Hope Is A Verb - Angus Hervey - Fix The News

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

It's no secret that the news media is in crisis: sweeping layoffs across newsrooms, consumer disengagement and stories of doom and destruction on loop 24/7. But what if we could fix it? In this bonus episode Angus Hervey chats about his mission to highlight stories of progress and to prove that another form of journalism is possible - one that not only informs us about the world, but inspires real hope for the future of our planet. Find out more: https://fixthenews.com/ This episode of Hope Is A Verb was hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose. The soundtrack for this podcast is "Rain" composed and performed by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠El Rey Miel ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠from their album "Sea the Sky." Audio Sweetening by Anthony Badolato- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ai3 Audio and Voice⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Welcome to Season 2 of Hope is a Verb, a podcast that explores what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people that are making it happen. I'm Amy. I'm Gus, and these are the unknown heroes who are mending our planet, stitching together a better future, and showing us the best of what it means to be human. I often like to say that this work is my own medicine. And like so many people, I have set out to try and create or do the thing that I needed the most. And in doing so, have accidentally discovered

that there were a lot of other people that needed that as well. So today we're doing things a little differently. There's no guest. Instead, it's just Gus and I chatting about something that's been on our minds a lot lately, the news. If you subscribe to our newsletter, you've probably already spotted that we recently changed our name from Future Crunch to Fix the News. And although in theory, a lot will stay the same in terms of the newsletter and this podcast, it is much more than simply a rebrand. It's no secret that the news media is in crisis.

There are sweeping layoffs across newsrooms, and it's getting harder for us to hold all the headlines of doom and destruction without feeling like there's no way out. Fix the News is about showing that another form of journalism is possible, one that highlights where we're going right and documents the progress that people around the world are making every single day. documents the progress that people around the world are making every single day. This mission is not about pointing fingers or laying blame. Instead, it's one of repair, a topic that we talk about a lot on this podcast. So how do we fix the news?

Well, luckily, I have the editor of our newsletter to help answer that question. So hi, Gus. Hi, Amy. It's just us. It is just us. And I have to say it feels quite different. It is. And I'm really looking forward to being able to have a conversation about why we're doing this and where we think we might be going.

Well, before we do that, how would you introduce yourself? What would you want people to know about you? I'd probably describe myself as a recovering pessimist. That comes from many years of addiction to news combined with a very long period of study of all of the various problems that the world is facing. My background and training is in economics, but I think if I had to describe what I do now,

it would be that I am a solutions journalist, someone who tries to document stories of progress from every corner of the planet. Okay, I was going to save this question for later, but now feels like it might be the right time to ask it. Why are these stories of progress so important? Why do you keep finding and sharing them week after week? The answer to that is fairly simple, I think, which is that if we want more people in the world to devote themselves to making progress, then we need more people to know that it's possible to make progress. Here's another way maybe of thinking about it. If you are climbing up a mountain and you've still got a way to go,

the best way of motivating yourself is not to say, oh my gosh, look how much further we still have to go. It's so steep. It's such a long way to the summit. I don't think we're ever going to make it. What you do instead is you take that into account and maybe you mention it, but you also turn around and you say, well, look how far we've come. We've managed to overcome so many obstacles already.

We've already gotten halfway or two-thirds up the mountain. Maybe that should give us hope that we can continue going. And the same should be true in the way that we address big global challenges. It's really funny because you are now the good news man. It's hard to imagine that you started this work as a bit of a pessimist. Can you take me back to that moment eight, nine years ago when you decided to do this newsletter? I often like to say that this work is my own medicine. And like so many people, I have set out to try and create or do the thing that I needed the most. And in doing so, I have accidentally discovered

that there were a lot of other people that needed that as well. But I am the original news junkie combined with a pessimistic view of the world. As a teenager, I really keenly felt the challenges of the world and wanted to do something about them. That was something that was always deeply incalculated into me, especially from my mother. She said that if you're lucky enough to be born in a good family and get a good education, you have a moral duty to give back. And so I thought, well, that's what I want to do. I studied in some really amazing institutions

and I wanted to try and do something about the problems of the world. So I studied those problems and I got to the end of a PhD. I did that at the London School of Economics and realized that those places were really good at defining problems. Not many people were very good at defining solutions. I kind of reached a bit of a crisis point,

a combination of four years in the field studying problems of deforestation and environmental degradation in Southern Africa, combined with a very intense daily news habit, kind of left me in a place of real despair. I thought the world was doomed, that we were headed for disaster, and I felt really negative and really dark about the future. And then I picked up Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Human Nature,

and that book was like getting hit by a bus. I had never seen anyone make the argument that the world was getting better. And more importantly, make the argument in such a well-researched and authoritative way. That book was kind of my gateway drug into this movement, I guess, that you could call intelligent optimism. Hans Rosling, of course, is a famous proponent of that view. And I started watching his TED Talks.

