 We're very privileged to have Tom Rosenstiel with us. He's really one of North America's most preeminent media critics, media scholars. You should know he is a journalist at heart. He began his career as a working journalist, worked with Newsweek LA Times, then moved into sort of the next phase of his career, helping us to understand journalism in very interesting times of transition and was one of the co-founders of the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Center and most recently has become the executive director of the American Press Institute. Those of you who are journalism students have almost certainly used this book, Elements of Journalism, and it's it's almost our holy book, I think. I mean, this is really an essential text to understand journalism. There's a new edition of that book coming out later this year and Tom is also co-editor of a new book on journalism ethics, which has only just come out. And tonight, he's going to talk to us about a range of things that cross over from the elements to the ethics and really the future of news trying to figure out what is going on in journalism and his view is, well, just ask the audience and that will maybe help you answer some of those questions. So I know that you are here to listen to Tom and not to me, so I will ask him to please come up and begin. It's a pleasure to be here. I should say that in the class this morning, Kanina and Alan's class, Kanina did some gimmick where she was going to give a mitten of some sort. This mitten didn't really have fingers it looked like to me, but well, I don't know anything about mittens, but it was based on who asked the best question and they were good questions for a particular for an undergraduate class, a number of things that I had not thought of before, so good luck picking that mitten winner. What I'm going to talk to you about this evening is where I think things are going in in this industry, in this business, in this institution that we call the news business, and there's a lot of uncertainty about this obviously, but there's one thing that I think we can agree on and that now the audience is going to determine the future of news. I would say that the, that one concept is probably most important to understand about where things are going, and that is that previously the consumer, the citizen, had to adapt their behavior to fit the news media. We had to be home at 6.30 to watch the news. We had to read the paper that morning when it came out to be in sync with our fellow citizens and know what they wanted, to know what the weather was going to be, to be in sync with the news cycle. Today, that has been turned on its head. The media now need to adapt their behavior to fit the consumer. The consumer can get news on demand when they want, and can use the sources they want, the ways they want to do it. And the media need to understand them in a way that they never had before. So this is turning everything on its head. It's a paradigm shift. And while that has proven to create enormous disruption, it has destroyed essentially the revenue model for media, at least for commercial media, and while, so while it's scary and disruptive, this shift is in effect democratization of information. And in many ways, it mirrors the democratization that happened with the Enlightenment. Before the printing press was invented in 1450, it took a month, a year, to hand copy one copy of the Bible. The Oxford University Library contained 122 books. After the printing press was invented in the first year of the press, a single Gutenberg press could print 180 Bibles. And by 1501, 50 years later, there were an estimated 35,000 new books that had been written across Europe. And 10 million copies of books were in circulation. A key concept of Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation was a call for all Christians to learn how to read so they could understand the Bible for themselves rather than having it translated by priests so that they could find their own path to salvation. A hundred years after the birth of the printing press, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word fact first appears in the English language. And in its wake came the birth of what we call journalism. Because power shifted from old authorities and more toward consumers of news themselves. Today, those who are going to thrive in our new media culture are those who understand the new audience, the new public, and who believe that journalism is going to be better because we have more tools to inform citizens and because this process has been democratized. So I want to now offer seven lessons that I see in the data about what the audience is telling us. And almost every piece of data that I'm going to refer to, every piece of data I'm going to refer to, there are multiple sources for it. So I'm going to cite one piece of data but there's more than one. The first is that audiences are consuming more news, not less. A quarter of people say they get more news, only 10% say they get less. Other surveys reinforce this finding, this data comes from the New York Times. And the findings are even more powerful when you survey people who get news on mobile devices. 32% get more news than they used to, 8% get less, meaning they're spending time with other things. So mobile is a very powerful multiplier. Second, the digital technology that has destroyed the revenue model for news has probably increased the news audience. The average age of a newspaper reader in print is 54. But the average age of a newspaper reader on mobile devices, on a mobile phone or a tablet, according to data from Scarborough, is 17 years younger, 37. And there's a new cohort of news consumer, mobile only, people who get news on digital devices, only mobile devices, not PCs. And the average age of the mobile exclusive audience, and this is for newspaper content, is 33. The concept that newspapers could reach a 33-year-old, let alone the average age of the reader would be 33, was unthinkable if we were only talking about print. If you look at print readership from the last eight years, it's down about 16% in the U.S., but total readership is down about 10% of newspaper content. In other words, if it weren't for digital, the readership numbers would be much worse. The revenue numbers would be much better. New technology is bringing new audience 59% of people 18 to 24 read newspaper content regularly. I'll say that again and make its own slide. 