sell. For that reason. We're easier than a lot of other Africa stories that I've worked on over my career.

Meera Selva

05:13

And tell me a little bit about again, the process of this you got a Pulitzer Center grant for this reporting, didn't you? Can you talk a little bit about how that works? I think it's a lot of people could find just that information very useful.

Speaker 1

05:23

Yeah, sure. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. The Pulitzer Center is great. They accept applications on a rolling basis for what they call Crisis Reporting, which can be literally about sort of violent crises, wars, things like that. But also just refers to a sort of wide swath of under covered stories in the world and undiscovered places in the world. And so I just made them the pitch that I sort of just made you guys about why I thought understanding better you know, the lives of our clothes was an important topic. And they gave me a bit of money to just drive over to the zoo to it's sort of a five hour drive from where I live, and spend a few weeks there with

Meera Selva

06:04

how did you find getting access into the suit to into the garment factories. Did you work with local journalists there as well?

Speaker 1

06:13

Yeah, I did. So the big story that I did for the AP is actually not my story. It's my story with a journalist from Lisu, whose name is Maura Tila Taylor. And she's a features reporter there and a reporter on development and she and I worked very closely together on that project. So she was really really instrumental, which I think this is a topic we're going to come back to probably later in the talk about how sort of how foreign reporting is produced in Africa. But she was of course instrumental as the person with the on the ground knowledge and contacts in getting us in and getting us to meet the right people.

Meera Selva

06:50

So your work for AP was kind of byline joint Lee Yes. ourselves in it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what how do you find your reception in in these places? You know, if you go in by yourself do is there more suspicion? Is there more acceptance or is it you know, you've been you've been there for a long time. I'm just wondering if if attitudes are changing, to kind of foreign journalists at all.

Speaker 1

07:16

I mean, to be honest, I find that if you do journalism, the way that I would say is the right way, which is sort of your approach humbly and with humility. It's, it is one of the best ways to interact with people in a foreign country because you're going in and you're saying, You're the expert. You know, this place, you know, this story, you know, this community, you know, what's happening in here? I don't I want to understand it better. Can we sit together and you talk and you tell me and you'd be the expert on your life on you know what's happening? And I find I find like when you approach people like that and when you approach people as a fellow person and not just to kind of you know, machine firing off questions at them people everywhere mostly, you know, depending on the topic, but but but largely are quite receptive to that. Yeah, to being sort of handed the mic and given a chance to tell their stories.

Meera Selva

08:09

And what has been your relationship with the editors and the kind of publications that you're writing for? Do you find that they're willing to give you the freedom to approach the story in your own way and frame it the way you're comfortable with and that you think is the correct way? Or do you feel that sense of sometimes having you've mentioned the need to make a connection with the home audience, but other than I was just excited to Africa correspondent myself based in Kenya and I kept bumping into stereotypes read write something about people feeling cold, man, get a note from the editor saying, You're in Africa, you can't be cold. Which is ridiculous when you're at a very high altitude and you know, there's snow on the mountains. So it was just those kinds of like little, little bits of friction that I just I was never expecting when I came up against it, and I forget that there are people sitting in another country with have very different images in their head and don't want to Always Accept what people on the ground are saying.

Speaker 1

09:02

Yeah, totally. I agree. And I think like a big thing that you get a lot is the sort of Africa as a country problem, right? That you pitch an editor and you say, I want to do this story about abortion in South Africa, and they say, oh, sorry, we don't have room for that because we did a story about malaria in Senegal. You know, two months ago, and that's sort of our health stories in Africa quotient, you know, for the time being, or you'd like you get that on a lot, a lot of different topics. Like, I want to do a story in this specific place grounded in this specific narrative. And they say like, well, there's a sort of story that's generally thematically related that we did somewhere totally different. And it's sort of contributes to that perception that it isn't sort of, like you say, a homogenous region where it doesn't get cold, where there's just sort of one thing happening. So yeah, that does definitely exist to an extent, although I have also had a lot of very sort of smart thoughtful editors who want their readers to know this region better. So I think it is changing.

Meera Selva

09:59

Okay. How I mean, how do you push back what what do you do to help this change come about? Um, it could be working with different types of editors different with different publications.

