TEDxPresidio - Robert Rosenthal - Investigative journalism in the 21st Century

[Music] I'm an investigative journalist from the Philippines journalists provide information that allows people to make decisions about their lives our investigation takes us to to an Insurgent stronghold democracies around the world continue to function because there are journalists out there still doing their jobs risking their lives still believing that they can make a [Music] difference I Came Upon one more place where the tensions in the forest were coming to aead [Music] in order to tell the story someone like that had to be shown he was still very frightened he said that if the government knew

that he had come to talk with me he would be punished if I could take it back I would every single case of these unsolved civil rights murders was initiated by a reporter [Music] when I was a boy I wanted to do that I knew about writing I knew about reading uh I wanted to do storytelling and I had no idea how to get there the first time I walked into a newsroom it was a New York Times I was 22 years old and I was hooked completely you walked into a room where typewriters were

pounding smoke was curling to the ceilings and every day you had to do it there was a deadline a few months later I got a phone call uh at home and an editor from the times was on the phone and he said we want you to come to room 11-11 at the Hilton Hotel tomorrow and don't tell anybody you're coming there and bring enough clothes for a couple of months and I said who the hell is this and he said this is Jerry gold and I mean it the next day I walked into the hotel

and it was the Pentagon papers I became part of the team as a 22-year-old that did one of the most important stories this country's ever faced and it taught me the value and the importance of Journalism and especially investigative reporting and its role as a watchdog facing the abuses and the lies and the threats of the government it was a beginning of a career that I had no idea I really was going to get into and how to start but it was based on one thing it was based on the love of the story and

it was based on passion after the times I worked at the Boston Globe and I ended up at the Philadelphia inquir and what I wanted to do was be a foreign correspondent and I got to do that I was in Africa 2 weeks and I was thrown into a jail in Uganda I'm lucky I'm alive 3 weeks later I was in the edge of Beirut with the Israeli Army about a day or two after that I was driving with my driver and a bullet went by my ear and it went like that and I said

what the hell was that and my driver said sniper and I goes and he goes do not worry he has missed so I wanted to take chances I wanted to face risk and at that point I should have gone home I was a foreign correspondent 5 weeks but I didn't I stayed in Africa and what I learned in four years in Africa was about the world I saw the most depraved people in the world at times I saw the most deprived I came back to Philadelphia and I was dubster Knight and I became an editor

something I never imagined doing it really was about leadership it was about ideas it was about creativity eventually I became the editor of the Philadelphia inquir and eventually I got fired I was in the first wave of big newspaper editors in the early 2000 2001 when the conf conflict between profit and creativity in journalism came to a for there was a complete disconnect between the values of the journalist because no journalist ever really started working in a newsroom or any place for money they did it because of the drive of creativity to potentially do the

right thing to potentially make a difference and the values there did not meld and this is what happened and the newspaper business model completely collapsed with an inability to face the opportunities that technology was creating after that I came out here to San Francisco I thought I had one more newspaper in me and I became the editor the managing editor of the chronicle that didn't work either uh I left there after about four and a half years and I had decided that I was not going to go back to a newspaper that I had my

brains beat in too often and I needed to be in an environment where the business side and the creative side were completely aligned now how to do that how do you look to the Future at a time where nobody wanted to really invest in media and every news organization in the country was downsizing news organizations that were mainly based on profit and profit margins and not really purely based on what the journalists could do to inform society and make a difference I had an idea what I wanted to do I taught at Berkeley and then

a journalist was murdered in Oakland his name was trony Bailey one morning he was going to work he was the editor of the Oakland uh press a small uh African-American newspaper and a man ran up to him was three years ago here and assassinated him three blasts to a shotgun the third when he was on the ground his head was nearly blown off he was killed because he was a journalist a group of journalists came together to start something called the chy belly project and because I didn't have a job uh they asked me if

