Welcome to Trusted Journalism Matters, where we chat to World Media Group members about the importance of quality journalism. This episode, Belinda chats to Brian Wolly, the Digital Editorial Director of Smithsonian Magazine, about what attracted him to working for the magazine and the role the organisation plays in helping audiences to make sense of the world around us. Below is an extract of our conversation. You can watch the full video above or listen to the podcast here.

Firstly, please tell us what Smithsonian Magazine is about.

We’re part of the Smithsonian Institution, which is the world’s largest research complex. It comprises 21 museums and four research centres. The Smithsonian is based in Washington, DC but has a global reach and a global focus. We have research centres in, Panama; we have a Folklife and Cultural heritage centre that covers much of the world. On the magazine side, we take inspiration from those museums and research centres.

We cover almost everything, except partisan politics and celebrity news. We often ask, if the museums had endless space, what would they have in them, what would they cover? We have multiple history museums, so history is a major area. We have our National Museum of Natural History and so we cover science, but we are journalistically independent.

Only about five percent of what we cover is about what’s going on with the Smithsonian itself. Instead, we like to say we put a Smithsonian lens on the world. Our main areas of focus are history and science, and we also cover innovation, travel and arts. The latter two allow us to have a more global focus, looking at how other museums and artists are engaging with the world.

For people interested in traveling the world, we show them the history, the local culture or the art they can see when they travel internationally. What natural wonders could they see? We have a beautiful national park system in the US but there are natural wonders across the world and our readers are really interested in that.

What drew you into journalism and particularly to the Smithsonian.

I’m from the suburbs of Washington so I grew up going to the Smithsonian Museums. My mother was a guide at the National Air and Space Museum, so I always had an affinity for museums. I also read the Washington Post every morning and grew up loving journalism.

When I got out of school, my first job was at the PBS News Hour, which is the Public Broadcasting news service. The head anchor often said “It’s better to shed light than heat,” which means that you give information, but not to get people angry. I took that on as an ethical way go about journalism. Are we saying something new here? And if not, try and find something new to say, but don’t do it in a way in which you’re going to get people’s emotions all het up.

So much of the discourse now on the internet and on the news is driven by anger and fear. Instead, I think of using our journalistic powers for good and shedding light instead. That was my first few years in the field of journalism, then I was lucky enough to get a job here at Smithsonian where I can marry the two worlds – a museum that the public trusts and holds in high esteem combined with my journalism background.

We look at the world through the Smithsonian lens, that lens of authority, that lens of trust, and that lens of being nonpartisan.

What does your current role as Digital Editorial Director entail?

I work with a team of digital editors overseeing what we put on the website every day – six to 10 news stories a day, 50 stories a week. The magazine itself is 52 years old now and for the first 35 years or so, it was a print-only publication. We began to expand our presence in 2006 – 2007 and I joined in 2008. It is a legacy publication in many ways, but we’ve grown so much in the time I’ve been here. We publish a print magazine’s worth of content a week.

I have a talented group of editors and we look at what’s going on in the world in the areas that we cover. Archaeology is a big area. Scientific research is another, and innovation. We try to distil that down for our readers, who are people who love to learn. They’re the kind of people who want something new to share at the family dinner table or at happy hour.

One of my favourite facts that was put in the proper context recently is that Cleopatra is closer to us in time now than she is to when the pyramids were built, which is a mind-blowing fact. The pyramids were already 2,500 years old when she reigned over Ancient Egypt! Those are the kind of facts we love to tell every day.

We also do some longer form storytelling. We work with our colleagues at the Institute to hear what they’re interested in and how we can amplify the messages that they’re talking about, but we do it from a journalism lens. We interview our curators about their expertise and what would be helpful to share with the world.

You talked about your consumers being inquisitive in nature but are there any differences in what your audience is interested in around the world?

About 83 percent of our audience is domestic in the US. Seventeen percent is global. What they have in common is being these lifelong learners; people who are curious about the world around them. We like to say that by reading the site, you will make yourself more interesting, have more anecdotes; you’ll be a more learned person about the world.