Speaker 1

10:12

Yeah, I mean, I think I think one thing is now you know, that we live in the era of the Internet. Publications produced in Africa are also available to a global audience, right. So if you can't sell a story to a Western publication, you know, there are for instance, in South Africa, publications, like the continent that covers the African continent, and its stories are disseminated broadly all over the world via the internet, you know, but they have a particular regional focus on what's happening here. And so it's easier to sell them the stories you have to make less of a pitch for the sort of colossal Hollywood level narrative, you know, pull of this story. So I think that's one big thing is that, you know, there's other channels for disseminating besides the sort of legacy publications in the west and then, you know, I think there is to an extent if you can give people a character who their readers will relate to, you know, that is like everywhere, that is like a thing that pulls people in, you know, so that's also something I I focus a lot on what sort of pejoratively called human interest. Reporting, but it's just reporting about people who are not in power.

Meera Selva

11:27

I think quite a lot of journalism isn't really journalism unless it's human interest reporting. That's the stories of the book, which means my next topic that I want to talk about, which is the kind of impact of women's the reporting you mentioned on the suit, is factories is also a part of a wider series on the impact of women. And, again, talk to me a little bit about this, there's a great deal of kind of, you know, I can think about you know, how how kind of women are portrayed in in the media and African women in particular are portrayed in the media as either a kind of very passive or this kind of noble, perfect yet suffering being and again to say, they are just, you know, they are they're human beings with the same individual stories and attitudes as everybody else. At the same ambitions and limitations and designs as everyone else. It's, again, a framing thing and I just wondered whether whether that's something you've kind of been looking at

Speaker 1

12:27

um, yeah, I mean, so I only worked on this series. I do write about women in general a lot. And you know, I'm always interested in the ways in which individual lives intersect with bigger trends, forces, moments, things going on, but are also distinct from them. You know, nobody's life sort of Marches neatly alongside history or neatly fits into all the categories that we would want to place it in, you know, so I love just being able to do stories that allow women in particular to sort of just be, you know, sort of flawed, big, complicated, messy characters, you know, be who they are, and not sort of be people with agency and not just be any one thing that we're sort of thinking of as the stereotype as you say, of what women are like in X place or what their role is like, in y place.

Meera Selva

13:23

Thank you. I mean, one of the kind of best things I've seen is the kind of the 99%, invisible podcast about Africans living in Africa's tallest building. And I thought I thought it was really good because you know, because you live there, and you kind of told the story within on the ground. And again, I remember in Kenya writing stories about about slums and slum clearance projects where they'd been these huge, you know, multi storey buildings built for the communities that they hated because the lives were not lives were lived on the ground at ground level and being able to see your neighbors and speak to them on a daily basis was, frankly more important in many cases than running water inside toilet because we're human. We are social beings, as we found out and if you take away that social connection, we kind of wither away. Tell us a little bit about the podcast and the making of it and tell just tell us about your role.

Unknown Speaker

14:16

Yeah, sure. So

Speaker 1

14:17

it was it was a story about Ponte tower, which is in near the downtown of Johannesburg and is a 54 story. apartment block, the tallest apartment building in Africa and one of the sort of three or four tallest buildings in Africa. And it's a really, if anyone has seen the Johannesburg skyline, you'll recognize it immediately. It's really distinctive looking at this too. So it's got this open core down the center. And then it's this round building. And at the top is an ad for a bright red ad for Vodacom, which is a cell phone company. So it's got it occupies this very sort of distinctive place in the skyline of Johannesburg, and also has always occupied this very sort of distinctive place in the imagination of Johannesburg. And the Johannesburg inner city has always been this place that sort of welcomed and absorbed new people coming into the city, you know, which, in the sort of, up to the 1970s 80s was white immigrants coming in from different places making a new life in a part of Africa which was whole white people from different places in for obvious reasons. And then sort of black people moving out of segregated townships in the 80s and 90s. People returning from exile and now more recently, immigrants from all over Africa. So the story was really looking at just over the years the role that building has played in the city as this sort of point of first contact and what it's meant for, for the city of Johannesburg.

Meera Selva

15:44

And how did you find kind of the podcast and how did you find podcasts this storytelling, medium supposed to text?