59% of people 18 to 24 read newspaper content regularly. That means weekly on a computer, in print, or monthly, at least monthly, on mobile devices. Mobile is measured monthly, that's the only way to get it, so it could be more often. The third idea is that the key to the future for news publishers is to understand something that I call the cycle of news discovery. What I mean by the cycle of news discovery is how people dig in and learn more once they start to hear about something. Again, data from the New York Times. Half of people say they first hear news from television, and 8 and 10 then go somewhere else to learn more. Half of those people go to another platform. If they heard it on television, they go online, they go to a different kind of device. Most of those go to a legacy established news source, somebody that they have some ongoing relationship. Traditional news brands. News consumers are loyal across 7 and 10, are loyal to those brands across platforms. The technology here is not a threat to your relationship with your readers. A key element for news publishers then is to leverage the synergy of screens. This is a report from Business Insider Intelligence and Market Research firm, but there are many sources that would tell you the same thing. That users gravitate to whatever device is most appropriate or convenient given the context they find themselves in. And people who own a lot of devices are not distracted by them. They tend to become more loyal. According to Reuters Institute data, smartphone and tablet owners, for instance, are twice as likely to pay for news online as other consumers. The fourth key idea is the future of your students, if you're a student of your production, and the future of our digital lives is mobile and social. Most of all, this means mobile. Mobile is the real Web 2.0. It's the second chance for publishers who essentially squandered the first decade of the Internet to not squander the next. This is mobile. This is unit sales of mobile devices versus PCs. That PC number is pretty flat. Mobile is going out the roof. And media has to start acting now. That means if you're a professor, you should be teaching mobile now. If you are a publisher, it means you should be creating your mobile apps now. If the industry waits for revenue to prove itself, then they will have squandered Web 2.0. Because you have to invent this technology, invent these apps, invent the way to use them before we will figure out how to monetize that. The instinct will be to say, well, we went from print dollars to digital dimes, and now we're going to go to mobile pennies. No, thank you. Well, you have no choice. If you don't do it, it's over. Mobile newspaper readership grew by 58% in 2012. The data show that half of newspaper consumption is now mobile. And 21% or half of that, virtually, is mobile exclusive. It also is going to be social. This chart tells you the time spent on social media versus web portals. And that number crossed in 2011. This year, 163.5 million Americans are on social networks. That's over half the U.S. population. And it's expected to grow another 17% to 183 million in 2013. Social is not necessarily a distraction for news. It is a portal into news. And there are ways to do this successfully for traditional journalism. The Deseret News, which is the news publisher in Salt Lake City that's owned by the Mormon Church and is run by a guy named Clark Gilbert, who was a protege of Clay Christensen and taught at Harvard Business School. They went from 100,000 social followers to 24 million in one year. And how did they do this? They identified the topics that they thought that they would specialize in. And then they recognized that for their audience, these topics were not news topics, but passions. So one of their topics is family. And they bought and created social portals for, I love my mother. I love my father. I love my kids. I love my family. I care about my schools. They built social media sites for these in eight languages. And then they created social content there. They brought in social content from other places there. And then they put their content into those spaces. More than that, they also listened to the conversation that's occurring in those spaces. They listened to the social conversation that's occurring on the topics that they want to really cover well. And then they create content based on what people are talking about. So they're listening to the social conversation and adapting their content to it, not just figuring out where they can place things. In other words, the public is having their conversation. And for the news to be relevant, it needs to listen to it and be part of it. The fifth idea I want to offer is that there is no such thing as an online experience. We spent the first decade of the internet thinking that people don't read at length on screens. The average time on a website was 30 seconds. Or the average time on a page on a website was 30 seconds. It's a distracted medium. What we didn't realize until a couple of years ago is what we were really measuring there was how people operate on PCs in the office. A PC in the office is a giant distraction machine. The phone is ringing, e-mail is coming in, you're doing all kinds of things. So yeah, people spent 30 seconds on a page. People wouldn't read long form, we thought. We now know that what we thought was online behavior was something else. That behavior actually changes online with time of day. It changes by device. It changes by place and context. Board at work is different than stuck in line. Double screening a game is different than walking to lunch while looking at your phone. And it changes by audience group. The mobile only users are growing cohort, power users, people who work across platforms behave differently than casual users. There are loyal casual users. There are accidental users. There really are many publics for a news publisher. The public is not a monolith. This chart shows us patterns by device by time of day. We can't read it, but the white thing is cell phones and the yellow thing is tablets. Tablet consumption gets really spikes after dinner. The tablet is an 8 to 11 long form reading device. And generations behave differently. This is an audience profile of the Boston Globe, which has worked pretty hard to get young people to read their content. This is what they thought their audience was going to be. But if you work at it, you can make your audience much younger. So the journalism of the future has to understand the rhythms of the news day, place, multiple audiences. This is a big challenge because now we have to go to them rather than they are coming to us. And long form reading is back, thanks largely to technology that didn't exist five years ago. 73% of people who own tablets read long form on them on a regular basis. 