“Glocal Journalism” in the United States 
                   An Interview with Doug McGill and Raman Narayanan 

                         Wisconsin Public Radio, “Here on Earth with Jean Feraca”
                                                         September 7, 2003 
                                                 (Click here for audio version)

Jean Feraca: Welcome to Here on Earth. I’m Jean Feraca. One of the things September 11 brought out in the minds of many Americans is how oblivious most of us are to what’s going on in other parts of the world. We all know the government’s response to September 11: the desire to protect America, the war on terrorism, the vengeful rhetoric, the crackdown on civil rights. But there’s been another response. Many Americans felt that to avoid another tragedy like September 11 in the future, the best tactic was to try to bring the world closer together. To learn more about what’s out there. A growing movement in American journalism is trying to do just that, to illuminate the connections between our local community and the international world. It’s called glocalizing the news and its being practiced by dozens or more small- and mid-sized newspapers. Journalism schools are teaching the subject, think tanks are sponsoring conferences, and reporters and editors around the country are pioneering this new style. Joining us to talk about this new trend is Doug McGill, the founder and editor-in-chief of The McGill Report, a web site that reports on life in southeast Minnesota from a glocal perspective. He also writes a weekly column for the Rochester Post-Bulletin newspaper of Rochester, MN, and teaches journalism at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Also with us is Raman Narayanan, who heads a unique and award-winning section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called Atlanta & the World, which looks at cultural and international issues through the lives of local people.  

Feraca: Doug McGill, how did you get involved in all of this?

McGill: I worked overseas as a journalist for ten years, between 1989 and 1999. When I came back to the United States I felt my overseas experience had estranged me from my fellow Americans. When I talked about where I'd been, I'd get blank stares. As a journalist I started trying to figure out how I might address that and learn more about it, so that I could feel more comfortable living in my own country.

Feraca: You’d been working in Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and China?

McGill: Yes.

Feraca: You were tired of getting the blank looks? And you wanted to change that?

McGill: Yes. When you live overseas for so long, as a journalist you are with people all the time, and I made a lot of close friends overseas, and I came to identify with them and their struggles. And they know a lot more about the United States than we Americans know about them. So when I came back here and I wanted to talk about, say, my Chinese friends who have certain struggles and hope for certain things in life, I just found it incredibly difficult to get that across to people in my daily life here. And I eventually started The McGill Report in response to that.

Feraca: Raman Narayan, I wonder if you would tell us a little bit about your background. You are from Malaysia?

Narayan: Yes, I’m from Malaysia.

Feraca: And how did you get involved in this movement?

Narayanan: What really happened here is that I first came to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1988 and even way back then, the then-editor of the paper Ron Martin was always thinking about how do we cover the changing face of metro Atlanta in a different way? Atlanta being largely a black and white town, the issues that had been focused on had been largely about African Americans and whites and the usual stories. But what we were also seeing was an influx of immigrants from around the world settling in the metro area, partly because of the growing economy here. So one of the things we came up with was a weekly column on the editorial page called International Atlanta where we would get someone from the immigrant community to write about any issue they wanted to write about. That column later morphed into one and a half weekly pages on Thursdays called International Atlanta, which was staff written. Two editors, Keith Graham and Moni Basu, who had other duties in addition to this labor of love. And it really was a labor of love for them. Then in the summer of 2001, the paper decided it was time to bring all this home with a weekly six-page section. Atlanta’s diversity was immense. One in ten metro Atlantans is foreign born. We have many big corporations located here which have impact all over the world – Coca-Cola, CNN, UPS, Delta Airlines. We also have a great number of NGOs, or non-governmental organizations, whose headquarters are in Atlanta but who work all over the world, like the Carter Center, Care International, and Ted Turner’s Nuclear Threat Initiative. So the idea was how to anchor all of this in one section so that week-in, week-out we can explain the impact that Atlanta is having on the world, and also how the world is having an impact on Atlanta. How the community is changing, the makeup of the immigrants was changing, and how Atlanta is handling these changes. In a nutshell it basically meant explaining Atlantans to each other, even though we are trying to explain the world to Atlantans.

