‘Regulatory regimes are usually behind technology’

LYDIA POLGREEN has spent 15 years with New York Times (NYT), reporting from West Africa and India, among other regions. Early this year, she joined HuffPost as editor-in-chief. HuffPost is part of Oath, the hub of media and content businesses of US telecom giant Verizon. Vanita Kohli-Khandekar spoke to Polgreen on journalism, technology and the internet. Edited excerpts: What are the challenges that journalism faces? Well, it is the best of times and the worst of times. You can spread news very fast through WhatsApp or social media. It doesn’t need to be fact-checked. And there is this chorus of voices. But the line between chorus and cacophony is very thin and right now we are slipping into cacophony. In the US there has been a real collapse of trust in institutional journalism. I grew up in a time when a story printed in the

New York Times was gospel. Now, any opinion or fact you don’t like can be discarded. We talk of fake news as if it happened in 2016, but it has been going on for a long time. In 2014, in the run-up to the Indian general elections, there were so many memes and stories. Then there is the profound economic challenge of journalism. In the US we have seen our ad dollars stripped by the duopoly of Google and Facebook. India luckily continues to support the print landscape, people still view print as their daily routine. It (the economic devastation) will come here too.

Over seven weeks, starting in early September till late October, we took a bus tour across 26 cities in the US to take the temperature of the country, to understand what kind of stories we should be telling. What was inescapable was the wholesale collapse of local journalism. More than 200,000 jobs have vanished because of the collapse of ad revenues. Early in my career I reported for a local paper from Albany. I used to attend local development board meetings, go to school boards. When people feel that a journalist is part of their community they trust them. It is very easy to distrust something that is far away. People are focused on issues that have most impact on their community. In Birmingham, Alabama for instance people are concerned about crime. In Fort Wayne, Indiana it is schools and school vouchers. Almost no one talked of Donald Trump. But if you switch on

CNN or Fox News it is only Trump and Russia. What that shows is there is a big gap between the issues that the national media is squawking about and what people are worried about. It speaks of the collapse of local journalism. The brands left are trying to do local reporting but with a fraction of the resources. Do you think that it is time to use regulation that treats Facebook, Google as media firms subject to the same defamation and libel laws and therefore checks and balances as mainstream media? Regulatory regimes are usually behind technology. For instance, child labour in agrarian societies has a different tenor compared to that in industrial economies. The way we think of monopoly, communication, media are all changing in real time. Two things are happening — the population is becoming more skeptical and it is having an impact on institutions. People are realising that there need to be some kind of regulatory framework. Currently, technology has taken away jobs from journalists and nobody is bothered. But, as technology obliterates jobs in manufacturing or from say truck drivers, we will be having a different conversation. Your view on native advertising. The Federal Trade Commission has clear guidelines while here in India we don’t. What has emerged so far is a sophisticated standard for consumers with clear labeling and transparent practices in the US. Any quality newspaper is ruthlessly guarding it. Brand is a word for journalistic reputation; no publication can destroy it for a few dollars. Native as a proportion of advertising is big. There are two issues with it. One is reputational. The second is the difficulty to scale because it is content. Native is important, but it is not the panacea people thought. The changes that you seek to bring at HuffPost internationally and in India. My last job was leading the international expansion at NYT. Everywhere I went people knew NYT but they knew

HuffPost too. I am an old-fashioned reporter. My career has been about going out and doing journalism. Therefore my job at HuffPost is to push high quality reporting that outrages people in a good way. We are upgrading our talent; there is an entirely new leadership team. India is a fascinating market and there is a real need for our voice, for an independent voice that is not just speaking for leadership, but also for the under-reported in the country. Our staff is mostly women. We plan to increase our team here. There are particular storylines that are important to our audience, for example on gender. We have always tried to cover hard news. There is a strong emphasis on lifestyle and entertainment. Given the current atmosphere what if you are pressured/ censored. They can try to censor us but we are independent. And also part of a large US corporation, they will find it difficult to muzzle us. The challenges and opportunities India offers... The talent pool in Indian journalism is the richest because newspapers continue to thrive. And, also because a significant number of journalists are frustrated by the limits of journalism. How do you reconcile the worlds of offline and online journalism? In India the highest quality of journalism is happening online by sites such as The Wire. When Caravan did a landmark investigative story instead of following it up, other publications are busy discrediting it. We romanticise newspapers, the reality is there are serious problems with newspapers. They speak in a ‘voice of god’ way. There is a lot to learn from online. At HuffPost, I was aghast at how little a gap there is between creating the article and publication. And, therefore I said ‘slow down’. Our goal is to be somewhere midway between a digitally savvy and a journalistically sound brand. Would HuffPost be getting into more languages in India? Down the road yes we would be interested. But, people tend to think of language as text. To my mind the most exciting possibility is audio. There are different opportunities for news products in different languages. For example we worked on the Spanish language edition of the NYT and discovered that a lot of Spanish speaking journalists speak the language very well but don’t have the writing skills in Spanish. Therefore, voice. How much does analytics drive editorial strategy at HuffPost? Analytics is not a nefarious force. There is absolutely no journalist I know who doesn’t want his story to be read. The stories that get traffic are the big scoops, the viral yarn. For example, there was this picture of a buff young muscular man and his slightly rubenesque wife which went viral because people were body shaming the girl. It would have been easy for us to do a round-up of the tweets. But, our reporter found out who they were and interviewed the girl. It went viral. It didn’t topple a government. It was a piece about feeling comfortable and positive about how you look. It is about doing human stories too. The rise of analytics has made journalism more accountable to the audience.