Dionne Searcey

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. This episode's guest is a remarkable reporter named Dionne Searcey.
From 2014 to 2015, Dionne covered the U.S. economy for The New York Times. She was living in Brooklyn with her husband and three kids at the time. Prior to this position, she was an investigative reporter and National Legal correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.
In the fall of 2015, she traded her life in New York for a position in Dakar, Senegal as the West and Central Africa bureau chief of The New York Times. This beat included approximately twenty-five countries from the Sahara to the Congo River. In 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 250 girls in Nigeria. This event inspired the Bring Back Our Girls international campaign.
Dionne went to northeastern Nigeria and Cameroon to investigate the conversion of girls to suicide bombers, battles between the Nigerian Army and Shiites, and Boko Haram raids on villages. One of her stories was titled, They Ordered Her to Be a Suicide Bomber. She Had Another Idea. Mausi Segun, Executive Director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch said this: "Dionne's reporting on Nigeria's Boko Haram conflict has been nothing short of phenomenal."
Dionne won the Michael Kelly award in 2018 for her reporting on Boko Haram. This award celebrates, "The fearless pursuit and expression of truth." She was also part of The New York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2020 for her coverage of Russian interest and involvement in the Central African Republic.
She recently published a book called In Pursuit of Disobedient Women. She currently covers politics for the New York Times.
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I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. Now, here's the remarkable Dionne Searcey.

Guy Kawasaki:
How did you get from the cornfields of Nebraska to Dakar in West Africa? How did that happen?
Dionne Searcey:
It was a pretty long, slow climb, I guess. Journalism wise, it came up through the ranks in a way that I think a lot of Gen X journalism people do. I worked at a series of local newspapers, I studied journalism in college. I didn't get a master's degree, but just very slowly climbed my way up from small newspaper to bigger, bigger, bigger newspaper.
I think it's a really good way to spend a journalism career because by that point in time you have a range of experience. So you cover city council meetings, you cover police activity, crime and shootings and gang stuff, you cover education and politics and whatever. I feel like it's a channel that is closed off to journalism kids these days because local news is in such a slump and the papers are shutting down. It's a pathway that I think is a little trickier right now.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now you're covering economics for the Wall Street Journal and from that you go to West Africa? How does that happen?
Dionne Searcey:
I was at the Wall Street Journal. I was doing investigative work there and then I got a job at The New York Times where I think everybody – I mean, not everybody, but a lot of reporters want to work there, at The Times. So I took a job on covering the economy with the understanding that I didn't always want to cover the economy there, and I think that's the beauty of American journalism and of these big newspapers is you're a generalist, as you can cover everything. I think European newspapers often operate a little differently, where people are specialists in different things for their entire lives, but we are generalists.
I would love to write about food for The New York Times or the ballet opera for The New York Times. In a way that I wouldn't really want to write about that for the Wall Street Journal, because their emphasis is on business news and it's a different thing. That was really fun and I'm so happy that I had that experience of learning how corporations work, stocks fluctuate, and that kind of thing.
I think all of it was really good training for these giant, massive international beats. So I covered twenty-five countries in West Africa, and you cover everything that happens so it was incredible.
Guy Kawasaki:
What was he thinking? You have three kids, you're living in New York, and you say - and your husband is working for the zoo - and you say, "Let's go be the bureau chief for The Times in West Africa."
Dionne Searcey:
A lot of dual parent couples, one person has a lot of flexibility in their job and that really wasn't the case for us, we were just both going full steam, and I think we were really tired of it. So it gets really exhausting and it prompts a lot of stupid fights and it's really hard.
I think it's hard as a woman when society's expectations are for you to take care of kids and to take a secondary role. We wanted to shake things up and when you get in New York City, and you're caught in a rut of childcare drama and “Who can work from home?” or “Who gets to work?” That was one big thing like, "I get to go to the office,” or “I get to work on a Saturday,” or even “I get to exercise today because you're stuck with the kids."
A friend had compared it to you are both out in the ocean and the only way for you to survive is to push the other one down underwater because it's the only way for you to get a breath, and that's really what it felt like so we were pretty eager to shake things up. We'd always talked about living abroad. I pitched to my husband on it 1000 times before and so finally he said ‘yes.’
Guy Kawasaki:
I think that I probably have as ignorant of view of Africa as your typical American. You address this in your book - it's hot, dirty, full of crime, everybody's a terrorist, etc, etc. So pretending you're writing the Africa for dummies book-
Dionne Searcey:
Well, that's what I felt like it was about in working there because-
Guy Kawasaki:
Can you give us the gist of Africa for people who are ignorant of what it's really like?
Dionne Searcey:
For a lot of Americans, we have so many stereotypes if we even think about it at all. We often don't even consider the place as a place as the old saying that Africa is a country, that people think of Africa as just one spot when they're fifty some nations, all kinds of nationalities, languages, cultures, and whatever.
