KU Alum Sally Buzbee, Part 2 - Encore; Unknown

today on k pr prisons family busby the new executive editor of the washington post busby was awarded the prestigious william allen white national citation on april eleventh two thousand nineteen for the rest of this hour we'll hear her remarks as he accepted an award at the university of kansas woodruff auditorium and you say that it is such an honor for me to be here today in kansas and receive his award not just because i'm from kansas because kansas is where i first got hooked on journalism a very long time ago tom evans and suzanne shaw helped me get an internship covering the kansas state legislature with the associated press a news organization i really didn't have that time and the first and an internship i walk into the press room at the kansas statehouse very hesitant very scared very gray and wondering where my new boss was sen leahy there's a big bear of a man barreled into the press room pushed past me and shouted welcome

welcome but please please the way he rushed over to computer plop down and began furiously pounding away on the keyboard i said there's times looking around and finally i whispered to another reporter in the press room kansas state senate had just voted down the death penalty on the first day of a new legislative session after years of voting in favor of the death penalty each and every year and having a veto that each time by democratic governor of kansas the new republican governor had just been elected and he had taken office vowing to finally get the death penalty reinstated in kansas and the republican controlled state senate on its first day back in session had late and vetted the death penalty down it was big news in kansas and liver is an eighties legendary topeka state house correspondent with sending that news in urgent bulletins to every newspaper every radio station and every television newsrooms across kansas i was in awe and after that i was

involuntarily hooked on journalism i tell this story because i think a lot of us probably think of a story like that as the good old days of journalism a time when facts matter reporting took center stage and people everywhere are paid attention too nice we tend to bemoan the disappearance of those good old days because we live in a moment when the news industry the journalism that we all strongly believe that faces many challenges misinformation and extreme partisanship or widespread in the united states across the world technology innovations as wonderful as they are have proven in recent years to be enablers things that can be manipulated to very bad hands by those who push this information and partisanship and the people who attacked journalists either verbally or physically and then emboldened all the way from washington to places like poland

last year one of my reporters one of haiti's reporters was called out and threatened by name a polish television by high ranking polish government official for supposedly writing fake it was after she had accurately reported what had taken place at a rally of far right nationalists these things are happening at a time also when the business models that underlie journalism are under severe challenge that leaves a stressed news industry that sort of knocked back on its heels and short of money and confidence and all these troubles local mayors in particular has faced some of the biggest challenges the store is named for william allen white the absolute epitome of a small town editor who knew his community deeply and made a difference in that community every day this journalism school sits in the middle of the united states at a time when a very large proportion of all the journalists working in america was the national league's

not necessarily locally is an often located on the east coast or the west coast specifically in washington not necessarily as much in small towns scattered across united states and yet i don't really like that that thinking about the good old days i'd really rather work in journalism and a time when he's under stress when what we do every day actually matters so very much about the future of this industry that we love and even as all these troubling things are unfolding there are i think some hopeful signs the average people do you value factual accurate journalism especially local journalism on the issues they care about and they're resigned striving to you that people are starting to understand what the loss of accurate factual local journalism might mean for their communities and for society at large story that won over a beat reporters did just a few weeks ago really eliminated this for me it was about the last the closing down of a small newspaper in missouri

it had all serve the requisite stuff about why this had happened and who was to blame in the subscription had fallen but the thing that really struck me about this article was a quote from the police chief you often think any sometimes we think of local journalist and local officials as being a little bit of conflict even the police chief in this small missouri town said he deeply regrets the closing about local newspaper because without it the community that he serves is not finding out any accurate information about the drug problems and the crime that are heading that town and he said he just really wishes the paper was still there and it struck me that was an amazing an amazing thing for a police chief to say so today i want to talk about some things three things in particular that i think are starting to show some signs of hope for journalism in the united states and i think across the globe some guideposts that we can use to help figure out the future of this industry that we all think we need so very much i wanna talk