Feraca: This is not your usual immigrant news.

Narayan: No it is not. When 9/11 happened, that gave the section another push. Readers wanted more background on the larger news, but they wanted it done in a way that they could relate to. So when we started Atlanta & the World in February 2002, what we wanted to do was explain the larger issues, but to do so by refracting them through the prism of Atlantans.

Feraca: Were you going against the conventional wisdom that people wouldn’t be interested in international news when you started this section?

Narayanan: It’s not that people are not interested in international news. I think largely a lot of American media underestimate the readership.

Feraca: People are already thinking globally even if the media treats them otherwise?

Narayanan: Yes. My personal experience has been, after doing this for more than a year, is that the readers are ahead of us. Way ahead of us. We just need to do our stories with a lot more sophistication on one side, but also that relates to readers’ daily life, on the other side. Which is why I think Atlanta & the World has largely succeeded, because we do not focus on issues as such. We look at people and tell the stories through people. And in doing that we raise the issues and help explain the issues. In the last decade the world has become a much more confusing and complex place. And also since 9/11 it has become a more fearful place for a lot of people. Our mission at Atlanta & the World as I see it is to try and explain some of those complexities, to clear up some of the confusion, and to alleviate some of those fears. And to do it in a way that people can relate to.

Feraca: What’s glocalization of the news like outside of this country?

McGill: It goes on a lot more outside the United States. The way I define glocalization is adaptation of foreign practices in a way that’s beneficial to your country, city, or neighborhood. America is so powerful in the world, there is so much of America that is being exported globally that for many countries the process of dealing with Americans, Americanism, American commerce, American culture, and even the American military is an explicit and major daily task. So people in other countries usually connect their local lives to international influences much more than we do in the United States. Here it has to be taken on as a kind of special, conscious effort.

Feraca: The two of you, it seems to me, both have a very broad worldview. Raman, you’ve always considered yourself to be an international citizen, growing up in a small country like Malaysia. Where you have no choice in a way. The point you made is that people in small countries depend on economic and political connections with other countries for their well being. And didn’t you work for CNN?

Narayanan: Yes I did. When I came over here back in 1999, I went to work for CNN International. They are the guys you never get to see here. Americans never see that network. They watch CNN Domestic.

Feraca: A lot of us don’t realize there is a difference.

Narayanan: There is a huge difference. On CNN International you can’t just say President Bush, you have to say United States’ President Bush. It’s also written from a very different perspective. It’s not as America-centric as CNN Domestic. That’s one of the things we hope to do through Atlanta & the World, and what Doug is doing in The McGill Report. We are trying to shift the perspective from America-centric to a more global perspective. My whole worldview and mindset was shaped by growing up in Malaysia. It’s a multicultural, multi-religious, and multiracial country. The way we had always looked at America was not as a continent cut off by two oceans, but as a continent that is a land bridge between the Pacific and the Atlantic.

Feraca: That crystallizes the image very well. That’s an image worth contemplating. Doug, would you agree with that?

McGill: Absolutely. And I’d like to point out too that beyond Raman and myself there is a very definite increase in this kind of journalism in the United States today. It’s not huge but it’s very intense, with a small but growing number of journalists exploring it. The Poynter Institute, a leading journalism think tank in Florida, had a conference on this kind of journalism a few months ago. It drew a couple of dozen journalists just from a few states around Florida, all of them doing this kind of work at their newspapers. Foundations like the Knight Foundation, the International Press Institute, the Associated Press Managing Editors, and the Freedom Forum are all trying to foster this kind of journalism, to get this kind of worldview into American newspapers.

Feraca: Tell us about the kinds of stories that you publish in The McGill Report. Your web site slogan is “Media for Global Citizens – Where International News is a Good Local Story.”

McGill: Many articles on The McGill Report are also published in my local  newspaper, the Rochester Post-Bulletin. I’ve taken it on myself to bring this perspective to journalism here in southeastern Minnesota. So just as Raman does in Atlanta, I try to find connections between our local community and the global world right here in this community of 85,000.

Feraca: Example?

McGill: One in ten people in Rochester, Minnesota was born outside the United States. So I spend a lot of time interviewing immigrants and writing their stories. Which are often very dramatic and interesting.

Feraca: How do you make them integrated with typical Rochester residents who have lived there all their lives and are descended from generations of, say, Scandinavians?

McGill: There’s a gap. We’re back to that again. For the past ten years, for example, many Somali refugees have moved to Rochester. About 2,500 Somalis live here. They came to Rochester because of the Civil War in Somalia that drove them away. They had long journeys from Mogadishu to refugee camps in Kenya, usually, then to maybe Cairo and Chicago, and finally arriving here. So we’ve had women wearing the long Somali dresses, the henna tattoos, the scarves over their heads, in our schools, working in stores, and so on for about ten years. But even now, a decade after they started coming, I find that longtime Rochester citizens, the former Scandinavian immigrants you mentioned, are still asking me, “Why did the Somalis come to Rochester, anyway?” They are still asking that. So I try in my articles to explain that, and to answer those kinds of questions, and through my articles to bridge that gap. Through my articles I try to explain who is that woman standing on the corner in her beautiful long dress and headscarf or veil?

Feraca: How do you penetrate that barrier that that long dress and veil tends to set up in the minds of most Americans?

McGill: It’s not easy. If you go to that woman and reach out your hand to shake her hand, she will likely either just stand there without moving, or she’ll give you her hand through her dress. So you have to shake her hand through her dress. It requires a special kind of attitude, a special kind of determination and persistence on the part of the reporter. You’ll find that even though the majority of the Somalis who come here initially don’t speak English, a few of them pick up the language quickly and are more outgoing. You stick with them, and they become your guides into the Somali community. So I’ve nurtured relationships like that, and through these guides I’ve been able to go to Somali weddings, Somali dinners, and have long conversations in Somali homes.

Feraca: Lucky you!

McGill: It’s a great job.

Feraca: We are talking about a new trend in American journalism, the new glocal media – reporting the world home. My guests are Doug McGill, a columnist for the Rochester Post-Bulletin in Rochester, Minnesota, and the founder and editor-in-chief of The McGill Report. Check it out at www.mcgillreport.org. And we have Raman Narayanan, editor of a weekly section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called Atlanta and the World. Doug and Raman, you both live in metropolitan centers in America. Would this concept work in more rural areas where immigrants are not as likely to settle?

McGill: It depends on the area. There are immigrants in many agricultural areas. Mexicans, the largest immigrant group in the United States, are often migrant workers, so you find them often living in agricultural parts of the country. They are in Minnesota. Some of the toughest problems with assimilation tends to occur in rural areas. Over in your state, Jean, Wisconsin, there is a group of farmers who grow ginseng, a ginger-like root that’s thought to have restorative and health powers. If you go to Beijing today and go to a pharmacy you’ll find stacks and stacks of ginseng, and the most valuable and pricey ginseng there is called “Wisconsin Ginseng.” It’s grown by American farmers, some of whom are naturalized citizens who immigrated from China, right there in Wisconsin in its agricultural lands. I find as a journalist no matter where you look these days, you are going to find those connections. It’s part of the fun of the job to find them out.

Feraca: You’ve been searching out those stories of economic interconnection like the one you just mentioned. Obviously that is a very important point of connection for Americans. It seems that before 9/11, when we weren’t so much in the grip of fear, there was a lot of excitement about new trading partners and markets opening up. Has that changed much would you say?

McGill: Yes it has. Some of the recent enthusiasm over finding global trading partners has diminished. It was part of the fever of the late 1990s that the globalization of capital was going to usher in a new era, when any place in the world you wanted to invest, you could immediately invest. And suddenly, dollars that you put into a mutual fund would fund a chicken farm in China, and the next thing you know you’re getting dividends. This hasn’t come to pass. The world is somewhat resistant to this easy movement of capital and people. So hopes have dimmed. Also the global financial contagion that started in Thailand in 1998, and then spread around the world, which ended up in Brazil and very nearly took a big chunk out of the American economy, was also part of the wake-up call that made people more leery about all the promises of globalization.

Feraca: I don’t know if you’ve been following Bill Moyers’ program, NOW, but he’s been emphasizing quite a bit the downside of globalization, featuring sweatshop workers in places like Thailand and so on. The same old story of exploitation is being repeated only on a larger scale.

McGill: As a journalist who’s been in many sweatshops in China, the odd paradox is that while, yes, you feel terrible for that 16-year-old who is hand-stitching heavy leather Docksiders, getting her hands filled with calluses, on the other hand, you also find out that she’s sending back money to her entire family and she’s very happy to have that job, because if she didn’t she’d be starving. It’s a complicated question that cuts both ways. I understand Bill Moyer’s point very well and think it’s something we really have to be watchful of, as consumers in the United States. But there’s another perspective once you get overseas as well.

Feraca: Raman, what do you think about this?

Narayanan: The point of doing the kind of story is not that you have immigrants in your midst, but that it’s a mindset. It’s a mindset you are reporting on. It’s a mindset you are trying to point out that exists out there. Then you find the connections, as Doug explained, be they economic, or cultural, or social.

Feraca: How would you describe mindset?

Narayanan: It’s a mindset that whether we like it or not, we live in one world. Whether we are in America or in Mali, in New Dehli or Wisconsin, we are living in one world, and what is happening thousands of miles away does have an impact on our lives. It’s something those of us who have lived outside of America have grown up with. We know full well that what happens to the United States is going to impact on us. The old joke, if Wall Street sneezes, Asia catches a cold. That’s in an economic sense. But people in Nigeria or Sudan know full well that a bill passing through Congress that’s being voted on, that the vote can make a difference to their lives, ten thousand miles away. We did a story last November about how catfish imports were destroying the jobs of catfish farmers in Georgia and the rest of the south. There was a move in the Senate to impose tariffs on catfish imports from Vietnam. That was led by Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader at that time. Our story raised the question, what’s the meaning of free trade when you preach it from Washington, yet when it comes to your domestic constituencies you start protecting them? What is the point of telling countries to ‘come join the free trade bandwagon, the democracy and freedom bandwagon,’ and a country where we sent 55,000 of our kids to be killed to fight for these ideals and values. Yet when the country does try to jump on the bandwagon and does try to become free market, you tell them ‘No, you can’t export your stuff here, we are going to put tariffs on those products’? These are the kinds of stories we need to be reporting more, whether we have immigrants in our midst or not.

Feraca: We have a caller joining us from Osseo. Hi Betty, thanks for calling.

Betty: Your programs are wonderful and thanks for this one, especially. I just want to say I think it’s really important that we get to know each other around the world for the sake of each other. I want to call to mind, tonight’s talk by the President will probably be one of fear and separation rather than one of learning from each other and about each other. I want to say that I think it was last year there were three farmers from overseas who visited farmers in this area, and they were looking at bags of feed the farmers were given their cattle. They noticed the feed included ground-up carcasses. They got onto the subject of Mad Cow Disease and said, “You should learn from us.” The farmers were totally unaware that was in their feed and what the implications could be. There are so many ways we could learn and we could break down the fear barriers and the enemy kind of images we have of one another. There are many things to point out but that’s enough for now.

Feraca: We are talking about “glocalized journalism.” The term by the way comes from Thomas Friedman’s book called The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It is basically bringing world news home. But as Raman was explaining to us, rather than any individual story, it’s telling the story from the mindset of a person who understands that the world is like it or not – or ready or not.

McGill: I like Betty’s comment about Mad Cow Disease. If you look at it from the perspective that Raman is talking about, you recognize that the virus-like particle that causes Mad Cow disease is the common enemy of all mankind. In most cases it’s not the people who bring it here who are the enemy, it’s the virus itself that’s the enemy. In the same way the SARS virus was the enemy of all mankind, whether we were Chinese or Malaysians or Americans or whoever. The international cooperation that occurred to contain and kill the SARS virus was a great model for international cooperation. Laboratories all over the world shared information almost instantaneously as soon as the news got out of China. Then quarantines were imposed very quickly and within months the virus was shut down. It was a great model and it’s helpful to see that in some cases, human beings all over the earth can work together, linked by the Internet and by phones, to take action for the common good.

Feraca: That’s Doug McGill, founder and editor-in-chief of The McGill Report at www.mcgillreport.org, and Raman Narayanan, the editor of Atlanta and the World, a section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Bob joins in from Mount Sterling.

Bob: Good show. Thanks.  I’d like to point out that there is a lot of feel-good information going out in the name of localize your globe and all that. That’s good as far it goes, but it can be quite dangerous. For instance, it just came up, your reporter mentioned Mad Cow Disease and a virus, but Mad Cow Disease is not caused by a virus. That’s kind of a side issue, but it speaks to the fact that there’s a lot of misinformation out there, whether intentional or otherwise. The plain fact of the matter is that economically, we aren’t playing on a level playing field, and that’s dangerous and damaging to ourselves and other nations. It’s interesting to me that while there is this rush to globalize everything, there is a great pushback when it comes to labeling country of origin of products, for instance. So Americans can buy products that increasingly come from overseas. However, we don’t know where these things come from. If international trade is so great, we should just say it, it cuts equally both ways.

[Editor’s Note: Mad Cow Disease or BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), is thought by some scientists to be caused by a slow acting particle similar to a virus called a prion, that is different from a virus in that it contains only protein and no DNA.]

Feraca: We have a friend, every time he talks to his telephone service, he speaks in Hindi because he knows the operator is most likely Indian.

Raman: We did a story a couple of weeks back on that. We pointed out that it’s a different phenomenon than what happened in the 1980s when blue collar jobs and textile factories went abroad. This time it’s the IT professional jobs that are being outsourced. One of the folks we talked to, his telephone customer service operator was in New Dehli, a local caller said, “How come you are doing this in New Dehli, how come we aren’t doing it here?” The guy in New Dehli said “I understand completely what you are saying, and we are starting to get worried because Russia is starting to take these jobs away from us.” It’s not just U.S. jobs that are being outsourced. It’s happening in Singapore, Hong Kong, London, and Paris. They are all warning these jobs are going. So the real issue is not the national origin of jobs. The real issue is cost. High-cost service centers, just like high-cost manufacturing centers, are farming out jobs. Thanks to technology, other nations are catching up very fast on the learning curve in terms of how to handle these issues they never could before. 

Feraca: I think the point our caller was making when he said we are not on the same playing field, he is speaking to the concern of a lot of Americans, that the economic advantage that this country was built on is being eroded. And that why there is so much resistance to the idea of globalization and the loss of jobs and the loss of a secure economic future. And then the resentment that people feel about who is the “other.” Who is getting my job? In some cases I am even asked to train that person to take my job.  

Narayanan: I agree. Then we all know that prosperity breeds tolerance. The 90’s was a very prosperous decade for much of the world, and the world became very tolerant decade for much of the world, especially in America.  

McGill: The kind of journalism we are talking about is aimed at giving people the information they need to level the playing field again. Because if things are out of whack, the only answer is to understand the situation clearly and to form a strategy to come back.  

Feraca: What might that strategy be, Doug?  

McGill: The Wichita Eagle newspaper, earlier this year, did a series of stories on the outsourcing of engineering jobs at the local Boeing plant in Wichita to engineers in Russia, Italy, and China. They sent a reporter and a photographer to Moscow and to Naples, where some of the jobs had gone. The series didn’t spell out one specific answer to the problem. But by the time you finished reading those article, you surely had got a better idea of what the real nature of the problem is. Which is the critical first step.  

Feraca: What occurs to me is that the two of you represent the best kind of job security, which is adaptability. Because of the experience you have, the language knowledge you have, and the knowledge of culture.  

McGill: No question about it. I’ve worked all over the world and it’s a nice thing to know that you can do that. It may just be a part of America’s future that some of the best paying jobs are going to be overseas. Again, I think this kind of journalism habituates us to that. It acclimatizes us to the real world and makes us more adaptable and able to make a jump when we have to.  

Feraca: Let’s hear now from Scott in La Crosse.

Scott: My comment is that even in the case of the IT jobs that are going offshore, the fact is that most jobs going offshore are the lower paying jobs.  

Feraca: But they are getting higher and higher all the time.  

Scott: That’s the whole point. The reason that people have anything to be afraid of is that we have de-emphasized education,. The thing that allowed our economy to grow after World War II was that there was a real drive in education. Obviously to some extent it was limited to technological areas but we’ve never been able to make really major advances in getting people to understand the world and other people in the world. But we did get a push on the technological education that allowed us to grow. We are now at a point where education is under attack, and we have more and more people who are trying to make a living with jobs that don’t have a great deal of technological knowledge or skills associated with them, and they are still hoping to be able to demand compensation that would allow them to live comfortably in our economy which is arguably the most expensive in the world. The answer to that, and for their children, is to begin to emphasize education again so we can hold on to the more advanced technical jobs and high-paying jobs and they’ll have less to worry about.  

Feraca: What about the quality and kind of education that is most important in making a person marketable in a globalized economy? 

Narayan: What we are talking about basically is what Doug mentioned earlier. To live in a global economy, and thrive in a global economy, you need two things. One is you need skills that have universal application and standard. But the second and more important thing, in my view, is you have to be multicultural. Bi-cultural at the very least. You have to be able to adapt to different cultures. You have to have knowledge of different cultures and societies. That doesn’t mean giving up your own values. It means grafting onto your own values, and being open enough to accept others and being able to discuss their values, their culture, their society. One of the things we are seeing in this country, is people are realizing you can’t be cut off. You have a sort of meta-American value culture. But beneath that you have all these other cultures that are mushrooming and blooming now. It’s the Internet. It’s technology. When I was growing up in Malaysia we celebrated the 1960’s in the 1970’s. It took that long to come down. In the 70’s we were living the life of the 60’s, thinking we were on the forefront. Now it happens immediately. It’s the Internet. It’s the MTV world. That’s what’s allowed other nations and peoples to catch up.  

Feraca: Considering all of the outsourcing of jobs going on right now, and the disadvantage it represents for the average American work, why do we have such a high percentage of immigrants still coming to this country? 

McGill: At the end of the day, the American economy is still by far the largest, the strongest, and most robust of any in the world. That’s basically what attracts them here. There are just more opportunities here. Looked at as a whole, America is still by far the best bet. I’d put in too that in the last few minutes we’ve come up with the question of education and values, and to me that gets to the root of everything we are talking about here. The most gratifying response I’ve had to my articles is when people come up to me and say I read your story about, say, a refugee from Laos, or an entrepreneur immigrant from Russia, and then they say, “You know, that story reminded me what it really means to be an American. What our real values are.” Because these are stories about people who came here, who worked hard, and who deeply value the freedoms they have in this country because they didn’t have them before. And now they are making something of themselves. These stories remind people in my community of their basic and best values, what really moves them and motivates them. This reminding is a gift that the immigrants bring to us.  

Feraca: We have Norbert joining us next. Hi Norbert.  

Norbert: Hi. I just want to say the program you are offering is really enlightening. I felt quite naïve about how we handle our subsidies to crop growers here in the States, especially in rice and wheat. What really happened, as I hear people talk on programs like yours, is we are shipping grain overseas, not to compete here in the States but to compete worldwide. As a result we put growers in smaller countries out of business. This insight is really powerful. We need to expand the rate we hear programs like this. 

Feraca: Doug, I wanted to ask about how we learn from new immigrations. It seems there is change in the pattern of assimilation. It used to be that it was necessary for new immigrants to erase their own native culture in the process of becoming American. Is that still true? 

McGill: It’s much less true. In my community, whether it’s the Laotian immigrants, the Mexican immigrants, or the Eastern European immigrants, you don’t find the same drive by the parents to keep the children from speaking the native language. That speaks to America having become more deeply multicultural in the past several decades, for better or for worse. And it also speaks to the sheer numbers of immigrants who have come in the past two decades, more than at any time in American history.  

Feraca: Thank you both very much for joining us.

Copyright @ 2003 Wisconsin Public Radio