Why do I do what I do
On October 3, I turned 40. That day it was also my “sounding” at Harvard. That’s the name of the speech each Nieman fellow gives answering this apparently easy, really tricky, deep question. This text is a shorter, edited version of what I said. During the Q&A afterwards, my fellow Lisa Lerer said that mine seemed to be the story of falling out of love of newspapers. She was right. I don’t know how that ends yet.
Before coming to Cambridge, I spent some time looking through my mom’s storage room and checking the back drawers I don’t usually open. My mom has kept every article I’ve written in print in the last 20 years. Even further. I’ve found the first time my name appeared on a newspaper. I was 14, and I had translated from Italian a piece on the war in Yugoslavia.
I looked through hundreds and hundreds of pieces of paper. There were many stories and many people behind them.
From Brussels, from Milan, from New York, from Paris, from a place called Coslada in the outskirts of Madrid. Coslada is a small working-class suburb and there I wrote the first story that I remember as something to be proud of. It was July 1998, I was an inter at the main national news wire, Agencia Efe. In Coslada I covered a speech from Julio Anguita, who was the leader of the communist party. He was an influential figure back then. That day he said: “We must give up the banner of communism… comrades”.
In the agency, they edited me out the “comrades” from the headline as they felt it was making fun of him, but anyway it became a thing in politics that slow summer as Anguita tried to deny it. I was the only one who had the story because I was the only reporter who was there. The guy who covered the party came back from vacation and congratulated me. I said I just followed his advice before he left: look for something different.
Through my mother’s boxes, I was trying to find that picture or that article that could respond to the Why posed to us. I didn’t have that letter to the President that Drew Faust could pinpoint to or that picture that makes you discover the secret magician in your family. The closest I’ve found was a newspaper that I did when I was 7. I played to be the editor.
Both my parents are journalists and journalism was part of my life since I was a little kid.
One of the first things I learned to say was Diario 16, the newspaper where my father was the editor-in-chief, according to a sort of radio interview that my mom recorded with me.
On my first front page I have a scoop: “The Department of Education says there will be no more homework at school”. It seems there was popular pressure as I had also pictures from the protests.
This newspaper had a business model based on rewards. It was priced two chocolate bars and if you subscribe you could have a computer. It was 1985. I know it because the paper reported on the visit of Ronald and Nancy Reagan to Madrid. It must have been brief because I put the picture of the “hello” and the “goodbye” on the same page.
I guess my first Why is here. I also found my drawings on the old carbon copies of the newspaper where my father typewrote his articles.
The first stories my dad told me before I could read were the adventures of a reporter called Tintin.
Journalism was just life.
So that’s what pushed me towards journalism. But no matter how you’ve ended up here, I think you can’t understand it or truly fall in love with it until you are doing it, until you have done it for a while. Until you love it so much that sometimes you hate it so much you can quit.
When I went through my articles I felt again the happiness of finding someone who opens up to you or the excitement of having a scoop. But also the frustrations. I saw the “half columns” for big news or that hidden back page with the scoop of the first president of the European Council that literally no one else in Europe had. I remember the desperation of covering the Boston terror attack while fighting with someone from the online newsroom so they wouldn’t publish random rumors they had seen on the New York Post.
Now that we are so often mistrusted by the public what the mistrusting public doesn’t know is what they believe to be manipulation is often clumsiness, rush, incompetence.
When I started thinking about the question of the sounding Why do you do what you do, my first thought was I don’t know what I do anymore.
I’ve been a reporter for a leading print newspaper. I’ve interviewed prime ministers and voters, millionaires and homeless. I’ve covered hurricanes and long night euro summits. When that wasn’t enough I became a startup founder. When that didn’t work out I turned back to being a reporter for a TV in transition to digital, Univision, and covered the most challenging Presidential campaign ever. Then I tried to start from scratch again with Politibot, an experiment around a chatbot and a podcast… you call it “experiment” when you have no money. And now what?
Now I am here and as today I am 40.
Looking through many years of coverage, I’ve found unexpected encouragement too. In Spain, the journalism we did 15–20 years ago, pre-Internet, or in the early stages of the Internet, was actually not that great. I’ve found the best pieces in the last ten years.
Space in print became scarce and you suddenly had to make a better use of it. Online, we can find examples of stories that are false, demeaning to women, or silly in search of a cheap, you-are-gonna-stain-your-brand-forever clicks, but also examples of great journalism because there is more competition, more feedback from readers and more tools to tell stories. I used to watch people on planes reading El Mundo, my newspaper, to see if they stopped at the page of my article. When they stopped I checked how long they stayed on the page and observed their facial expressions.
We don’t need to do that anymore. We know. And often that’s a good thing.
For 15 years or so I was a foreign correspondent, mainly in Brussels and New York. For months I worked from Monday to Sunday and I missed many things outside work. But one of the many fortunes of the job was to be focused on the stories, just the stories.
I have lived extraordinary things. My first convention was in Boston in 2004, I was on the floor when a candidate to the Senate from Illinois gave the speech of his life. I didn’t take a picture, I was writing. There was no Facebook, no Twitter to post it. My last convention was in Philadelphia in 2016.
Over the years, I enjoyed as much interviewing voters in the cold of a school in Iowa as I did reporting on the last details of the bailout package in a European Council summit in the early hours of the morning.
I recall as fondly the night we stopped the presses at 4 a.m. to report on a budget agreement in Brussels after a Tony Blair press conference as listening to the lady from New Hampshire who has met every President since Eisenhower.
When I think back, I think about the people. I think about Brunilda, a girl who lived in a slum in the outskirts of Milan after leaving Albania and went every day to school as if she had a normal life.
