 Welcome to PR Tech Wednesdays, the weekly webinar where thought leaders discuss the latest in PR Tech. If it's Wednesday, it's PR Tech Wednesdays. I'm your host, Eric Schwartzman. We do this every Wednesday from 12 to 1 p.m. Pacific time. It's free. And you can sign up at PRTechWednesdays.com. Our guest today is Steve Lore. He's a senior writer and technology reporter from the New York Times. He's a leading expert on the corporations that dominate computing today. Steve, welcome to PR Tech Wednesdays. Glad to be there. Thank you, Eric. I want to start with a quick shout out to the EFF, the Electronic Freedom Foundation Champion's User Privacy, Free Expression and Innovation through Impact Litigation, Policy Analysis, Grassroots Activism and Technology Development. The Electronic Freedom Foundation is a U.S. 501C3 non-profit and you can donate online at EricSchwarzman.com forward slash EFF. Our Bookster Gram of the Week is brought to you by the 2020 Startups Guide for PR, which you can download and learn how to sequence PR campaigns based on your growth stage at EricSchwarzman.com forward slash startup. So this week's Bookster Gram is the mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Rob is a tech entrepreneur who learned the hard way that what people tell you in the early stage about your company is generally wrong and how to avoid getting and acting on bad information when you're at a tech startup searching for a product market fit. Now this book is about how to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone's lying to you because they don't want to hurt your feelings and just want to make you go away. It has all sorts of practical tips on asking the right questions. It's a quick read and if you're not at a tech startup and you do any kind of market research, this book will help you cut through the niceties and capture better insights. It's a wonderful little book. Check it out. All right, let's do this. I have I have plenty of questions. So be as brief as you like. I promise we will not run out of things to talk about. Okay. So now, since the last time we met, it was 2006, you key noted the PRSA Technology Conference. And at the time, you were not 100% allocated to technology news. And today, tech crosses over into economics and politics. It's really so much more than just a business newsbeat. Absolutely. It's it's it's, you know, it's part of the fabric of everything really. So tell us what you cover primarily these days. I think it might be this technology and economics and that covers a broad swath of things. So recently I've done a lot on competition issues in big tech antitrust. Since in the past, I was the cover the Microsoft investigation and trial in the nineties. And it was along at the time, along with the OJ trial and Limburg trial, the only one we wrote about every single day. And now with the four big tech companies, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple to some degree, you know, a lot of these issues have come back. So I'm doing doing that and I do a lot of kind of workplace stuff, you know, you know, kind of my classic description of this is, you know, 1520 years ago, I remember asking Bob Reich, who was then the labor labor secretary had left being labor secretary. What's your best bet for good jobs? The modern economy for the two thirds of Americans who do not have 40 college degrees. And his answer at the time was a geek squad for everything else, you know, the best buy people and the care and the feeding of all machines in all kinds of industries. I mean, it was pretty good answer then. The answer today would be more software inflected. But so I'm interested in a lot of those programs that try to prepare people for careers which happened. I mean, tech is only part of it because there seems to be demand there. And you can actually measure the skills. So there's a number of programs that have looked at that mostly nonprofits are the ones I've written about. For everyone that's on the call, I want you to know that the chat room is open for questions. So if you have questions for Steve, put them in there. Walk us through. I mean, you know, here we have a little porthole into the gray lady, you know, in Manhattan and we see activity in the newsroom. Walk us through if you would sort of the process behind how an idea becomes an article in the New York Times. It depends on the subject. I mean, if you're in Washington covering breaking news and stuff's obvious. If you're in a more feature writing beat, you propose a story to your editor and they say yes or no. We think this is a good idea, but you'd like to steer it in this direction. And then it's up to you to do it. It's not particularly complicated. Newspapers, you know, news organizations are just incredibly decentralized organizations. So nobody has carte blanche. Like you can't go and say, look, this is what I want to write. You still have to get approval from someone? Yeah, yeah, I mean, basically tell them you're going to do it. I mean, you know, you know, if you're just starting out, you got to get sort of approval. Yeah, I mean, you don't. There's not too many noes. Is there some sort of a meeting that you have everyone in your department where you come together and the tech group has a meeting Monday, midday. It's one 30 hour time, 1030 San Francisco time. And people talk about, you know, things that are coming up. I mean, we also have a kind of list of stories that you're working on so forth. So it isn't sure isn't, you know, everybody go around show and tell. But it's mainly kind of what to be aware of, you know, the current week and then any other kind of things to have to discuss. Is there any sort of technology platform that you guys have so that everyone can see what everyone else is working on so there's no overlap. Yeah, and we've got a Google Doc with the story list. That's, you know, available to everyone. It's simple. It's a simple Google Doc. Yeah. How many people in that meeting in that tech meeting. It sort of depends. But yeah, people