Magazine Publishers

October 17, 2005
Remarks by Patty Stonesifer, chief executive officer

It’s an honor to be here. You are here to talk about the future of magazines, and I want to talk about the role of magazines in shaping the future. Because what you publish next week and next year will greatly affect that future—far more than the grants I fund or the money I give away.

Magazines tell the story of our time. 20 years from now, in 2025, looking back at the first quarter of the 21st century—our century—what will that story be?

I think there are two very different possibilities.

One story is that we accepted our world as it is. Tom Friedman writes that the world is flat: Goods and services cross borders with ease, lifting many people’s living standards in the process.

But will our story in the year 2025 be that globalization ushered in a shining era of peace, harmony, and rising living standards for everyone?

Not likely.

The world may be flat for those few of us who have access to advances in health and education. But for the 3 billion people who live on less than two dollars a day life remains a steep uphill slog.

If goods and resources flow even more easily throughout the next 20 years but empathy and action do not, this will be the story of our time:

Disconnected:
How the Global Age Broke Its Promise
In this story, nearly 11 million children die each year because basic vaccines and treatments, inexpensive and readily available, simply aren’t provided to those who need them most.

By 2025, AIDS will have taken more than 80 million lives in Africa alone, and the disease will be spreading fast in China, India, and Russia.

Malnutrition will still afflict 2 billion people worldwide, killing more than 1 million children under the age of 5 each year.

And in the United States, an African-American or Hispanic ninth grader will have only a 50 percent chance of even graduating from high school, and only half the students who do graduate from high school will be prepared for college.

One quarter of the way into this new century, we would be looking at the story of our time and be asking: How did a world that we thought was so connected become so divided, and what should we have done?

But there is another story to be written—based not on blind hope, but on opportunities and resources that are in our hands now.

Right now, we have a drug that costs less than $3 a person and cuts in half the odds that a pregnant woman with HIV will pass the virus on to her child.

Right now, vaccines and treatments can cheaply and easily prevent millions of children from dying every year.

Right now, for a couple of cents per person, we can fortify foods like flour, soy sauce, and wheat with vitamins and minerals to help prevent anemia, mental retardation, and blindness.

Right now, we know hundreds of public high schools in the U.S. that are admitting students who would otherwise be written off—and they’re graduating every single one of them ready for college and a good job.

That second story might be told like this:

The Great Intervention:
How Compassion Finally Caught up with Globalization
In this story, for the first time ever, every child, everywhere, receives basic, lifesaving vaccines.

Every mother knows how to plan her pregnancies so she can ensure her children’s health as well as her own.

In this story we prevented the transmission of HIV from any mother to and child, and then finally delivered an AIDS vaccine—developed through an unprecedented collaboration of scientists, donors, and drug companies from 15 countries—and we stopped the spread of the pandemic.

In this story, better health means more farm workers and better yields, less famine and better nutrition. Better health also means more children staying in school and succeeding.

In this story, our global interconnectedness becomes a powerful engine of compassion.

I heard on NPR that these recent disasters have shown that the American public has, quote, “empathy in catastrophe.” And of course that is true. After the tsunami that hit Southern Asia, and then hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we learned that if we (1) see those in need quite clearly, and (2) believe there is a way to address that need, then ordinary citizens—magazine readers along with corporations and governments—can and will act.

However, many of our challenges are not sudden catastrophes, like tsunamis and hurricanes. They are slow-changing, seemingly intractable issues that we only label “catastrophe” in hindsight. If 450 newborns died of preventable causes in the USA between when my remarks started, and when Mel Karmazin’s remarks finish, the U.S. media would cover it non-stop for a month. We would know those children’s names, their mother’s names, the cause of their death. But, sadly, 450 newborns did die in the last hour, and 450 more will die this hour, and the next hour, and the next hour and the next hour—4 million this year, and 4 million next year—but all in the developing world.

To meet those with the same outpouring of compassion and commitment that marked our response to the recent disasters, we need to do two things. Both, as it happens, are jobs for journalists and magazines.

First: We need to make these stories real.

We need eye contact with the people who suffer. Why do we look away when we see a homeless person on the street? Because when our eyes meet—when we really see the sufferers as people like us—it is nearly impossible not to help.

You have the power to make the world’s eyes meet the world’s problems.

Second: People need to know that it’s not hopeless, that something can be done to create change—and we know how to do it.

We all have something to contribute to this effort.

At the Gates Foundation, we start from two core values. The first is: To whom much is given, much is expected. Bill and Melinda Gates realize they have been given a truly great deal, and as a result, they need to give back a great deal.

Our second value is every human life has equal worth; the random chance of a child’s birth—in a wealthy country or a poor country, in a rich neighborhood or a poor one—should not determine her chances of a healthy life or getting a basic education.

These two values—and $28 billion—and you’ve got the basic assets of the Gates Foundation. But just like in your businesses, we knew we had to focus. We determined that the biggest obstacle to human equality is poor health. We know that when health improves life improves, by every measure—social, economic, educational.

Then we studied more and learned what health issues cause the biggest burden: malaria, TB, AIDS, diarrhea, malnutrition. And we studied how we might intervene to reduce suffering and learned about what is called the Inverse Care Law. In short, “The availability of good medical care varies inversely with the need for it in the population served.” And we realized our best hope for reducing suffering was to find ways to simply, effectively prevent disease and malnutrition, since treatment is so often out of reach to those who need it most.

But even with our tight focus, the Gates Foundation can’t solve even a fraction of these inequities.

We strongly believe that only government and markets can solve big problems on a global scale.

But governments and markets are wary of risk—and they’re far more likely to invest in a proven solution than an untested idea.

