Keynote address by Marina Walker Guevara (CJS2022 Day 2)

Joe Amditis49min

mago torres

00:03

Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Stephanie and the team of the center of comparative media and everyone that has worked to make possible the collaborative journalism summit this year. And I am deeply honored and excited to introduce you to these years key speaker, Marina Walker Guevara. I want to start with a very short story. I moved to the US seven years ago, and Marina was the first person who reply one of my emails and welcome me to meet the journalist and the work that they were doing an iCj and I felt like so welcome from day one that I was able to meet people. And since then i i keep crossing paths with Marina and learning from her in every possible way from one on one conversations to hearing her in a when she speaks in panels, where she shares on Twitter and also just like how she communicates such I just want to invite you to do enjoy the generosity of someone that is so. So smart, so disciplined, so professional, and just so thoughtful in how it is changing, and has created a big change in how we do journalism around the world. In the official presentation, I want to say my negative ad at MIT net Welcome to give a shout out. He's a Pulitzer Center Executive Director before joining the center, she was deputy director at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists iCj where she managed two of the largest collaborations in history in journalism, the Panama Papers and Paradise papers that involve hundreds of journalists that use technology. And I want to add to that thought, was a learning process for journalists who embrace that technology to to unravel it stories of public entries from terabytes of leaked financial data into that I also want to share that teachers journalist of how to understand these complex financial data, she had a she was instrumental instrumental in developing a model of large scale collaboration. She works has worked very hard to present reporters who used to be competitors to work together. And I think also to not only fall in love of working together, but just recognizing how important and changing it is. So I would give Medina the time it very soon, but I just want to invite everyone to share your questions and in the q&a section of soon as the as a as GC speaking, we will, we will start looking at them. And if anyone is comfort is more comfortable writing your questions in Spanish, feel free to do it. Apologize, I cannot offer that in another language. But we are doing our best. So with that, Medina, the floor is yours.

Marina Walker Guevara

03:17

Good morning, everyone. And thank you so much, Margot. There is like really nobody I would rather share this morning with and thank you. Thank you so much for your kind words. And I'm so glad to be here today with this vibrant and resilient community of journalists and innovators. Thank you so much, Stephanie. Thank you to the Center for Cooperative Media for bringing us together for your fellowship for your leadership. So we can reflect on our craft this morning. Collaboration, as Michael says, has anchored my experience and my career in journalism, and allowed me to do things that I basically never thought were possible. And speaking of impossible ventures I would like to share with you want to start this morning with an anecdote from another discipline that has resonated deeply with me as I reflect on our achievements and challenges in journalism. On April 10 2019, astronomers at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics declared at a press conference, we have seen what we thought was unseeable, they were referring to the first ever photograph of a black hole, something that until that point had been considered impossible, because to accomplish that, the scientists would have needed a telescope the size of the Earth. So instead 200 journalists, not journalists, scientists, joined forces and created a network of synchronized array radio telescopes that were set to focus on the same object at the same time, and act as a giant virtual telescope. So the more telescopes involved, the sharper the image. As the New York Times put it at the time, the scientists had to adjust the telescopes to work together. They had to get the timing right, they had to hope that the weather would cooperate in multiple places at the same time. Imagine that. And yes, they had to hope that nothing broke in the process. It sounded crazy. But it worked. So now let's think about journalism. And how that kind of cooperation and ingenuity grounded in trust and a little bit of crazy has allowed us to overcome our limitations, break new ground, and tackle the stories that we thought would be impossible to do. Go no further than the current global pandemic of the past two years, whether by choice or by force, stack at home, journalists have found bold and creative ways to cooperate across newsrooms and borders, discovering in the process, a new sense of journalistic solidarity. We use mapping and other digital tools to overcome mobility restrictions. we cooperated with other disciplines, scientists, artists, educators, to get the context and the nuance that makes a story not only compelling, a truly relevant to the communities most affected. As we gather here today, docents of our colleagues are cooperating across newsrooms and borders, including Ukrainian and Russian journalists working hand in hand to track Russian oligarch acids, to unravel global networks of propaganda and disinformation and to document war crimes. So when humankind is at its lowest, as it sometimes has felt in the past few weeks and months. Journalists who ground their practice in collaboration are best positioned to tell the crucial stories of our time. They know that these stories transcend us. They transcend our competitive instincts, our newsroom politics, and yes, our own egos. So they use the technology in a smart ways. And they band together, they band together for the sake of truth, to bear witness together. And to get a sharper image, just like those scientists chasing the black holes, a sharper image of the crisis that will change not only our lives today, but the lives of generations to come. So maybe this is a good moment to pause and appreciate what a radical proposition collaboration is, in the context of journalism.