Speaker 1

15:53

Well, I mean, I love it. It's very it's very intimate. And you know, as a print reporter, anyone who sort of made the transition can tell you it's a kind of different kind of reporting you have to get people to to do a lot more talking and describing because you can finessed a lot less of it right like to have their voices saying what's happening, what they're seeing and stuff like that. That's an interesting challenge for someone coming from from print. But yeah, I think it's it's such a great way to tell stories, and I was reading recently, I guess this is quite a famous famous Ira Glass quote, that radio is the most visual medium. And you really, you really see that when you work on a long form story like that, the way that it sort of creates scenes that allow people to imagine what's going on in this really vivid way. So I loved it.

Meera Selva

16:40

It's brilliant. Do listen to it, because it is it is really extraordinary. I'm going to go to the room to the Reuters Institute fellows and start with Paul, who is all kinds of fellow from South Africa this year. April.

Speaker 2

16:53

Thank you. Nice to meet you. All. I'm from media 24 Back home in Cape Town. Oh, cool. Very nice to check you. I have two questions and I'll just ask them in sequence. My first one is coming from another country. I mean, what what attracted you to reporting in another continent and why FY Africa for you? I'll ask my second one as well. Do you think traditional terms such as Sub Saharan Africa or global south are outdated and we needed a bit of an upgrade that sort of categorizes huge swaths of land into sort of one geolocation and in my opinion, will experience the issues in West Africa for instance, verify and move from some of the issues in South Africa, we wouldn't group them together in one story necessarily in local reporting. So I just want to know what your thoughts are on these two additional terms and do they help or do they hinder your reporting for Northern audiences?

Speaker 1

17:58

Thank you cool. Yeah. So So why Africa and why South Africa. When I first started coming to South Africa, which was sort of in the mid 2000s. What I was really struck by was, how much seemed unsettled still in the society. How much seemed in the process of changing how the sort of South African society felt like unset clay to me, you know, and narratively, I felt like that was very dynamic, right? Like there was always there were people were thinking so profoundly and doing things in the service of those thoughts about how they could make their country different, better, you know, pivot the direction that history was going. And I just found that sort of profoundly interesting both on a professional level like as a journalist and also just as a place to live right that you go out to a bar with your South African friends, and they're kind of imagining what they want the future to look like in the country and maybe it looks very different than the world they live in now. And it just felt sort of like less less static than the US where I come from, or at least my experience of the US, and I thought I find that regionally as well, you know, that Africa is such a sort of, continent of young countries that are often like very dynamic, changing very quickly, decade to decade, generation to generation. And it makes it a really, really exciting place for me to tell stories. Yeah, and I agree with you about those category categorizations I think some of them are sort of sloppy and lazy and outdated. And I don't have great ideas for what can replace them beyond sort of just always trying to be specific about the countries and the places that you're covering or the sort of sub regions rather than, yeah, Africa.

Meera Selva

19:44

I don't like the global south either. I can't quite think of an alternative but I end up saying not Western Europe and North America.

Speaker 1

19:54

I'm doing a story now about another Nigerian because I'm invisible episode actually about North Korean statues across Africa because North Korean state run company that's built a bunch of statues of liberation leaders across Africa. But anyway, it's led me to sort of learn about the origin of the term third world which actually used to be quite a term of power and empowerment. It was sort of to say we're not with the Soviets. We're not with the Americans. We are something different, and we're charging our own way in the Cold War. So anyway, sort of just made me feel sort of sad that I guess like, I see that that that you know, that term has now taken on a sort of pejorative character, and forced the conversation about what can be used instead, but I don't know what should be used instead, either.

Meera Selva

20:43

Yeah. I think like you said, being as specific as you can and think about what you're trying to say when you use these phrases like who you're referring to. Exactly. And why is it country?

Speaker 2

20:53

I just want to follow up on that Ryan and just ask that you follow me you have got an intrinsically interesting story that tells its own place and time that you actually don't need to mention locations or framing does the power of a good story. I mean, you can call a South African story like Kenyan story and just have it be its own story. What has been your experience?

Speaker 1

21:14

Not not really unfortunately, I would say still the majority of the South Africa stories I'd pitch have some lead in that some version of like a generation after the end of apartheid. 25 years after Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, blah, blah, blah, something like that, because there still is a need to sort of situate people where are we what are we coming into? And you know, from what we know about this place? Why might we want to know something else? Yeah, so I do still find you have to make the case for the for the place in addition to just the story itself.

