JWEB Interview: Philip Segal

Published November 25, 2003

By Jeff Cannon

On his recent visit to the J-School, journalist Philip Segal made time for this interview, in which he talks about his experience in a broad range of posts. Segal began his career immediately after college as a writer and assignment editor for Global Television News in Toronto. He recently left his position as Hong Kong-based markets and finance editor for the Wall Street Journal to accept a one-year fellowship from the Knight Foundation to obtain a master's degree from Yale Law School. Segal talked with us about his initial leap into the world of foreign correspondents, his work as a stringer for several radio services, and his decision to accept a fellowship that led him back to pursue additional study mid-career.
In his visits with several J-School classes, Segal repeatedly grabbed students' attention with stories about his bold decision to move abroad without a job in hand. We began our interview there.

J-WEB: How did you get started working in Asia in the first place?

PS: I just went. I went to Asia. I had gone to Columbia University and one of the required courses there is a great survey of Western thought called Contemporary Civilization. I was very lucky that I was assigned to a professor for that course who was an Indian history specialist. A guy named Ainslie Embree, who was the chairman of the history department and head of the South Asian Institute. And he taught the whole course, often times just flipping back over to South Asia from time to time, so we'd be in the so-called dark ages in Europe, and he'd say, "Well, these were the dark ages, but look what was happening with the Moguls over in India at this point. And that got me thinking about India. Then I decided to do some course work on India, some topics in geography, which was my major. I had gotten a job at a TV station in Toronto after junior year, so when I finished my senior year, they offered me a full-time job writing TV news, and I went and took it. I thought it would be interesting to try, not knowing if I would be a journalist or not, but thinking I'd like to take a year off anyway before grad school, whatever that would end up being. But soon I was bored writing about garbage strikes in Ontario, and kept reading about India and wanting to see it. And if I knew about anything other than being a student, it was how to write for broadcast. So I went to India and figured I'd try and get a job.

J-WEB: You went without a job?

PS: Well the thing is I thought I had a job. A friend of our family represented herself as being very good friends with the family that owned one of the prominent Indian newspapers. She also represented that she was very good friends with one of the Indian diplomats in Canada, and represented that she could get me a job "no problem." And I asked about the work visa and she said that would be "no problem" also. No problem at all. So, one of my first lessons about people in India was that I shouldn't take people on their word when they make promises like that.

Well, I did, and I gave notice at my job. I gave three weeks notice, which I had to do. And I went to my desk and called the woman and said, "Well, I'm going to India, so could we call that family now?" And she said, "Well, I Ð I Ð I don't know. We used to be friends with that family. I haven't talked to them in years." So, within about a half an hour I realized that maybe I should go and beg for my job back Ð which I easily would have been able to do because they were flabbergasted when I said I'm leaving this local television station and moving to New Delhi; they just couldn't believe it. And my father is an entrepreneur, and he said to me, "You'll never set anything up here. You have to go there anyway." And my upstairs neighbor taught economics at the University of Toronto, and she and her husband were very nice to me. And she said, "You'll never ever set anything up here. She had done graduate work in Calcutta, and spoke Bengali, and she said to just go and I would find something.

So I did, and that was pretty nerve-wracking. I was 22 or 23. Off I went, but I made a few phone calls and saw a few people before I went. There was a Canadian guy who worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who had been arrested in a high profile way in Amritsar at the Sikh golden temple a year after it had been overrun by tanks and Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards as a result of it. He had been on TV in Canada for a year, and he was kind of my hero because he was a young guy who just went, and then NBC hired him and he was a big star. Then the CBC hired him to be a full-time reporter back in Canada. So I went to Canada for the day on a plane and asked him out to lunch. And not knowing that he was coming back to Canada full time, I told him I'd like to come and work for him. And he said, "Well, you can have my String at CBC. I don't think anybody is there to do it. Why don't you take it? You can talk to Jeffrey Dworkin over at CBC radio." So I went over and talked to Dworkin, who I'd met years ago in some other incarnation, and he said, "Sure, that sounds great. Call us when you get there." And the guy who had been in India is Jonathan Mann, who's now a big star at CNN. He's Canadian, from Montreal, as I am. He was very nice to me. He was pretty much the first journalist I ever looked up and asked for advice. So I try and be nice to people who are in the position I used to be in. My general advice to them is to just go over there and find something.