That’s why we believe our best role as a foundation is making the targeted, high-risk, early-stage investments that can lead to new solutions and prove that they work. We need to show that they are affordable, too—and then push the public, the governments, and the market leaders to make sure they’re delivered to those who need the most.

So our global health efforts center on two areas: first, research and product development for new ways to save lives. This century will be marked by an unprecedented level of new health care and pharmaceutical products. If we can stand on the shoulders of that investment—and use it to create health technology for the poorest people—then we can save millions. And second, we need to support better delivery of affordable life saving tools we already have today, things like bed nets to slow the spread of malaria, delivery of available vaccines (some of which have been sitting undelivered for 15-plus years), and cheaper drugs. Because the only thing worse than not discovering an AIDS vaccine 30 years after the start of this pandemic would be finally discovering one, and not being able to deliver it.

And here at home in the USA, we see it as a national emergency that in spite of our supposed commitment to a quality public education for all, the great equalizer of opportunity—one third of our 9th grade high school students will not even graduate.

So in pursuit of greater equity here at home—we’ve chosen to focus on public school systems reform and we’re even more tightly focused on supporting the creation of thousands of small high schools that provide more intimate learning settings—places where teachers and staff can work more closely with students, and make sure nobody falls through the cracks.

In the next few years we will put a billion dollars behind our belief that all kids deserve to graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship—and that smaller more rigorous and relevant high schools are the right way to achieve that goal.

But even with the billions of dollars we will spend on health and education in the years ahead, we won’t reach even a fraction our neighbors in need. For that, we need government and markets.

Think about it this way. The billion dollars we’ll spend on U.S. education in the years ahead is just one quarter of one percent of the $400 billion annual price tag this nation spends on K-12 education every year.

For our $1 billion to change the way the other $399 does business, we have to show the folks who supply the other $399 billion that there is a better way to spend it.

The role of the magazine industry becomes pretty evident.

You can force us as citizens to really see the problem. You can analyze and promote the solutions that are already available. And you can hold governments—ours and others—donors and recipients—accountable. You can make us say, “We know what the problem is, we know what the solution is, and we can make this change.”

Your industry brags that 84 percent of all adults in America read one or more magazines, and more than half of them act on something they read.

This adds up to immense influence. You have the power not only to chronicle change over these next two decades, but catalyze it.

That is as true for the course of history as it is for hobbies, as true for world affairs, as it is for women’s fashion.

I know that solving the world’s problems is not your sole mission, and I don’t expect it to be. You’ve got corporate commitments to keep, and I—and millions of others—look to magazines as a respite from the difficult realities of the world.

Still, it can also be good business to engage your readers on a deeper level. People want that kind of engagement—we’ve got dozens of colored bracelets and lapel ribbons to prove it. And it’s not just nonprofit campaigns. Cosmetics companies are now promoting breast cancer research. After Katrina, Amazon.com customers donated $12 million to the Red Cross in 18 days. Over 110,000 customers used Amazon as their vehicle for making the world a bit better. That is brand building!

People want to help. But they need help in knowing how to help. What are the crucial causes, and what can they do about them? You can help your readers to help the world.

But if we want to tell that more positive story in 20 years, you need to tell some of those stories today.

While this may seem obvious for National Geographic and The Economist, the truth is each of you has an audience touched by global realities. I had a list of story ideas for you—Highlights for Children exchanges places with the child in Boston and Botswana; Latina or Essence doing a piece on a new breed of charter schools bringing urban teens into business one day a week; Vogue Knitting doing a feature on the members of knitting cooperative in Nepal who developed boutique yarn while lifting their families out of poverty; Fitness covering the immune system boost kids in Central Africa are getting from a new sweet potato crop….

But my husband (the editor in the family) pointed out that I could either:
a) ruin a good story idea by broadcasting it to all of you, or
b) (and more likely) insult half of you by proposing stories inferior to the ones you already ran!

You can come up with story ideas far better than me. My job is just to tell you why you should be doing this—not just once, but over and over. And here’s my final story why.

In 1999, Nelson Mandela came to visit us in Seattle and on one stop we made I was standing in the wings as he spoke to civic leaders about the world’s great challenges, and called upon all of us to do something personally to change them. At the end of his remarks he said to that audience:

“Would all those of you who took personal action, any action big or small, to end the terrible injustice of apartheid, please stand up, will those of you who took personal action, something—anything—big or small, to help me walk free from Robben Island, please stand up.”

The next 60 seconds, while he stood silent, was one of the longest and most painful minutes of that decade for me and others in that room. The power of the moment was magnified by the bearing of President Mandela. There was no anger, there was no recrimination, he was not judging us. He was asking us to judge ourselves.

And to a person, we found we came up short. Those of us who had done nothing wished we had done something, and those of us who had done something wished we had done far far more.

And yet, in spite of our far from perfect performance, Mandela was set free. Apartheid did end.

It ended in part because his story was brought into America’s consciousness—not only by Newsweek and Time and The Economist, but also by People, and Life, and Rolling Stone, and Reader’s Digest, and Scholastic Update, and Ad Age. All of these—and many many more—at one time or another told Mandela’s story.

Far too often, the news we read is only what changes. And Mandela’s story wasn’t changing: He was still just sitting in a cell year after year, decade after decade. But the story was about injustice, and by writing about it, you reached millions of readers, and they made the story change—they helped bring an end to apartheid.

I want to end today with the same challenge to you that Mandela gave to me.

It’s 20 years from now. The Mandela of our age is standing on this stage.

He or she asks you the same question: “If in the past two decades you took some action —big or small—to end injustice, to end the disconnect between the rich world and poor world, to make us really see the suffering and do something to stop it—please stand.”

I hope you’ll be able to stand. I am confident you will. I really hope you will be satisfied with your own accounting.

And if you are, that will mean that we’ve, together, written a far far better story of our time.

Thank you.