Horace Mann - Spring 2017 - 13

HM Alumni Address "The Issues" in Their Work and Lives

prestigious Middle East beat-a training ground for many top
reporters. With language skills in Spanish, Arabic, Armenian,
French and Portuguese Setrakian was perfect for the position.
It was challenging, nonetheless, for her to head to the Middle
East as a self-contained reporting team, provided by the network with only a camera, laptop and backpack to carry them in.
The assignment had Setrakian covering the widespread
upheavals in the region-the most extreme since national
borders were redrawn there as English and French colonialism ended. The alum's two years were marked by rising social
unrest in Egypt, the 2009 Iranian presidential election, frequent
bombings, deposed leaders and sweeping historical change.
Bloomberg News noticed Setrakian's reporting and arranged
with ABC to share her work. The ABC-Bloomberg partnership
put Setrakian at the forefront of another major change-in the
news industry itself, propelled by smartphones and Twitter. The
Bloomberg Terminal Setrakian was feeding simultaneously
offered instantaneous news, video, and text, plus Tweets to
activate community discussion. "That opened my eyes to how
the news flow was changing," Setrakian said. She saw in these
different means of exchanging information a way to create a
dashboard featuring high-quality information serving a variety
of interests. As her idea coalesced Setrakian wasted little time.
She sketched out the dashboard on a page of her reporter's
notebook. Shortly thereafter she left her reporting position to
turn her vision into reality, launching News Deeply less than six
months later.
An expansive mission
With an overall mission of surpassing the sound-bite approach
to information News Deeply does much more. It also seeks
to be a teaching tool, empowering individuals to grasp issues
and angles buried in the headlines. One stream of Syria Deeply,
for instance, worked with the National Council for the Social
Studies to create an interactive curriculum around the Syria
crisis and shared this curriculum with teachers across the U.S.
under the banner "Teach Syria." Clicking on any of the Deeplies
shows the depth of information available. For example, Water
Deeply, launched to cover the California drought, includes sections on Environment & Wildlife, Innovation, Law & Policy, and
Management & Supply. Each Deeply promises that its coverage
is "Always noise-free, always trustworthy."
News Deeply realizes this maxim with a culture it describes
as rooted in "respect for our readers and our reporters. Driven
by empathy for our users we strive to create an easy way to understand the world's most important issues. We recognize that
journalistic integrity is crucial to our work, and we have made
it part of our competitive advantage to maintain the highest
ethical standards in what we deliver. All of our reporting is factchecked by our editors ... We do not editorialize, and we provide
the greatest possible safety for our writers ... using intelligent
information to build a community."
That community includes politicians, policy makers, academics, activists, concerned citizens, and especially those caught
up in the situations News Deeply covers, for whom its "empathy"
most deeply extends.

Considering today's media
"Empathy" is not a word often associated with today's media,
though it once may have been. But, Setrakian's experience both
inside and outside of mainstream media has enabled her to
contribute to the industry's transformation. "I think our industry
has been out of touch with reality in a way that we can no longer
ignore," she states. "The anger that was expressed during the
elections came from peoples' sense of a lack of compassion. We
as the media were out of touch with a lot of things because we
tend to cover what's happening now. We have 24 hours of news,
in an information-poor environment. In covering the election
the media never took a close look at how issues like the automation of peoples' jobs, or trade, impacted peoples' lives. I saw
in the Arab Spring a lot of the dynamics I see in the U.S. today.
Many people feel they have nothing left to lose. They're saying
they want to crash and reset."
The news industry's problems are "different in different
arenas," says Setrakian. "In local news it's existential, it's about
whether these outlets can exist anymore at all. In national news
there's the challenge of economic optimization, quarterly earnings, and a little bit of human greed. We're seeing corporate
ownership of public airwaves without accountability, which is
contrary to the news media's public service obligation." News
Deeply has found, however, that "you can be profitable when you
take the high road," Setrakian proclaims.
While the media's recent rude awakening has raised the
question of what to do now Setrakian can be skeptical about actual change taking place. "I don't know how successful this will
be. Right now we're seeing a lot of navel gazing, but I don't see a
lot of accountability. The best we can do is explore alternatives,
and pursue alternative models."
Setrakian does not see News Deeply as an exclusive answer.
Rather, she counts herself among "a generation of media
innovators" responding to the situation, because "our industry
has not been engaged in problem solving. We broke away from
our respective jobs in mainstream media because we noticed
this happening with specific issues, as we noticed it with Syria.
We are thinking about news at a very specific level." (Mic.com,
founded by alumni Chris Altchek '05 and Jake Horowitz '05 is
another news innovator.)
News Deeply "decided to start with the premise that there's
a subset of people who truly want to know what's going on, so
we try to be a system that will support a different subset of
information. We know we're read by high-level people in each
area we cover, and that we have resonance and impact. We
do the work for those who need it. We're a valuable platform
because we have important people reading us. We sometimes
refer to News Deeply as the vitamin supplement to mainstream
news," Setrakian says. "What matters very much now is
authenticity. I always say to our team and to others, what's the
likelihood as a species that we're going to solve a problem we
don't understand?"
Setrakian would like to return to reporting one day, but not
until News Deeply makes an even deeper impact. "I miss being a
journalist, but I have loved working to solve a problem I care so
much about," she says. $

Horace Mann Magazine Spring 2017

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