I think Americans have the stereotype of Africa perpetuated by Hollywood as a place of wars, savagery, famine, disease, and maybe a few wild animals. There are bad things that happen in African countries just like they're bad things that happen in America, and there are very universal sets of problems.
I had this massive beat and I tried to break it down by covering twenty-five countries, I tried to break it down into different themes that I saw that were going on there that have very real parallels to America. Climate change is a huge issue there as the Sahara spreads the winds carrying the stand farther down, and the rains are fewer and farther between.
There are great demographic shifts that are happening there, a growing population, a big population of young people and that's true in America too. We have huge demographic shifts here with places becoming less white.
There's urbanization, people are emptying out of the countryside moving into cities, that's happening in America to crazy extremes. A lot of times these things all are cycled together. People are leaving their farms because of climate change, because there's so many young people who don't have jobs and they're moving to the city so everything's intertwined.
Another thing happening, there is extremism. You're seeing a rise in conservative Islam, and here we have extremism too. So I really was eager to draw some parallels to America to make these unfamiliar themes sound familiar.
Guy Kawasaki:
How did The Times prep you to move over there?
Dionne Searcey:
The Times is a big corporation, when there's a lot of cover your butt liabilities stuff that goes into it. They also want to prepare you for the absolute worst because you are sometimes covering a war or going into dangerous spots.
They fitted me for a bulletproof vest and then a helmet and put me through hazardous environments training where former British commandos teach you how to avoid land mines, or watch out for snipers and that kind of thing. They pretend to kidnap you and show you what that might be like and tell you what to do in those circumstances.
The biggest tip I got was your best chances of survival in a kidnapping are in the first few minutes because kidnapping is babysitting - nobody wants to babysit somebody for a long time so, eventually, they just get tired of you and kill you if it drags on. So I thought that was a pretty interesting insight.
Guy Kawasaki:
Does that mean the optimal strategy is resist as much as you can?
Dionne Searcey:
Yeah, I think so. Try to get out. If there's a way to flee - run if there are any opportunities.
Guy Kawasaki:
As opposed to be cooperative and reason with them, etc, etc.?
Dionne Searcey:
Yeah, as opposed to the normal street crime, the advice that you get, turn over your wallet if you get stuck up for something that's a little bit of a different kind of strategy. It was really strange. They also teach you how to... it's like a first aid course but really, really hardcore first aid. If you have a bullet wound to the chest, how to basically stabilize you or your photographer along with you or something like that so that you can stabilize some until help arrives.
The Times also gave me a list of questions that only I knew the answer to like, “What was your grandmother's favorite meal to make,” or something like that, so that they could determine if a kidnapper had me that they weren't being fooled. If the kidnapper called my editor and said, "I have Dionne in wherever,” then that would assure them that they really had me because they were answers to questions that only I would know.
Guy Kawasaki:
You're prepping this and doing this training and you don't think, “Maybe I shouldn't do this with three kids?
Dionne Searcey:
That's an interesting question because would you ask a man that question? Do men get-
Guy Kawasaki:
Actually, I would.
Dionne Searcey:
Okay, true. I feel like sometimes it's expected for a guy, it's okay for a man, a father, to do these kinds of jobs without a lot of real questioning. I will say that The Times at the time, and still, had a lot of moms who were in dangerous postings, and Barnard was in Beirut and covering Syria for many years. Rukmini Callimachi was covering ISIS from New York but flying into very dangerous places. There were a lot of women on the staff and I was really proud to work for an organization that if somebody wanted to do it, and could work it out with their family, their partner, and have kids.
I think the kids would definitely get concerned at sometimes, but we have all this training and all this background. I'm not twenty years old, running in like some goofy cowboy or something into dangerous situations. What I really found that some of the best stories are told on the sidelines of conflict, not in the middle of conflict, finding victims and just hearing them out and hearing what they have to say, I really think that that is some of the best reporting than being in the middle and in the thick of things when it's really dangerous.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so let's pursue that path a little more. How do you write a story about something like a group such as the Boko Haram? First of all, am I pronouncing it right because it's-
Dionne Searcey:
Yeah, you are.
Guy Kawasaki:
Boko Haram.
Dionne Searcey:
Mm-hmm. Boko Haram, yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, let's say you decide, which you did, to write a story about Boko Haram. How do you proceed to do something like that? This is different than calling up Apple PR and requesting a meeting with Tim Cook.
Dionne Searcey:
Yeah, definitely. Boko Haram is a terrorist organization that operates in northeastern Nigeria and some of the surrounding countries. They're one of the most secretive organizations in the world. They don't tweet it, reporters. Even ISIS has some channels of communication. The Boko Haram, they're out in the boonies and they do their own thing.
