Photo: Simon Wilkinson
Noel Curran, EBU Director General, invites delegates to News Xchange 2023
Noel Curran, EBU Director General, invites delegates to News Xchange 2023 in Dublin:
Hello everyone. It’s an opportunity to invite you all today and open this exceptionally crucial conference for our market – and a vital occasion for the EBU. I wish to thank everybody who has actually been associated with arranging it, especially our partners at C21.
They have actually produced a program that includes a diverse and great variety of speakers – individuals who produce the news in every sense of the word – and concentrates on the vital concerns that require to be front of all our minds.
I’m especially happy to be here since I’m on home ground.
I was born simply a couple of miles from the Northern Irish border at the height of the difficulties. Devouring the news was an everyday routine for my family – news from RTÉ, from BBC, from ITN. We turned every day to nationwide and worldwide wire service to get a larger point of view on something that was simply taking place up the roadway.
We had a relationship with those outlets since we felt they were speaking straight to us – which we might trust them.
That’s the effect of News succeeded. News moneyed effectively. News that has a worths system that underpins its professionalism.
That experience has actually never ever left me. It’s among the factors I ended up being a reporter and my younger bro after me. I began in business media and consequently operated at RTÉ as a press reporter, news editor, television manufacturer, then Editor of Current Affairs and, later on, Director General.
I’ve now been Director General at the EBU for 6 years. My experience in both civil service and business media implies I’ve seen the low and high of both – and the typical fight premises all of us deal with. That’s what I wish to speak about today.
What prevails for everyone, is that difficulties dealing with News are growing and the roadway ahead for everyone is rough.
The business design shift from print to digital has actually succeeded for some however for a lot of is still an operate in development.
Digital has actually offered us higher option – definitely and its to be invited and treasured– however it is likewise offering us a growing reliance on algorithmic editorial choice that might lower the options we in fact get to see and make.
Greater require for immediacy has actually resulted in less time for thoroughness.
A more polarized world has actually resulted in a more polarized journalism, more direct federal government disturbance, more dangers to our journalism and terrible personal abuse of our reporters.
And the huge social platforms have actually become our really own Venus Flytrap, appealing us in with access to broader audiences, hanging younger audiences prior to us, ending up being more important to us and yet constantly most likely to close shut on our own business design advancement as quickly as theirs takes a various course. The Facebook experience.
Last week’s Reuters Institute report on has actually created some debate, which an entire different argument, however I do believe that those people who care deeply about News cannot however be stressed by the group patterns we see ourselves and which the report has actually highlighted.
I have 2 children, thirteen and eleven. The oldest has an eager interest in composing, in literature and in what’s taking place on the planet. A marketing interest thus a number of that terrific generation instead of an observational interest however an eager interest however. I hope they are years away from even considering what they will do with rest of their lives – but I do wonder would I encourage her if she showed an interest in being a journalist. I would support her completely obviously but would I actually encourage her. I don’t know is the answer.
And that is coming from someone who consumes up to ten digital news sites a day, who still likes the feel of paper with a coffee in a quiet café and who has never had a single second’s regret about working as a journalist.
And yet, and a big yet, all this uncertainty and challenge I have just listed comes on the back of a three-year period of Covid and war when the importance of News, it’s relevance, its connection with audiences and it’s downright brilliance were clearer to see than it has been in quite a while.
That’s why this conference is important. We need to nurture, develop and transform this thing we all love. We need to be happy to see the next generation take it on and change it and make it better.
And of relevance to everyone here today, we need to share our experiences, share knowledge and insights and learn from each other. We need to cooperate and find common ground.
The theme of this conference – Frontlines of News – couldn’t be more timely, not just because of war in Europe but also because we’re all operating on so numerous fronts, ethical, technological, editorial, commercial.
During the next two days, we’ll be taking a deep dive into these challenges.
But in concrete terms, what can we really do together to counter them. Sometimes our first defence, should be to attack, to call out. Take the pressure on our independence and on our journalism. We need to and we can speak publicly together to spotlight those cases where there has been government interference, when there have been attempts to shut down or stifle news reporting, and also – chillingly – when journalists are verbally and physically threatened.
Most recently, EBU joined worldwide calls from public and commercial organizations for Russia to reverse their unlawful detention of Wall St Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich. Evan continues to be held in a Moscow prison with no date set for either his trial or his release. This is unacceptable and we cannot forget Evan or the countless other journalists like him.
These are the extreme cases. There is also the day to day bullying of newsrooms around Europe directly by Governments or sometimes even by their Government appointed management proxies. We see it amongst our own membership, particularly however not exclusively in Eastern Europe and it is rising. Today public media, tomorrow private. It is a common threat because once a Government learns to flex those authoritarian muscles, it becomes addictive and no one is really safe. That’s why I would like all of us to speak together on these issues with one more powerful voice.