come in from different places. Yeah, 1516 kind of thing. And several of them I imagine teleconferencing in. Yeah, I mean, the China and London people only rarely do. But yeah, people it's Washington. I mean, half the San Francisco Bureau kind of shows up it doesn't. I mean, they all cut the awkward, you know, they'll work from home for largely or a lot of them do to be fair, not all. Is it a structured meeting? Is there like a set format or how does it go? How long does it take? It depends. Pewing Tam is the is the technology editor and she starts it out and says what the agenda is. And if there's not much to say with it can be a short meeting or it can be it can range from 20 to 40 minutes. So once you get the go ahead on a story, talk to us a little bit about, you know, if it's a if it's a story that involves a company. Talk to us about whether or not you use that company's website to gather information. You care about a company's website. Does it matter? Yeah, it's one thing I was checked as I do LinkedIn for anybody I'm talking to. I rarely do stories on individual companies themselves. I mean, the throwaway line I was used to people is, you know, I'm not going to write about an individual company unless it's a large one in trouble and then I have to. But and that's not entirely true, but not most of what I do are kind of theme stories that that include individual companies. But yeah, I don't look the company website, particularly for startups, right is illuminating. It can be it gives you a good overview of what you know what they do. So it's yeah, it's one thing to look at. Is it enough if it's on a company website or do you need to sort of verify that like you trust information on a company website? Well, it depends what it is. I mean, you know, if it's anything with, you know, the investor site with it's an SEC filing or something like that, of course. You know, and different websites are done different ways. I mean, some are, you know, you have the equivalent of FAQs, which, you know, answer basic questions. Others are, you know, are more marketing. So this is a question from Mark Morganstein comes in on the chat room. He says, What's the balance for you and your team regarding day of news and long form features? And when do feet and and when do went and when you do features, do you like to find characters on your own? Or do you like to be provided with characters? Yeah, look, you like to be like to find characters on your own usually. As far as the first question, the mix of daily stuff versus features, it's, you know, you're always aware of what's going on daily, many really daily stories for us. I mean, I get, you know, pitches all the time about some funding round or some partnership announcement and so forth. And I, you know, we're not going to do that. I mean, that way lights madness. You know, it's just, you know, that's, that's not what we do. And that's not where we add value. I mean, if you're doing something, everybody else is doing it. Do you pay attention to any corporate blogs? No, except when I'm referred to them. You know, if I see a link to something we took, we took up this issue here, you ought to take a look at that or something on Twitter refers to what I do. But I don't, I don't, there's no routine blogs, corporate blogs I'm watching. Are you using any of the public relations newswire services, you know, the ones that are used by publicly traded companies to make non selected disclosures? No, again, I mean this, you're talking about like the PR newswire, right? Or business wire or newswire. Yeah, there's quite a few of them. Yeah, I mean, only when it comes up on a search. And so when it does come up on the search, do you read press releases? Yeah, sure, I can. Do you read them or do you just skim them? I mean, do you ever actually read all the way down to the boilerplate and read the boilerplate? Well, the boilerplate is that, you know, that part at the bottom that says, you know, what the company does, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that can sometimes be the most illuminating. But mostly, I mean, those kinds of press release, you look for what people said in the past. I mean, I'm not, you know, scouring around for daily news. I'm going to jump on this, you know, no way. But I mean, if you know, if they said it was the bees knees, you know, a year ago, and you know, this thing has since tanked. That's kind of interesting. This question comes from Jill. She says, what holds more weight in securing a story? Numbers, you know, quantitative information like revenue, user count, or uniqueness of the product, something new, new and useful? Again, I, you know, they're not too many things, you know, they would fit in as ingredients in a story. And something that catches your attention is one thing. But it's, you know, usually it's the whole point of doing all these stories is that there is a, you know, something is reflective of something broader, right? Some broader trend. And that is usually, you know, these days, if you can't measure that, it probably is not there. Let's break it down. I don't want to just be generic on this next question. But I want to talk about, you know, engaging with public relations people. And I want to talk about your preferences. So let's say it's hard news, something breaking that is, you know, of importance. How do you want to be contacted in that case? Not only rarely. I mean, in a sense, it's got to be pretty big news. I was, you know, before IBM announced that Jenny Rometti was going to step down, right? After the close of market one day. I mean, I did get into it. I got a call from, you know, all the top PR guys there at IBM, almost at the same time as crossing the wire, right? So, I mean, there's that other than that, I mean, I, you know, kind of telephone calls on daily news. It's got to be pretty big. It's got to be very big, actually. I mean, for us to cover it. But if it is really big, do you want a phone call or an email? I want, if it's really big, I want both. Just so