For me, I studied up, I read books, I read articles, and then they wanted to interview a fighter I thought it would be amazing to talk to and to find some fighter somehow, but it seemed really impossible. So I went to the place where Boko Haram began. This movement began like many terrorist movements because of government corruption and government neglect, in a city there are no paved roads, no electricity in many places, yet government officials were living it up and with fancy cars and nice houses, and so that's how it began. I wanted to go to the center of the action and see what I could find.
Guy Kawasaki:
What did you find?
Dionne Searcey:
Well, I couldn't do anything alone because I'm nobody from nowhere so I hired a local journalist to help me out. In this case, it was Shehu Abubakar. He was the fisheries and agriculture reporter for a newspaper called The Daily Trust there.
I hired him and we went around, and he explained the situation to me. It's a pretty common thing for international reporters to rely on local folks to help guide you. A reporter I used to work with at The Wall Street Journal like to say every story needs a shepherd and you really... Regardless of where you are, if you're in Podunk, Nebraska, where I'm from, you still need somebody to guide you through when you're either to navigate the bureaucracy or to tell you points of view.
So I listened to him and I became really intrigued by this notion of things that were happening which were suicide bombings in these cities and many of them carried out by women. That really set me on a path of trying to figure out what in the world was behind all that.
Guy Kawasaki:
What causes a woman to become, anybody really, but what causes a woman to become a suicide bomber?
Dionne Searcey:
Well, that's what I wanted to figure out. As is the case with many things, I very slowly learned over time that these women were not becoming suicide bombers, they were being forced to carry suicide bombs, they were being - explosives tied to their waist, marched at gunpoint after seeing their family slaughtered in front of them, and very naive.
In some cases, girls and girls, not women, girls who were fourteen years old, twelve years old, eight years old, in some cases. I really tried to focus on their bravery and change the narrative because the government was painting them as villains, as evil suicide bombing terrible people, and that just wasn't going on.
Once I started talking to them, and hearing about ones who had turned in their bonds, who had surrendered to authorities, or found other ways, very clever ways to get out of it, I really was on a mission to portray them as heroes really or just as something that the government was not portraying them as because they were really trying to paint them as bad people and that just wasn't the case.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have to say, I was just riveted with your description of how you did this. I come from the tech world and there's nothing even close to… nothing. On a scale of one to 100, you are 15O and tech is about five. So yeah, it was-
Dionne Searcey:
For me, one of the most fun, exciting, and interesting things about reporting is when your assumptions are turned on their heads. It might be similar in the tech world, I don't know, if you go into something thinking that, "Hey, this is one way and I'm going to just find out all about it and whatever,” and then you find out a piece of information that just completely flips the script and turns your head just completely backwards as you try to figure it out and piece it together.
That, to me, is the most fun, exciting part about journalism, is when you're just 100% wrong and then figuring out why you're wrong and what is really happening. I feel like that's your curiosity. That's the importance of curiosity, I guess.
Guy Kawasaki:
Did you ever gain insights into the mindset of a Boko Haram member? Why do they join?
Dionne Searcey:
Yeah, for sure. Just listening to girls who were forced, who spent a lot of time with Boko Haram or were forced to be married to them, or even who were maybe willing. Women's roles were often relegated to doing laundry and cooking and cleaning in the Boko Haram camps but even people who were there willingly were there because the situation with them was better than it was at home.
In some ways, that was the driving force. I started out my journalism career at a place that no longer exists called the City News Bureau of Chicago, where I covered a lot of black gang warfare in Chicago, and I found a lot of parallels. I found myself thinking about these stories I would cover in the housing projects on the south side of Chicago about kids who just had no jobs, no money, no family structure, the city government didn't care about them, society just had cast them aside and it gave them this sense of belonging and you add to that just really, really, really awful unemployment levels in these places and when you join Boko Haram, they give you a motorbike. That would appeal to many teenage boys. So I think getting a gun on a motorbike and having this camaraderie, I think was really, really appealing.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is going to sound like a ridiculous question, but what separates you and I from being a Boko Haram organization member? Is it just by the grace of God or?
Dionne Searcey:
Privilege, I think sheer privilege. I just was constantly reminded of my privileged position when I was hovering West Africa. I'm white, I'm a woman, I'm from America, I'm from one of the most prestigious news organizations in the world, but looking at unrest in America now, Boko Haram really got violence after their leader died in police custody. Think of that for a minute, in the context of what's going on in America.
It was an extrajudicial killing. He was shot in the head by police when they arrested him, but that kind of thing triggers riots and violence. In places where conditions are even more extreme, obviously, than in America, it spirals out of control.
You add to that, a religious, I don't know if I want to say a cult, maybe, like a cult-like experience or just real conservative, a belief that all government is bad; all Western education is bad, that's a big thing of Bolo Haram because they thought that Western education was poisoning the minds of these people, because they would see government officials send their kids off to boarding school in the UK or America, and those kids would come back, and also run for office and steal from the citizens just like their parents had done.