70% of people who own smartphones read long form content on smartphones. I don't know how many of them do it every day. Audience focused means, I think, thinking about journalism in a very different way. And the way I suggest we need to think about it is journalism as a collaborative intelligence. We need to see news less as a static product, our stories, our site, our content. And increasingly, we need to see it more as a service that helps citizens, that helps them answer their questions, that helps them learn from each other, that helps them know what's true and does many other things. What do I mean by journalism as collaborative intelligence? I mean journalists organize the power of the network, the machinery, the community, and then they add to that the skills that they can uniquely provide as professional trained journalists. What do I mean by this? Machines, the network, can count. They can bring data in, big data, and make what we know more empirical than it ever was before. The audience brings something new to our journalism that we really didn't have before. They bring their experience, their skills, their physicians, their engineers, they have expertise far beyond what can exist in the newsroom. They also bring multiple vantage points, especially during breaking news events. They bring depth. There's something they call at the guardian, open journalism. It's the philosophy they use, really. It's journalism as collaborative intelligence. They hired a new banking writer who came from Eastern Europe and he knew nothing about banking. And the first thing he did is he started a blog and he said, I'm the new banking writer at the Guardian. I know nothing about banking. Educate me. His theory was that if he went to the readership, if he started calling up sources and said, I'm the new banking writer at the Guardian, you don't know me, but I'd like to interview you, that these bankers would run away. They wouldn't want to be on the record and they wouldn't help him. But if he called out to them and said, I know nothing, educate me, people who would never, he would never have been able to get on the phone would come to him anonymously and want to educate him because it was essentially a request that they teach him rather than that he exploit them. This is one of many examples of how you organize the community. And then journalists, in my view, are hardly obsolete. They are hardly unnecessary. Quite the contrary. They can organize the network and the community. They can triangulate the information that comes from these different sources. They can verify. They can translate and write it in a way that other people can understand it. They have access to interrogate actors and newsmakers that these other factors in this collaboration don't have. And importantly, at least to me, they bring the discipline and training of a dispassionate, open-minded inquiry. In my experience, as you work with other people who enter the media space, you discover, and you find this at the Academy, too, that this notion that you come to something with an open mind and think all sides might have merit is pretty unusual. It's a skill that journalists have developed. The best of them have it more of it. It's what I call the cold eye. And it should not be discounted. In elements, we talk about the idea that of objectivity when it came to journalism never was intended to mean that the journalist had no points of view. The journalist wasn't objective, but their methods could be. Their method of inquiry could be. And we don't want to lose that. The other thing to understand in this new environment is that it is rapidly changing. This collaboration is constantly evolving. It's not static. Once the consumer has seen something better than what they had before, that immediately becomes their expectation. Once you've seen that you can watch anything on HBO, on any device, or that you could watch ESPN live, it takes about a day for you to think, why doesn't every network do that? So the innovation has to be constant and ongoing. The other thing in this collaboration is it has to be optimistic. You have to believe that these tools and this technology creates the potential for a better journalism. The future belongs to people who believe that the future is going to be better. If you think all of this is just a hassle that you have to adapt to, oh God, here comes another one. You will be surpassed by people who believe in and want to exploit and explore the potential of these new tools. So thriving equals deeply understanding our audience. In the past, in media, audience research was largely the domain of the marketing department. And we researched the audience largely so that we could leverage them for advertisers. We tried to figure out what their psychographics were and what they wanted to buy so that we could tell advertisers, here's why you should advertise. Now we need to create a new and better audience research so that we can figure out how to create a journalism that better serves this audience. The way they consume news, what they're worried about in their lives. There is virtually no precedent, no infrastructure for this kind of research in news, and we need to create it. I suspect the university is the place where it can be born. The bar is also higher because on the internet, something better is only a click away. Every website is equal, and the web rewards specialization. It rewards places that are very good at something. So the modern newsroom is a place that's going to get better at a few things that become the tent poles