A Leadership Journey from Global News to Local Communities with Eli Flournoy

This episode features Eli Flournoy sharing his leadership journey from a 25-year career at CNN to his current work supporting local news organizations. Listeners will learn about the mentoring culture at CNN that drove their success in international news coverage. Eli also discusses the impact of technology on news consumption and the spread of misinformation, and how focusing on local news can help address these issues by empowering communities. Leadership principles of building diverse teams and a servant leadership approach are also explored.

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OnBrand Podcast Studios produced this episode. Special thanks to Audio Engineer Alex Winnenberg, Producer Nick Winnenberg, and Marketing Specialist Cori Stokes.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:07

Welcome back to the Leader Lounge podcast brought to you by the Robert D. Walter Center for True Geek Leadership. Okay, that was at least close enough. So we're gonna keep that. Yeah, that was

SPEAKER_03: 0:16

good.

SPEAKER_02: 0:17

That was good. I'm joined today by Dr. Amy Taylor Bianco and also Eli Flournoy. And I pronounced that correctly. You did, yeah. Well, it was a close call. I had to practice that one a couple of times, not going to lie. But Eli, I know we've had a couple of runs before, and you have a really interesting leadership story. So can you start me back all the way from the beginning?

SPEAKER_01: 0:36

Sure, sure. So I went to school, undergraduate at Indiana University, thinking that I had a very distinct leadership path. I wanted to be, or I thought I wanted to be a diplomat. And I went to school to study political science and African studies and Spanish minor and thought that I was going to go to graduate school and go into the, you know, take the Foreign Service exam, go into the State Department and do that pathway. But along the way, I became aware of a research opportunity and got an internship at CNN. And this happened to be in 1990. And at the end of my internship with CNN, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. And that changed the trajectory, not only of history, but also of the presence of CNN and the way that international news was done. And so, long story short, I was hooked and began to realize then going back for a second an internship at CNN that I could be more effective in leadership and more directly involved sooner in leadership types of things through journalism. And so I made a career change and switch and fortunately got a job offer to start my career at CNN in 1991 and spent 25 years at CNN. Wow. That's quite the legacy you have at CNN. So

SPEAKER_02: 2:09

when did you leave CNN then?

SPEAKER_01: 2:10

I left CNN in 2015. And during that time, I spent almost my entire career on the international side of CNN, coordinating international news coverage through CNN's international desk, what most organizations call their foreign desk. But Ted Turner banned the use of the word foreign, so we called it the international desk. And I had the opportunity to run a business within CNN, which was the international side of CNN's news agency and international affiliate operation, which is called Newsource. So it was about a$30 million business within CNN, exchanging content, selling content, and between CNN and about 250 broadcasters outside of the United States. And I set up a consulting team to help launch platforms like CNN Indonesia and CNN Philippines, again, outside of the United States.

SPEAKER_00: 3:06

It's really, really, really interesting, Elay. You've shared with our students a number of times just about kind of the culture of CNN and some of the things that you learned, experienced, maybe even helped create in terms of kind of cooperation and competition and kind of how to work together in these really, I mean, around really difficult topics. Could you share with us a little bit of that?

SPEAKER_01: 3:28

Yeah, I think that a lot of people ask me over the years sort of what was the secret sauce of CNN? What was it that made CNN able to be successful in terms of getting to the story quickly, more quickly than anyone else, and broadcasting live, doing live coverage of international stories in very, very difficult logistic circumstances. And I think that if I was going to boil down the secret sauce at CNN, it really came down to a culture of mentoring and teaching within CNN. So the people, the individual employees of CNN in whatever area it was that they dealt with, whether it was video editing or photography or writing or assignment editing, there really was a genuine interest and passion for sharing expertise in those areas. So if you wanted to learn, if you were a writer, but you wanted to learn how to do more technical side things, how to edit, work with digital video or whatever, you could always find somebody who was willing to share it with you if you were willing to take the time to spend time with them. And then importantly, the company established certain programs which incentivized that kind of cross-training, that kind of mentoring and sharing and made it economical feasible by putting budgetary programs in place. They had a program called CNN Passport, which is where you could apply and then get permission to spend from three days up to, I think it was three days up to three weeks in another department. And the company would pay the department to backfill you, to cover your time in absence from that, from your normal job. And so And so that made it that it made it much more easy for bosses. And then I became a boss and managers to facilitate that kind of exchange and made it so that employees weren't required to just on their own time completely spend time and learn other things. It really integrated this cross-training into the company.