To an uneducated kid growing up without anything, that looks like Western education is bad. I'm dramatically oversimplifying, but you can really see how these movements start. I felt like... You obviously don’t sympathize, but you can just understand how things happen.
Guy Kawasaki:
In your book, you drew one of the more amazing parallels which is: Donald Trump and the president of Senegal. So are there parallels?
Dionne Searcey:
For sure, I think we're seeing that all the time. I was seeing parallels when I was in West Africa but now even more so now that a lot of things that Trump is doing, talking about extending his mandate, his term, talking about blaming election rigging before an election to hopefully achieve results that you want. These are straight out of playbooks of dictators and corrupt regimes. I'm not calling Trump corrupt, or a dictator, or anything like that but they are tactics that have been used by regimes that we would probably not consider as examples or role models for healthy democracy.
So I think, more and more, we're seeing those kinds of things but there's corruption in every administration and I think maybe we had a really great story about the end of American exceptionalism. I'm really hopeful that these times that we're in right now make us stop and consider when we're like, "Oh, well, that election rigging happened in Africa. Oh, but it would never happen here." Well, maybe bad things do happen here could happen here and maybe we're not so different from other places that are in crisis.
Guy Kawasaki:
Two more questions about Africa, okay? One is: when you see some Hollywood star or starlet jump and become this activist, what's your reaction to that? Part of the problem, part of solution? Is it hypocrisy? Is it angelic, great philanthropy? What is it?
Dionne Searcey:
That's a really interesting question and I think a lot of the international NGOs and the UN organizations do have celebrity… there's a name they have for to carry over, but they do have celebrities who go out to refugee camps to try to call attention to things and to get donations.
I think there's... I don't know, I haven't studied it. I'm not an academic, but there's probably a place for certainly calling attention to things, but I just was typing up an interview I did with Kehinde Wiley, who is a black American with a Nigerian father, an African American mother who did the Obama portrait, he has opened a residency in Dakar for artists, and I think, rather than being a celebrity going out and serving soup at a refugee camp, he is working on getting more attention for African photographers.
A Nigerian photographer had a residency at his place last time. I talked to a Nigerian author, a novelist. He is trying to showcase Africa's talents that way by giving these people time and space to work on their craft and I think that is much more noble on. Musicians who break through to Western audiences.
We're at the point I feel like with Africa, where even just... Sometimes stereotypes are so bad that even just showing Africa as human beings, or artists, or painters, or potters, or something from these countries is important to make people realize, "Oh, right. There are individuals there who aren't out on safari or something." Our stereotypes are so bad of the continent.
Guy Kawasaki:
What was the effect of your kids living in Africa on them?
Dionne Searcey:
Well, I think they know a lot about a part of the world that a lot of people don't know about. I'm proud of that. I like that.
They went to an international school where there were kids from all over the world, but you know, all of them were listening to Taylor Swift so I don't know how much difference that was there. I do think we were touring public high schools last year, last fall. I got back a year ago, right in time for New York City's insane public high school process where you go around and tour schools.
We're going through a hallway, and on the hallway were posters of a history class with posters of Peru and pottery or something. All these different countries and highlighting things, a specialty from that country. We got to one that was just Africa in a mud hut, and my son just cracked up laughing. He's like, "Are you kidding me?" And I was really psyched that he understood and got that. We talked about what he would put up there. It was really cool that these kids know that there are complex countries and nations and peoples in other places.
Guy Kawasaki:
I recall you said something like you didn't take malaria shots and you started letting them go out by themselves. I think most American parents would say, "Oh, my God. First of all, I would never go live in Africa, but if I did, I would live in this totally protected compound, and my kids would never leave and we'd have all the shots. Everything."
Dionne Searcey:
Oh, yeah. A lot of Americans did that to be honest. There were protected compounds even in Dakar. Everybody lives together. Everybody has a security guard. My office had a security guard and I lived in the office but I tried to take cues from what Senegalese parents were doing and there were two kids to a bicycle out riding around. My kids aren't coordinated enough to do that but my son by the time we left, he was twelve when we left, he was taking taxis by himself all over the city.
Some of the taxi drivers didn't even speak French, which is the language he was learning at school. They spoke Wolof but he realized, "Okay. Well, I can communicate, I can point, and I can whatever." I'm really proud that he had those skills.
My girls were going to the ocean where there was a riptide apparently, but they knew how to swim and it just felt like it was overblown. There were other kids in the ocean, Senegalese kids, so I really feel like a lot of living abroad and in different cultures is just watching and learning and they were a part of that and I hope that they have that bug to go out on their own.
One of my girls wants to be in the Peace Corps, one of them wants to study abroad. We'll see, but I hope they do.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, they certainly have the right DNA, there's no question about that. Switching gears now, more generally about journalism. Has journalism helped you do something? Has it helped you contribute?
