Nick Spicer, NPR’s New Europe Editor
Ember Braun interviews an experienced and well travelled international reporter, who started his career with CBC Radio, with other postings as a journalist for Al Jazeera, France 24 and Deutsche Welle, on why top level journalism still matters.
Berlin-based Nick Spicer has worked as an international reporter since 1997, mostly in broadcast. Currently, he is the Europe Editor for NPR, coordinating coverage from the war in Ukraine to the upcoming Olympics in Paris. In our interview, he spoke about how international reporting has changed and what some current challenges are, including dealing with social media.
Q: So, the first [question] to start off with would be, what got you interested and passionate about international reporting in the first place?
A: Sort of happened by accident. I studied English Lit in Canada and then I ended up in France, studying French Lit. And then I went to the politics school there called Sciences Po. The schooling I got really made me think internationally and globally, [I] studied international relations. I wanted to be a writer. So being a print reporter in Paris for Canadians was not a particularly original idea. It just was almost like a no brainer. Then, I got into broadcasting. Anyway, that’s how I got started. I mean, completely no idea what I was doing, but it was fun.
Q: Was there any culture shock that you experienced in any of the places that you traveled to?
A: Oh, yeah, sure, all the time. But you get less and less shocked, and less and less rooted at the same time, the more you travel. We recognize people will have their own logic, as they view events, and try to change how things unfold. And as crazy as whatever may seem to you, it makes sense to people. You learn to sort of accept that and not be too judgmental.
Like, my daughter, who’s 18, is a third culture kid. She’s got a Canadian passport and a French passport and has lived in neither of those countries. Then we moved to Washington D.C., then we moved here [in Berlin]. Third Culture kids, you know, a psychological phenomenon, therapists talk about it. They’re very open to different perspectives, but they don’t have a lot of roots in a particular place. So that’s a strength and a weakness at the same time because somebody says, ‘Oh, I don’t know where my home is.’ But then at the same time, everywhere is [your] home. So you’re kind of a third culture kid as a correspondent.
Q: Are there any common mistakes that beginning international reporters make?
A: I think the common mistake is, and I’ve taught in a lot of newsrooms, a lot of young reporters don’t consume news. And they confuse advocacy for journalism. You do whatever the news is. You’re out there to show facts. It’s a dying profession: serve the trade, do a good job and help journalism survive. I’m very concerned about the future of the industry and people having an opportunity. It requires some clarity of vision.
Q: What do you think is going to keep this profession alive and relevant?
A: The hope is that we teach media literacy in schools and tell kids, ‘Don’t get your news from TikTok.’ You’re not going to see the world for what it is. Read stuff you’re not wanting to read. This is the beauty of opening a newspaper, you learn by accident.
Q: Do you have any tips for up and coming journalists?
A: Just do it. Don’t listen to the people saying fake news or it’s a job with no future, because you are the future. You have to believe in it and read old journalism. If you want to be a foreign correspondent, the only thing you can be obsessive about is your actual geography on a map. You have to learn the history, its ups and downs, the players on the stage. Learn the language. Just talk to other people who are doing this. It’s something you learn by doing, more than anything else, and there’s a lot of relationship management.
Q: In what ways has international reporting changed?
A: Generally speaking, there’s been technological progress, that makes it a lot easier. My phone here, I can shoot in 4k, I can edit on it, and I can do a live on it. There are greater possibilities. However, there’s so much demand for content that it sort of reduces the quality. And the big thing that is reducing both demand and quality is that people are just turning away from the news and not paying for it. They want free news and they get nonsense. Germany is a country that has a lot of people still willing to pay for newspapers.
Q: Do you think it’s worth it to try and do news on those kinds of social media apps?
A: We live in a world where there’s sort of a collective hysteria about the future of journalism, and a desperate search for answers. And people are reaching for social media. Because I think, in part, they are reassured by the presence of data, which sort of shows usage. That’s not the case for broadcasters. If you’ve done like a 45 minute doc (documentary), then you really know something well, and spent six months on it. You spent two hours doing a TikTok story, it’s not the same level of journalism, and it never will be. Even if you have more certain numbers about the TikTok hits. So again, I think they’re kind of the appetizer, this sort of thing to get you, hopefully, to the buffet table eating the healthy stuff.
