Local Man

My appearance on NPR’s "On the Media" is now online at http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_052005_glocal.html. A transcript of the show is also on the page. I like how it turned out — especially that I was able to get on air that glocal journalism is really an ethical standard. At least it is for me. It also, just so happens, is a great way to generate story ideas. Let me know your thoughts.

1. Immigrants. Immigrants keep a very close watch on the politics of their home countries. Especially with cell-phones, e-mail, and the Internet, they are often more knowledgeable about home-country politics than the people at home who may not enjoy freedom of the press. As a result, immigrants can give you insights into home-country politics that can be scoops that you write, or can offer great tips and leads for AP reporters in-country to follow up. In addition, many immigrant diasporas now have formed political interest groups for the express purpose of influencing politics in the home countries. This follows the Cuban model in Florida. Very often, because the U.S. is a free country, dictators and autocrats in foreign countries hate the immigrant diasporas of their country with a special passion, because they are their most potent source of dissent. This is growing more true every day as a result of the Internet, of course. Again, these immigrant diasporas can therefore provide us here in Minnesota with very powerful scoops and stories that will have a very big readership in foreign countries. In Minnesota this certainly applies to the immigrant diasporas of Iran, Iraq, Russia, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Mexico, China, South Korea, and many other countries. Many of these communities have or are starting their own newspapers and web sites, which are good places to make contact.

2. Academics. The university system in the U.S. has for decades subsidized professors to take extensive leaves to live and work in foreign countries. As a result, virtually every university, including more than a dozen here in Minnesota, are heavily stocked with genuine experts in foreign countries — not at an abstract but a very real level. These professors speak the foreign langauges and stay in close touch with the countries they study, return there often, and engage in continuing dialogues with students from those countries. As a result, the profs also are a great source of news from these countries — especially news of trends, grassroots movements and moods. Presently these profs are used mainly as "quotamtics" when news breaks overseas. But they are also a good and underutilized source of the kinds of scoops, analyses, and other enterprise pieces we are talking about.

3. Foreign Students. Everything that’s said about professors (above) can be said equally of students. You can find these students through the global studies programs and departments on every campus, in the ethnic restaurants, and in many specialized foreign language clubs and associations. The students tend to be politically savvy because A) their visa status depends on the state of political relations; B) they are trying to decide whether to return to live in their homeland or not; and C) they inherently know geopolitics matters in a way that U.S. students don’t. Foreign students also have their own associations for sports, academics, singing and dancing, and so on. The Minnesota International Student Association at the University of Minnesota is the largest foreign student group in Minnesota and probably in the U.S. with 3,000 members.

4. Expatriates. About 2% of the U.S. population at any given time lives overseas — between 3 and 6 million people. An even larger percentage lives in the U.S. after having lived abroad for three or more years. These folks are a motherlode of glocal tips, ideas, and story leads. In Minnesota there are informal expat groups for employees of 3M, Medtronic, Cargill, and many other companies. Several dozen Minnesotans live in Saudi Arabia where they work for Saudi Aramco, having been recruited out of Saudi Aramco’s midwest office in Iowa. The Fulbright Scholarship and Peace Corps programs both have very active alumni organizations in the state. The list goes on. Many great ideas here.

5. Corporations. This is the toughest nut to crack — I haven’t yet done it well by a long shot — but potentially is one of the best sources for glocal stories. Many major Minnesota corporations have large overseas staffs, and also regularly host foreign visitors from those offices here in Minnesota. Many corporations in the high tech, healthcare, and other knowledge-based industries also very actively recruit in foreign countries, and of course many manufacturers and information service providers outsource to foreign countries. It’s a tough nut for the obvious reasons — the corporate bias to secrecy, concern for PR image, and so on. Yet persistent nurturing of corporate sources could turn this around. Also the foreign-born employees of the largest firms often form groups such as langauge schools for their kids, sports teams, and so on that are easily approachable.