Dionne Searcey:
Well, I think I'm a huge believer in journalism. People believe in science, or God, or whatever, I really, really believe that journalism has the power to write the first draft of history. Journalists, obviously, don't always get it right, and I do think that there is a place for people of color and from different nations to write their own stories, to tell their own stories.
I hope that women that I wrote about in my book do tell their own stories at some point, but I felt like I wanted to be a conveyor and a translator to this world that most people don't think about and if I can make people see West Africans in a new light, and these countries.
I met someone who traveled to Dakar because they had read my writing, and they never would have traveled there before. I was really proud of that. I was really proud of the fact a Nigerian singer I wrote about got to perform at South by Southwest because they had read my story. I was psyched about that.
I was in the Central African Republic one time, which is this really war-torn country that has a lot of diamonds. I interviewed a Catholic bishop there, one of the most powerful people in the country, and I always said to people interviewed, "Is there anything you want me to tell you the world because you have this platform in front of you right here; What would you like people to know?" And he just said, "We, in the Central African Republic, are humans,” and that was his message because so many... He was like, "I travel throughout Africa and people don't even know Central African Republic is a country in Africa. Other Africans don't know that.”
It just tore me up inside that he wanted people to be reminded that there were human beings in that country and anything I could do to contribute to the fact that people from West Africa we're human beings and these were nations with lives, with economies, with the tech scene, the tech scene in Nigeria is huge!
Jack Dorsey went there, was planning on moving to Nigeria earlier before COVID happened. Mark Zuckerberg traveled to Nigeria. There are tech startups and hubs and all that kind of stuff there.
I went to a poetry slam after going to KFC in Ghana when I... It's real people having real lives that deserve as much attention as us.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. If someone's listening to this podcast and says, "I want to be like her. I want to be a journalist like her." How? What do they do? What kind of courses? What kind of experiences?
Dionne Searcey:
My path to journalism was a slow and steady climb up through a lot of local newspapers, and local newspapers are closing down at alarming rates in America right now so it's tricky. I think writing for any number of websites, contacting... I always like to talk to young journalists about their career paths and being in touch with as many people as possible is a good idea.
A lot of people go to Columbia Journalism School - I did not have that privilege. I went to school at the University of Nebraska, but it had a great newspaper. It was me and my friends putting out a paper, making mistakes and having successes. That's really important.
I also think one other really, really critical thing to do is to read the newspaper and understand journalism, what it is, how it works, and how a story is conveyed. Have opinions about... Compare different newspapers to TV or whatever else because I think how things are covered and being critical about it is really important too.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, can you give us a crash course on how to conduct a great interview?
Dionne Searcey:
Well, I think you start by listening and not assuming things or being open to the fact that your assumptions may be challenged and are wrong. I think doing your homework on a person is really important, reading all the stories that have been written about them, knowing something about their bio is important, but I like to do two things: I try to be empathetic to people even if that maybe, personally, I think I don't agree with or something, but I'm not a robot.
An editor I used to have always said, “Reporting is a series of human interactions,” that you're a person and I'm a person. If your kid is crying in the background, have a conversation about that kid, because then everybody's more comfortable.
I interviewed a group of Senegalese migrants one time and they were really nervous, they were these young teenage boys and they all had a scar on their forehead. All of them had like scars on their forehead, and it made me laugh because my son had just fallen down and got a scar on his forehead. I was telling them about that and they were like, "Oh, yeah. I was about ten when that happened to me, too,” and everybody becomes more comfortable, and we're all people.
I also think it's really important to ask people, what do they want out of this interview? What is the message that they want conveyed? And what am I forgetting to ask them? I think those are all super critical things to make sure you bring up in an interview.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. The flip side of this is, how do you also maintain distance, or should you maintain distance?
Dionne Searcey:
Yeah. I think that's a real question roiling journalism right now is activism versus straight up journalism. Journalists are not activists - we do maintain distance. I think that does not preclude you, however, from channeling your empathy to better understand a situation, channeling your rage, even.
You see, when I was covering these victims of Boko Haram, little girls who are sent out to go on suicide missions and the government then calling them “traitors” or “bad people,” I think it's okay to channel that like, "What? Are you kidding me?" into a story that like, "Okay, then. Here it is. Here is what this girl went through and you're telling me she's a criminal? She watched her mother get slaughtered in front of her, she was told she would be raped if she didn't walk down this pathway with a bomb strapped to her. She couldn't actually physically untie the bomb because it was tied behind her back, she then surrendered to police and you put her in jail for eight months."
Channeling the rage that you have at that, I don't really feel like that shows bias - that shows empathy and informs your reporting and I think that that's really important.
Guy Kawasaki:
Small story, but did the woman get her bag of rice where you questioned whether that was ethical?