SPEAKER_00: 5:45

It's really interesting too, because I would think of, and I don't know, but I would think of journalism as a lot of really strong individual contributors, you'd have to have incredibly strong sales to even get to CNN in the first place.

SPEAKER_03: 5:56

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 5:57

So then people were, the company was incentivizing this cooperation and the people were very open to it.

SPEAKER_01: 6:03

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. One of the most remarkable things about, and this was, you know, an incredible privilege to work at CNN and to realize, as I did over my career, that literally everyone that I was working with, regardless of what type of job they were doing within CNN, was were among the very best in the whole world at whatever that thing was. And so you did have an environment where everyone, around you was the best at what they did. And so in many ways, it was remarkable that there was also a culture of mentoring and sharing. It was a very public service oriented mindset at CNN, as opposed to, I mean, certainly there was plenty of competitiveness and, you know, when people wanted to, you know, to raise their level and their salary and everything and for different positions. and so forth, but the work that we were doing really felt like we really tapped into the vision that Ted Turner had for creating CNN in the first place and to inform the world, bring the world together, bring cultural understanding together between countries and between people that maybe had traditionally thought of themselves as enemies or maybe were political enemies, but to put bring people together.

SPEAKER_00: 7:31

Interesting. So I'm curious about how that shaped your leadership. Of course, you led within CNN, but then you've gone on to lead since. And you've got Media Growth Partners. You've got Sugarbush Foundation. So I'm curious to see how that how that culture, that collaborative culture, and competitive, right? Competitive and collaborative at the same time. How that culture have helped you form your leadership style.

SPEAKER_01: 8:00

Right. Well, my leadership style I would describe as, and philosophy I would describe as a servant or service leadership style. So it was, my experience at CNN was very influential in terms of feeling that development that and seeing how you could be successful personally by employing that type of leadership.

SPEAKER_02: 8:28

Can I ask a personal question real quick? Sure. I don't know if we want to dig in too much, but looking at the vision that Mr. Turner had for CNN and building that interconnected web, and I know this is something you're looking at now with your current venture, do you think A, the 24-hour news cycle, and then B, the internet has helped connect us more or disengage us more, especially with the things like AI and fake news and all the different things that we've seen recently?

SPEAKER_01: 8:51

Yeah, I think that we are in a particular time right now where the The connection of satellite news and 24-hour news that has made the far reaches of the world more accessible and able to find out about that, and then the advent of the internet itself and then big tech companies and social media platforms like Facebook, it has... Unfortunately, it has gotten to a place where, in my opinion, there is too much information and that people are overwhelmed by that. And within that, there is a ton of misinformation and disinformation that is happening. that is built in because not so much on the 24-hour news cycle, but in the social media platforms, there is just way, way, way too big of a financial incentive towards disinformation and misinformation. So when people can make that much money off of doing that, it's going to be very hard to counter that. It's going to be hard to work against that because the so-called free market principles are driving that the growth of that that misinformation and disinformation that's the way the algorithms are set out are designed to work they're not they weren't they weren't creating you know mark zuckerberg didn't didn't create facebook to create you know a platform for misinformation and disinformation but he did create a a system and his product managers made algorithms which which purposefully create information silos and they put people into communities and keep them in communities that are isolated from other perspectives because that's the most profitable way for advertisers because advertisers want the most motivated people of certain types. That's who they want. That's who they want access to. So it's become... it's become sort of a self-fulfilling cycle now in the wrong direction and for the wrong reasons.

SPEAKER_02: 11:18

So is the answer to combat misinformation then just demonetization and say like, hey, we can't sell ad space? And again, I know that you're currently thinking about this with the current program, but how do you think we fight misinformation?

