Nobel Laureates and SIPA Faculty Discuss Impact of International Journalism Partnerships

On March 4, Nobel laureates Maria Ressa and Joseph E. Stiglitz spoke about the importance of investigative journalism during the age of Trump.

Organized by Columbia SIPA’s Technology, Media and Communications specialization and the nonprofit news outlet Report for the World (RTW), Ressa and Stiglitz joined André Corrêa d’Almeida, associate director director of SIPA’s MPA in Development Practice and TMAC director, Anya Schiffrin to discuss Schiffrin and D’Almeida’s research on media impact, why investigative reporting is good for society and democracy, how big tech platforms destroyed the business model for news, and how to stand up to dictators, to paraphrase the title of Ressa’s most recent book. Ressa is a professor of professional practice at SIPA. 

“The growth of unregulated big tech robbed the news outlets of the resources they need and this has had societal impacts, impacts on public governance and private governance. Information is fundamental to the functioning of society,” said Stiglitz, a university professor whose 2001 Nobel Prize was awarded for his work on asymmetric information. “Nothing functions without information.” 

The collapse of the business model for journalism, which Ressa pointed out was fueled by the platforms’ focus on engagement, has had disastrous effects on democracy. “We’ve got to get away from the incentive structure that, frankly, rewards the worst of human nature.”

In this world of fragmented attention spans, AI, and online mis- and disinformation, small nonprofit outlets around the world have become a key part of the media ecosystem, said Preethi Nallu, RTW’s global director, who moderated the panel. But these organizations struggle to survive and have been hit hard by the recent USAID funding cuts. The Supreme Court ruled against these cuts last week. 

Foundations and aid agencies that help support these niche news outlets need proof of their impact.

Report for the World embeds specialized reporters covering, for example, climate, health, or the environment, in different newsrooms around the world. The research discussed at SIPA had found that this effort often raises awareness among audiences as well as newsrooms about the importance of these topics and how their lives could be affected. 

The March 4 discussion was the first event on campus to present research carried over the last four years. During the pandemic, Lindsay Green-Barber, a prominent expert in media impact, worked with Columbia faculty on a project with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to measure the impact of the Pandora Papers — almost 12 million documents leaked in October 2021 — exposing how many wealthy people and public officials hid their assets in offshore bank accounts. D’Almeida, Columbia Journalism School PhD candidate Adelina Yankova, and Dylan W. Groves, ’23GSAS, were also engaged in the multi-year project. 

Report for the World is a flagship program of The GroundTruth Project. Together with its domestic counterpart, Report for America, the programs recruit journalists from under-reported areas and place them in partner newsrooms. 

Strengthening independent journalism and building trust among the public are key to preventing the backslide of democracy, according to the panelists.

“It’s a war,” said Stiglitz. “People who want to undermine trust have a technology by which they can do it and it's going to be made worse by AI. Awareness of what is happening is perhaps the best inoculation that we have and that means society needs quality journalism.”