Dionne Searcey:
Yeah, I had a fixer who wanted to deliver a bag of rice to a woman we had just talked to who was completely destitute, and we're not supposed to pay people and that would have been... It wasn't just a bag of rice, it was like you have to translate that into American terms, it was like a new car or something for even more important than that because it would have sustained her. You always are constantly seeing awful things and trying to understand the point is, “I'm going to write about it to make the situation better and make president see it,” and you have this huge audience as a New York Times reporter, but my fixer wanted to buy her a bag of rice and I just was like, "Fine, buy her a bag of rice." She has all these kids. I ended up not writing about her so there wasn't an ethical question.
It's tricky and it's really hard when you're supposed to be objective, and you're supposed to do all this stuff. So I guess a lot of times, that's why it's sucks when your story isn't run on the front page, because you really want to get all the attention in the world and then you write a story.
I was battling against news about Trump at the beginning of the Trump administration and there would be some story about somebody trying to curry favor by sleeping in a Trump hotel or whatever and then my story about refugee or something would get shoved in the back of the paper, but that happens and it's just part of a deal and you just try harder and try again and try to figure out what works.
A lot of times I've benefited from being a distraction on the front page from what was going on in America.
Guy Kawasaki:
You can find a story and use it to illustrate a larger point but as we've seen lately, you could also, not you, but a person could find a story where someone drank Clorox, or someone took this other kind of medicine, or someone never wore a mask and went to a crowded bar and didn't get coronavirus, so how do you balance the power of storytelling versus it sort of the scientific, “Is this a representative sample? Is this statistically valid?”
Dionne Searcey:
Well, I think there are definitely checks and balances in newspapers that's why we have editors to make sure you're not going off the rails and to reel you back in. I think you also really have to constantly question yourself, “Is this representative?” Use as much data as you can.
We have really great reporters who work in data mining and that kind of thing, but also just talk to as many people as possible. Don't talk to officials and trust no one or at least, not really but I think you really have to think always about what someone's motivation is for telling you something. Is it power? Is it money? Is it to make themselves look better?
Everybody has a motivation for talking to a reporter, everybody, whether it's for good or not good. I think that you just keep that in mind and try to present as many points of view as possible and call people who know.
I work in a really big newsroom where there's always somebody who's faced the situation before me. We have an ethics editor, we have other reporters who've covered things and come across things, and you just have to be careful but is a constant process because you have so much power in your hands as a reporter, especially for The New York Times with that platform and especially when the President's attacking the paper like you don't want to portray something wrong and do something stupid when you're in the spotlight constantly on the President's Twitter feed.
Guy Kawasaki:
Getting a little tactical, what are your tools of the trade? What's-
Dionne Searcey:
I'm so hardcore old school - I have a pen and a notebook. If I'm in an office, I take notes on my computer, I often record interviews on my iPhone. It's so simple. I just always look at the photographer's that I travel with and feel bad for them carrying all their equipment or if I'm with a video person or something because they're juggling all this stuff, but really, it's pretty simple.
I think being a reporter and especially, iPhones are kind of revolutionary in that way, because you don't have to juggle a recorder and that sort of thing but it's pretty simple.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, some advice about working with editors.
Dionne Searcey:
Working with editors… I really like my editors. I'm not one of those people who is angry and cantankerous about editing, I feel like I have had very few editors I didn't like or didn't learn something from. I just really love having a partner and so I think the worst kind of editing you get is when your editor isn't into your story but if you just get them on your side and get them into it, it's so fun. It's such a fun partnership and it's also aggravating.
I think every reporter wants to write really, really long, but learning to write short is a craft that's worth understanding and knowing. I don't know, I just think you should... Any writer that goes into a situation with an editor angry is just really off base. I think reporters can be great friends and partners in writing.
Guy Kawasaki:
What makes a great editor?
Dionne Searcey:
I think somebody who listens and really understands. I like editors with a sense of humor, that's my favorite thing. That get when you're trying to be funny and don't want you to be straight up in your stories or get when you're trying to be a little bit quirky or weird or appreciate details, especially when reporting from West Africa or when you're out in the field somewhere or even in the middle of the country.
When I go back to Nebraska, where I'm from, to write, I want to write about what a place looks like, what are people wearing? Because I feel like, especially, in New York, LA, and Silicon Valley, we all get in these little bubbles where we think everybody has a Patagonia vest on and everybody... or in New York wears all black or whatever and just to give us a sense of like, "Hi, these are different people in different places and here's, you know, how life is here."
I had a research assistant in West Africa, Sierra Leonean, and I would try to say to him, “Pretend like you're on the moon when you go out and report like no one's been to the moon, what does it look like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? What are the sounds that you hear? Incorporate that, sprinkle it into your reporting,” because I think that's really just makes a story stand out from other boring he said, she said stuff.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, working with photographers.