about innovation collaboration and my very favorite topic good old fashioned x so innovation first we are all struggling to get a handle on the rapid technology leads that are changing our world of news organizations to embrace innovation and find a way to cut innovation and all this new all these fabulous technology tools in the service of the journalism we're going to all benefit sitting just a couple examples of what i think that really means on a very concrete level when we were starting to cover the syrian war it was really hard for our reporters to get in there and find out what's going on it was an enormously extraordinarily difficult country it wasn't really responsible of us to put people in there and say that they should be trying to cover it at great risk for their lives a firsthand reporting that you really need to know what's happening was very very difficult but we and some other news organizations sort of double down into a lot of brainstorming about how i'm going to be able to actually report what was happening inside

syria and we were able to learn to use technology to help clarify the videos that were being taken and created by ordinary syrian people inside the country and circular that online at first we were very worried that these were going to be fake videos and that we were going to get bad information but we cannot wasn't technology tools in some human skulls that really helped us really narrow in and figure out that these videos were very often if they were accurate they were real time and that the user generated content which we call which we call that type of thing that we put into our new into our journalism was a new and powerful tool to help tell the story of that dangerous work and it took us new thinking and some risky thinking and new skills and different skills we had to hire a different types of people to make use of that as a reporting tool to embrace it as a new way to report but it lead to better journalism and obvious parallels between a story very far away something like that even our local news organizations might cover things like tornadoes that

character taliban when people get that video making sure that it's real and it's accurate and it's timely and it wasn't taken two years ago and all that kind of thing every natural disasters in many ways i think is another example of how innovation can help news organizations as a whole thing that's been growing up around natural disasters in the us and globally serb of loose groups of people who help track down victims during things like hurricanes or flights using tools like your location and crowdsourcing and other technology tools to say hey i'm worried about my mom is she safe where she did she get out a lot better so that's happening a smart local news organization is going to embrace that and it's going to sort of incorporate that into what they do sometimes were a little bit skeptical that's not trained journalist that's just some group of community people who were jeering crowd sourcing but i think what we really need to do is at all these organizations need to embrace that kind of innovation and he needs her you know the need to put your arms

around it and welcome it into their journalism and not separate the brain that vital community conversation find and center into their conversation they don't let it happen outside of their news organization david is divisions that we do at now i think are another example of how technology is creating some real strength in journalism so we report and we tell a national story maybe it's something about ah a federal housing data or something where there is public housing the senate story to our memories of decisions as we often do the day doesn't end there we send out a set of local data to each newspaper or tv stations or website that we serve they're little community sometimes it's really down to you county level or even a smaller level the map and it allows them to essentially put a local spin on that story at all the journalism and all the recording and all the contacts that we've done and then they're able to localize that story and find a story from their

specific community we send them the data we talk through the data clean up the data we tell them to look for stories that data would basically sort of help them become data journalists we provide a service to that in many places this has energized local reporting allowing very strange news organizations that may not have the resources to hire their own data journalists still tell stories that are that are sort of you know propped up by data and made more strongly we live in an era when there's a revolution in data analysis and data analytics and we don't want local news organizations to let that pass them by we wanted to harness the power of that day back in an innovative way and the power of machine learning which is i'm really amazing thing is happening in our society and share it and having it have inserted energize their local reporting i think that example brings us to my second point which is collaboration and

the importance in this time in the news industry are finding park nurse in california right now a group of news organizations including the ap bet a whole bunch of news organizations mcclatchy and small local news organizations all across california are joining together in a new collaboration to try to do a definitive set of reporting around the recent devastating california wildfires why that happened what the rest the future wildfires is to the state of california many of these news organizations in the course of their normal day to day lives compete against each other their competitors and yet they have decided to ban together and put the resources together and learn to work together share resources to tell a story that none of them has the resources to do on their own my own news organization it was founded on the idea that we're stronger as an industry when we work together rather than when we work allow and there's nowhere that this is more important than in the push for access and the push for

free press were actually listen to you if we each go and push alone for access and four government officials to do what they should do under freedom of information acts but when we collaborate and join together sometimes we have the power to get people to listen to us and in places like philadelphia and denver today and in california like i talked about they're really interesting experiments and cooperations partnerships popping up among news organizations where they're joining forces to report using create journalism and stories that otherwise would make sense other news organizations of course are partnering with non profits who might be providing grant money to support certain types of reporting or they might be offering technology help the resources to provide expertise that news organizations might not have but that they need to figure out the future in some cases foundations others are actually financing the start of new news organizations or non profit news organizations where there's little coverage that's that's