5. Foreign Trade Offices. Many local consulates, offices, and individuals are active promoters of trade between Minnesota and foreign countries. I’m sure the AP covered the opening of the Mexican consulate in St. Paul next June. The Minnesota Trade Office maintains extensive contacts with foreign trade offices, and many departments of Minnesota government maintain programs with overseas partners and markets, such as the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s continuing interest in opening Chinese agricultural markets and developing China trade.

6. International Trade, Contract, and Immigration Lawyers. Most of the major law firms in Minnesota have specialists in international contracts and trade, and many smaller and solo practitioners specialize in immigration law. These folks are always deeply knowledgeable in their fields of expertise and often, if they travel frequently or were born in their countries of expertise, are broadly knowledgeable. Many immigration lawyers know very interesting immigrants who for political reasons cannot return to their home countries. One of my glocal stories was about the only immmigrant in Minnesota of the discriminated Uyghur minority of western China. A local law firm was working on her visa application which took a couple of years to pass; once it did and she was free of fear of deportation, I was able to write about her.

7. Local International Relief Agencies – The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Relief Agency and Catholic Charities are the two largest local agencies for resettling immigrants into Minnesota. The American Refugee Committee is a Minneapolis-based international humanitarian group with offices in Loring Park. I’m sure you are familiar with the Minnesota Center for Victims of Torture. Also there are many local agencies that are staffed mainly with recently-relocated immigrants who help newer immigrants get over legal, housing, and visa issues, such as the Intercultural Mututal Assistance Association in Rochester, where I get a lot of good stories ideas.  Books for Africa is a fabulous program run out of a storefront in downtown St. Paul. Schools that teach ESL to immigrants are also terrific places to meet sources.

8. Local International Programs – There are a ton of these in the Twin Cities which has lots of people, and groups, devoted primarily to fostering better international relations, trade, global citizenship, global education, and global thinking. A few of these groups include the Minnesota International Center, Citizens for a Global Solution, Great Decisionmakers (Council on Foreign Affairs), World Citizen, Global Citizens Network, Ground Zero Minnesota, and plenty of others. There’s a full list at www.tcglobal.org/directory.

9. Translation Agencies and Cross-Cultural Consulting Agencies — Plenty of the former, and some of the latter (e.g. FGI World in Butler Square) in the Twin Cities. A full list is at http://www.exportassistance.com/translation_services.html.

10. International Music, Dance, Food, Arts and Religious Groups — Scads of these too including not only arts groups but mosques, temples, and churches. The directory at www.tcglobal.org/directory is by no means a complete list. Going to any of their programs or services, and talking to the people next to you, will put you in direct contact with the great sources from any of the categories above.

Bob Garfield, the host of the NPR program On the Media, interviewed me yesterday about how the media works in this globalized age.

He’d seen my glocal journalism and wanted me to explain it a bit.

Sitting in a high-tech sound studio with a large clock silently ticking overhead, I sometimes felt tongue-tied. Later, as I drove home from the interview, I mentally replayed my discussion with Bob in a bout of "l’esprit d’escalier," i.e. all the brilliant answers I could have given but which didn’t occur to me until I’d left.

For example, Bob had asked me why I liked the word "worldplace."

What I wish I’d said was, worldplace defines something for which the English language has no word, which is the mental image one has of the place and role in the world that one one occupies. This image necessarily combines aspects of one’s local place, such as one’s knowledge of the geography of one’s home town and region, with one’s knowledge of the wider world.

How do these fit together? Is there a big gap between them? Just where in the world do we as individuals fit?

The artist Saul Steinberg’s famous drawing of New York City, with the United States scrunched up in the background in absurdly missized portions (e.g., New Jersey the same size as the Pacific Ocean), is a picture of a worldplace. It accurately reflects a New Yorker’s fantasy of the world, not the real world.

The idea of glocal journalism is to modify our worldplace mindmaps so that increasingly they reflect the real world, as opposed to reflecting our imaginative worlds that are composed primarily of whimsies and fantasies, dreams, wishes, prejudices, and comfortable mental routines.