Marina Walker Guevara

08:16

Just think about all the things that we had to unlearn in order to put radical sharing at the center of our reporting. For how long journalism's whole ethos revolved around hoarding information, scooping others, and getting ahead along. The thing is the world got complicated, interconnected and increasingly more dangerous. And so the the story is that the lone wolf reporter was trying to tackle in glorified isolation. How do you follow the money across doses of tax havens jurisdictions where secrecy and opaqueness are protected by law? How do you track commodities from the depths of the rainforest in the Amazon, to the global markets, to luxury fashion and cars in the US? How do you investigate algorithms that are developing chips in Silicon Valley, maybe Shanghai, but the data they are trained on is labeled in the Philippines, and it's used to develop models and then deployed in countries around the world. We journalists realized that we needed our own network to investigate these complex networks and systems. I was fortunate to be part of one of the first attempts at organized journalistic collaboration. Most people learn about the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists when we published the Panama Papers in 2016. And they were a little surprised to learn that the network had been around since 1998. building this network indeed took several years of trial and error, and learning our old methods, tinkering with technology and crucially, learning to trust one another. So here's the definition of trust that resonates with me. Trust is the confidence or trust is confidence in the face of risk that the other person will do the right thing. Trust is confidence in the face of risk that the other person will do the right thing. We need to be certain in the face of risk or pressure, that our collaborators will do the right thing of serve embargo, protect the sources, give appropriate credit, follow our security protocols, and of course, do their share of the work. Ultimate, ultimately, trust is the foundational stone that determines whether a collaboration thrives or crumbles, there is no digital tool or coordination strategy that can overcome a lack of trust. So developing that deep trust that is anchored in share values involves, at the very beginning, peeking your partner's right. My advice based on my own mistakes and successes, look at the whole person, not only the journalistic skills or the track record in journalism, self awareness, humility, and ability to put oneself in somebody else's shoes, optimism. These are all invaluable traits that can help you overcome the most challenging moments in a collaboration. So make sure that you have enough of those qualities in your newsrooms, and in your collaborations. In other words, as my friend Dong RCSs, no brilliant jerks, and I would add, life is too short. So we don't collaborate just out of the goodness of our heart. We do it for the sake of the story, and the audience. We put the story at the center of all of our efforts. Sharing the Panama Papers with 376 other journalists around the world was a decision both practical and philosophical. Technology was only going to help us so much. We needed local knowledge, we needed new ones. And we needed context to interpret the data that only our colleagues in places as disparate as Mexico, Hong Kong, Burkina Faso could bring to the team.

