Q&A with journalist Nick Kristof: A battered optimist

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof details many lessons learned about life and about his storied journalism career in his memoir "Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life." Kristof spoke about his experiences chasing the news as a journalist and about his faith in humanity in his keynote address at Health Journalism 2024 in June.

After the speech, I sat down with Kristof for a deeper dive into the current and future state of journalism.

The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

It seems so many people think journalists are evil, or liars. How do we restore faith in this profession?

At a fundamental level, it's not just about restoring faith in journalism, but restoring faith in institutions more broadly. That will entail fixing a lot of the disparities in the country, the gulfs in the country - education, income, etc. But, even in the absence of that, we can do more distinguishing between the most reputable journalism and kind of the crazy clickbait stuff, and encouraging media literacy so that people understand that there is a difference.

Those of us in mainstream journalism can do a better job with outreach. Frankly, sometimes we have been condescending to people outside the profession - there's been a tendency for liberal journalists to sometimes be dismissive of people across education, or who think differently, or people of faith, in ways that all undermine our credibility. There are things we can do at the margins that will help.

The role of journalists is to help people think about the world differently, but it seems like people don't want to, or that all they want is confirmation bias.

It does feel like that, but still, there's a lot of amazingly good journalism out there, and good journalism has rarely been better, and there still is a market for it. I haven't given up hope for overcoming our confirmation biases.

Many older journalists had an opportunity to first work in small, local newsrooms, where you got to be a jack of all trades and understand what's important to that community. With so many local outlets closing, how can we help younger journalists learn these fundamentals in today's business environment?

That is the aspect of the crisis, local journalism, that I'm a little less worried about. I think young journalists are still pretty amazing. And I'm kind of amazed by how many really smart, dedicated young people there are going into journalism, even though their parents are aghast.

So many young people are going into a profession that doesn't have a fair business model. And I find that really encouraging.

I'm really troubled by the collapse of local journalism around the country and what that does for communities, or the people working in those places, governance in those small towns, but young journalists will still emerge and do amazing things, albeit without the background that you and I had in small town papers.

You mention in the book that health journalism doesn't get enough attention. How do we get editors to be more cognizant of important health stories if they don't think it will generate the clicks or eyeballs?

I think that's a weakness. We do over-cover politics and sports, for fairly similar reasons - people like to read about their teams. What helps is there's an element within science journalism that has built in bias, because people do want to be healthy.

And, it feels relevant in a way that journalism about astronomy sometimes does not. We need to get better at telling the stories and including individuals, so that we're not just writing about a journal article, and it feels fresh.

If you think of stories, say, in the context of Black maternal mortality, that's an important story, but Black cervical cancer is maybe something fresher, and kills even more women and is even more preventable. It's something that's easy to put a face on. We need to work even harder, putting faces on stories and finding compelling examples.

You're also a big proponent of solutions journalism.

Absolutely. And that can also be hard for similar reasons. Readers aren't always particularly interested in solutions, especially if they're kind of nuanced and imperfect.

Where and how do journalists draw that line between being an advocate and getting involved, because your instinct is to help people, but the professional in you says, take a step back.

I think our paramount responsibility is to other people, not to the professional canon. I do not think that a reporter should watch a child dying and take notes as the child dies, thinking, "great, great story." We should avoid the temptation to lobby or become champions of a particular cause, but it's a fine line, and difficult to navigate and different people will draw that line somewhere.

It is okay to be against sexual violence. It's okay to be against malnutrition, against child abuse. But we should be a little careful of championing particular policy solutions, particularly where there's a dispute, a particular side in the dispute, and we should always be very ready to step back and acknowledge, maybe we made a mistake, and avoid committing ourselves too clearly to one side, where we may end up looking back and regretting it.

It's hard not to feel passionate when you hear many of the stories about abuse, inequities, unprovoked violence, and the like. You highlight many examples in your book. How do you keep your perspective?

It's a little bit like being a doctor in an ER, in that you are frantically trying to do your work. And you have a certain professional armor, and you're trying to get some facts. Periodically, stories will break through my armor, and kids especially.

But it's maybe good that there are kinks in the armor. That's also what keeps us passionate, keeps us going to dig up more stories. There's nothing wrong with being human.

Do you consider yourself an optimist?

I do, but a somewhat battered optimist.

What else do you want other young health journalists to know?

I can appreciate that it's a somewhat terrifying time to be a young health care journalist, because there isn't a good business model for what we do.

But I also think that health care journalism is enormously important, and that information about health has intrinsic value, and where things have value, we will figure out ways of monetizing that and paying people salaries.

They will be drawing salaries, 10, 20, 30 years from now. We may not understand, or know the platforms that will derive it - maybe, people will pay a little bit for the electrode that goes in their brains that will feed the information directly. What is important is that what they do has merit and value.