I don't miss it, you know, don't miss it. How many emails are you getting each day? How many email pitches would you say you're getting each day? I don't know about pitches. But, you know, I've got an old email address which is kind of widely used and let's just see. My inbox has 310,493 emails. Just to frame it, you know. So, you know, I can get 40, 50 emails a day. But usually 40 or 50. But usually, you know, some small, tiny percentage I will open. Some of them, you know, if you're working on a story and people are back and forth, and you're fact-checking, I mean, that stuff is what you're looking for. Other things that come in, I, you know, might do it at the end of the day to sort of take a look at what we've got. Do you use any spam filtering technology to screen out bulk email sends? No. I mean, but the New York Times has some. And so, of those 40 to 50, what percentage would you say you open? Ten percent. And you open it based on the subject line, the sender? Yeah, the subject line. Also, the sender, I would imagine, if it's coming from... Of course, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, look, some of you know. I mean, you're all in the courtesy. Right to reply. I mean, I just, you know, thanks. Whatever. But, you know, so I, and I look at just some of it's just arbitrary. Something comes in if you can, you know, it's obviously not for me. It might be of interest to somebody else at the time. So I, you know, reply and pass on the email address of the other reporter. And what makes a good subject line? Are there any trigger words? No, I mean, it has to look good. It has to sync with something I'm looking at or interested in. And so, but no, I mean, there's no dog whistle. Right? That's good. Oh my God, I got to open that, right? You know, Green Carter had those empty modifier words that are so famous that everyone talks about. He had this list of like empty modifier words that could not be included in stories. And they were words that were so overused that they were devoid of meaning. For me, the one I keep seeing in tech that just comes up over and over again is effective and efficient. You know, I mean, okay, it increases productivity, you know, to do what. Are there any sort of empty modifier keywords that if you see them in a subject line, it's like, yeah, I'm not opening that. Oh, I won't say I'm not opening it. But, you know, I mean, look, they're the usual overused marketing terms. I mean, everything is AI now. Right? I mean, three years ago, what we used to call data science, which is a bunch of, you know, a lot of data plus machine learning algorithms is all now branded AI. There's no company that doesn't engage in AI. So, so, you know, the filter there to get over that towards something substantive is pretty high. But there aren't, I mean, they're not set words, you know, set me up on one or another. I mean, it just, you know. So how do you feel if, you know, someone goes around you if you don't reply? Like they send you something, they don't hear back, and then they go to someone else on your team? Totally free market. I'm fine with it. There's no, I mean, if you're proprietary, you're doing too little. There's plenty to go around. I don't, I don't have any problem with that. I mean, you know, it's one thing if you're halfway into a story, right? And so, you know, then it's because you've invested some time, right? But other than that, I just, you know, look, I, it is, it's, you know, people have a different time. They're not focused on one thing at a particular time. I wouldn't care almost what it is. You couldn't get to something else for three days. Yeah. You know, all that kind of stuff goes into the mix. So I think it's, to me, it's a free market. There's no proprietary stuff. It's like what I was overseas for a decade from the times. Tokyo, Manila, London, bunch of the places in between. But in London, we were in the same building as the Wall Street Journal. And I, you know, they wanted to ask what the, what, what working with the bureau chief was like. And the journal, I mean, bureau chiefs were filters. And they, you know, they could control what story pitches went in. You had to get it past them to get the pitch inside. Joe Leligo was my, was the bureau chief when I was asked this. I said, Hey, I don't think he reads it. My stuff when it goes in the paper, let alone before it goes in. I mean, it just, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a pretty free market place. And I always ask him. This next question is from AB, Amy Robin. She says, do you ever take in-person meetings with corporate folks for background or introductions? Yeah. Yeah, I do. I do. I don't, I mean, you know, again, do it regularly if that way lies madness, but it's got to be something that captures my attention. I mean, but you know, this, I don't have enough time for, you know, outgoing, letting load incoming. But if, you know, look, if somebody's in an industry that I'm looking at or doing something that looks particularly intriguing, I, you know, yeah, I do. I just, you know, I try to limit it to a couple of times a week, you know, because otherwise, again, it just, you know, it just chews you up. What's a good length for an email? Introductory email, sort of a query just to take your temperature on whether or not you're, might be interested in a story. Three paragraphs. I mean, arbitrarily, but yeah. Attachments okay or no? Yeah, sure. I mean, it depends. I mean, but if the first three paragraphs don't get you interested, the attachment is, you know, you're not going to go to it. So, you know, who the, who the person company is, you know, what they're doing that's intriguing. You know, it's, you know, it's, it's the pitch, you know, it's the pitch on an idea the same way they talk about sort of, you know, the DC elevator pitch, you know, what's your idea? Who's on your team? Who's back in you? Right. That's, you know, to get attention for stories, it's, you know, it's somewhat individual companies. It's somewhat the same. This