Dionne Searcey:
Man, I love working with photographers. It's one of my favorite things about The New York Times is getting to work with great photographers. My brother's a photojournalist and so I grew up as his sidekick in the darkroom back when there were dark rooms.
I really find that photographers, you can learn so much by getting up early in the morning. Photographers are always chasing light, like that sort of horizontal light at the beginning of the day, and the end of the day. So my reporting either won't be started or will be 100% wrapped up and the photographer wants to go out and I go out too because even it helps again with those little details or they may meet someone who will completely change the trajectory of my reporting and then I wouldn't have been there and then that person will be gone.
I can't ever let a photographer go out without me. It just I can't do it. If it's my story, I want to be beside them and I want to have that partnership, I want to talk to them and them to be part of the story process because that partnership I think is so important, and it's really rare in newsrooms these days.
A lot of newsrooms don't hire photographers, they can't afford it. It's expensive. They'll run a wire photo and I think stories really, really lack when that happens. The Times does this great job of visual journalism and displaying things.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now working with fixers.
Dionne Searcey:
Working with fixers can be really tricky. Fixers are colleagues and you have to choose your colleagues and so there's personality involved.
I found that my predecessor, he left me a list of fixers that he used in places and he liked the strong male personality type and I don't and so I found out pretty quickly that I'm not into that. I would try to... You want to find a local journalist who knows the situation, who knows the scene, who other reporters have used before so you know they're straight up. You want to make sure they're not paying people because that is something that some organizations from other countries or maybe even your own country, if there's an unethical journalist out there and they're having the fixer pay someone, you have to sniff that out and you just can't do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Paying the fixer to pay someone to do what?
Dionne Searcey:
To tell you things, to talk to you. A lot of people in poor places want to be paid for interviews or bribes. “I'm going to bribe this cop to tell me...” I'm sure that kind of stuff happens like in our own country with a lot of some seedy organizations, but I think you have to make sure.
In certain countries, it's a way of life and just journalism standards are different and so you have to be careful that that is not happening straight up. You have to pay a fair wage and you have to worry about their safety because, as a foreign journalist, I can fly out of somewhere.
I have a major newspaper willing to get me out of any situation and go to any means to rescue me if I'm in trouble, if I make a government official angry or a cop mad and get thrown in jail, but local journalists don't have that luxury. Sometimes they can't even get a visa to get out and they're going to get flack if you make a government official mad and then you're back in your home office just tooling around and they're stuck with it. So their safety and security so, so important. I just became very, very close to a lot of my fixers, they’re very good friends. I think that's really important.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can you give us some examples of publications and journalists that you admire?
Dionne Searcey:
I like reporters, journalists, and photographers who have... you can really see their soul in their work. I think our correspondent from Afghanistan, Mujib, who is about to go to India and work from there, is one of the most amazing. His work, he just pours his soul into all his stories.
Azam, what is Azam's last name? Now you're putting me on the spot. We have our Mexico correspondents are really great at The New York Times, all of them have really just put their heart into their work. My colleague who's a freelancer, Ashley Gilbertson, is a photographer and his empathy for the subjects that he photographs. He does a lot of work for our opinion section sometimes, but also the new side and his empathy really shows through in his work. I think these are largely New York Times people, sorry to say. If you are-
Guy Kawasaki:
That is a little self-referential.
Dionne Searcey:
If you're not reading Stephanie McCrummen at the Washington Post, you're completely missing out. She does nice little moments in Times stories and just show her coverage of the coronavirus. Anything she writes about is just completely rock solid, amazing, and will blow you away.
Guy Kawasaki:
How do you get your news?
Dionne Searcey:
I read my newspaper a lot and I also have all these weird Twitter accounts that I follow from West Africa still, different reporters or different publications that are really like. I read the Washington Post and I like to check in on the newspapers where I've worked before the Wall Street Journal, the Seattle Times, Newsday of the Chicago Tribune, but I also read the Omaha World-Herald a lot and just to keep up with what's going on in the Midwest. I find that we just often ignore huge swathes of the country that have a lot to say and that shaped what is going on for all of us, especially in the election on the Madison, Wisconsin newspaper is really great too in terms of just that's a swing state, and now with the shooting in Kenosha, that happened, that's a really important place and knowing what's happening. I love local newspapers, I always get the local paper wherever I go.
Guy Kawasaki:
One thing you did not say is you did not say, “I forced myself to watch FOX or read Breitbart or the Blaze to get the contrary in opinion.”
Dionne Searcey:
That's true. I don't watch a lot of TV at all but when I travel, when I'm in a car on long stretches, on the road, I definitely listen to conservative AM radio. I like to find the local conservative stations to that have local radio celebrities who have new shows.
I love to hear even the ads on conservative radio, I feel like can give you a sense for what people are feeling. A lot of ads for home security systems and things like that because I think that gives you a sense like people feel like they're under threat. “Okay, I get it. That's who the audiences are playing to.” I love listening to other points of view.