I started trying to seek out more of that kind of content and material and was really amazed to discover that it just basically didn't exist. The impetus to create the newsletter and to start researching these stories came from a desire to find and to see more of them. Basically, I was sitting there and telling myself, there must be more good news out there. If these big long-term trends that people like

Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling are talking about exist, then where is the kind of daily cadence of these kind of stories and where are they showing up? Now, you sent that first newsletter to 50 friends and family back in 2015. And today that number has grown to almost 55,000 people all around the world. I mean, in those early days, was there any part of you that imagined this is where things could end up? The answer to that question is no. I had no idea what it would become.

I don't think you ever do when you start out with a new project. But I did have an inkling. I knew that there was something important going on, which is that I had discovered this way of looking at the world. And then I remember a year or two later, once Tane, my co-founder with Future Crunch and I had started, I remember one of those flashes of insight that you know is really important that you need to listen to. And it was that it's not what you know that counts, it's what you do regularly that really matters. That you can know everything about a particular topic

or that you can have the best sources of information possible, but if you're not showing up consistently to disseminate and to share that information, then you won't be a trusted source. And so I knew that when I started the newsletter that regardless of what happened, I needed to just keep on showing up again and again. And initially, we only used to put it out every fortnight. And from the first issue, I remember saying to myself,

no matter what happens, you have to get out an issue every fortnight. And that has stayed with me all the way through the journey. And that first edition came out in 2015. We're in 2024 now. So I have been regularly writing a newsletter, researching stories of progress from around the world every two weeks for the first five years and then every week since then. And that practice has changed me. And it's a practice I've observed working with you. And

then it's also a practice that I've had the benefit of using myself. There is something when you are in these stories week after week, you start to see the common threads, you start to see all the different narratives that are going on. Yeah, I'm really curious to know what do you think has changed in you and what state have you gone from and what state do you have you kind of reached now? gone from and what state do you have you kind of reached now? So I came at this work from the opposite direction. You were a pessimist. I was at the other end of the scale. I was almost a Pollyanna optimist. I really wanted to believe that the world was okay, but the way that I did that was to switch off from the bad things that were happening, especially when I became a mum, I became really hypersensitive to any negative news. Now, what this work has given me is that

it has really grounded my relationship with the world. You know, my hope now, it has a real weight because it's grounded in evidence from all of these stories that I've read and worked on over the past three years. But I've got to say the side effect that I wasn't expecting is how much it's increased my capacity to sit with the world when it breaks. You know, when there's a war or a natural disaster or a new statistic about climate change, I am able to pay attention to that story because I now know that it's not the whole story. So, yeah, this work has really changed my relationship with the world because I'm able to see more of it, both the good and the bad. And I'm able to show up and pay attention without falling apart or switching off. That's interesting that you say that because that's the place that I got to,

but it took me a lot longer. When I first set out to do this, I set out to prove that the world was definitively getting better. I think what then happens is that over time, you look at enough news to realize that it's actually not that simple. That yes, things could be getting better on a whole number of different indicators, but that at the same time, a lot of things will be getting worse. So I had to kind of throw that mission away.

Then the mission became to kind of really try and prove that the media was not being fair. And I kind of stayed in that place for many years of trying to say, okay, this news data is here to show people that mainstream news just doesn't have a clue. The media had a bad news problem. And I think that is true. I think that we all know that. But then I realized that there's no overlord, there's no kind of Rupert Murdoch figure sitting at the top there,

rubbing their hands with glee and saying, okay, let's just fill the people with bad news and keep them in a state of fear. What you actually realize is that most journalists and most editors are doing their best to speak truth to power and to report on the world and to make the world a better place. And that there are structural problems with the way that media is organized that leave us in that place. And so I realized that there is no such thing as the big bad media. It doesn't actually exist. I realized that there is no such thing as the big bad media. It doesn't actually exist. The place where I've got to now is to say what this work does is it allows us to take all of the news in,

which is where you are. So you and I have arrived, I suppose, in the same place that by showing stories of progress, that allows us to also look at the stories of where things are falling apart. And that gives us a real view of what is happening in the world. So this capacity to hold both the progress and decline is at the heart of Fix the News.