J-WEB: Just pick a place?

PS: Pick a place. And maybe you wouldn't want to move over there lock, stock and barrel. But today, with air travel being so cheap and Internet deals, and whereas many are maybe thinking about Eastern Europe, just go for three weeks. Poke around as a tourist. And then walk into the English language newspaper in Budapest. And see if they need someone to write. That's how people start. From there maybe you could get a job at the AP bureau, or the Reuters bureau or Bloomberg. So Mann told me his NBC radio string was open as well, and I thought wow, NBC radio. It paid 50 dollars a shot, but it was prestigious for me. And I called up Dworkin at CBC, who is now NPR's ombudsman, by the way. But he wasn't there when I called; he was on vacation. His boss said, "I don't know who you are. I never made any kind of deal. I'm the foreign editor here. Maybe we'll give you some kind of tryout. Who are you?" And I said well, I'm the new NBC radio stringer here, so he said "Okay, we'll give you a tryout." I immediately hung up the phone and called NBC and they said "Who are you?" and I said to them I'm the new CBC stringer. I hadn't really planned to do that.

Stringing abroad:

J-WEB: Would you explain the concept of what a stringer is?

PS: Stringers are people who are not on staff for a company. They just get paid when they do work. And when they don't do work, they don't get paid. Newspapers and radio outlets and wire services rely very heavily on these people. The Associated Press or Agence France Presse will have two or three people perhaps in Cote d'Ivoire in their bureau in Abidjan. But if something explodes in the second city in Cote d'Ivoire, or the second or third city in Cameroon, there will not be an NBC staffer in that city. There will be a person Ð maybe someone who works for the local paper in that city Ð and there will be an understanding that they will work for AFP when AFP needs them. Sometimes a stringer will be on a retainer per month, sometimes they won't be. Sometimes they're called "super stringers" if they're paid a lot per month.

J-WEB: Is there an understanding of some kind of exclusivity with a stringer?

PS: That depends on how big the retainer might be.

J-WEB: So it's a free-lancer of sorts with some kind of agreement?

PS: That's right. And it's just what you negotiate. And the more they want you, the more they'll pay. If they want an exclusivity agreement, oftentimes they'll have to pay for that. If you don't have an exclusivity agreement, the understanding is that you can't sell exactly the same story anywhere close to where you might be heard on the CBC. But if I wanted to sell that CBC story to Radio Australia, or independent radio in Britain, or Deutsche Welle, or Vatican Radio, which actually pays pretty well, that would be open.

CBC and NPR and very similar. They have many of the same stringers around the world. You hear the same people. Lisa Schlein in Geneva, who you hear on NPR, has been the CBC stringer there for a long time. BBC will also be of a similar style. That will be different from the 10-second hits that you hear on CBS news. CBS radio is much shorter, much less nuanced stuff. And NBC radio was less nuanced and shorter, and it's just gotten more so over the years. It grew less appealing to do it and less profitable to do, so I stopped doing it.

J-WEB: So you moved again?

PS: I did it one more time. When I was in India after a year, there was a Pan Am plane that was hijacked but remaining on the tarmac at Karachi, Paksitan. And all of the NBC TV people who would've gone to cover that, kind of the fireman crew in Asia, were Hong Kong based. But they were all in Manila, where there aren't many flights out. And there aren't that many flights to Pakistan every day from the rest of Asia, and London is nine hours away or so, and they couldn't get there until 14 hours later. So I called the main logistics guy for NBC in India, and I asked that he please send a telex to Tokyo saying that I'm willing to cover the hijacking for radio. And he called me back in about an hour and said, "TV wants you. TV will hire you, they want you to go. Rent eight cars and trucks. Get a satellite uplink ready. Get five hotel rooms; get drivers." This was so that when all of these people land from Manila, they'd be able to get in the trucks and go, because who knows how long this thing is going to last and what will happen. And there was a flight to Karachi that afternoon at five. I thought, this is my break. I don't have a visa for Pakistan, but I have nothing to lose, so I bought a ticket. And there were a bunch of other journalists there from the AP and other papers all on the same plane all going to Karachi. I think it's about a two hour flight from Delhi to Karachi. And we landed and saw the hijacked plan. There it was sitting there in the dark. And five hours later it was stormed by the commandos. There was a lot of bloodshed. But I had all the taxis arranged, and I had the guy at the telephone exchange at the airport nicely primed to let me make all my calls. And the TV station knew we were there. Logistically we were all set, but I also ended up going on the air live with Tom Brokaw during a special which aired in the afternoon in the U.S. after the commandos had stormed the plane. So that caused some dropped jaws at my old station in Toronto, because this was only around a year after I had quit. That was fun to hear about later.