Marina Walker Guevara

12:55

Collaboration can be a powerful equalizer in the media ecosystem, when it centers like para todos equally stellar but that is so overt, often overlooked by national and global media. So when people ask me, what was the key to get these massive collaborations across the finish line, I say the people, the diversity of perspectives, skills, languages, geographies, even even journalistic traditions, and the sense that we were all united and part of something that was big and bigger than ourselves. So we established from the beginning that there were no hierarchies among partners, everyone had access to the same data and resources, and everyone was expected to help one another. And to follow the same community guidelines. Whether you worked for the BBC, NPR, or the gutsy Tunisian outlet, Inky father, which I highly recommend, take note in GIFa. There were no fixers in our team, but reporting partners, the word fixer, in fact, was not tolerated. And I hope we quickly agree that is shown should no longer have a place in journalism. We share radically knowing all too well that any mistakes or breaches of trust could not only derail the story, but also the viability of collaboration in journalism. That's what we felt at that time. That was at stake. Some of the memories I share it cherish the most involved colleagues doing the right thing in a small and in big ways for the sake of the team in US colleague who led the request for comment in a repressive country to protect the local partner from possible retaliation before publication. It partner who shared with us that his editors would not willing to play by the rules, thus allowing us to prevent and contain a bad situation before it happened. Here's a journalist who put this story on the collaboration ahead. Above even his own employment an employer are the colleague living in a small country who gave up his job at the public broadcasting system to prevent a possible leak of the Panama Papers finding do during the year long research process. That colleague was Your Highness, Christiansen, and his Panama Papers story brought down the prime minister of Iceland. I am sure your collaborations are filled with similar moments of kindness, courage and ingenuity that allow for the most impactful journalism. But we also know that collaborations are hard. Yes, we know. And that if and if they are managed poorly, they can become a true nightmare. We owe so much to our colleagues who take on the difficult, crucial and often thankless job of managing our collaborations. We need more of you in journalism. You navigate from the tree to the woods and back seamlessly. You keep track and make sense of the complexity that goes into our collective research. You anticipate and manage our conflicts and disagreements, and you keep us all focused and motivated to get to the finish line. So if you are a project manager and facilitator, what a cat herder, thank you so much for your leadership. Please know that you are essential to our profession. And I want to invite everyone in the chat to feel free to share your shout outs. For any collaboration managers or facilitators that you have worked with, that you think are doing an amazing job. Let's give them a really warm shout out. Feel free to share their names. I will share my Waterous She is a wonderful facilitator. I know I couldn't have done it without using Panama Papers and more. I regard collaboration as one of the most significant paradigm changes in journalism of the past 50 years. It has become the new normal, but you know what an extraordinary shift of mindset and approach it took to get us to where we are today.

Marina Walker Guevara

17:49

Many of you were pioneers of these efforts and faced all kinds of scepticism and doubts. You had to work hard to convince others and your own editors that we needed to turn our practice practice on its head because we were missing the biggest stories of our time. You remember the rice eyebrows, the uncomfortable questions, the sheer fear in our letters, face faces. And then you persevered and slowly but surely, we started to see doses of little fires everywhere. Local collaborations, regional networks, even once fierce competitors joining forces to tackle tackle a reporting challenge together. A couple of years ago, the California reporting project showed us how you approach a complex and systemic story like police misconduct, as a collective. You get together with trusted colleagues, and you fire the hell out of police departments. Then you share the documents with your 33 news from partners and write the stories that were hidden for too long. Still, and despite all these amazing successes we know that is there is so much more work that we need to do. And here are a few questions for for us to think about this morning. are we collaborating enough here in our own backyard in an election year, when the core of our democracy the right to vote is systematically challenged and eroded in cities and counties across country and our existing reporting networks and collectives creatively and effectively countering the massive disinformation networks that flourish in our communities amplified by social media, political parties and deductions. And how might we deepen our cooperation with other disciplines? Human Rights researchers, lawyers, artists Make our work even more ambitious, more relevant, and I would add more memorable. At the Pulitzer Center where I work now, we have had the privilege in the past year to support the creation of its 1619 Teacher Network. This is a collective of teachers from dozens of school countries across the country, school districts across the country, who have come together to develop lesson plans based on the New York Times 1619 project. The network network also allows these teachers to support one another amid widespread attacks and legislation that seeks to make the teaching of the history of slavery in America illegal. Big shout out to all these teachers, these brave teachers, who not only doing really hard and important work, but that have discovered in this network and discovered in working together in your sense of opportunity, possibility, and resilience. The challenges we face are perhaps bigger than in any recent memory. But the different is that at this time, we journalists are better equipped to tackle them. A sense of solidarity and possibility has permeated the media ecosystem in Chicago and in California, in Texas in New York, and it means we all have gone through a lot in recent years. And yet there is this great momentum and synergy of peoples of ideas and methods. What is going on in our profession reminds me again of those scientists coordinating their telescopes from different corners of the earth to finally see what was unseeable. Remember, the more telescopes, the more the more people working together, the sharper the image of the black hole, as long as there was discipline, coordination, trust, and yes, a little bit of luck. So I am counting on this community. I am counting on your journalistic ingenuity and courage to give us a sharper image of our dwindling democracy. a deeper conversation about the enduring legacy of racism in our country, and bolder ideas on how we might create a more equitable, inclusive and sustainable media industry.

Marina Walker Guevara

22:41

Here's to hoping that we can continue to reach for the impossible, and the unseeable with new tools, deeper determination, and more collaboration. Thank you so much.

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