"People should not take information for granted because they think it's free"

AFC-USA News Associate, Kate Nakamura interviewing Alex Segura on Instagram Live

Alex Segura is an International Monetary Fund contest winner and board member of the Club of the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents. Alex’s project competed against 700 other submissions worldwide. He was selected as one of four winners for his project entitled “Can fintech companies help close the gender gap in financial inclusion?” Alex has worked as a foreign correspondent for five years in the U.S. and abroad for Agencia EFE, the largest newswire in Spanish worldwide, covering economics. 

Alex Segura sat down with Foreign Press for an Instagram Live interview from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Segura is a Los Angeles-based foreign correspondent but was recently sent on assignment to cover the trial of Derek Chauvin in the case of George Floyd’s death. Before donning his protective gear to go out and cover the developing story in Minneapolis, he spoke to us in a live interview to share his experiences of reporting in America.

You’re usually based in California right? So what brings you to Minneapolis? 

On Monday the trial for the George Floyd case started here, I’m usually based in Los Angeles but I’m going to stay here until next week covering the most relevant news in the world of the last year. Pandemic apart I think obviously the George Floyd case has had a lot of impact not only here in the states but also worldwide. It’s a pleasure to be here and to have my company send me here. 

Tell us more about yourself. Your career is still quite fresh and you’ve been in the U.S. for only five years now. Why did you become a foreign journalist? 

It was always kind of a dream. I think for journalists when we were kids, we were always dreaming about traveling the world and explaining stories from overseas. I’m from Barcelona, I love my city, I miss it and my family a lot obviously, especially in these hard times I haven’t been able to go back. But the employment situation in my country is not very good for youth and so I was always hoping to go abroad. I first started by going to London and then I got an offer to work in Austin and was in Texas for about a year. Then my company decided it would be good for me to go to Washington, D.C. where I used to cover Congress and the White House and help my colleagues within the

company in D.C. It was amazing, I have great memories from there. Then I went to do a project in California and I’m super happy there. 

What has been your experience so far as a foreign correspondent working here? Can you speak more on your role as a board member of the Association? 

Being a journalist in the United States for the past few years, I’m not positioning myself politically because this is not my country and I’m a journalist so I try to stay away from that, but being a journalist in this country has been a little hard because the rhetoric against the media was very strong, and even though I’m a foreign correspondent I’m still a part of the media in the states. So it’s been tough but I also had the amazing opportunity to join the Association of Foreign Correspondents as a board member, thanks to all the board members and Thanos as well. It’s been such a great opportunity and I’m leading the project in Los Angeles, and I think having a presence on the west coast is super important. I hope that we keep fighting to protect the role of foreign correspondents here in the U.S. because as we always say in the organization, a free press is the most important part of a free democracy. So I’m super proud to be a part of this amazing team and I hope it’s going to be a few more years. We had elections a few months back and I was one of those chosen to keep serving the board so that’s exciting for me and I’m looking forward to our next projects. I’m going to say to the people, stay tuned, because good things are coming. 

Alex Segura

How does the AFC-USA help you as a journalist? 

First of all, being a part of a family, a network of great professionals, we are all over the states, a lot of them are on the east coast because of the structure of the news here in the states. Washington, New York, they’re super important cities, but we also have a lot of journalists in the territories and I think for me, what’s been the best so far, has been the honor of being part of this group. I’m not super young but I’m still young in my career, so I think the trust of the organization has given me a lot of confidence, especially meeting amazing people in the world like Thanos Dimadis, Bricio Segovia, and obviously all the rest. I don’t want to say all their names because it would take a little bit but it’s been amazing being a part of all of this. 

What are some differences between working in the U.S. in comparison to Spain? 

My career is still fresh, I’m 27, I started collaborating with some media early on when I was in college but really my career has been mainly in the U.S. I was working full-time in Spain for one year before I had the opportunity to go abroad. Here in the U.S., we have the Washington Post, the New York Times, but I also want to highlight all the local newspapers, for instance here the Minneapolis Star. The main difference is the structures, here they’ve very robust. Clearly, in the U.S. the media has more power but also more economical stability than in Spain. I’m not scared, I love the states but sometimes I think “will I go back to Barcelona?” because I don’t really know. I’m super happy here, I’m grateful to be here, and the sector in Spain is not working very well. I’m privileged to be here and hopefully, it’s for a few more years. I’m trying to get my green card, hopefully in the upcoming months or a year. I think this will give me more opportunities in the states and I’m happy to stay here for a few more years. 