Although the museum is based in the US you have a strong international perspective. Is that important to you?

Yes, even though the Smithsonian itself is a national museum, the world is becoming so much more connected and more of a global community. That’s important in terms of what we cover and how we cover it

Climate change is a major area of focus for our science desk, and it can’t just be what is the US doing? We’re all dealing with the struggle of how to adapt to climate change. Sustainability is a big new initiative for us, covering life on a sustainable planet. What are the lessons we can learn? What are the ways in which cities are being built? Which energy is being created? Finding ways to adapt to climate change. That is a global problem, and we can’t just handle it by looking at what’s happening between Atlantic and the Pacific.

We do our fair share of US-based coverage, but again, science is a global thing. We have Smithsonian scientists all around the world doing research. There is the Smithsonian Centre for Folklife and Cultural heritage – we use that as reason to talk about global food, world culture and world art in a way that many other publications don’t.

Is there an innovation you’ve covered that you’re particularly proud to have been involved with?

Sustainability is one of them. That’s an area where we’re really focusing. It’s not just an innovation in terms of something new we’re doing on the site. it’s an area in which there is so much innovation around the world, in terms of new devices, new techniques, new breakthroughs in alternative energy solutions. It’s a more positive story too. There’s so much that gets you down – that can get you really depressed about the state of the climate. This is good solutions journalism; there’s optimism is this area of innovation.

We’ve also been focusing on race in America – on the history side of things. It’s been a topic of great debate in the United States about how we talk about our past. One thing that I like to say about Smithsonian Magazine is, we are nonpartisan, but it’s impossible to not be political nowadays, because everything is political. Even climate change in the United States can be very political but we talk about it based on the facts, based on what the scientific consensus is and what is known as things that can be done.

In the same way about history, we don’t shy away from the facts about American history and what has been longstanding discrimination against disadvantaged communities in the United States for multiple centuries. I’m proud of the way in which we’ve talked about it and the ways in which the Smithsonian Institution at large has talked about it.

What is your vision of trusted journalism in the future particularly with the advancements in generative AI?

I think that there will continue to be a lot of emphasis on showing your work. That’s something I often talk about, especially with younger journalists who are coming through the publication. In many ways, it should be like a maths problem where you have to show your work. That involves linking, it involves annotating, saying where did I find and source this information?

That also comes to the heart of Smithsonian as an academic research institution. We’re not an academic publication but we take inspiration in being based in research, based in understanding the proper way to be a media consumer. That’s something that Chat GPT doesn’t have – it just gives you five paragraphs without any sense of where they got that information from.

Magazines and sites like ours talk about where we get our information from, and we have a long history of trusted journalism. I think it’s going to be a while before Chat GPT and its descendants are really able to give things that people trust. For brands like Smithsonian Magazine, we have the benefit of people having decades of knowing who we are. They can rely on people like us – we ask them to trust us because we tell them the facts and give them analysis based on those facts.

Thanks Brian. We highly recommend going to the Smithsonian Magazine website, where you can find all sorts of interesting facts to wow your friends and family with.

Welcome to Trusted Journalism Matters, our new series in which we chat to World Media Group members about the importance of quality journalism. Here, Belinda chats to Fiona O’Brien, the UK Bureau Chief for Reporters Without Borders, also known as Reporters Sans Frontières (RFS), about the 2023 World Press Freedom Index.

Reporters Without Borders is the World Media Group’s charity partner. The following is an extract from the conversation covering:

• The best and worst environments for journalism based on the 2023 World Press Freedom Index – including how the UK and US rank
• The effect AI generated content is having on quality journalism
• The risk of danger to journalists in the field.

You can watch the full interview in the video above or listen to the podcast here.

The 2023 World Press Freedom Index shows the environment for journalism is bad in seven out of 10 countries around the world and satisfactory in only three out of 10. Were you surprised by those numbers?

It is a shocking statistic, but I can’t say it was entirely surprising, sadly, because we’re monitoring all year round, working with individual journalists and media organisations around the globe. We’re very aware of these problems. The index only comes out once a year but we’re watching and analysing all year long.