But why do you think the news is broken in the first place? A lot of people may have seen in the past few weeks that media has been really down on itself. A lot of media organizations are closing. There've been layoffs of jobs in the journalism industry. It's carnage out there at the moment. What we're seeing is the collapse of the news industry as it was essentially formed in the 20th century. So this decline and collapse has been happening for a while. And the reason for it, of course, is the internet. The old business model was predominantly through advertising.

Those advertising dollars have dried up and disappeared. For a while, news organizations thought they could sustain themselves by creating greater reach on social media platforms. But of course, social media itself has changed. And so now there are a few media and news organizations left standing but all of the sort of smaller titles and publications are kind of being destroyed. Incidentally, that does not mean the news is broken in other places. If you have a look at India's news industry, it is crazy.

There are so many titles, so many publications in India. Every time I go looking for a story from India, I can find about 50 different versions of it from 50 different titles. So just because the news is broken in the West doesn't necessarily mean that it's broken in other places. The other factor that I think is important, and this is important for what we're doing,

is that it's not just that the business model of news is broken, it's that a lot of people are turning off from the news. And that multiple surveys in the last few years have shown that there is this kind of increase in disengagement by people in the West. They just don't want to hear the news

anymore and the reason for that is that the tone of the news has turned markedly negative in the last decade. And the reason for that is combined the tone of the news has turned markedly negative in the last decade. And the reason for that is combined with the collapse of the business model. That what's happened is that as the available audience has shrunk, and as the money has dried up, those news organizations have been trying harder and harder to get audiences' attention. And the best way to get people's attention is to concentrate on stories of death, division, disaster, destruction, dysfunction. The more they do that, the more attention they get,

but then the more people eventually switch off and so they get a dwindling pool. So we've kind of got to this point where that combination of the sort of advertising-led death, disaster, and destruction version of media just isn't viable anymore. And there are a lot of people trying to do it differently, taking different angles, going for different kinds of business models. But we haven't really seen a corrective yet to the tone of the news. And I think what our mission with Fix the News is,

is to show that journalism can be about reporting stories of progress and that that can be serious journalism, that can tell us something about the world. It can be comprehensive, it can be authoritative, and it can leave people feeling not just better informed about the world, but it can leave people feeling like there's something that they might be able to do to make the world a better place as well. Yeah, it's been really interesting,

and this has only been for me over the last few weeks. I knew that the news was there to inform us and since we've started having this conversation around Fix the News, I've started to realise that when the news does its job and you are well informed about the world, you understand it better and it can actually increase your capacity to care about what's happening. And I've never thought of that relationship between the information that the news is giving me and then my ability to care about fellow humans in a place that I may never visit, that I may not have even heard of. And that is something that's coming up for me a lot at the moment. For me, that manifests most directly in the way that I feel about climate change right now. Because what I'm looking at, what's been here

on my feeds in the last few weeks are just these really horrifying graphs where you're just seeing these red lines of temperature rise that are just unprecedented. And they are genuinely terrifying and genuinely scary. But at the same time, I'm also looking at just the extraordinary acceleration in progress in clean energy deployment globally. And so that gives me hope that this move to a fossil fuel-free global society is happening quicker and faster than anyone thought possible. And that the world that my daughters will live in

actually is a world that may be largely free of fossil fuels. And that is going to be a better world than the one that I live in. Even if it's a world that is hotter and scarier with climate change. And so there's this strange fear and hope, they sit side by side. But that's the place I'd much rather be than in the place of blind optimism or absolute terror. Okay, let's talk about Fix the News. Why the name change? What does it mean? Fix the News, it's an aspiration, and it's a shift from the passive to the active. It means that we're a mission-led organization and I think that's really important.

