Poverty or Propaganda. Choices for journalists.

Thomson Reuters Foundation Editor-in-Chief tells us about their groundbreaking journalism and has some advice for reporters at The Telegraph.

At Web Summit in Lisbon last month, I had dinner at one of Anthony Bourdain’s favorite restaurants Ramiro. My guest was Yasir Khan, the London-based editor-in-chief of Thomson Reuters Foundation.  As spiny king crabs were lifted out of their tanks and walked over to the grill and then to dinner plates, I asked Khan about why the news leaves us feeling so powerless and full of outrage. 

He told me that his newsroom is providing exactly what’s missing from the daily, non-stop pinging of mass shootings, political fails and bad weather reports: the how and the why. 

In an interview for The Media Mix podcast I asked him about what it's like to be free from the constraints of advertising and subscription worries, and I also wanted to get his thoughts on Jeff Zucker’s bid for The Daily Telegraph, which is being probed by the UK government because the bid by the former CNN chief is backed by the United Arab Emirates, known for its lack of media freedom. 

The Foundation’s motto is ‘Know better, Do better,’ Khan tells me and it’s intended to convey the idea that a more informed citizen can help create positive societal change. He reels off a host of stories that have done the kind of journalism many reporters aspire to. You can read their work at the free site, www.context.news.  

Khan’s team told the story of Roe v Wade, one year on, through a business lens asking about the economic impact of women sidelined from the workforce because they are unable to get an abortion. Read it here. 

The Foundation team also looked into the struggles federal firefighters are having with exorbitant medical bills after facing uncontrollable wildfires. Soon after the report, the US Labor Department started processing many more claims. Read it here. 

The Foundation has a mission to deliver stories focused on climate change, inclusive economies and technology among other topics. Getting these stories read can be challenging for mainstream outlets which are competing with social videos and porn.

“Bad news and fake news travels six times faster on social platforms,” says Khan. “It's a huge concern among newsrooms, including ours, about how we survive and find our place in an environment like that. And my gut feeling has always been that good, useful and valuable content that adds meaningfully to the lives of our consumers will transcend algorithms.” 

“You're not just competing against other news organizations, you're competing literally against cat videos. At my fingertips are cat videos, a ton of porn and all sorts of other things,” he says, “It is forcing us to make our work count. And if we don't clue into that then of course, we deserve to be relegated to the backwaters of the internet.”

The work of Khan’s newsroom isn’t measured in clicks or traffic reports or social shares. “I think our ROI [return on investment] on good, deeply reported journalism should be what kind of societies are we creating,” says Khan.

Because Khan has worked all over the world as a reporter in India, Canada, the Middle East, France and now London, I also wanted to get his take on Jeff Zucker’s United Arab Emirates-backed bid for the UK’s The Daily Telegraph newspaper and The Spectator magazine. (You can read more on the topic at PressGazette.Substack.com.)

“One thing to understand about money from the Persian/Arabian Gulf is that it never comes with no strings attached. Ever. Ever. Ever. There is always an ask behind it,” he tells The Media Mix podcast.

(Often, that means simply knowing what’s off limits.) Khan was editor-in-chief at Euronews’s digital newsroom and was head of digital video at Al Jazeera, based in Qatar and owned by the state.

Even so, Khan notes that Al Jazeera provided the financial clout to do lots of under-covered stories. “A lot of us took that deal because for example: Who the hell gives you money to go cover the elections in Burundi? Al Jazeera does. Who flies you to Bangkok to cover the red shirt protests that were so consequential in the history of that country?”

In a recent talk to journalism students in Canada, Khan explained the tough choices journalists have to make to earn a livelihood. 

“We’re given a choice between poverty and propaganda and by that I don’t mean literal propaganda, I mean fulfilling some state’s political agenda, be it soft power, pushing a point of view or whatever it is. Look who’s paying the living wages to journalists today.”

He points to Russia Today (RT) or the Turkish government’s TRT World and China’s CGTN, “Or it’s the big corporates who have their own corporate agendas.”

Khan is lucky enough to run a newsroom that funds deeply reported stories on climate change, women’s and LGBTQ+ concerns along with broader topics like data privacy and surveillance. 

“What I would say to folks at The Telegraph or at Al Jazeera or at The Independent or whatever it is, is you get to decide how much Kool-Aid you are willing to drink. And based on that, make your decisions about what to do. But at the end of the day, you can still be in those places and still do good journalism. You can. It's possible.” 

Thomson Reuters Foundation’s funding is listed here.  Hear more what Khan has to say on how many seconds readers stay on a story and the destruction of the tech scene in Gaza.

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