The range of challenges facing journalists today is huge. The most obvious are physical threats to their safety. Terribly sadly, just yesterday, a French journalist became the 10th journalist to be killed in Ukraine since that conflict began. The ninth, a man called Bogdan Bitik, was killed only a couple of weeks ago, at the end of April. So that’s one example of a very deadly conflict for journalists.

Since the year 2000, 1,797 journalists worldwide have been killed while doing their jobs – the statistics are horrendous.

Another problem is the imprisonment of people for trying to hold power to account, like the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich who was wrongfully detained by Russia. As of May 2023, there are currently 562 journalists and media workers in prison around the world. In China alone, there are more than a hundred journalists in prison. It’s a very convenient way, for authorities to try and silence journalism using all sorts of pretexts. It’s often national security laws or, in Evan’s case, it’s accusations of espionage – this idea of collusion with foreign elements. All sorts of flabby laws are brought into play, or even sometimes completely random laws.

The risk of imprisonment or the risk of death are two of the huge things that we work with. Beyond that, there’s growing online harassment of journalists around the world. Social divides within democracies – there’s real partisanship – has become increasingly problematic and linked very much to that online harassment.

It’s a very difficult economic climate for journalists worldwide. As old funding models stopped working, it’s been harder in the digital age for journalism to find ways to survive. And often, there’s just a general feeling of animosity towards journalists, lack of trust, sometimes even hatred. So, all those things come together to create a difficult climate for journalists in many parts of the world, reflected in the number of countries which are now coloured red on our map.

One of focuses of the report is around fake news and AI generated content. Can you tell us a little more about that?

One of the things that came through strongly on our Index was what a concern AI is right around the world. The Index includes a qualitative element where we ask experts to answer an extensive questionnaire. This year, in 118 out of the 180 countries which were surveyed, most respondents in 118 countries said that they were concerned about AI, and that the volume of disinformation – and the way disinformation was being used systematically by those in positions of power – was alarming.

We know it’s a growing problem and, as technology advances, it becomes easier and quicker to create fake images, fake news, and also much quicker to send them around the world. That means it’s very difficult for audiences to understand whether they’re looking at something that’s true or false; something manufactured or something real. It’s a very pressing problem that industry leaders need to grapple with.

The Scandinavian countries do exceptionally well year-on-year within your Index. How are they combatting this?

If we look at Norway which has come first in the Index for the seventh year – and the rest of the Scandinavian region is always right up there in the green zone as well – it’s not that they don’t face the same challenges. These big questions like AI, the digital landscape, online harassment, economic problems are, to a certain extent, universal.

It’s more about the way that they handle them and the climate that they create around journalism to ensure that good, ethical, robust, independent, reliable journalism can still happen. In Norway, for example, there’s a strong legal framework safeguarding the right of journalists to function independently and report freely.

The media market itself, is very vibrant. There’s a strong public service broadcaster, NRK, but there’s also a diversified private sector, so we don’t see the concentration of ownership, which can be problematic in other countries. By and large, politicians, don’t tend to label coverage they don’t like as fake news. They accept that there can be critical coverage; they don’t disparage its authors,

It doesn’t mean that there are no problems in Norway. While there are very few instances recorded, there is violence against journalists that are reported threats. Online harassment doesn’t know borders. But overall, the society and the state encourage independent journalism and encourage the exchange of ideas.

To give us contrast, where does the UK sit on the list?

The UK sits at 26 this year – it dropped two places from 24. In a global context, although it’s not nearly as high as we’d like it to be, it’s still in the satisfactory zone. We’re not talking about problems anywhere near the scale of China, Iran, or North Koreas at the other end of the list.

That said, it is at 26 and that shows us that there are various problems that need resolving; things that are slightly worrying for us in terms of how media are able to function. Parts of the problems are legislative – there are some new laws coming through Parliament which don’t contain what we would consider robust protections for journalists.

One example of that is the National Security Bill currently in the process of becoming law. Through that parliamentary process, thanks to a lot of campaigning from us and many others, there has been some recognition that journalists need to be protected in some way within it. But even so, the changes brought to the law aren’t strong enough to ensure that the law couldn’t be abused in future.