next question comes from Garrett. He says, what are your pet peeves when reading story ideas, pitch emails? Somebody has no idea what I've done or what I, you know, I mean, you have to know who you're dealing with. I mean, it's so obvious to see the stuff that somebody just pasted your name at the top of it. And it's, you know, right? And it's, it's a carte blanche email. It's just, you know, I mean, they're used to, it's, you know, it's got to have something that, you know, that resonates, you know, look at what the person's done last, you know, six months or a year. Does any of this resonate with any of that or not? I mean, you know, that's, that's a pretty good indication. So I, you know, I know you, you've been covering antitrust for years and that seems to have heated up for you lately. Yes. Are there, is that what you're most interested in right now? Or is there anything else you're tracking closely? And that question's from Sarah. Yeah, I mean, look, there's themes. That's one of the themes. Again, this kind of, you know, the progression of modern, you know, AI technology through the workplace is another one. You know, where, where it shines, where it stumbles is another thing. And these kind of workplace issues that I mentioned before, you know, how you get more inclusiveness, you know, and I look at that to frankly, just, you know, everything's a tech story. So that is, yeah. Are you, are you looking pretty, you know, intensely at AI right now? Is that something that you are covering? Yeah, sure. And so, you know, when, when we think about AI as this black box versus artificial general intelligence, you know, the idea that, you know, not just can AI solve some narrow problem, but can AI actually solve a human problem? Like analyze the sentiment of a story. What's your opinion on that? Yeah, I mean, sentiment's probably pretty easy actually of the things it can do because what, you know, what those sentiment analysis stuff does is, is link words to sentiment and then it's a matching problem. So that's not hard. I mean, what people generally think of as general human, general AI is, you know, the simplest explanation is, you know, reason as a child does, you know, goes out and sees the world and makes sense of it without thousands and thousands or millions of, of cases of data. Right. And that's, that's, you know, you don't have to worry too much about that. It isn't going to happen anytime soon. There's a young guy who is in here, who's an AI expert and he was, he's got to start up. And as he said about general AI, that's a very few people drinking large amounts of Pule. It's, you know, the kind of, one of the nice things about the quotidian stuff is it actually, that's where you're really going to get productivity gains. You're going to build businesses. You know, things like robotic process automation. I did a piece on that a couple of years ago and it, you know, and it, you know, some, I think Tom Malone was the guy who said, or Tom Davenport at the time said, you know, it's the lowest imaginable form of artificial intelligence, right? The least intelligent form of artificial intelligence. And that's, I mean, that's where it kind of rises up. And then there are big questions. I mean, how, how, how broad can natural language processing go? For example, I mean, because that eats into all the knowledge professions. And what with the great advances since 2012 in deep learning have been in, you know, classification and recognition problems, that image recognition, speech identification, translation and so forth. And those are interesting, but they're kind of, you know, specific things. And even playing go board games, board games are great. They're a bounded world, you know. I'm writing a report now on the state of media monitoring. And so I've been briefing with a lot of the CEOs of the news and social media monitoring platforms. And then I've been kind of gut checking what I hear from them against academics at Stanford and other schools that are doing natural language processing. And, you know, basically what I'm hearing, you know, here's one example. Let's say, for example, there was an article written about maybe a roundup story about mobile phone services. Comparing the quality or rather the richness of the of the subsidies of various services against each other. I mean, you'd have things like, you know, speed of the network, consistency of the network, the deals in place to afford you handsets. There'd be so many different topics and subtopics in a story like that, comparing the services to each other that if you tried to reduce, you know, the sort of the final judgment on whether or not that piece was positive or negative to a single sentiment, it would be impossible. And if what you're doing is counting words, right, and processing language rather than understanding language, right, that information would not be accurate. And so what I'm hearing, what seems to be the consensus I'm hearing from most of people who are much smarter than me is, you know, when it comes to something like natural language understanding, you know, that is a form of AGI and we are not there yet. And so human assisted AI when it comes to interpreting sentiment is, you know, very reasonable, but to automate that process is really risky. I'd agree. It's, you know, for example, I mean, this is a few years back that there was a piece that did artificial intelligence in legal profession, right? And they, you know, in earlier years, individual, you know, kind of electronic discovery and so forth had been, there were these predictions that lawyers would go away, right? And what happened was that MIT labor professor and North Carolina law professor got a hold of billing records for how, you know, lawyers really do spend their time and then seeing what could, you know, looking at what could be automated and not, and part of that was then looking at, you know, legal startups. And one of the guys who, for a Toronto firm is who had worked on the Human Genome Project and he was asked