0930-Fri-062521-PR-Building Resilience at a Growing Intl News Nonprofit-FINAL-V2: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

0930-Fri-062521-PR-Building Resilience at a Growing Intl News Nonprofit-FINAL-V2

Online News Association35min

Speaker 1

01:02

Morning everybody, I'm Leslie Compton. I'm here with Heather Ali, the CEO of the new humanitarian. The new humanitarian is a nonprofit news organization covering crises disasters in the international aid industry. They were started in 1995, by the UN and in 2015, broke off as an independent publication. I work at pro publica, our organizations in some ways could not be more different. But we've got at least one thing in common, which is that we both only covered depressing subjects. Hopefully, this conversation will not be depressing, but will instead be inspiring and interesting. So let's go ahead and get started. Have a Why don't you give us a start by telling us a little bit more about the origin story of the new humanitarian. I think a lot of folks who are joining us today are probably not super familiar with what you do.

Speaker 2

01:48

Yeah, it's great to be a donee and to kind of widen the circle of, of newsrooms that are often featured in these things, given that we're outside of the US. So the new humanitarian was founded as your news by the UN, as you mentioned, in 95, it was just after the Rwandan genocide, which, as everyone knows, you know, led to the slaughter of

Unknown Speaker

02:14

hundreds of 1000s of people and

Speaker 2

02:18

the feeling at the time was had there been a better flow of information between the various aid responders, they could have saved more lives. And so we were created really essentially as a as a way as an information coordination tool. And it was only over time that we emerged into much more of a newsroom with a journalistic culture. So we started really with a focus on East Africa and then grew over the years, to be a global newsroom with editors based in today, Bangkok, and Jerusalem and Johannesburg. And of course, here in Geneva, our headquarters, and our mission really is to put high quality journalism at the service of the world's most vulnerable people. So we're reporting on conflict reporting on refugee flows on disasters and the effects of climate change on epidemics with the goal of informing the way the world responds to humanitarian crises, and hopefully contributing to more effective responses and more accountable responses, which is the other way in which our two organizations are

Speaker 1

03:20

somewhat similar. So talk to us a little bit about your transition, I think one of the things that we're here to talk about today is building resilient organizations. And as you guys have in recent years rolled out as an independent organization, you've had to do some interesting things about sort of how to become independent building on this legacy of who, who you were and where you came from, and resetting that. So talk to us a little bit about what that transition was like and why it happened. And then I have some more questions for you, but set the scene. Sure.

Speaker 2

03:57

I mean, we were part of the UN for almost 20 years. And there were a lot of advantages to that in tapping into the networks and the access that the UN has the infrastructure. But it also came with some drawbacks, in part being part of a huge bureaucracy, partly the perception that some had that we were an advocacy organization or a kind of NGO, bunch of folks that were kind of promoting certain points of view, which wasn't, which wasn't true, but you could understand why people would think that way. I think the largest obstacle was that we were trying to do real independent journalism, but housed in this this thing that had all kinds of diplomatic sensitivities and operational constraints. And it just got to a point, particularly over coverage of Syria in which it wasn't tenable anymore, and I think both sides felt that we would it would be a win win. If we split off and became independent that way we'd be completely free to write about and write how we felt The best and the UN and its staff and its operations wouldn't pay any price for what we published. So that's why we kind of decided to split off. And it was essentially like setting up a whole new organization, we had to create a new governance structure, we had to hire new staff had to fundraise from scratch, right to build up operations, finance, everything that you that you can imagine goes into setting up an organization. So we were for many intents and purposes, a startup really. But with this legacy, and reputation and history that gave us I think, some credibility, and with, you know, an existing audience, and to some extent, some funders that knew what we did and had funded us via the UN, and we're looking to see what this next chapter would look like, and whether that that might be something that continue to support. So we had a few, a few starting points, but it was really a whole new ballgame in many ways, in terms of really entering the media landscape in a in a more visible way. And, and acting like a bonafide a newsroom and not a un project.

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