I would help run it coming into that first meeting there were about 30 News organizations all on different platforms all who had been competing how do you get them to work together through collaboration and being driven by the story the story was to try and figure out why chony Billy was murdered and to try and figure out what he was working on that would have gotten him killed we did it after about a year and a half an incredible amount of Storytelling and through incredible amount of work and focus on what the story was there

were many indictments and the trial of 20y Balor alleged Killers is now going on in Oakland but that taught me something it really showed me the necessity of working together in this new model So eventually I the center for investigative reporting which has been in existence since 1977 approached me about becoming the executive director I had never worked in a nonprofit I had no idea how to raise money I really if I think about it now would never have done it uh because it's a but it's incredibly rewarding and what we're talking about here today

is passion and drive and love and this is what I love uh you know I love The News Room the first time I walked into it I can't believe it over 40 years ago and I love the storytelling today but I had a very different idea I wanted to take the core story The Core is a center and think about the spokes of a wheel and all different Spokes and platforms the way people get storytelling today it was really not a totally new idea but it was a very different idea when you worked in a

newspaper you put the story in the newspaper the internet came you put the story on the internet how do you evolve into an organization where at the core of the story which start in the exception and our model is around unique high quality investigative reporting that can be trusted create a team of people who have the skills to take that core story and create it on every platform so if it's a print version you have a print print team you have multimedia you have video which I agree is crucial to the Future you have interactive

you have radio and when I went around and started to try and raise money the foundations they looked at me and thought I was crazy this is right at the beginning of 2008 the stock market was crashing foundations were not giving out money and I went around and people look gave me the fisheye now one thing that was an advantage for me is I've been around a long time and a lot of people knew me so I had credibility I had credibility as a journalist and I believed in the model but it took 18 months

and cir almost closed to ra begin bringing in funding to build this model so we had an idea we had a vision and we were not just simply looking to the future we were looking to filling an important Niche that exists today and aoid since that time cir when I got there had seven people now it is over 30 and we have evolved into one of the transformational models and what we're doing is Distributing stories to very wide audiences on every platform the way they want to get it now the challenge is how do you

sustain this a word we've heard a lot today and how do you tell the audience tell the world that what we do really makes a difference what we're seeing around the world today and what's happening through social media is a huge ability to transform and get people engaged and get audience the other opposite side of that we which we haven't talked about today is the ability of others governments really or corporate interests to use that same technology to control information control movements control people really spy on people there's a there's a going to be a

balance we're going to see going forward and and a conflict really about the openness and the democratization of Technology we're going to now so I just want to give you an example of what we're doing because it's really remarkable the next week we're going to do a story about seismic safety in schools in California we've worked on it 19 months this is not something you do with normal journalists this is really difficult work we've literally looked at tens of thousands of pages of documents we found documents we found information hundreds of interviews getting people on

the record we've created a database and this is really where you get to the new model of over every school in California K through 12 over 10,000 schools we had a conference call yesterday with 80 journalists from a news organization that's around California every one of their sites is going to use the story the story will be broadcast nationally the story will broadcast in every Market in California on Commercial TV it'll be broadcast on public radio throughout California and in NPR it'll be in newspapers throughout California and it's going to be on every website we

can get it on it also and and this is where you really need think differently who is the target audience of this story we hope to get results we hope to impact change we hope to do a story frequently investigative reporting in journalism is done after the fact when you identify victim victims we all know about the leadup to the Iraq War we know about the financial collapse of the banking the huge criticism Justified about journalism why don't we know about this how do you do a story and get impact and results before the disaster

happens that's what we're hoping to do one amazing element of this story it really gets to what you just heard about youth one of the youngest staff members said who really needs to know about this it's kids in school we did a coloring book I said what so she said let me try a coloring book we've had orders for over 40,000 of these coloring books in California schools it's going to be in two versions of chinese vietnamese Korean English and Spanish I never would have thought about that it's another way to get a story out

the challenge we face now is how do you sustain this how do you keep it going we're charging for our content that story probably cost a 3/4 of a million dollars to do we'll get about $30,000 in Revenue so I want to ask all of you not for anything but to really think about how with your brain power your understanding of Technology your understanding of where this is going and how social media is moving how information is moving how new platforms are going to be created to somehow come together and work with people like me

to solve this problem and really serve Society this is a crucial issue for all of us it's a global issue it's a local issue and it's something that we have to educate the public about and really find a solution thank you n [Music]