SPEAKER_01: 11:29

Well, I think that my current strategy and the current conclusion that I have come to personally is that one, I know that I can't solve this problem overall, but I do know that I can have an impact on it on a very local level. And so that is what's caused a change in my professional strategy, sort of shifting from a career working on global news, things in very big picture, very wide range, to now my new consulting firm, which is called Media Growth Partners, is focused specifically on small news organizations, on small markets. Because I think the opportunity to change this dynamic It lies locally and it lies in the micro markets with the individuals that are living in local communities who are working on local problems. They're finding local solutions and they are challenged by difficulty in getting the word out. So, you know, you call it good news. It's not necessarily all good news, but it is but it is it is locally relevant news. And and people are people are turning away from from this hyper political, hyper, you know, the, you know, what we call doom telling. So there is a tremendous, in the industry right now, there is a term called doom fatigue. And the number one reason, statistically, why people are turning away from news organizations is because they can't take it anymore. Psychologically, for their mental health, people, they're tuning it out. And so the opportunity that lies there is at the local, at the local news level is to provide a way for people to have a voice, to find out what's going on locally in their communities, and people are willing to pay for that. And that's what I'm working on are the business models that restore that business ecosystem for news organizations in local communities.

SPEAKER_00: 13:59

And you think by doing that, so people are getting to tell their story, they're getting the news, what are, like, I guess, could you talk a little bit more about the social benefit of doing that?

SPEAKER_01: 14:08

So, you know, there are mountains of evidence about the problems that result from news deserts. So the absence of a news organization in a local community or a scenario where you have so-called news, ghost newspapers, where they don't have local reporters, that they're, you know, owned by someone else from outside. So there's a ton of evidence that civic participation goes down. Local corruption, either in the business community or within politics, goes up when you don't have that. And there are very straightforward reasons for that. So one of the One of the most striking statistics is related to down-ballot voting. So that's the local voting for local candidates is down across the United States. people, well-meaning citizens of the United States, they go in to vote, they know who their statewide candidates maybe are, they know who their national candidates maybe are, and they know who the presidential candidate is, and so they vote in those amounts, but they just leave blank. the local ones because they don't feel like it's a responsible, that it would be a responsible act for them to place a vote. So they don't vote at all. So if you have a local source for information, which is saying these are who the local candidates are, this is what this office does, this is what the local county auditor or whatever it is, then people vote.

SPEAKER_03: 15:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 15:55

For those candidates, for whatever side, whatever party candidate. But the vast majority of Americans want to participate responsibly in civic activities, and they can't do that effectively if you don't have local journalism.

UNKNOWN: 16:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 16:18

That's very, very interesting. So from your perspective, it's not really a combat through national policy, but then you're saying, I want to start in an area that I can control in local news centers and then teach people how to run that up and scale that in their own communities and go from there.

SPEAKER_01: 16:32

Right, right. And local news organizations have a huge advantage over national news organizations or international news organizations in that local news organizations, their mandate is to cover things that are going on locally. So they don't, they don't need to pay attention to the war in Gaza or the war in Ukraine, or even have a heavy focus on the Republican, the Democrat, or liberal, the conservative debates out there that have become so caustic and that people, they can concentrate on the local things that make them feel, not just make them feel good, but that people know they can participate in and take some action about. That's really interesting. So if people know about a local school board meeting and they know what is going to be discussed, they can make a decision about whether to go and participate in that or take some action as a result of whatever was discussed at the local board meeting. Because these negative stories, the doom stories, whether it's climate change overall or the political stuff, people are overwhelmed and they feel helpless and they feel hopeless about their own ability to have some sort of impact on that, some positive impact on that big problem. And so they have to tune it out.