But even more important that our words are our actions. As a News community, we also need to continue to take risks. As someone who was privileged enough to work in this area, I know that one of the most difficult, impactful, rewarding however also risky types of journalism is investigative reporting. In recent years there has been a big shift in investigative reporting practice: from an “old model” of a highly competitive, single newsroom environment to a “new model” of multiple newsrooms (and countries) sharing information to expose the big stories that have global resonance.
EBU wants to be part of this shift. That’s why we launched the EBU Investigative Journalism Network. It supports major investigative journalism initiatives by sharing sources, resources and intelligence; and includes talented journalists from across Europe – many from your media organizations.
A few months ago, they collaborated on a hugely ambitious, in-depth investigation into the forced transfer of hundreds of children from occupied Ukraine to Russia. The story has been shared not just by our Members but by media outlets all over the world. The International Criminal Court has since issued an arrest warrant for President Putin for war crimes. This showed the real power of collaboration.
But we also know that our individual member organisations are also working with commercial broadcasters and newspaper groups, producing important investigations distributed around the world. Recent technological developments have opened a whole new range of investigative possibilities for our journalism and we need to seize that moment now. Such co-operation is something EBU is happy to motivate and invest in.
Another topic for discussion at the conference is inevitably AI. We are increasingly and rapidly becoming aware of the threats it poses to our industry and indeed our world. But I passionately believe that we still need to embrace it – its not new, its here, it will become a bigger and more seamless part of our lives whatever we think of it.
So as a community we need to give it a big, warm, however regulated hug. A hug where we all feel the technological change and improvement but also the transparency, the accountability, the ethical standards.
This is one of the most important areas where I feel we can work together in the months and years ahead. Regulatory approaches are only really being formulated now, with the AI Act in Brussels and with regulators around the world grappling with the rapid progression of this technology. We need to shape that legislation as an industry.
But even those initiatives are only scratching the surface of what I believe will eventually be enacted. That’s an opportunity for us. It’s also an opportunity where I believe public and private have so much we can do together.
As an industry we also need to continue to innovate and share our innovation. News is at the cutting edge of technological and editorial innovation but we all know that requires constant development, investment and yes collaboration.
At EBU we’ve developed two powerful tools with the support of so many of you in this room. A European Perspective which enables audiences to access stories from across the continent, in their own language, and NewsDeck which gives journalists the option to search and consume stories from more than 30 sources, again in their preferred language. We are committed to continuing this technological journey with you.
But change is about more than technology. It has to be also about how we tell our stories, how we reach our audience. We all know firsthand the trends highlighted by the Reuters Institute. We are losing younger demographics.
That will require a fundamental rethink of how we approach News for that generation – and not just in distribution. In choice of stories, in presentation, in narrative and fundamentally in who we recruit as journalists now in the future. We are blessed in Europe with fantastically experienced and professional journalists who care deeply about what they do.
But I visit newsrooms all around the Continent every month and there is a sameness to what I see – in terms of background, race and age profile. As there is at EBU to be honest. We all need to look at ourselves and ask do we have the right mix of staff to ensure we nourish our experience but also appeal to a generation who are growing up with very little knowledge of what we in fact do.
People matter. Chat GBT and its next iteration will become a part of all our lives – but our journalism will still require journalists. Most of all we need to value, protect and invest in them. Their analytical skills, their stubbornness in getting the story; their willingness to put, in many cases, their personal safety aside; their ability to connect with the people at the centre of a breaking news story. These qualities can’t be replicated by amateurs, algorithms or artificial intelligence. We see it every day in the reporting from the frontlines in Ukraine.
And the quality and impact of that coverage has to give us hope for the future. I like to kid myself that, despite the rapidly greying locks, I am not that old. But I started journalism on a typewriter – the last year of the typewriter in our office but still a typewriter.
Look how far we’ve come. I have actually been hearing for over a decade about the imminent demise of news – death by digital, death by algorithm, death by indifference. The list goes on. But yet here we are. How many hundreds, yes hundreds, of millions of people will have accessed news output yesterday from one of the organisations represented in this room or at this event. How many tens of thousands of people will have worked to provide that news. We still have a huge relevance. A challenged relevance that we need to re-define but a relevance nonetheless. We are still a significant force.
At the EBU, we are defined by our alliances. As well as having 112 public service media members across 56 countries, our Eurovision News Exchange, led by our fantastic Head of News Liz Corbin, brings together public service newsrooms from more than 50 countries. Non-EBU participants in this event have your own alliances, your own worldwide operations.
We want to open our community more to yours on areas where we have a clear ability and need to co-operate and collaborate. We want to find common ground with everyone who believes in News and wants it’s significance to our society to grow not dimmish. At the EBU we want to form alliances – since we can tackle the Frontlines of News if – and only IF – we stand together.
News Xchange is an opportunity to get the ball rolling, to network and share, as well as take a step back and consider the broader difficulties of what we do and how we do it. We’re all here because we believe in news journalism – we’ve committed our careers to it – so let’s make it count. We have actually much to talk about.
Thank you really much.