Meera Selva

21:45

In Kenya, you did a lot of stories on land rights and land reform and, and it was forever I was forever being asked to framed in terms of Happy Valley, which is a very British obsession with the kind of the valleys just outside the highlands just outside Nairobi, where the rich aristocrats from Britain lead very, very decadent lives and there was a kind of murder that was then turned into a very famous book and this just suddenly became this is like a framing you know, nobody in England that I dealt with was part of this aristocratic group, or we're ever going to be invited to any of their house parties, but seem to all feel that this is how you need to introduce the country when you're talking about land rights for people. It was it was crazy and really annoying. I'm going to go back to the room and to Laura, in particular, to saddle up quite a lot of questions. I want to ask, following up from your comments about the clothing industry because I think you hit on some very, very pertinent points there about overconsumption overproduction. The impact on climate is something we're looking at the opposite climate journalism network as well. But Laura, you you phrase the questions very well.

Speaker 3

22:52

Where are you from Columbia, was wondering what I was reading your articles. Why do you think most of the coverage of fashion issues has been about the systems or clothes for brands? Rather than the consequences of the production?

Unknown Speaker

23:08

Rather than the consequences of what sorry, I learned? As you say the whole question.

Meera Selva

23:16

I'll say it again, if that's okay, louder, because you're far from the mic. Yeah. Why do you think that most covered fashion issues has been about the seasons and clothes rather than about the consequences of production? And your follow up question to that is what role can the media play in a cultural shift in thinking about where our clothes from and how we can improve our attitudes to clothing, you know, and kind of buy in and talk about the environmental impact economic impact as well as do you have this season's must have pair of shoes or so?

Speaker 1

23:51

I think a not insignificant portion of it is that it's seen as an issue about by for women, that the fashion industry is seen as a kind of frivolous thing that women care a lot about, and that the people who produce the clothes are women, women of color, poor women of color, and that's a sort of easy category of people to have their concerns dismissed just sort of globally. In terms of where the the power centers are and who sort of gets handed the mic. So I think that's a non insignificant reason for it. I think it's not seen as as consequential as it is, because it's sort of thought of as this kind of frivolous industry. And not sort of given center stage.

Meera Selva

24:39

And how would what do you do about that? Do you do or do you try to do it center stage? Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 1

24:53

You notice I mean, I try to lead often with these the sort of hard facts of it right? This this thing about it being 10% of global emissions and more than air travel and maritime shipping combined. I think that that always surprises a lot of people. Because again, because it's not something that's sort of front and center. When you think about climate change, or you think about pollution or things like that. And so I think part of it is reframing it in that way that makes it not just this kind of frivolous, feminine issue or makes it harder to dismiss for the people who are sort of coming at it from that side.

Meera Selva

25:30

Thank you. And I'm now good to go to Morrison Kenya, who's hastily switch seats to place where we can see and hear him. Thank you, Maurice.

Speaker 4

25:40

Boys from Kenya. I wanted to hear your thoughts. About foreign correspondents in Africa. Coming through stories from one point about a different country. For instance, yesterday I was reading a story about the church attack in in Nigeria from one of the international media and the story was about Nigeria when the reporters they were two reporters who did it they were in Dakar, Senegal. So and we see this a lot especially you find a story about Central African Republic, but the reporter is in Nairobi, so the sign of his reporting from Nairobi, about Central Africa. Do you think this reinforces the belief Some people felt that Africa is a country and does excel or what are your thoughts about that? Thank you.

Speaker 1

26:35

I mean, I I definitely think there's an under supply of people covering Africa for foreign media, and in particular Africans covering Africa for foreign media. I don't know and I mean, I just don't know. I don't know if people who aren't us like people who aren't journalists looked at closely at the dateline, you know, like, I don't know how many people sort of see that the story about Central African Republic was reported in Kenya and make any draw any conclusions based on that? Yeah, it's a good it's a good question. I just don't know. But yeah, I mean, certain certainly, I think like to have a wider network of people in a wider range of countries to cover stories on the ground would obviously generally be better. What do you think

Meera Selva

27:25

Alright, yeah.

Speaker 4

27:28

I think that's it we have recovering from the different points or get someone Rockford report the story we'll have most wondering that. They had fixers so how they fix us on the Bible as well because someone might have helped them get the contract in the in the interview, so also include a lot of assisting in the importing.