none of this new collaboration is easy and there are some real head thoughts on a very simple answer the basic level it can be very hard for five news organizations to work together i enjoyed journalism project issues of control and editing and trust all have to be worked for him and those are not easy we also have to be careful that we don't lose our independence if we take rent money for example it we can't let any sort of collaboration of a partnership influence or sway or coverage and yet toomey the risks are absolutely worth that these collaborators were some of the most vital things happening in the news industry in the united states and if you look across the globe in places like europe it's happening very cheery the resulting in excellent journalist and they're creating excellent journalism they're also helping us figure out what the future might look like white business models and what sort of arrangements of resources of journalism might work going forward and might be

sustainable so finally and i think most important we get to the power of good old fashioned facts what makes news organizations to our communities and to our customers is that we tell people what's going on we report we find out what's happening and we bring that information to people this obviously seems so obvious to all of us and yet in all that worried about the future that is heating our industry right now i think we're sometimes in danger of losing sight of the central primacy of the us there is a lot of hammering right now because on we've all interrogation at that no one in the world believes in that same i don't think that's true and i just absolutely do not think there is any evidence for that in fact there's powerful evidence that most people still let facts by the vast majority of their lives what is true is that humans always tend to resent us uncomfortable facts especially those facts conflict with

some deeply held beliefs or view political or something else that they have that is so precisely why accurate reporting matter so much i remember being in a rack into thousand five twenty thousand sex the war was going very badly for the united states we were reporting and writing about sectarian an effort he traded was breaking out all across the country and very specifically breaking out all across baghdad and we came under attack from many officials and for many other people for being unpatriotic people accused of reporters of making things up exaggerating how badly the war was going i had honestly thought that the united states was over that i hadn't the vietnam war taught us that we should listen to reporters and what the reporting from the ground and not necessarily from the people who have a vested interest if a war is going on and might be in trouble but here we were decades past the vietnam war and when reporters started to

say that the war was going badly we were called open to try and we were accused of making things up the phrase fake news wasn't inclined right then but we were accused of making things i eventually of course everybody realize that the war was going badly so very tough situation and the military made some adjustments in his policy things started to go bad or that were some efforts to try to get the country on a more stable path and as the long haul interact and it's not like things turn golden very thing but they became a truthful conversation about what the state of iraq was and the us government took steps to sort of address the reality of what was actually happening on the streets and i think he actually reporting that helps them get to that point that situation woke me up to the reality that good reporting is needed every day in every community across our world from small towns in the midwest in missouri to conflict zones in the middle

east the need for good fact based reporting never goes away societies never get to a perfect point they always need at steadying slow of rio accurate information to keep them grounded to keep them away from room or to keep them focused on what's actually happening whether it is a small missouri town trying to figure out the extent of its local drug problem or whether it's syria or the islamic state grappling with what to do with refugee women and children or whether it's wrapped in two thousand sex try to get an accurate handle on what's actually going on in this country so that's what i try to focus on when people get super ground about the future of news the three things that could help guide us through this rough patch they were at i think of it this way hold on to the bedrock so the past that had major roles and strong so that's the accuracy of credibility

not taking sides are that we all believe in the training and the processes and education better journalism beyond rio to make our news organization's straw in other words the things that i've learned here and from great professors like suzanne shah had richardson tom madeleine i could go on and that i learned from a great kansas working journalist likely ferguson and the standards of someone like william allen white absolutely in bodies to this day but i mean everything else on everything else be bold embrace the male don't be scared of that went to the future be bold and how we present our journalism the new listeners modern ways we can possibly think that be bold on who we partner with and who we collaborate with doping cannot buy some of those things in the past think outside the box a little bit the bold on the innovations that were brave enough to give a try to in the new things like user generated content how could possibly get that would make a good be bold and

embracing some of those innovations take a risk on all that reinstate some of our confidence that what we do matters that has real value in this world and i think really get to the place where people die and journalism it so much i really pushing for family first week the new executive editor of the washington post previously executive editor of the associated press and k u graduate speaking at the university of kansas and she accepted the two thousand and nineteen william allen white national citation and j mcintyre k pr prisons is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas