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Five years ago, I had my dream job.

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I was a foreign correspondent
in the Middle East

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reporting for ABC News.

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But there was a crack in the wall,

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a problem with our industry,

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that I felt we needed to fix.

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You see, I got to the Middle East
right around the end of 2007,

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which was just around the midpoint

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of the Iraq War.

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But by the time I got there,
it was already nearly impossible

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to find stories about Iraq on air.

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Coverage had dropped across the board,

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across networks.

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And of the stories that did make it,

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more than 80 percent
of them were about us.

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We were missing the stories about Iraq,

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the people who live there,

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and what was happening to them
under the weight of the war.

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Afghanistan had already
fallen off the agenda.

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There were less than one percent
of all news stories in 2008

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that went to the war in Afghanistan.

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It was the longest war in US history,

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but information was so scarce

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that schoolteachers we spoke to

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told us they had trouble
explaining to their students

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what we were doing there,

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when those students had parents

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who were fighting
and sometimes dying overseas.

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We had drawn a blank,

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and it wasn't just Iraq and Afghanistan.

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From conflict zones to climate change

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to all sorts of issues
around crises in public health,

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we were missing what I call
the species-level issues,

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because as a species,
they could actually sink us.

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And by failing to understand
the complex issues of our time,

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we were facing certain
practical implications.

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How were we going to solve problems

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that we didn't fundamentally understand,

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that we couldn't track in real time,

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and where the people working on the issues

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were invisible to us

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and sometimes invisible to each other?

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When you look back on Iraq,

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those years when we
were missing the story,

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were the years when the society
was falling apart,

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when we were setting the conditions
for what would become the rise of ISIS,

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the ISIS takeover of Mosul

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and terrorist violence that would spread

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beyond Iraq's borders
to the rest of the world.

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Just around that time
where I was making that observation,

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I looked across the border of Iraq

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and noticed there was another
story we were missing:

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the war in Syria.

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If you were a Middle-East specialist,
you knew that Syria was that important

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from the start.

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But it ended up being, really,

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one of the forgotten stories
of the Arab Spring.

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I saw the implications up front.

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Syria is intimately tied
to regional security,

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to global stability.

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I felt like we couldn't let that become

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another one of the stories we left behind.

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So I left my big TV job to start
a website, called "Syria Deeply."

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It was designed to be a news
and information source

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that made it easier to understand
a complex issue,

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and for the past four years,
it's been a resource

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for policymakers and professionals
working on the conflict in Syria.

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We built a business model

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based on consistent,
high-quality information,

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and convening the top minds on the issue.

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And we found it was a model that scaled.

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We got passionate requests
to do other things "Deeply."

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So we started to work our way
down the list.

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I'm just one of many entrepreneurs,

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and we are just one of many start-ups

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trying to fix what's wrong with news.

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All of us in the trenches know

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that something is wrong
with the news industry.

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It's broken.

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Trust in the media
has hit an all-time low.

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And the statistic you're seeing up there
is from September --

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it's arguably gotten worse.

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But we can fix this.

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We can fix the news.

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I know that that's true.

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You can call me an idealist;
I call myself an industrious optimist.

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And I know there are
a lot of us out there.

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We have ideas for how
to make things better,

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and I want to share three of them
that we've picked up in our own work.

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Idea number one:

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we need news that's built
on deep-domain knowledge.

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Given the waves and waves of layoffs
at newsrooms across the country,

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we've lost the art of specialization.

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Beat reporting is an endangered thing.

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When it comes to foreign news,

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the way we can fix that
is by working with more local journalists,

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treating them like our partners
and collaborators,

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not just fixers who fetch us
phone numbers and sound bites.

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Our local reporters in Syria
and across Africa and across Asia

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bring us stories that we certainly
would not have found on our own.

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Like this one from the suburbs
of Damascus, about a wheelchair race

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that gave hope
to those wounded in the war.

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Or this one from Sierra Leone,

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about a local chief
who curbed the spread of Ebola

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by self-organizing
a quarantine in his district.

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Or this one from the border of Pakistan,

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about Afghan refugees being forced
to return home before they are ready,

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under the threat of police intimidation.

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Our local journalists are our mentors.

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They teach us something new every day,

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and they bring us stories
that are important for all of us to know.

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Idea number two:

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we need a kind of Hippocratic oath
for the news industry,

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a pledge to first do no harm.

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(Applause)

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Journalists need to be tough.

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We need to speak truth to power,

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but we also need to be responsible.

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We need to live up to our own ideals,

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and we need to recognize

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when what we're doing
could potentially harm society,

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where we lose track of journalism
as a public service.

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I watched us cover the Ebola crisis.

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We launched Ebola Deeply. We did our best.

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But what we saw was a public

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that was flooded with hysterical
and sensational coverage,

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sometimes inaccurate,
sometimes completely wrong.

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Public health experts tell me
that that actually cost us in human lives,

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because by sparking more panic
and by sometimes getting the facts wrong,

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we made it harder for people to resolve

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what was actually happening on the ground.

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All that noise made it harder
to make the right decisions.

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We can do better as an industry,

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but it requires us recognizing
how we got it wrong last time,

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and deciding not to go that way next time.

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It's a choice.

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We have to resist the temptation
to use fear for ratings.

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And that decision has to be made
in the individual newsroom

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and with the individual news executive.

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Because the next deadly virus
that comes around

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could be much worse
and the consequences much higher,

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if we do what we did last time;

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if our reporting isn't responsible
and it isn't right.

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The third idea?

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We need to embrace complexity

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if we want to make sense
of a complex world.

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Embrace complexity --

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(Applause)

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not treat the world simplistically,
because simple isn't accurate.

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We live in a complex world.

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News is adult education.

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It's our job as journalists
to get elbow deep in complexity

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and to find new ways to make it easier
for everyone else to understand.

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If we don't do that,

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if we pretend there are
just simple answers,

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we're leading everyone off a steep cliff.

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Understanding complexity
is the only way to know the real threats

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that are around the corner.

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It's our responsibility
to translate those threats

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and to help you understand what's real,

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so you can be prepared and know
what it takes to be ready

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for what comes next.

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I am an industrious optimist.

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I do believe we can fix what's broken.

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We all want to.

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There are great journalists
out there doing great work --

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we just need new formats.

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I honestly believe
this is a time of reawakening,

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reimagining what we can do.

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I believe we can fix what's broken.

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I know we can fix the news.

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I know it's worth trying,

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and I truly believe that in the end,

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we're going to get this right.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)