by a friend who was a lawyer and was head of the startup, take a look at this. He figured, oh, that'll be like a weekend's worth of work. Well, four years later, he was still at it, right? I mean, all of this, and it works best with specific domains. I mean, it's, you know, if you can do a legal profession, medical profession, specific words and things, it's, you know, you can make a lot more progress than you can in just, you know, generally, you know, with conversations, trying to figure out what people are saying, right? And I mean, to be fair to the machines, I mean, the kind of classical line on this is from one of the original founders of speech recognition is, you know, airplanes don't flap their wings. I mean, machines do it differently. So that's not necessarily a problem. It doesn't have to be like humans do it. I mean, the way humans do it. But the output has got to be something that we would recognize as you put it, understanding. Talk to us about your policy on news embargoes. Usually I'm fine with them because they're not going to be stories anyways. I mean, look, if it's something, in a sense, if it's something that's coming, look, this is how something came to you and you wouldn't have know it otherwise. I mean, you're sort of dishonest to say, you know, you know, you're not going to take an embargo. If it's fine that's taken embargo, then you're not going to look at it. You know, it's, yeah, I don't do a ton of daily stuff. I mean, I think the guys in the journal take a different approach to this, right? You're a real beat reporter, right? You have to, you know, you don't want to be held back by the company, right? And then there's other things. I just got a piece for, we'll run tomorrow. It's based on new research that a bunch of scientists have done, which was being published in the journal Science at 2 p.m. tomorrow afternoon. Do I agree to that embargo? Sure. I mean, you know, that's, yeah. I think it's, you know, it's a judgment call as to how interested you are. And, you know, it's one thing if you, you know, if you follow the company so closely, you kind of knew this was coming anyways. I mean, I think that's where a lot of really deep beat reporters were. But that's not, that's usually those things are so granular that they're hardly, you know, they're not stories for us. Well, let's say it really is a story, like Microsoft has some serious new product. And, you know, they want the story to come out when it's available, but they want the advance time to brief you. And you know, they're briefing the journal and they're briefing business insider and whoever the other usual suspects are. You know, when, before you get into that type of a situation or there are certain questions, you're going to want answers to before you decide whether or not you're going to cover it. What would the terms be? I mean, what I would have to do is get some indication that like product announcements I almost never cover. I mean, companies got to sell their own stuff. That's not what I mean. What if it's the Apple Watch or something of that magnitude? Yeah, sure. Then we do. I mean, Brian Chan does, I'm sure, right. You know, he's, you know, yeah. No, that, if it's, if it's, if it's open and shut, sure. I mean, and then there's the debate here. I mean, some of these Apple products we've actually, I think, I think, we actually fronted, you know, it's, you know, something when I first joined the paper that never would have happened taking a commercial product. Are you kidding me? You know, it's, you know, it's like an ad, right? Whereas, you know, the argument is that the story is the story and these are huge sociological phenomenon as well as everything else. So I'm still glad I don't have to do it. I mean, I can just remember being involved in so many embargoes that were such nail biters because we were so afraid that someone would go early and screw everyone else over. Is that not something you're concerned about in an embargo situation? Yeah, but look, if you give somebody a word, you know, I mean, that's, that's it. I mean, the notion is so that you're going to create a barcode and then consciously break it. I mean, some of these embargoes move around a little bit. They actually wasn't conscious in one case. There could be mistakes. They could be, you know, they can move around and then you kind of miss an email or something. I mean, that, you know, that, that'll happen now again. But, you know, I mean, of the things you worry about in your career, embargo and a product announcement of the things you're going to think back, I mean, geez, I wish they would have done that. I don't think so. What about exclusives? Are you doing a lot of exclusives? And it's so, do you have a policy around that? Yeah, I mean, what's exclusive is my ideas. And that's what animates most of my stories. So I don't, you know, I'm not, I don't have the issues that, on that front, that, you know, Dai Wakabayashi who covers Google would or Micah Isaac who covers Facebook would or Jack Nickas who covers Apple would or Karen Weiss who covers Amazon and Microsoft would. Right. So it's, it's, you know, it's just far less an issue for me than it is for them. But I mean, you know, always you would prefer to have it exclusively than be part of a pack. Talk to us about some of your favorite news sources. Are there any sort of underground kind of niche news sources that you really like and pay attention to? No, but it's underground niche news sources. But I mean, you know, I look at the National Bureau of Economic Reports, you know, working papers and those are circulated every Monday. You know, there's ideas, you know, things that are going on there. I used to, I used to follow Techneme more than I do now, just to see what's the kind of out there. You know, look, then there's all the kind of basic stuff. I mean, you know, it's, there's some, you know, Times Journal, the FT, the Bloomberg. I mean, we, you know, I live in a household where we subscribe to them all, including the Daily News, only