Meera Selva

27:58

Yeah, I mean, I think I think, on one hand, the easy answer is it's a resource issue that you know, a lot of media outlets can't afford to have correspondents in every country. I do think when you're looking at something like the Washington Post on New York Times, or AP, it's not so much purely resources. It's just what you choose to spend your resources on and thinking that this isn't that they have the money, they just don't want to spend it on this. Either because they feel it there's no business case for it or they feel it doesn't matter. People can jump on planes and get to where they need so it's it's decisions that are made elsewhere. But I think it's it's different. It's different for very large organizations and I think smaller ones. I think smaller ones can sometimes be better at building up networks of journalists on the ground that they call on when there is a breaking news story.

Speaker 1

28:47

It's interesting, I mean, just sort of adjacent to this. I did notice that during the pandemic, I think a lot of publications were forced for the first time to the lie more on journalists who are already on the ground in places because they just literally couldn't get their people in. And I hope that will be a sort of longer term shift in the relationship between local journalists and foreign outlets, particularly in African countries. Because they've seen now that people are sort of highly capable of reporting those stories and doing the work without the foreign journalists being there as well.

Meera Selva

29:23

Absolutely. And we're gonna go go to Joe now of just more questions about the kind of nuts and bolts of making a living as a freelance correspondent because I think it's not all that easy. But Joe

Speaker 5

29:35

Yes, I'm I'm interested in that, I guess, your own business model, and whether they're under supplied that you've spoken about it by the foreign correspondents or African correspondents, reporting foreign media, has that helped your business model is the has the reduction of foreign correspondents over the world all around the world lead to greater opportunities for freelancers or do you still have those same struggles that all freelancers have? Around? You know, getting those Commission's coming in and keeping up those relationships with editors and funding bodies?

Speaker 1

30:07

Yeah, I mean, so I find I don't know how unique of a case South Africa is. But this is a country that generates a lot of global interest and some organizations do have full time correspondents here but quite a lot don't. So there's sort of a gap in the market for writing about South Africa, I think, because it is a country that sort of globally enough known and its history is globally enough known that it kind of picks the interest of editors. But it's still probably because it's still a country in Africa, like it's not a place necessarily that all outlets have put full time resources. So So that helps. I also do some non journalism work because I it's just more stable. It's often better paying and, you know, the sort of getting commissions for stories is wobbly, you know, it like it's it's sort of feast or famine. You don't kind of know when pitches are going to land or where or so it's nice to have other work as well that you know, sort of copy editing, work comes work, things like that, just to sort of balance things out of it.

Meera Selva

31:19

And pretty I think you had a follow up from that. And then I want to ask you about your thrift store. Print the asked question first. Still playing with this camera. Linda some excellent job remote. Hi, I'm

Speaker 6

31:46

thank you for being here. And you actually just done second part of my question. You know what you asked, but I would still be interested in knowing why you quit Christian Science Monitor to go freelance.

Speaker 1

32:04

I guess the short answer is I just wanted to do a sort of wider variety of stories than were available to me working for them. I had worked there for several years and I really loved it in a lot of ways. The Christian Science Monitor has always sort of prided itself. In doing less covered stories and from less covered places and sort of gave me a long leash to travel and to write the kinds of stories that I loved. So I enjoyed that. But they also have a sort of quite narrow mandate in terms of what they cover and I just wanted a chance, you know, to sort of dabble a bit in other things radio magazine stories, a book just a kind of wider variety of stuff.

Meera Selva

32:46

What what do they tend to cover i i wrote for them briefly myself in Kenya, a few years, several years ago. And yeah, never fully understood. Exactly. What their mandate is.

Speaker 1

33:00

Thank you, um, quite a bit of news analysis, sort of second or third day stories on news events and what they mean. And then sort of short human interest features that illuminate a particular place or issue those would be the sort of two categories.

Meera Selva

33:22

Thanks very much. And as we talked a little bit about the the extra strings you have in your bone you mentioned copy editing and columns, but I think you'll also have a thrift store is that right? Which is appropriate given you're writing about secondhand clothing?