Ecologists, epidemiologists, meteorologists, geographers, and some novelists have highly developed notions of worldplace. The idea of an "ecosystem," for example, defines a global model that links to specific locales at many places. Individuals at specific locales within an ecosystem, trained as ecologists, can define and explain local phenomenon in terms of causes located at a great distance.

The same goes for all the categories above, including novelists who use their moral imaginations to link human causes in one part of the world to human effects in another. Think Dr. Zhivago, Moby Dick, Herzog, or Huckleberry Finn.

Yet ordinary citizens don’t really have a workable idea of worldplace in mind. Ideally, readers and viewers of news stories in the United States would as quickly link events in their hometowns to events abroad, just as quickly as scientists would link a flu outbreak in Minneapolis to the chicken farms in China were the virus was bred.

Glocal journalism tries to nurture that kind of thinking by offering models of it in journalistic form.

Three other "words from the staircase:"

1. Bob’s best question to me (from memory not a transcript) was, "How knocked out should I be with your articles on the Anuak tribe of Ethiopia?"

I liked the first sentence of my answer which was, "Putting modesty aside, pretty knocked out, I think." I would have liked to follow that up with: "After all, I uncovered an unknown genocide in Africa without leaving Minnesota, using nothing more than a telephone, a PC, and an Internet connection."

That’s the bottom line. I’m proud of this work, yes. But more than that, the Anuak story really shows, I think, how empowered stand alone reporters can be who work from anywhere in the world.

The Anuak story is an example of international reporting that’s much along the lines of the domestic reporting done by the Powerline bloggers, who unseated Dan Rather from his high perch at CBS. All that I used against the Ethiopian government were the honest facts — and they were enough.

2. I wanted to say on air that the idea of glocal journalism fits much better into a public-minded than a commercially-minded culture.

People so often remark to me that it’s hard to grasp the essential idea of glocal journalism. Yet it would not be so difficult if journalism in America were more connected to its public service and social crusading roots — e.g., the muckraking tradition of newspapers, and the public broadcasting tradition of TV and radio.

Today the idea of consumership, not citizenship, rules. We know a lot more about choose the best sneakers when we go shopping, than we do about choosing the best candidates for political office. The ideal of public service journalism lives on in our culture but it’s on life-support, barely maintaining a pulse while being fed on drips of occasional high-quality journalism in newspapers, along with public TV and radio programs (like On the Media) that run against the general cultural tide.

My bottom line as it relates to glocalism: citizenship is about how we define membership in society, but also about re-membering society. When we re-member we include, we populate our group of familiars, we define the boundaries of our enclosing social circle. This circle includes the beings we decide we care enough about, and are dependent enough upon, to devote our lives to loving and supporting.

That circle today should be drawn around the entire globe. Glocal journalism re-members the circle that defines the rightful boundary of our lives.

3. I told Bob my favorite glocal story, but I didn’t give the moral.

The story is about a middle-aged Minnesota civil servant who traveled to China on a sabbatical to teach English. One day in a discussion, a student turned to him and said "Teacher, you are fat." Crestfallen, the teacher immediately felt angry and started to fantasize about how rude all Chinese people were.

But then another thought came to him, which is that his student knew only a few words of English and had taken the risk to simply use what words he knew in a conversation. And this, after all, is why he had come to China, to give young Chinese people just that opportunity.

"I realized," the teacher told me, "that it was not about me, it was about them."

That, to me, is a heck of a moral. Travelling to foreign countries, if done correctly, is a 24/7 excercise in humility. It’s about learning ones limitations in many directions. It’s about the discomfort of reaching intellectural, emotional, and physical limits. And it’s about the risk of exposing one’s long-cherished prejudices and notions about yourself and about the world, to the great likelihood they will wither and die once exposed to the foreign and the unknown.

On the flip side of course, this gives a traveler the opportunity to truly learn and grow as a human being.

Glocalism to me is an attempt to recreate these transformative experiences in the literary form of journalism. It’s not as good as being there, but close.