the New York Post we do not. Part of this is, you know, we oversees for all these years the FT, you know, for all the time sake. But you know, we take all those and then, you know, and then you look Twitter is I use it as a recommended reading list. And that's, you know, and then you kind of, you know, follow people there that are, you know, that might be useful and that, you know, that's always, you know, a toggling question. I mean, if you're really actually doing work, you're not following Twitter, right? If you're an editor, you are. If you're a reporter, you're not. I mean, you're going deep on individual stuff and talking to people, right? And so how much time you then pull out and look at some of this other stuff or have, you know, have tweaked that going all the time is, you know, that's just not something I'm going to do, but I do follow it. I mean, you know. Do you listen to any podcasts? Yeah, but most, I mean, I catch the weekly or the daily at the end of the day. And then there's just different ones. I mean, American history tellers is run by a guy who's part of the marketing department of Southern Memphis University. He does some really terrific stuff. I mean, these are, you know, history of the Depression. These are in episodes. He gets experts to come in. You know, there are a few others. I Spy is one that Foreign Policy magazine does on the international stuff. So I don't, you know, but I'm not, you know, I listen to Care Splishers once in a while. You know, but I'm not. Sorry, I missed that. You listen to who? Cara Swisher. Okay. All right, Kyle. Recode. Yeah, exactly. Which is, you know, which is more in the, you know, the category that you're talking about. You know, right? I mean, business related, right? Do you find like, if you're working on a story and you haven't spoken to the subject that, to characters who might be key to the story, do you ever go on to sort of the podcast world to find them and listen to their appearances on other shows or maybe, you know, is that a resource for you podcasting? Are you using that? Sure. Or, you know, YouTube has a lot of presentations that the person's given in the past. I mean, you know, CEO who spoke to Stanford or something or something, you know, right? I mean, that's all potential. When you're looking to add YouTube videos and there's a bunch of them and you've got some which are presentations at conferences and some which are presentations in an academic environment. Would you favor the academic environment? It depends what the subject is. And there aren't usually that many. And I, you know, I find them this way. Everybody else does search. Talk to us about your search. I imagine you must have very advanced. I mean, my, I would think, I don't know. I mean, I would think you don't just put a keyword in. You do an advanced boolean query. Is that true? No, I use a lot of words, though. I mean, so I, you know, you know, here's where Google is pretty darn good. Yeah. Are you using negative keywords? This and this, not that or? I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I mean, that's more, you know, if you do refine things on LinkedIn, you know, you, you know, you can do by company and this and that. You know, you can put in the filters. But I mean, for, for regular search, I do not. I'm so surprised because you're covering these enormous companies that I would think you would get so much noise. Yeah. Although I'm not, I'm almost never trawling randomly. Right. I just, you know, it's, I mean, I'm looking for something specific usually. So it's not. Can you give us an example? Yeah, sure. You know, FTC filings in an acquisition case, historically, you know, what the vote was and what the, with each one, you know, so, I mean, one of the great, one of the things that really changes how much to send public record over the years. I mean, that is, that's a revolution. And then there's, you know, freedom of information at filings, which are a kind of a dark art. I mean, some, some places are really good. Some places, you know, you could go forever, right? Your federal agencies and, you know, maybe in the next year, right? Where sometimes, you know, bang, you go right away. So if that is, and to be honest with you, people who are FOIA experts, you know, and that kind of do that. I mean, both the Washington Bureau here and here in New York. So there's, you know, there are people who've mastered those arts or as well as one can. This question comes from George Bradley and Ashlyn Lepore-Russi. And they're basically interested to know, like if you're a PR person that has a stable of academic experts that are genuine experts in different domains, how do you promote that as a resource to the media to comment on stories that they're writing? I try to be a matchmaker. In other words, you know, see what somebody, you know, pick your venue that you like this person to appear in and see who's been writing about the subjects that they're experts in. One of the ones I, you know, kind of, you know, never use is the stuff that's, you know, right-pigged to a news event and we've got an off-the-shelf expert. I should, you know, I'm not in that game. I should know more than they do who the best people are. I mean, most of these fields, you know, that's, but in some, if you've got somebody that's done, particularly in any kind of really recent, you know, relevant research in the area that the person's writing about, you know, just let them know. That's interesting. And to be honest, the filter for academics is lower. I mean, you know, they're, look, you know, they're in the business of developing and owning ideas and sense their marketers, right? But the assumption, true or not, is that, you know, it's a more disinterested inquiry that they're making into the subject. So frankly, they get much, you know, if you're an academic, you get much better, you know, you're more likely to get a hearing. So what I heard, it's one of, repeat it back to you to make sure I understood. Because of your domain expertise, after 