And then the NBC crew landed in Manila and they were very happy with the fact that I knew the airport. The hajj was just finishing so there were thousands and thousands of people there. The airport was jam-packed. It was a mob scene in and outside the airport. Lots and lots of people pushing and shoving and for a lot of the hajjis, that would be the only airplane flight of their lives and the only experience with an airport. So a lot of people were milling around pushing and shoving. So the crew lands at the airport from Manila in the middle of the night and it's really hot, and there are all these thousands of people in white pushing and shoving, and there was little me saying, "Come this way." I snaked Keith Miller, the reporter, through all these people into the phone office, and said here's the phone line open to New York, so he was able to then talk to Brokaw.

J-WEB: This must've impressed the network people, no?

PS: Well, yes. They said, we'd like to move you to Pakistan. We need you there all the time. So they moved me to Karachi, and I was there for almost two years as their representative, and did some radio and some TV voicers, but I got a lot more work when Gorbachev decided to pull out of Afghanistan, and then I was in Peshawar a lot. Not going into Afghanistan, but running free-lance tape in and out, getting a lot of interviews with the Mujaheddin, groups that were based there. And then after I'd had enough of living in South Asia for three years, I said to NBC I wanted to move somewhere else where there's a greater demand for news and where it's not quite so hard to live. So they said, "Well, would you like to run our Mexico City bureau?" I said yes, and so they moved me there. And then I quit because I couldn't get health insurance with NBC. I was still officially not on staff, so I couldn't get health insurance, and yet I was going to war zones for them. And I didn't think that was a principled way to behave, so I went to work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

J-WEB: How long were you there?

PS: I was there for four years and then I got bored, and I moved to Hong Kong without a job again. But before I moved to Hong Kong, I went first for three weeks and found the job with AFP. I didn't just pack up and go. I said, I'll go for three weeks and see, and I set up a bunch of interviews with other journalists and people. Only because I was in Hong Kong talking with someone over a cup of tea did I receive the suggestion that I try AFP and Bloomberg. My presumption about the AFP had been that they were only a French service, because the CBC only got the French feed from them. When you get to Hong Kong, you realize that AFP is now larger than any English service. In Asia it's exclusively English for the Asian consumption. In fact, I've been telling the students here that my first two jobs in Hong Kong happened because I went there and someone said, "Why don't you apply here." If there's an opening for a part-timer in West Africa with Reuters, you might not find that listed. Maybe they would list it, but probably they won't.

Returning to college:

J-WEB: Your degree is in economic geography. How did that help, as opposed to a journalism degree?

PS: I was originally an economics major and I changed because economics was too theoretical for me. In my first year I asked one of my professors Ð he said we're going to now assume that investment is constant Ð and since investment is never constant, I put up my hand and asked when we get to not assume that investment is constant, and he said your math is not strong enough to assume that until your fourth year. I told myself there has to be a way to study what's really happening out there with economies and resources. The second oil shock had just happened in 1980 and I wanted to know who had oil, and how much it cost to get it out of the ground. And I wanted to know who had gold and who had platinum, because that's what wars get fought over, things that are in the ground, how much it costs, etc. And I thought that geography seemed to be the department there that did that kind of thing. So I switched and I majored in geography, and the reason I say "economic" geography is that a of people who choose a geography major are in fact geologists or climatologists or agronomists, and I'm in fact none of those things. I add the word economic because I studied food supply, the green revolution in India, why Bangladesh had a famine when there was a food surplus in the country overall, how people prepared for earthquakes, that kind of stuff.

J-WEB: Journalism wasn't part of your plan?

PS: No. I thought I would do it for amusement for a year after the university. I still am doing it for amusement and getting paid better, but not as well as I would've been paid if I'd gone to law school. And now I'm in law school, but not to be a lawyer.