Speaker 1

33:37

Right, do I so during the pandemic, you know, when we were all locked at home, one of the things that I started doing was learning how to sew and that was one of the things that indirectly led me to this project because I just realized, like, while sewing is sort of a mechanized process and that you're using a machine it actually like requires a whole lot of very skilled human input, you know, and it just got me thinking like, okay, no matter how little you're paying for your clothes, someone's putting very skilled labor into this. And then Anyway, another sort of output of me getting interested in the making of clothes and all of that was I got interested in the secondhand clothing market in South Africa and started buying vintage clothes, that sort of a big market in downtown Johannesburg, and then reselling them on Instagram. So that's been a sort of fun project that runs adjacent to this journalistic project and touches on a lot of the same thing, things and brings me into contact actually, with some of the sources and stuff that I would need for the journalistic stuff but is quite a bit more tactile and tangible, you know, than sitting in front of a Word document with a blinking cursor. So it's been nice.

Meera Selva

34:42

How's it been working with Instagram to kind of search for a retail outlet? Rather than a media rather than continuing stories?

Speaker 1

34:51

Oh, well, it's been fun. I mean, it's just sort of exposed me to a totally different cross section of the world than the people who are reading my human interest stories about people in various African countries. So it's been it's been nice. It's just I've actually started using the Thrift page also has a sort of informational page about the clothing industry, and all of that and putting little bits of my reporting on it as well. So it's just been a fun way to sort of reach a different group of people.

Meera Selva

35:18

That's great. That sounds really fun. I'm gonna look up the page now that actually makes sense females back up. Yeah. I'm gonna hand it over to Caitlin to ask you a few more questions that are in use. Brian, I'm going to ask,

Caithlin Mercer

35:36

typically, Frank philanthropy question which I know you're used to you personally doing as a foreign correspondent to ensure you're not part of a parachute problem?

Speaker 1

35:49

Yeah, that's a good question. And I think we should all be asking ourselves that more often. So I'm glad you did. I mean, one thing is that I tried just sort of like conceptually to think of working in this part of the world is a privilege. It's something I get to do. It's not something I have a right to do. And I have to earn the privilege continue to earn the privilege of doing it with every story. So every story I do I have to do in a way that's sort of sensitive and nuanced and complicated, and fair. Otherwise, I don't get to keep doing this. And so I tried to sort of keep myself a little spooked in that sense. And then on sort of like a more practical nuts and bolts level, I in the past several years have become very, very interested in the relationship between Morris mentioned this, you know, between foreign reporters working in the region, and local journalists are often called fixers, who we hired to work with us in places that we don't live and who are often enormously skilled, incredible receptacles. of information, experienced language, know how culture etc, and have historically just been, frankly, the underclass of foreign correspondents, right, they've been the sort of uncredited labor force that makes the whole thing possible. And even when I arrived here, you know, editors in the US would just tell me like, oh, when you go you know, when you get to Senator or when you're planning to go to Senegal, just ask around find a Senegalese journalist who can work for you pay them like $100 a day and you know, that's that's how you'll do your stories. And it took me a while to realize like, I found this like very unnerving but took me a while to realize that like, the informality of it obviously makes the power imbalance that already exists. Even more imbalanced, right. And so what I did at the monitor was I spent a lot of time talking to local journalists we worked with and that my colleagues worked with, and we put together a legal agreement for the work we would do with them. And it was mostly around things like credit, right, like local journalists are historically under credited with by lines or reporting credits, and by lines and reporting credits are obviously like a huge form of leverage to getting other foreign reporting jobs. So they're really, really important. And then pay, you know, making people share with people we're getting fairly compensated for the work that we're doing. So we set up a legal agreement that sort of takes care of all that but it also like beyond that, it just requires like making sure that you try to make like if you are the person working within the Western media outlet, making sure that you make that that relationship of pipeline and not just a sort of dead end job for people that if don't if you work with journalists, that they can then go on to solo write for that publication. You know, but the idea being that I think the idea historically has been in foreign correspondents that you send in journalists to understand how to write for foreign audiences that that's the skill set that we need for as foreign correspondents, that we know what people back home don't know. And so we will know how to explain what's unusual or different or how to explain what's going on in a way that sort of comprehensible, right? But then also, we're going into places that we don't understand well culturally in terms of language, etc. etc. And that's the skill set that the local journalists brings. So if I can be expected to learn that informational stuff, then I think somebody working on the ground can also learn how to tell stories for a foreign audience. Yes, you know, so I think it also like it takes people working in Western media outlets to say, like, pitch me a story, write it for me and then like, I'll walk you through, you know, okay, you're gonna have to explain this more. Okay, this is too in the weeds for our audience. They're not going to sort of care about that. particular political infighting, whatever, you know. And, and make it a two way street. So it's not just one of those skill sets is valued and the other one isn't,

Meera Selva

39:59

like a good to have give you a follow up, Caitlin. But I just want to completely add to that because I find that you framed it exactly correctly. And it's odd that the editor sitting in the news desk, outside Africa, wherever this may be, and the correspondents think it's fine for both of them to have exactly the same knowledge knowledge as the audience but not on the ground, and to produce the story whereas actually, it makes far more sense for the editor to say I'm the expert on the audience and being able to tell you what's too in the weeds and you're the expert on the ground and together which will produce something much, much better, so absolutely correct. Caitlin, did you want to follow up?

Caithlin Mercer

40:36

First, amen. Second, I know that the international community has read a lot about Xenophobia in South Africa, and I wondered if you'd experienced any.

Speaker 1

40:51

No, Xenophobia in South Africa is not directed at White foreigners. We are sort of supposedly just you say unfairly excluded from that we're not the hated kind of foreigners.

Caithlin Mercer

41:05

That's really interesting. You want to say more about why.

Speaker 1

41:09

I mean, Xenophobia in South Africa is centered in working class communities and it's about access to scarce resources. And so it's, it's directed at people who are seen as taking resources from South Africans. So other working class people, with with businesses with shops who have jobs in those communities, that's where it's directed, rather than at foreigners, writ large.

Meera Selva

41:40

Thank you I am going to go to Robin. There's a resident Brit in the room.

Speaker 7

41:50

i When did you say? I mean, you mentioned a little bit or maybe you mentioned a little bit there. But you talked a lot about the benefits of going to South Africa as an outsider and being able to kind of see things with a kind of with the kind of newness that you don't have if you grew up there. I never did. Another kind of flip side of that, what there must have been some challenges that kind of went with that. So that was kind of one common question. And also, you've been there now so long that do you feel like that kind of new perspective that you had when you went in initially? Do you think that's one off now?

Speaker 1

42:28

Yeah, to the to the second part I do often I find myself less confident in pitching stories now. than I've ever been. And it's because I think I get more bogged down now in how complicated every story I want to tell really is and worried about glossing over the details of it, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Actually, I think it's probably better to be a bit more cautious and in what you pitch and sort of the conclusions that you're ready to draw, but it does make it harder and I've noticed I see when new correspondents come in, and they have those fresh eyes where everything building and everything like this is unusual. This is making me curious, and they do catch stories that I don't catch anymore that have just become kind of background noise. I think I found one thing that I found really interesting moving to South Africa and still find interesting is that I come from the US where no one talks about race where people go out of their way to avoid talking about race at all costs will trip over themselves, not to mention someone's race in a conversation and so the Africans are Lunt direct and constant in their conversations about race about what it means. And I love that I love that it was because of where I come from. It was like unsettling and hard to get used to at first but I think it's great.

Meera Selva

43:47

Thank you. Thanks very much. I think I'm good to go to preety. Then you had a question about sources. And payment. And then I'll go to Paul.

Speaker 6

44:11

So a few journalists I know including myself have faced this dilemma of us sources in the African continent wanting to be paid for that. Time, or maybe for lunch or transport. Have you experienced this too? And have you navigated keeping in mind the ethics of journalism?

Speaker 1

44:35

Yeah, this is such a complicated one, because I will say I think the ethics of journalism, we're not set up for the kinds of power imbalances that you often find in these reporting situations. And I think there have been many times when I've gone into an interview with someone and I can see that they see that I've come in a private cab or I've come in a car, you know, maybe I come with recording equipment, they see I have money, and then I'm earning money from their story. I'm literally like, it is for me, literally transactional, I'm making money from telling their story. And they are very rightly pissed off about that. I don't think it's wrong. You know, when I first started going into these situations, and people would be like, I want you know, can you pay me for my time I was sort of like Pearl clutching about it. Like, how can anyone ask that? Don't they understand the ethics of journalism? And I sort of very quickly came around to like, oh, maybe it's the ethics of journalism that are wrong. I mean, I'm not saying walk into a room and sort of offer everybody like $20 to talk to you but that I do think that there's more sort of nuance and gray area and radiant in that conversation than we have ever sort of openly as a profession allowed there to be. And so I do try, I don't pay sources directly, but I do try where possible. And especially when I see that sort of power dynamic existing to just to make to to thank people for their time in whatever way I can, whether it is to sort of pay for their transport pay for a meal. If I'm talking to a vendor who sells something almost always I will buy something from them. You know, just sort of things like that, what can we do around the margins, that are not sort of directly offering someone compensation, but that our way of saying, I understand that you are giving me your time and your story and that that is not worth nothing. So yeah, I just I think it's like sort of conversation. We need to have more.

Meera Selva

46:33

I think Robbins did a lot of work on you to help people when they interact with the media, it's quite important that sources are not left feeling worse than they were at the start of the interaction. And that's partly, you know, emotional intelligence. And treating them kindly, but it's also making sure they can get home safely and dry, you know, quickly and the journey is to meet you it's not exhausting and that they are given a reasonable amount of food and water so that because being interviewed by someone is a physically draining process as much as it's an emotional one. And I think I don't think that kind of bumps up against ethics of journalism to say you do kind of provide a certain amount of resources to make sure people are physically and emotionally Okay, off. They're being spoken to you and given given their time. Yeah, thank you. And we're almost out of time. And I'm going to go to Paul for the final word here because he was up

Speaker 2

47:24

thank you Meera. I appreciate that. Oh, I can see it. Actually. Just a few more. You mentioned earlier about local reporters potentially important for foreign editors. How would you bridge that trust gap between a foreign editor trusting a local reporter, practically to just do more work like practically or how would you recommend to any sort, of course freelancers out there who want to report in other publications around the world and improve sort of reporting process? What would you recommend? And then I'll ask my second question once you've answered that.

Speaker 1

47:57

I mean, I think it's probably a lot in how you pitch the story, if you can pitch it to them in a way that shows that you understand what a foreign audience will want or need to know about that topic. It will give them a lot of confidence in your ability to report it in a way that will be appropriate to their audience. And so that's just a sort of muscle that you get PRAK practice flexing you know, by reading a lot of foreign journalism by practicing doing pitches, and by thinking what are sort of the connections I can make between the story I want to do in the audience of this publication. I think that's the main thing like when I was reading pitches at the Christian Science Monitor. I mean, it wasn't always something new. Sometimes I would take a story where I felt like I knew it had international importance. And so even if the reporter wasn't sort of making the pitch in a really coherent way for why it did, I could help them get there. But the pitches that really stood out the most were the ones where I could see that the person understood how to write that understood that they weren't writing the story for the mail and guardian or news 24 or, you know, a publication within South Africa that they were writing it for a bigger audience.

Speaker 2

49:00

Thanks so much. My last question is just if you had a magic checkbook with resources, always a problem anyway, but if you had a magic checkbook, what is the one great strength of foreign correspondents being in other areas, and you'd love to see more of, and then what is the one big weakness that you think needs to be fixed? That you'd love to see?

Speaker 1

49:22

I mean, you know, there's like this conversation about like, getting African reporters more involved in covering Africa is obviously super important. Super important. But it obviously like shouldn't end there. Right? If, if I can come and write stories about countries in Africa, then wouldn't it be awesome also, if you had a correspondent from the SU two based in DC covering politics there, you know if you had a correspondent from Malawi in The Hague, you know, and those those kinds of flows, I would like to see a lot more of I would like to know how reporters from this part of the world, what their fresh eyes would bring to new stories that are familiar to me in places that are familiar to me. So if I had if I had all the resources in the world, that's what I would do.

Meera Selva

50:07

That's brilliant answer and I think a brilliant note to end on. And this is the whole idea of creating a global knowledge sharing network where knowledge sharing goes absolutely in all areas. Robinson, thank you so much, Ryan, for your expertise. It's really, really been amazing to talk to you. And this is my penultimate global journalism seminar. But we're ending next week with Ronson Chan from the Hong Kong Hong Kong Journalists Association talking about the future of press freedom in Hong Kong if we ever needed reminding of how important it is to have correspondents. On the ground everywhere telling all these stories. And in the meantime, Ryan, thank you again so much today.

Unknown Speaker

50:47

Thank you, and thanks for all the questions

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