30 years covering this, you feel like you know the academics that are worth talking to. You don't necessarily need to be trotted out as stable of new experts every time there's a story because you know them already. Yeah, although you're always looking for different people. And I, you know, I probably shouldn't say this, but there's a, it's true. I mean, there's a real effort to balance out these things to make sure they're women and minorities. I mean, nobody's actually doing an absolute count. But, you know, imagine tenure at a university. You're a white male. You know, you better have invented a cure for cancer. Right. And so, so it's no different. I mean, we're, you know, what a down version of that. But I mean, you know, it's, there is, and I've had people ask me, I mean, is there, you know, is there a quota? No, there isn't. But there's, you know, there's a leaning toward that direction. So, I mean, new people, I'm not, you know, it's not like I know everybody, right. And new people come up all the time, including in antitrust, right. Or any of these kind of familiar fields. So, yeah, always looking, but I'm not, you know, you know, stories, you know, e-mails to say, you know, what stories are you working on and can I help you? Aren't very helpful. Here's an interesting question from Greg Wise. He says, do editors or publishing folks judge coverage in the times by how many clicks it receives or how many times it gets shared? Yeah, everything's measured. And that's a signal, but it's not, you know, it's, you know, you're guided by it, you're not ruled by it. I mean, in the sense that, you know, look, we're going to, look, we're going to, you know, in the day, I mean, you know, we have a Kabul Bureau, right. I mean, the amount of people in Rod Norland, for example, was there, you know, I mean, the resources spent on that are immense. I mean, are there, you know, what percentage of clicks are you going to get? No, I mean, if we did it only by, I mean, we do, do a lot of opinion, we do a kind of smarter living stuff and then any big news, right? I mean, that's just not, I mean, that's not what we're going to do. So, yeah, you do it, but it doesn't have an effect sure it does. I mean, if you look, but if you, if you do a story and you sort of, you know, this is what I ought to do, right. It's just, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's good subject. It's, we ignored otherwise, yada, yada, yada. And it gets, you know, 20,000 page views, which is nothing for us, right. You know, you say, am I going to do one of these again? Right. Next time around, because they all take more time than you think, right. So, yeah, no, it has, it has, and we measure everything. There's not, I mean, to pretend that that's not a factor. This is case, but it's also, it's not, you know, I don't really know about his feet, but then my, my impression was in the day. I mean, you know, there was, you know, it's kind of a skin or rat following of, you know, what attracted, you know, what attracted clicks, right. And, and also what's really changed, of course, is that advertising is a false God. I mean, the view was at one time that you had to, I like, we frankly, we had a tech blog, right. From between like, It's, it's a vlog, remember. But like 2011 to 2016, it ended in 16, right. And, you know, whatever, you know, you know, the justification is always, this is a way you can kind of harvest new material, you know, things that are in your notebook and yada, and, you know, the idea was that, you know, you're supposed to do it a couple of times a week, in addition to everything else, right. That was a PR person's dream. Because then a product announcement, you know, you kind of get two other calls, right, or two or three other calls and put in a short story. And you could write it in a looser tone, which is sort of fun, but it, you know, a proper job took the better part of the day, right. And so, you know, and they were set up, they were often pegged to some sort of announcement or something, right. They were brought them out, but basically this was, you know, the people who were involved in this, who were part of the announcement were, you know, the Amen chorus for the product, right. And part of that, the big, the rationale, was that we needed to create more content to sell ads against, right. And what happened, of course, is everybody learned that, oh, by the way, you know, I mean, online advertising is a great business, if your name is Google or Facebook, and now it's something on Amazon. But everybody who's making it is a subscription business now in publishing. It's us, it's the journal, it's the Washington Post, it's, you know, it's the FT, right. I mean, the economists, I mean, I see the things that I subscribe to and how, you know, the New York Times never gave it away, the printed it, it was never, you know, it was never cheap, which was always, which was always good, right. Whereas, you know, the journal, I used to get it for like $90 a year, and then they had this big hunt to find out so much through companies, this big hunt to find out where to send things on the weekend because, you know, they didn't, you know, right, they were corporate subscriptions. You know, now it costs $500 or whatever it is a year, just like the FT does, like the Times does. So ads don't matter anymore. So then they're all changed, you know, no, fewer better stories, right. And yes, is there a journalistic rationale? Sure there is. But, you know, the business context changed a lot of what we're doing. And, you know, and now, you know, we also mentioned shares and engagement and so forth are all, you know, kind of part of the mix. And some things are much more, you know, if you're writing for, if you're in the cooking product or the crossword puzzle, or some of these specialized things, right, which are pure service journalism or entertainment, depending on your point of view, right. Those things are, you know, the volume of viewership and the length of it and so forth is, you