On the IMF Youth Fellowship Contest, can you go into further detail about your winning project and how you sought out ways to improve upon the gender wage-gap? Why did you pursue this proposal in particular? How do you feel about winning? 

Alex Segura with Christine Lagarde

I think everybody likes to win. This country is very competitive, but also a big difference between my country and the U.S. is that usually when you fail here, people cheer you up, they are happy that you tried. In my country, people are waiting for you to make mistakes, to fail, sadly. So that is also one of the reasons I’m here. Regarding the IMF contest, it was amazing. Being selected to compete among 700 applicants, it was very competitive. I was a part of 25 applicants selected so that was amazing too. I had the opportunity to share my thoughts and views with 24 other amazing communicators around the globe from Japan, Kenya, Botswana, Italy, the states, Russia. All over the world. I put all my effort into the project, I really wanted to win but I wasn’t expecting to because the competition was tough. I decided to take on the issue of the gender gap in financial inclusion because I think it’s really crucial that in this century we’re in, for me it doesn’t even make sense to differentiate between woman and man. I think that this gender gap that exists, it’s about nine percentage points, it’s outdated. We shouldn’t be fighting still for this equality, and I focused on how the fintech companies can close this gap because really fintech companies already have the technology set to be able to reach this population. A lot of the time what happens is that people that live in remote towns and cities, women in this case, don’t have access to financial services because maybe the nearest bank is 20 kilometers away. Nowadays there are more wireless devices than people in the world, according to data from the U.N.. I think the opportunity is there, we just have to take advantage of it, use mobiles to increase access to credit, increase digital ID, increase financial education so people can really know what they are doing when they take a loan, what opportunities they have but also the risk, the obligations they have to return them. So I think I was very happy to do it. I think that was one of the reasons I won because I’m invested. I won with three other amazing women. One from India, another one from Kenya, and another from Botswana. Three amazing journalists did amazing projects as well. I want to give a shout-out to them as well.

A lot of your work centers around economics whether it be in America or the U.K. What was the most interesting or difficult story to cover in the past year with the coronavirus pandemic? 

It’s funny you mentioned the U.K. because I lived in London for a short time and I tried to do some stories related to economics. But here in the U.S. and what’s been happening with the pandemic, I always try to get the personal angle and I think I’m finding the human stories behind the headlines and the key behind journalism. The one that was the most difficult and that I’m most proud of, I find in my life and my career it’s usually like that. The most difficult story becomes the one that you’re most proud of and in the pandemic, I went to the border. I went to four different cities outside the border, in San Diego, California, Yuma, Arizona, I also went to New Mexico and El Paso, Texas. What I was trying to find were these stories where people were able to really show the impact in these border town communities that COVID had. Obviously, it’s been brutal. The economy, not in San Diego, but in the other towns, is usually complicated. The unemployment rate went through the roof in those communities. People were there just waiting for some luck, but also some help from the government. People were not receiving their paychecks. This had a very hard impact on some of the families I was talking to. So this was obviously hard for me to report on. But I also think that this is our role. We have to explain the stories that are not easy to read. 

What story have you done that you’re proud of the most? 

Well, this one was clearly very important to me. I was explaining in these four different towns how these communities were arriving at the U.S. election. Explaining their fears, what their priorities were, and obviously in the middle of a pandemic. Two things were the main topics people were thinking of. First of all, health. When I went to El Paso, it was one of the worst moments of the pandemic in El Paso. There were very high rates of hospitalization but also very high rates of death. Second, obviously the employment aspect. I talked to people in their 50’s with families to take care of. And I talked to people that were just laying down on a bench in the main avenue in El Paso and I reached out to them in Spanish because pretty much everyone speaks Spanish. And they would tell me: “Look I’ve been out of work for five months, we don’t have any savings anymore. We spent all of our savings in the past few months so I’m here begging for food”. And on this main avenue, there were only people begging for money. It was hard. I’m happy that I put some focus on it.