SPEAKER_02: 18:05

Are you familiar with Dunbar, Dunbar's number? By any chance, is that psychologist Dunbar's number? Ho, ho, ho. This is my name to teach you people things. This is great. My name's Dr. Nick Winneberg. No. So Dunbar, I think he was a psychologist, sociologist, and his entire philosophy was the idea of how many people can the brain care about at one time and rationally understand because human brains are really bad at big numbers. We just don't get them. Right. And the answer is 150. So realistically, we're conditioned based off our tribes, based off our caveman days to care about about 100 150 people so the idea of like 10 000 people in a country over there like our brains aren't ready to handle that right and then when you have an influencer is 1.3 million followers like you It's not, you're out of the realmness of you caring. So what you're saying is like, let's localize everything. Let's focus on our small family groups, our small areas, and talk about what matters instead of looking at the doom and the gloom of the war on Gaza.

SPEAKER_01: 18:59

Right, right. Yeah, and you know, journalists understand that. They do, that is the way that journalists function. They know that all stories are local. And so journalists do intentionally try to localize whatever the story is. They find the local stories. They find the individual story. You can't tell the story story of a million people were affected by that, that doesn't mean anything to people. You find the story about the one person among the million that was affected by something, and then you tell the story through them. The problem is that the stories overall and in combination with the other negative stories that are going on are just too much for people. And because those individual stories within the larger story are probably not locally known. There's no local connection to most people there if you're not someone who lives in Gaza or Israel or lives in the Ukraine and they're being directly affected by it. So that strategy of telling the individual stories is less and less effective.

SPEAKER_00: 20:07

So it seems like it's the same principles, the same underlying principles that took you to managing, covering global news to Local news. So could you articulate a little bit, because I'm interested in, I know you're a servant leader and giving back and some of the underlying values that kind of made you go it could seem like a big switch right here you are like covering one kind of news to another kind of news but what's i don't know what's the thread

SPEAKER_01: 20:38

well i think that i think the thread is and i you know i realized pretty early in my career that while it was fascinating to be a journalist and to be a writer and to to do those individual things what really drove me was being a manager of teams and so the principles that that i used and tried tried to use in managing teams at CNN and figuring out how to make a team of diverse people most effective and then literally get out of their way so that they can be most effective. Those principles apply. directly. And so whether it's a local news organization or a national news organization, it just depends on how many people you have to work with and the specifics of those situations. So I would say that the most challenging thing is helping people understand in a very local or startup context is helping people to understand how to effectively build the team to begin with because you know if you're a startup you're probably not you don't have the luxury of starting with a bunch of people with having a full team you've got to build that team out over time and there are many critical decisions that have to be made in terms of being able to succeed successfully build that team.

SPEAKER_00: 22:05

So what would you like our leaders, I know you talked to our leaders for a while, but what would you like our kind of future leaders, like budding new leaders and managers, what would you like them to know? Like what could they kind of take from your lessons, your life experience?

SPEAKER_01: 22:17

Yeah, I mean, I think the most important lesson, as I mentioned, and we've talked about many, many times, is that no matter what the context is, no matter what the business that you're in, as you develop as a leader, as a As a manager, the principle of don't surround yourself with yourself is critically important. You are working and living in a diverse market. You must have a diverse team. You must have a strategy for how it is going to work to not surround yourself with yourself. You need to understand yourself. And then you need to understand what it is that you don't bring to the table that you need from the rest of your team. And those principles cross over regardless of what the size or the stage of your business that you're working in.

SPEAKER_02: 23:16

Love it. What's been a universal principle for leadership that you've carried over from the different realms? And then now you also have a nonprofit as well. Do you want to spend some time talking about leadership for your nonprofit?

SPEAKER_01: 23:26

Yeah, I mean, I think that... The through line between the nonprofit and the for-profit activities that I have is definitely that I understand that my role and I believe that our role as human beings is to be of service. And so that is the fundamental rationale and that I have I have seen firsthand in my professional career that practicing service leadership and being of service has been a very, very successful and financially lucrative way to function professionally. That has helped me, not hindered me, from being promoted, from working better, being recognized as being able to successfully manage teams, and then to help others start organizations.

SPEAKER_00: 24:24

Eli, thank you so much for being with us. Eli Flournoy, Nick Windenberg, and myself, Amy Taylor-Bianco, thank you for tuning in to the Leader Lounge podcast here at Ohio University's College of Business. See you next time.