We're not just here to report news, we're here to try and make things better. Obviously within our business model, that is baked in, this idea of circular good news where one third of all of our subscriber fees go to charity. We then choose small charities, we help them out, that contributes to the wider circle of good news. Eventually at some point further down the line,

maybe we get to report on larger scale change of which of course those charities just play a minor part but you need lots of small parts to make up the bigger change. And then we get to report on more of that good news, hopefully we get more subscribers and then we get to give on more of that good news. Hopefully we get more subscribers and then we get to give away more to charity which plays its part in creating more good news. So there's a kind of regenerative circular aspect

to what we do. The hope is that this idea of fix the news solves the two problems that I talked about earlier which is one is the business model problem and two is the tone of that news. And what we're trying to do is trying to say is there a new business model problem and two is the tone of that news and what we're trying to do is trying to say is there a new business model that we can use to become a media organization

where our subscribers and readers don't just subscribe to us because we give them great information they subscribe to us because they want to see progress happen and be a part of progress and two, can we change the tone of that news to say, we're going to bring you news that both informs and inspires? That's the experiment. And I don't know if we're going to pull it off, but we're going to give it our best shot. And at the heart of this experiment are these stories of progress. And I actually wonder if

we're in the business of great news rather than good news, purely because the scale of these stories is so much bigger than traditional good news like local rescues and dogs on surfboards. I'd really love if you could share some of the criteria that you use to choose these stories each week, Because when you look under the hood of this newsletter, it is quite a process. As you've already said, I'm not really interested in good news, I'm interested in progress. So is there a story that is really amazing progress for a really large number of people? And when I talk about large numbers of people, we're talking anywhere upwards of 100,000 people or more. Sometimes our stories talk about news

that affects tens of millions of people. That's a rough number that I have in my head. If that's something that has affected more than 100,000 people, then that feels pretty significant. The other one that I think is pretty significant is when you have a law that gets passed. If you have a change in the rules

for the way that our society works, whether those rules are unspoken or spoken, that feels like something that is really important to document and to talk about. The most recent example that I can think of is that the European Union has passed this nature restoration law. So that is now a rule that says that the EU has to restore 20% of its land by 2030. So that's not an aim. That is now a law, and that is momentous. Europe's never done that before. In fact, very few places have ever done that before,

never mind an entire continent. So a change in the rules, something that affects a very large number of people, or a scientific or technological breakthrough that moves us forward in terms of our know-how and our capability and our capacity. And then I think maybe there's a fourth category of things around conservation

where we have an event like a species recovering or a huge tract of land that gets protected or a mangrove that gets restored. And it can't be a mangrove that's like 10 hectares in someone's backyard. We're talking about big spaces of land. It has to be large scale. And that's what goes through my head a lot when I'm trying to find these news stories.

And what that also means is that a lot of the news stories I find are in really obscure places. I tend to spend a lot of time digging around in the bowels of the World Bank or the United Nations or the World Health Organization in this sort of really strange, what they call kind of grey literature, which are these numerous reports that kind of come out. But of course, they don't get picked up by regular news organizations. So apart from going down rabbit holes on the internet, what are the challenges of working in good news? The challenge of working in this space is that you are always just going to be a lone voice in the wilderness. There are a few organizations out there that do

similar types of reporting, Top of Mind, The Progress Network, Reasons to be Cheerful, Positive News in the UK, but generally it doesn't really happen on a large scale. So you're always just swimming upstream. And what that means is that you have a smaller pool of potential subscribers that you don't get to rely on clickbait. There are a lot of people, for example, who have a lot of success reporting on US politics

because it's just this endless bun fight. I think half of English-speaking media right now is reporting on US politics. And then you compare that with the recent democratic election in Indonesia, home to something like 400 million people. And I reckon the proportion of coverage that was given to the Indonesian election compared to the US election is maybe 1 to 1,000. Wow. Maybe? Yeah. Probably less? Yeah. So does the news inform

us about what's happening in the world? No. I love that you say that because for me, doing this work has been a bit of a geography lesson. And the other thing I've learned very early on when you were walking me through how to create these summaries for the newsletter, you said it was really important to always put the time that it's taken. And I think that is probably the other challenge with good news is that it's slow news.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, bad news happens quickly, good news happens slowly. And it is a major challenge in terms of reporting on progress. I want to just add one more thing on the geographical angle. My favorite bugbear is that there is no news out of South or Latin America.

I just keep on thinking, what is going on there? What are those 400 million people doing down there? A recent story, I think we reported on this in the last newsletter, 80 million kids in South America are now getting fed through school meals. Yeah. 80 million children. I mean, that's a pretty extraordinary accomplishment, but where did that come from?

And why do we not know about that? Why is that not reported front and center in New York Times? 80 million children. It's extraordinary. I loved that story. I loved that story. And the other thing, I think it was also that 19 of those countries within that region had actually created a policy around it.