J-WEB: So why are you in law school?

PS: I'm in law school because the Knight Foundation and Yale for a long time have had this very nice arrangement whereby three or four journalists a year go and do one year of law school, the first year essentially. And the Knight Foundation gives you living expenses while Yale waives the tuition. They offer the degree for nonjournalists as well: people who want to go and get a better understanding of law without practicing. In my program there's a professor from Middlebury who's paying and doing that. But the journalists go in order to have a better understanding of the issues they're reporting about. So one of the other reporters there is with the Village Voice, and she's interested in the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay prisoners and national security. There's a guy from Forbes who's taking all kinds of stuff about antitrust and tortes. I'm there studying white collar crime, criminal procedure, race and economics, antitrust, a lot of the stuff I've been very interested in for a long time, but now I have an idea about how legal research works.

J-WEB: Are you finding your work experience is a great help to your study?

PS: The thing I always say is Ð after all these years at the WSJ writing about finance Ð I've learned part of an MBA anyway on the run. I can look at an annual report and take a lot of it apart now. I can call up an analyst and ask what discount rate they used in a model when they were discounting the future string of income on a real estate company. A lot of what people learn in business school, I can do. But when I used to have to call up a lawyer Ð before I went to this law school Ð I pretty much had to write down what he or she said if I was asking about a position and how it was legal. I'd have to put that in the paper. I had no way of saying I want to see that case myself and read it. The first bit of Latin floors you, and you just stop. You don't understand the citation system. You need to read a few hundred cases before you get into that mindset of how cases are written. And in law school you read hundreds of cases the first semester. Hundreds of them. And I'm amazed now. I'm going back and doing some research for my own interest about the Corrupt Practices Act. A lot of that research is in law journals, and I came across a paragraph about the way the act is enforced by the SEC. It was written by a lawyer in legalistic terms, and I knew that two months ago I wouldn't have understood it. Now it's perfectly understandable and also I have perspective.

J-WEB: How did you happen to focus on corruption as an issue?

PS: The reason I'm interested in corruption is that it's one of those concepts that shifts over time. And I've learned in law school that a lot of the law is that way. The area of tortes is something that kind of shifts with the tastes of the times. Common law always had a no-fault tradition. If you bumped into somebody and hurt them you paid, even if it wasn't your fault. Then in the Victorian era, they introduced fault because companies needed not to have to pay every time somebody got hurt, and the price of progress was that sometimes horses and buggies hit people on the street and the guy did his best not to them, but hey, that's progress. Then the pendulum swings back and you get worker's comp and you get no-fault auto insurance, and you learn that everything ebbs and flows. And so, being able to look at something like ethics in business and corruption as a function of taste and shifting ethical standards, I'm realizing corruption is not that different from other areas of the law. So, tremendous perspective is available by studying something that, at first blush, isn't remotely connected with Asian economics or business. But if you're going to write about corporate governance, you have to write about law. No one even knows what Sarbanes-Oxley is going to mean yet. I was watching the Senate finance committee's hearing on tax shelters on C-Span yesterday, and it was fabulous. Outrageous stuff happens, and it's all legal. But if they made it illegal and someone tried to do it, it would be "outrageous" and "corrupt" and "awful." But today people do it and they're proud of it. Some bank leases the Canadian air traffic control system, and Canada leases it right back. The bank pays Canada a little fee, nobody has any risk, and there's a gigantic tax deduction. Now that can't really be what congress intended but that's what happens. It's not corruption today, but if they did it in a secret, evasive way next year maybe it would be. Now that to me is interesting. And would journalists reflect that in their reports about it next year if someone decided to outlaw it on day one, and then on day two, someone was caught doing it? Would it be treated with the same degree of outrage as insider trading is? That used to be legal too, but it's been illegal for long enough that we all agree it's outrageous. This is not like murder. This is something that's shiftable. But I think a lot of the context of journalism doesn't reflect that. And that to me is interesting. If there's some scapegoating happening today when a lot of people lost a lot of money in the market Ð even though they were told that this was a bubble and they should get out and they didn't listen Ð for them it must be somebody's fault. So, not to say that all of these people indicted are lily-white, but we knew a lot of the practices that are under scrutiny today were going on before and no one cared because everybody was making money.