The law, as it currently stands, opens journalists up (especially journalists working for foreign-owned medium) to be accused of endangering national security or even espionage, just for going about their investigative work so it’s not protective enough.

The US has dropped three places since Biden took over as President, which seems surprising.

Yes, the US is down. It’s still in the satisfactory zone, but much lower, at 45, having dropped from 42. The arrival of Biden has changed the tone of debate to some extent. There’s a lot less animosity coming from the top level of government than during the Trump administration, but there are many problems in the US for journalists.

There’s a very partisan media. There are a lot of economic problems, a lot of layoffs, a lot of anti-media bills are being brought in, especially at local level. These bills are making it harder for journalists to report critically on those in power; making it easier to be sued, for example, or increasing the risk of legal action against journalists who try and hold power to account. So again, that lack of legislative safeguard.

Two journalists died in the US doing their job in the last year, which has a big impact on the ranking. Last September, a journalist called Jeff German was shot outside his home in Las Vegas. He’d done a lot of reporting on misconduct of those in office. And then in February this year, a journalist called Dylan Lyons was killed while reporting on a homicide.

The US government is still seeking the extradition of Julian Assange, who is currently in prison in the UK, for his revelations of US war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere, which is a clear case of a government trying to punish the publisher rather than punish the perpetrator of the crime. All these things add up to make quite a difficult climate still for journalism in the US.

Going back to AI, what can quality international news sources like the WMG brands do to ensure that trusted journalism is recognised over AI-generated content?

It’s difficult because not only does AI, and other technologies, give us the ability to create increasingly sophisticated fake content very quickly, it is often used to distort real content. So, you have something that was in essence true, but has been changed.

AI also enables algorithms, which don’t tend to prioritise quality but prioritise those who shout the loudest or those who are the most outraged, so it’s difficult for quality journalism to cut through sometimes.

At RSF we’re championing an initiative called the Journalism Trust Initiative, which is aimed specifically at this problem. It’s a way for quality media to self-certify. They go through an audit process initially internally, and then there’s an external audit, which gives them the ability to show that they use robust news gathering methods and can be trusted and reliable.

Can you tell us in real terms how Reporters Without Borders supports journalism and what you do for journalists in danger on the ground?

We do a lot of work with international bodies and with national and local governments, to try and solve these big problems that we’ve touched on today.

In Ukraine for example, during the conflict there, we’ve been providing huge amounts of flack jackets and training and helmets, and things to physically help journalists, and insurance policies for independent journalists – so it can be really practical things like that.

We also offer emergency help for journalists whose lives are in danger in places like Afghanistan or Iran. When journalists are imprisoned, we do a huge amount of work to try and secure their release. That can be working with families, lawyers and working with governments to try and get them to engage.

It’s usually a mixture of campaigning, which will be visible, plus a lot of advocacy behind the scenes. And it does work – in March a French journalist, Olivier Dubois, was freed after being held hostage for 711 days, and we’d been campaigning for nearly two years.

We look at every case individually and see what’s most needed and what’s the best approach, the number one priority being to ensure the safety of the person themselves.

Finally, how can people help to support the brilliant work you do?

Some of the WMG members have been supporting us with space to be able to publicise things we’re doing, which is enormously valuable because raising awareness is obviously central to the work we do.

On an individual level, we’re a not-for-profit organisation, so we rely on the generosity of donors. Financial donations are always very welcome through the ‘make a donation’ button on our central website.

The last thing I’d say is, for those of us who are lucky enough to live in democracies, make your voice heard; engage yourself. If you care about a particular case or about press freedom generally, make that known to your MP if you’re in the UK or your representative wherever else you are.

As citizens, it’s all of our responsibility to make sure that governments understand that we care about press freedom, and that we understand that press freedom is all of our freedom. Without the ability of the press to hold power to account, to report on what’s actually happening in the corridors of power, it’s impossible for us to understand what’s being done on our behalf. It’s citizens in the end who lose out if information isn’t freely available.