Another story that I did this year that was very relevant; I interviewed the guy that was wearing horns at the insurrection at the capitol. Jake Angeli, that was the artistic name he told me. I interviewed him three weeks before he became famous worldwide. So I had THE interview. I was talking about it the other day in a Clubhouse room. They were interviewing me because all the television networks were asking me for permission to publish my interview and I went live on some channels in my country but also CNN and some networks in Latin America to talk about it. This was maybe the most curious but also the story that had more impact. This guy said he was sent by QANON, this network of conspiracy theories born in the dark internet. I was researching it before but now I’m writing a book about it so hopefully, it will get published by the end of this year. It explains the origin, the background of QANON. 

When you interviewed Jake Angeli before the riot, what was the impression you got from him? 

It was interesting. I was in Arizona, there were some Trump supporters that were against the results of the election. They were arguing that there was some kind of problem with the counting in the country. Then there was this guy. And I saw him and was like “what is this guy doing with these horns, this type of dress, and the face paint?” So I reached out to him and asked him what was going on, what he was doing here, why he was here. And he told me that he was like Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus, or Martin Luther King Jr., he said he was fighting for his civil rights, fighting peacefully on the streets to send a message of the corruption that was going on during the elections. So basically I was with him for almost a week, we were going to the same place, the Arizona state capitol. Everybody was paying close attention to him and he actually told me he was going to Washington D.C. so I knew he was going, I didn’t know he was going to become the headline worldwide. But I did know he was going to Washington, D.C. and he actually told me if I was there we could get a coffee or something. And I was like wow, okay. I’m glad I didn’t because now the FBI would be searching for me. But jokes aside, it was very interesting to know the reasons behind his appearance and in the end, he became one of the lead organizers of the insurrection. I knew he was going to make some noise because of his image so I thought if he’s in D.C. close to the capitol, I’m sure there will be pictures of him. But he became kind of the story of the day, and what I did through my Twitter which went viral for a little bit, I showed all the content I had of him including the thoughts he had shared, and it had a big impact. 

Does he dress like that all the time? 

Yeah, he said he dresses like this because he’s a “shaman”. He likes to dress like an animal to bring attention to him to spread whatever message he has. In this case he

said he was spreading the truth. So he dresses like this so people and the media pay attention to him. If he were dressing like a normal 33-year-old from Arizona, that would look average. But he was wearing this stuff and it obviously grabbed my attention. It ended up being very interesting for me especially after he became one of the lead actors of the insurrection. Obviously, it was scary to see those images. I wasn’t in the capitol at that time but I’ve been there hundreds of times because I used to live next to it and cover Congress. This time I wasn’t there but I had some colleagues, some journalists, and some friends who work inside the Capitol. There were four fatal injuries, four dead, but politicians and people of the media weren’t hurt but it was very sad. It seemed it was going to be huge and in the end, it was sad and dangerous but luckily politicians were hurt. 

What advice can you offer to young journalists aiming to report abroad? 

They could join an organization that they believe in. Even if it’s an internship or a collaboration. I was listening recently to GaryVee; I recommend following him on social media, he is an entrepreneur that is very inspiring and motivating. He was actually talking about this. If you are young, there are ways to get in touch with an organization or a person that you believe in, that you want to emulate. Join that organization and work until you become necessary for them. In my case, I’ve been so lucky. I joined an incredible company that I’m super proud to be a part of. I joined the same way. There was a contest to win a paid internship, very low paid I must say, so for a year I was getting paid very little, I had extra jobs in media but I was in contact with this organization that ended up being my employer. The company hired me and sent me abroad. I think that is the best advice for young journalists. Detect what you really want and try to work in the same sector or covering the same type of stories, doing internships with them, collaborating with them, until you reach the point that people appreciate your hard work, appreciate your professionalism, and decide to invest in you. 

Are there any parting words you’d like to share? Anything to promote? 

It’s been a pleasure. I encourage everyone to follow the organization. We do important work. The only thing I want to say is that I’m super happy to be part of this amazing group of journalists. I hope to keep reaching people and promoting our role in the states. Sometimes people take information for granted because it’s free on the internet but nothing is free. My company has invested a lot of money in me, for instance, bringing me to Minneapolis. So I ask that people support local newspapers and support organizations like ours that protect journalists here in the states. If you want to know more, follow my social media, I have my own podcast where I share a lot but also make funny content and share motivational content with people I interview on my podcast.