know, it's hugely important. Whereas, I mean, if, you know, if you're, if you're doing a, you know, we've hit privacy very hard, for example. At the Times, a lot of people on it, including on the editorial side, the op-ed page stuff. You know, it was an institutional commitment to do that. And if some of these stories don't get a lot of coverage, that's fine. You know, a lot of, you know, we're going to keep covering and keep covering and be honest. So that when things do get big, you know, you're there. And it's considered an important subject. So, in his book, AI Superpowers, former Google President Kaifu Li argues, China's disregard for personal privacy and personal property rights and a general nonchalance for personal privacy among Chinese consumers puts China in a stronger position to lead on AI. Because there's no data like more data in a machine learning world and there are fewer data collection restrictions over there. Do you think AI is going to, that China is going to lead on AI? In certain areas it might. And then there's the question of how much it can export it. You know, this is Belt and Road and stuff, right? I mean, you know, it's extend to other places and we've done stories on that including, you know, Latin America, not just Asia. But I would argue there's diminishing returns to data. And there's a whole debate in the AI world as to, you know, the limits to the absolute brute force you know, data approach. It only gets you so far. So I, look, the only honest answer is it remains to be seen. But, and then there's, you know, this whole kind of, you know, whether it's true or not. I think China is much better positioned, for example, to do these things that we feared Japan was in the 80s. I think China is much better positioned to fear Japan was in the 80s. And I was over there in the early 80s, right? This is just after Ezra Vogel at Harvard had written Japan as number one. And this is where, you know, there was concern about Americans being reduced to sweeping up around the supercomputers and flipping burgers to McDonald's, right? That was Mondale's famous line. My sense. I mean, I don't know China as well as Japan. It's, it's a more individualistic place. So there's more upside, you know, for China. And then there wasn't, I mean, I remember having this conversation with Bill Gates about, you know, why didn't Japan? I mean, you know, highly literate, stem education, terrific. Why didn't they develop, you know, software business? You know, that were really competitive with the United States. And, you know, it's not, it's also 125 million people. It's not, it's a big market, even there. And his, you know, was, you know, individualism and so forth, right? I think China is a much better place than that than, you know, in some ways. And even their education system and their willingness to, you know, go out into the world. You know, all the Chinese students everywhere in our university. So I, you know, we'll see. We'll see. But I don't think, I don't think just data is manifest destiny and AI. You know, that line, there's no data like more data was coined by Cambridge Analytica founder Robert Mercer. And Cambridge Analytica used psychographic profiling for political advertising. And so obviously the more data they have, the better they can target those ads. Any thoughts on how psychographic profiling will show up in the upcoming presidential election? Yeah, again, I mean, we have people who, that's a full time beat here. So I assume more of the same. I'm personally unconvinced that it does more of the magnify what's already there. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm, you know, I am reluctant to believe that people are skinner rats. You know, only responding to the stimuli they have. But that said, I mean, let's face a lot of this has, you know, this is deterring some people from going to the polls, encouraging others revving up the base and so forth. And everything we've read suggested, you know, the current administration was extremely good at and others are kind of trying it as well. So I, you know, one would think wouldn't say that the more of this fake stuff's around the higher your filter is. But, you know, we'll see. Steve, thanks for taking the time to do this. You've always been so generous. I want to do a final shout out to EFF, the electronic freedom Foundation, protecting your personal privacy online. More information at our source.com forward slash EFF. I want to thank our gold sponsors, Flux Branding, a world-renowned resource for defining your visual brand. Flux Branding is a group of creative visionaries and graphic designers dedicated to helping clients conceptualize and realize their brands online at Flux Branding.com and Digital Dragon, where children can develop the skills they need to prosper in the age of machines. Digital Dragon teaches digital literacy to tomorrow's programmers and technology entrepreneurs. More information at digitaldragon.com I want to invite you all to join us next week for a discussion beyond the newsbeat and conducting accurate, timely journals research so you can deliver your news to the right reporters with Muckrak CEO Greg Galant. As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently completing an extensive report on the state of news media and social media monitoring platforms. If you'd like a free copy you can sign up at for my PR Tech Secrets email newsletter at EricSchwarzman.com. That will cover using AI to monitor for relevancy and sentiment, monitoring articles behind paywalls, advanced boolean filtering, monitoring for business impact, PR attribution and more. You can get that again, sign up for a copy at EricSchwarzman.com. If you're not watching this live, you can go to PRTechWednesdays.com and register to attend these free weekly PR Tech briefings every Wednesday. If you're watching on YouTube, please like and subscribe to the channel. This has been EricSchwarzman. Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you. We'll see you next Wednesday. Thanks. Bye-bye.