If you’d like to read more about the Index, you can find a summary of the report here with a link to the full report on the Reporters Without Border’s website.

Welcome to Trusted Journalism Matters, our new series where we chat to World Media Group members about the importance of quality journalism. This episode, Belinda chats to Business Affairs Editor Rachana Shanbhogue about what attracted her to working for The Economist, and the role their organisation plays in helping audiences to make sense of the world around us.

You didn’t train as a journalist so what prompted you to make the move into journalism?

Yes, that’s right. I worked for eight years at the Bank of England as an economist, which was fantastic training and a really interesting place to work, especially as I joined shortly after the financial crisis began. I realised two things: Firstly, that I enjoyed the process of writing down ideas, thinking about the arguments and presenting them in a way that people wanted to read. I gravitated towards the jobs at the bank that were more communications focused, as part of the team that wrote the bank’s inflation report, for example.

The other thing I discovered over that course of my time there was that I was interested in exploring a much wider range of subjects than the ones that a central bank rightly focuses on. If you work in, for example, the monetary policy area of the of the Bank of England, you’re mainly thinking about the prospects for inflation – the types of policies needed to meet the bank’s inflation targets. But there’s a whole universe of interesting subjects out there, so that was the other motivation.

With the Brexit referendum in 2016, I realised there were lots of important economic policy questions that one could be considering and writing about, and that encouraged me to make the leap. My experience is not that unusual. If I look at my colleagues here at The Economist who write about business, economics or finance, quite a few of them have experience in industry or working as economists or analysts in investment banks.

Economics and finance have a bit of a fusty, white middle-aged men image. Has it been a benefit to you being none of those things or has it held you back in any way?

In terms of what it’s been like to be a woman in economics, ever since I went into university to study economics, it’s been clear that there are more men than women in the subject. That follows through to the jobs I’ve done, and perhaps for that reason, I haven’t thought so much about it.

I’m not sure how my career would have been different if economics had been balanced by gender. It’s worrying for the subject that, for whatever reason, there aren’t many women going into it. I’ve been fortunate to work in places where that gender imbalance hasn’t translated into a barrier to women’s careers.

So what attracted you specifically to The Economist.

I’m an economist by training, as we’ve discussed, so I was naturally drawn to an organisation that has The Economist in the name and puts a great emphasis on reporting on economics and finance in a thorough and in-depth way. It seemed like the natural place to apply for a job.

The philosophy behind The Economist is one that I feel most at home with. It was founded on free trade principles, arguing for the abolition of the Corn Laws here in the UK. Its liberal philosophy’s quite attractive. What may be less apparent on the outside – because there are no by-lines for the Economist, and it’s edited to sound like it’s one voice presenting arguments and presenting the news – what really strikes you when you work here is that there are lots of experts, people who care really deeply about their subjects. And there’s a lot of debate internally about what our leader line should be. It’s all guided by the principles of the newspaper. That way of working was also quite attractive as well.

Thinking about your audience, could you kind of describe them for us, and if or how has that changed during the pandemic?

We have a variety of readers spread over the world and I tend to think about two groups. One is the informed professional and one is the curious or informed reader who’s not necessarily a specialist in the areas of finance or economics but wants to know more about the world. Internally, we often joke about that reader being the dentist in Milwaukee who wants to find out more about what’s going on. I read The Economist as a student precisely to know more about the world, so that’s another way of thinking about that group of readers.

And then, as a financial journalist, I also think about some of the readers being CEOs of companies, managers of companies, people who make policy, people who are pretty close to the world or work in the world of finance or business. So, we’re trying to write both for the interested, non-specialist as well as the specialists, and that’s often the trick of financial journalism – being able to write for both groups of people.

We also try and think about two different types of coverage. One is curating what’s happening in the world, so there’s lots of news, breaking all the time. What The Economist does is take the bits of the news that we think are important and that we think that readers should be aware of, and curate that for readers. Wherever you are in the world, and whatever part of the world you’re interested in, we’re telling you in a given week, what the stories you should be aware of are.

