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Katie Couric On Digital Media and Financial Journalism

Jun 25, 2012 || OpenMarkets || No Comments

Covering the financial crisis and the shift towards digital media are two of the biggest challenges the news business has faced in recent years. From her position as a veteran anchor at some of the largest media organizations in the world for most of the last 30 years, Katie Couric has a special perspective on both of these developments.  She spoke with us at last year’s Global Financial Leadership Conference about these issues, her early career, and her work for cancer research. Beginning in September, she will host her new daytime show, Katie, on ABC.

There’s been a big shift in news consumption from print and TV to digital. Take us through that from your perspective. How have you experienced these changes in your career, and where do you see things going?

I think there have been seismic changes in journalism.  I’ve been in the business for 30 years, and when I entered television news, I was a desk assistant at ABC News in Washington.  And at the time, I was using little white gloves to change the ribbon on the teletype machines.  So, that makes me feel like a dinosaur.  But, it also, I think, is illustrative of how (news) has changed by leaps and bounds.  The way people disseminate information is so different.

I was one of the first employees of CNN, which my network colleagues dismissively called Chicken Noodle News back in 1980.  So, you have the advent of 24/7 news, first of all.  I was there to witness that.  And then, of course, with the Internet, it’s much more personalized, individualized consumption of news.  As a result, traditional media has had to change or perish, to be honest with you. Not yet, but they are declining.  And I think people want news how they want it when they want it.  Just as personalized medicine has become much more prevalent, now, I think personalized news consumption is really the wave of the future.

As someone who has been in the traditional news business a long time, how do you reconcile that?  How do you think the hard news business can make that transition from television to the internet to filtering news to people who want something specific?

I think that people want quality content.  And as a result, there are incredible outlets that are now just focused on purely online products, whether you’re talking about the Daily Beast or the Huffington Post or Slate.com and all sorts of different websites that have surfaced even in the last two to three years.  So, I think that people want accurate, quality journalism.  I don’t think it’s really something that you have to reconcile.  I think still many, many people rely on television news.

The online audience can be quite fragmented because there are so many outlets.  But, I think that people who want accurate, quality content can get it in both places.  And increasingly, you see traditional news outlets trying to find a way that they can have a huge fire hose to deliver information online as well, ergo the ABC/Yahoo deal which gives ABC material a place and a venue for all the people who go to Yahoo for news.

And of course, everyone’s saying mobile devices are the wave of the future and you can be starting to get news that you want tailored to you sent directly to you.  You can see that with Twitter and Facebook and all sorts of social media.  So, I think that a lot of people were really terrified of new media, if you will, and digital outlets, but, I think they really can be very synergistic – to use a very ’90s word – because I think the quality can be available in both places.

Let’s touch on the financial markets. They’ve been under a lot of political regulatory pressures.  The financial industry took a lot of the blame for the 2008-2009 crisis, but there’s many sectors of the financial industry. How do you see mainstream media absorbing, digesting and ultimately delivering the message in a fair way?

I think that no entity or institution is monolithic.  When you say “the financial industry” that’s like saying “the media.”  And I always take issue when people say, ‘What do you think the media has done about blank?’  First of all, the financial industry and the media and government are made up of many different people, many different agencies, many different facets, people with many different responsibilities. So, I can understand why at times the financial industry has felt demonized.  But I also think there has been room for improvement in the financial industry.  And sometimes, quite frankly, they’ve done things wrong, just as the media has done things wrong in the past.  It’s important to be honest and do a healthy and realistic self-examination of any institution and where there is room for improvement.

Having said that, I think sometimes in covering any particular story – and by the way, I think there’s plenty of blame to go around when it comes to personal individual responsibility, but also institutional failure – a narrative is developed that can be unfair, and society as a whole needs someone to target and to blame and to vent their frustration and anger at.

Sometimes that has been our financial institutions.  I’m not defending them for everything that they’ve done.  And as I said, I think they have been culpable, some of them, and some players in the financial industry have been culpable.  But certainly, I think there’s individual responsibility as well.

But I think that often when a story surfaces, a narrative gets developed.  And it can somehow neglect and ignore the nuances and the complexities of the story.  I think that people have to be really on guard against that.

Lastly, we’d like to touch on some of your philanthropic projects. In addition to your work in news, you’re very involved with some cancer research organizations. What’s the latest with that?

Cancer advocacy has been something that’s been incredibly important to me since the death of my husband in 1998 to colon cancer.  And as a result, I’ve really channeled so much effort and energy into not only the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance, but the Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health at New York Hospital and more recently Stand Up to Cancer, which really is trying to attack all cancers. I didn’t want to just focus solely on colon cancer when one in two men and one in three women in this country are diagnosed with cancer in his or her lifetime, and one person dies every minute of cancer in this country

So, along with some other women who were frustrated with the pace of development of new drugs and new strategies, we started this grassroots movement that has raised almost $200 million that is given to dream teams of scientists who share their experience and wisdom and lab work and tissue samples so that they can collectively come up with better treatments for all the cancers that affect so many people and so many families in this country.