I think about the mom of a soldier in Iraq who couldn’t get any other journalist to hear her complains about his son lack of toilet paper on top of every other humiliation. I think about Paul, the journalist turned soccer coach in a small town in North Carolina to help latinos who weren’t allowed to have a soccer team in their own school until he showed up. Or about the city engineers from Venezuela who now live in a village of 28 inhabitants in rural Spain after they couldn’t bear their own country anymore.
It’s all about the people.
I’ve found some pictures of me during interviews (of course they are somehow on my mom’s phone). I am usually smiling. It’s not that I really like all these people, but I try to make them feel comfortable and I am grateful when they share something. You have to show patience.
While reporting I try to keep in mind a little story from Mike Shapiro, my teacher at Columbia and writer at The New Yorker. He told us one day about an interview he did with a Korean baseball player.
It was late, it was raining, he had been for five hours with this guy in the Bronx, and called his wife, also a reporter, Susan Chira, saying he wanted to go home because the guy wasn’t really talking. She said, “be patient, stay a bit more, listen a bit more”. He stayed and got the best detail to start and focus his piece.
Reporting is great. If you are serving the public, if you are allowed to do it, with resources, without fear or favor of companies, of governments, of cheap clicks.
Especially during the crisis I felt the pressure from politicians and businessmen to change stories or dispute facts that were that, facts. Pressure works better when the business is not clear, when the newspaper is not sure where it’s the value to sustain what you do. In the world I started working, you just cared about getting the story right, getting the story first. Then that was not enough.
After many years as a reporter, I got more interested in business models.
I can point to a moment that changed my career towards that. It was the spring of 2014, I was walking with Eduardo from the Hudson river, in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It’s a steep slope. There were works, there were big trucks parked.
Since we met when he was a correspondent in London and I was a correspondent in Brussels, we have shared the same passion for reporting and some of its frustrations. We were going to Austin to the Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas that is organized by Rosental, a Nieman fellow. Walking that slope, we talked about starting a blog to report on the symposium. We did it and we called it nohacefaltapapel, meaning “there is no need for print”. It meant you can do good or bad journalism in any format.
That blog made us interview people in the US doing interesting, new stuff. Later that inspired us and pushed us to try something on our own with other journalists.
After the financial crisis in Spain, what was left was a crisis of confidence in institutions, political parties, and also in the media. Readers were sometimes right as many journalists had followed instructions from power in their reporting. Some of the criticism was unfair as big corruption scandals were discovered by newspapers, and it is still the case.
The other complaint were low standards and too many stories about gossip or anything with word sex in it.
Fairly or not, there was a space for a media organization promising to check on power without being partisan and with respect for the reader. That promise helped us broke the world record for a crowdfunding in journalism. We raised almost 4 million dollars from 5,700 people with El Español.
The name of the company that edited the new online project was the same as that blog born on a Manhattan slope, No hace falta papel.
The best part was building the newsroom. I hadn’t met before most of the journalists that ended up working there. Many were in their 30s and early 40s, sometimes younger, had grown disillusioned with big media organizations and wanted to push something more fresh, more focused on looking for good stories and good scoops.
These people were very eager to be in charge in a country still dominated by a generation that came of age in the late 70s, during the Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy. That generation was still in power, especially in the media. In the political scene, three of the four leaders of the main political parties are now from my generation. The one that it’s not, the babyboomer, is still the prime minister, though.
As everywhere, we were living the first effects of the absolute dominance from Facebook, the fragmentation of attention and the dissolution of brands. In the new project, we started doing long stories and very short ones. Instead of the same boring piece with unemployment data, just a chart, and days later a carefully reported story about the people who suffer long-term unemployment. We did a carefully curated daily newsletter when no one did that in Spain. We did an opera in VR, we reported on protests with a 360 gigantic picture.
We tried and keep trying. In the end, it was not that tough to do good content and to find readers for it. You could add millions of readers without publishing rumors, without being partisan and without offending women. Our most read stories of the first year and a half were something to be proud of.
Last year I quit. I quit because we started running away from what made us different.
What happened? It’s a long story but let’s say there was fear of not hitting big numbers fast. Just fear actually, before there was evidence of that happening.
Your audience changes as you change what you offer. With the platforms pressure and the distrust we are living, our tools to fight are the personality of the brand and the unique work of reporters. It’d better be unique. For the content. For the principles while doing it.
Being involved in the business, from the hustles to create a company in Spain to the difficulties of finding a balanced model, I learned too that editorial decisions don’t happen in a vacuum and that there is not a clear cut road to do good journalism and sustain it.
Sometimes it’s easy for reporters to blame editors or owners without thinking about how tough is to make it work now. I also learned that readers are better than we think. And if you give them something really good they will read it. Some will even pay for it. You need resources to begin, you need time to try and you need to be brave to break with what you think are the rules. And to be flexible enough to give up your own new ideas when they don’t work.
Why do I do what I do? Or what I did.
To seek change. I guess that was the main story of my first newspaper. Change could mean no homework. Change could mean a new life for an Albanese girl thanks to a story. Change could mean understanding someone in a brief moment or make readers think differently. Change could mean shorter meetings in the newsroom or not doing that boring piece about what some politician said because “you have to”.
I’ve kept thinking about what Reverend Walton said the other day in this room when Bonny asked him about atheism in Australia. He said that the opposite of faith is certitude.
At 40, I have few certitudes, especially about our business.
Being a reporter has always been about not being sure, about trying to find out, about mistery. And I do still have faith in the principles that made me love journalism, that probably made you love journalism too. I am just not sure that most media organizations are the place to do good journalism anymore, but I still believe in the core. Maybe the framework is different now, maybe you have to do journalism on a chatbot, on a theater stage, on Netflix, on a book. I still believe in it. Faith could now be my Why.
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