The other kind of coverage is something that sets the agenda more. It might not be in the news this week, but there might be a really big shift in how the world’s political order is functioning. We pull various strands together to try and lay out how the world is changing. So that’s a slightly different type of coverage that we think about as well.

In terms of how readers are coming to us, there was a shift that was going on that definitely got a bit of a kick during the pandemic – that is that more people are reading us online. We know digital subscriptions are rising. We also know that more people are coming to our app on a daily basis rather than a weekly basis, even though in print, we’re once a week.

All of that is leading us to think a bit more about how we present our work digitally; what the cadence of that work should be. Should it be that we’re producing stories every day? Should we think about whether to respond to a news event rather than to take a little bit of time to digest the news and analyse it and really add value? So those are the sorts of questions that we’ve been grappling with. And we’re quite a small organisation – we’ve got something in the region of 120 journalists, which is really quite small compared to bigger daily outlets. So that’s an interesting strategic question that we’re thinking about.

You’ve talked about different aspects of international news. Would you say that’s even more important now than it has ever been?

It’s probably always been important to have that international view. It’s really helpful when you see a trend, for example, here in the UK that the healthcare system is under strain to be able to place that trend within a global pattern or context. How different is what’s happening with the NHS, to what’s happening elsewhere in the world? And what does that tell you about what’s driving the problems here as opposed to elsewhere? So, I think that global canvas really helps inform the story and helps add that little bit more context to what’s going on.

Also, being able to understand the thought process, say in Beijing or in Washington DC, is increasingly having more of an impact on the rest of the world. And with the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen that these decisions that were taken in Moscow then led to commodity prices spiking, energy prices spiking, upending the kind of the norms around what countries do. The norm was always you don’t invade your neighbour – ever since the Second World War in Europe, the norm is you don’t invade other countries. So, our international focus is something that we bring to readers, and I’ve had readers in America say that they really appreciate that extra global context.

Is there any one story that you’ve worked on that you’re really proud of?

I’ve been editing for a few years so that’s a very good question. Last year, I took a bit of time out of editing to go off and research what we call a special report on central banks – a 10,000 word series of articles. The way it works is you have five weeks where you’re only reporting on this particular story. It was extremely satisfying figuring out the ways in which central banking is changing, just as the war in Ukraine was breaking out.

It seemed like central banks were going into ever more areas, thinking about not just inflation or keeping the bank safe, but branching out into things like whether they should be tackling inequality and what they should do to counter the effects of climate change. That was immensely satisfying, partly because it was such a huge endeavour.

More recently, I wrote one of our editorials on the turmoil with the Adani empire. This is the world’s third largest businessman and his business conglomerate, which is based in India and a short seller’s report – this was at the end of January and early February – a short seller’s report sent the market valuation of that business empire plummeting.

It was quite a spectacular implosion of this really big empire that had these very vast nation-building ambitions in India. And following that through and the questions that were raised around it, thinking about the ways in which Indian regulators might need to think of how to respond was just immensely satisfying and quite an exciting story.

 

What do you see as the role of journalism going forward now that everybody is a content maker?

It’s an interesting question because, on the one hand, that rise of free content and social media is something to be celebrated. As a journalist, when there’s jitters in the financial markets or there’s worries about the banking system, just being on Twitter and seeing what people have to say, seeing what some of the experts have to say, is really helpful and interesting. At its best, I think social media performs quite a useful function.

What journalism adds over and above that is the trusted nature of the brand and certainly. The Economist adds quality assurance – you’re assured that what you’re going to read has been written by somebody who knows what they’re talking about, who’s done the research, who’s spoken to the people in the know. We don’t often do quotes, but we do speak to a wide variety of people off the record.

It’s that assurance that what you’re getting is something that really has been stress-tested, fact-checked and is high quality. What we found was in times of upheaval, if you think of when the Covid lockdowns began and when the war in Ukraine began, there is a flight to quality journalism. We know that people are interested in coming to us to read the news. They’re paying for subscriptions, which suggests that there is value in having journalism over and above the free content on social media platforms.

Thank you so much for sharing your time with us today when we know the markets are so busy. It’s been fascinating to hear a little bit more about you and The Economist.