My Facebook feed is all my friends and family from Nebraska, a lot of conservatives and so I really like looking at what all sides of everybody are talking about, thinking about, and writing about right now. I think it's fascinating
Guy Kawasaki:
Two last questions, okay? So second to the last question, after all of this, working for these publications all over the world covering this, all these kinds of tragedies, pain, suffering, and also good stuff, where are you now mentally?
Dionne Searcey:
Thinking about whether my kids school is going to be online or not? Boy, this pandemic has really put us in a tailspin but what I was doing before... What I'm still doing now is writing about divides in America.
I'm doing political features on political divides. I think that, mentally, for me is I'm drawing a lot of parallels to what I saw in West Africa. I'm missing going out in the field in maybe a little more adrenaline-filled conditions, that's definitely a bit of a bummer and a letdown, but I think that's true for everybody.
I'm trying to... Mentally, I'm just trying to convey America in a way as a foreign country because I think a lot of parts of America to people of any political part of the spectrum are foreign. We're so divided at where we're at that I think that really, really giving a detailed look and channeling empathy and doing all the things I did while I was abroad to write about America are really important right now, too.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you hopeful?
Dionne Searcey:
I don't know, man. Yeah, sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's a hell of an answer right there.
Dionne Searcey:
I'm definitely a glass half-empty kind of outlook. Ask my husband, it drives him crazy. I really, really have a negative outlook on everything always but that said, I hope... I don't know, are you hopeful?
Guy Kawasaki:
My glass is always three-quarters full.
Dionne Searcey:
That's nice.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's just in my DNA.
Dionne Searcey:
Good. We'll see what happens with the election, we'll see if there's a vaccine, we'll see all these things. I think going out on the streets in New York and seeing people still doing crazy stuff, eating outside, and having a good time or wearing their masks and going about their life, sure, there's still hope.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so I picked this up in the middle of this interview that I should ask you this question, which is, is there anything I didn't ask you that you want to communicate?
Dionne Searcey:
No. I think we covered... Thank you for doing that. I think we covered everything.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, that can't be true. I'm going to apply to The New York Times.
Dionne Searcey:
What can I say? It was interesting working for The New York Times abroad when it was under fire by the Trump administration. It's interesting being back now and knowing that people... We do have this target for a certain set of people on the left and the right who don't like The New York Times. So I think that that is one thing that a lot of reporters are trying to figure out how to manage right now, and we just keep doing our job and I think that it's really important.
I think reading the newspaper and reading local newspapers, it's just so important and trying to instill those values into kids. I try to make my kids read the front page every day. I'm not always successful but I think those kinds of things are really important to our country and our democracy.
Whether you agree with things that are in the papers or not, correspond and talk about race, talk about the issues that are out there. I think that that's a really, really important part of what's happening right now.
Guy Kawasaki:
I've covered everything I wanted to cover, and I really appreciate you doing this. I'll send you a bag of rice if you want.
Dionne Searcey:
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, time to read you a couple of reviews.
“I just love the focus on this podcast, finding those remarkable people and getting into their stories, their own lives and finding out who they truly are. One of my favorites is the episode with Martha Nino being that I am an immigrant myself. Sometimes we don't see how remarkable we humans really are. Thank you, Guy, for bringing those stories to us. I say download every single episode of this podcast and listen to them all because that's where you'll find your true successes that you can use for yourself, and Guy Kawasaki has a knack for finding those gems. Love it.” That's from Polish Peter.
One more review.
“At age eight, my daughter wrote a report on Jane Goodall. She's now eleven. A while back we listened to the Remarkable podcast with Jane. At the time, I knew she was attentive but I wasn't sure what stuck. This week, she announced she wants to give up beef. ‘Why?’ I asked. She answered with, ‘Jane would approve. ‘She tied it back to Jane and how global warming is affecting animals around the planet and how cows, as she learned in the Netflix Explained series, contribute to global warming. So she wants to play her part in less meat consumption. Thank you, Guy and Jane, for telling the stories that inspire action in all ages. That's from Rainmom.
Thank you, Rainmom, and thank you Polish Peter.
Go to the Apple podcast app and write a review too, I'd be happy to read it.
Back to Dionne Searcey, I hope you get the idea. Dionne is a remarkable reporter, just learning about what she's covered scares me. It must be great to look back at one's body of work and see how much truth it brought to light. My thanks to Holly Brady for suggesting Dionne for Remarkable People and then helping make it happen.
My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff Seih who help bring this podcast to light every week.
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. Remember, wash your hands, maintain a social distance, don't go into crowded bars and restaurants, and wear a mask. But above all, listen to doctors and scientists not politicians.
Until next time, mahalo and aloha.
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This is Remarkable People.