So it was big change. And that must mean that people have been working on that problem for 10 or 15 years. Yeah, yeah. And so I'm really interested in those stories. Who started this? Where did it come from? Who are the key organizations?

There must have been a few key politicians that already publicized and promoted this. But now we're at the point where the majority of children in South America are getting one really great square meal at school every day. And that just feels like a really great story of progress that I'd love to know more about. But unfortunately, because media is not interested in that. It's just difficult to know. Is there one story or is there a thread of story that has really stayed with you? I think for me it has to be disease elimination.

Yeah. A lot of this progress that we've seen, I look at a lot of it and I say, okay, that could potentially be reversed. But when you eliminate a disease in a country, it tends to stay eliminated. And in the past decade, something like 50 countries have eliminated a disease. That's new. Humans haven't done that before. And we are just inches away from eliminating polio and guinea worm.

And once those diseases are gone, they're gone. And those are diseases that used to affect millions of people and have done in the time that human beings have been here. So you're not just talking about a change in global affairs or in conservation, but where you're talking about a fundamental change in what affects our species. Those ones really stay with me. a fundamental change in what affects our species. Those ones really stay with me.

And in the past 12 months, we've seen, for the first time ever, a country eliminate hepatitis C, which is in Egypt, which is crazy because they used to have the highest prevalence of hepatitis C in the world. So how do you go from having the most in the world to being the first country that eliminates it? I don't know the story of that. Also, disease elimination is just so difficult. It's tens of thousands of people,

billions of dollars in funding, systems and advocacy and legislation and promotion and setbacks and pardyards and massive infrastructure and last mile efforts and cold storage chain. It's a lot. So that really speaks volumes to what human beings can do if we set our minds to it. Yeah. And that I think is at the heart of this work, really. And I think that's what we're trying to do with Fix the News is we're trying to say, you know, pass the headlines

in the places where the cameras aren't rolling. In those places, what are people doing to push things forward and to make progress happening? And I think when you start looking in those places, there's just so many reasons for hope. What would you say is the biggest lesson that you've learned from doing this work? I've learned that maybe we're going to make it.

That maybe I set out with a question nine years ago and the question I was answering was, are we going to make it? And what I believe now after nine years of this work is that we are going to make it and we're going to be bruised and we'll be battered and our hides will be scarred and some things will have been lost forever and there will be a lot of damage and trauma. But on the other end of this, we are going to emerge into a world that I really do think is going to look a lot better. And that sounds like a pretty radical statement

because it's not the message that we're seeing out there right now. But everything that I'm looking at suggests to me that that is well within the range of possibility and that gives me a lot of hope and means that this is work that I really want to just keep on doing. That if we want more people to make progress, then we need more people to know that progress is possible. And that's the thing, right?

Because once you know that we're going to make it, how does that change the way that you live? How does that change what you do? Well, I think what it changes is you say, well, I want to be a part of that story. The commitment and the dedication is to say, I'm going to stay with that story all the way through to the end. I'm going to wrap up with the question that we ask all our guests.

What does the word hope mean to you, Gus Harvey? I should have known that we were going to get this question because we ask all of our guests. And the problem is that all of our guests have said it in way more eloquent and more beautiful ways than I ever could. I'll give it a go. Hope is a choice. We get to choose hope again and again and again and again. Once you realize that hope is within your own control, it just gives you far more agency. It gives you a way of navigating the world that I think, for me, has become essential to who I am.

Whenever I feel despair, whenever I'm looking at a piece of news and just going, oh my God, human beings can be so cruel and we can be so selfish, it's really great to remind myself that I can hope in that moment and that that choice is up to me. And in making that choice, you realize that,

yes, humans are cruel and stupid, but more often we're actually really brave and really kind and really smart and really awesome, and that we tend to choose love over hate more often than not. As part of our mission to fix the news, we're offering free premium memberships to any educators or mental health workers who find our newsletter to be a useful resource for restoring hope.

You can check out our website for more details. This episode officially rounds off our second season of Hope is a Verb, but we will be back later this year with another chapter of Conversations. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this podcast possible. If you're interested in becoming a paid subscriber and actively supporting more stories of progress, go to fixthenews.com. If you enjoyed this episode and you would like to support Hope as a Verb, please subscribe and leave a review. Thanks for listening.