for people to come to them. And then while they're there, they conveniently get the mediocre stuff that they can also find. So the modern newsroom needs to know how to do a few things extremely well and how to curate, borrow, aggregate, or otherwise gather the rest, which means that the modern newsroom may have people in it that we didn't have before. It may have subject experts, it may have social scientists, it may have folks on call. But the idea of this old newsroom that was essentially writers and a few graphics people and former writers who manage them is too simplistic. It's got to be audience people and computer scientists and people who appreciate the technology, people who can create technology. It's a much more complicated operation and it's really good at a handful of topics that become the reason that people go there rather than drift away. The old model of the newsroom was we did everything, none of it particularly well, but because we had everything, people couldn't avoid coming to us. And finally, the journalism of the future has to be much more transparent. So we have to present the news differently. Before trust basically equaled brand. You went to the New York Times because you trusted them. Not every article of the New York Times had to justify that trust independently because it was in the New York Times it spoke for itself. Today trust equals show me why I should believe this particular piece of content. Show me the evidence. Show me the decisions you made about this piece of content. Show your work. And as I said that has to be evident in each piece of content because that content may be completely disconnected from the main brand when I access it through Twitter or Facebook. The old era of news might have been known as the trust me era and now we're in what might be called the show me era and the me in those two phrases has shifted from the media to the audience. So if this is a new era towards enlightenment, a new moment of democratization and by the way that is what they think at Google. That is what they think at Twitter. That is what they think at Facebook. Then the key to this is understanding what citizens really want and capitalizing on that but bringing to it the special things that only journalism can provide. It does not mean thinking that journalism is what it always was and people should somehow pay for that because it's what you've always done. There is, as we say in elements, a basic human instinct. Is there something that I need to know? And there was an old saying that journalism is only as good as the person who owns the press. That's no longer true. Now it's as good as the curiosity of the audience and those who really understand the audience and who believe in the audience who believe in that democratization will be the ones who will prevail. That's it. I hope there are some questions. What different kinds of jobs can we expect to see in that modern newsroom that we don't have now? Right. Well, and we're seeing some movement toward this already. But at bloomberg.gov, which is their new effort started a couple of years ago to cover things in Washington, they don't just have reporters. They also have people who can understand government data, people who used to work, who used to be government experts, who now reside in the newsroom or at the organization and can say, well, this is what this means and do that interpretation. So it means not just translators. It means that you need people who, at the New York Times, they have an audience department of 25 people who are essentially computer analytics experts. These people did not come from news and they study their analytics and survey that audience constantly, their digital audience. Much of what they did in creating the metered paywall at the time came from enormous amount of research and iteration with their digital audience. Their original plan was to charge their print readers more. Why? Because they thought, well, we can soak these guys because they're really loyal. And then they discovered through talking to them a lot that that was going to really irritate these folks and that they felt they should be rewarded for being print readers and that they should pay less because they were servicing the advertising in print. They're now coming to the conclusion at the times that there's actually multiple audiences for digital and they've done this again through this research. And they're moving towards what will probably be a three-tier pricing plan, something that's like $10 a month instead of $30 for people who just read a few articles but are pretty loyal. And then some higher level thing for people who are premium consumers who will pay even more if they could have content that nobody else gets. Politico does the same thing, political problem. So people who really want to study this audience who are data folks and not journalists are part of it. Computer scientists who could say, you know what? We could take this data that we pulled from this database and we could understand it in the following way, create apps, create presentations for it that have nothing to do with what we would think of as journalism. It means having engineers like they have in Silicon Valley working in a modern news organization. In a sense, what made Apple such a successful company during the jobs years was not just that Steve Jobs was there but that it was really a company that had two core sets of values. It had design and engineering. And that sort of bifocal culture is what needs to happen in newsrooms. They need to be computer science data and shoe leather reporting companies. In the same way that they used to, by the way, be printing press and shoe leather reporting companies. Because the other thing about the newsroom culture is that they were these real lone wolf cultures. One reporter would go out and Joe would go find out what's going on in the mayor's office and Joe would come go out and come back with his trench coat and come out of the rain and say, here's my story. And nobody knew how Joe got it and nobody ever asked him about his sources and everybody said, Joe's a stud, let's go have a drink. This new culture is much more of a team culture in which somebody says, you know, I'm seeing something in the statistics about real estate because you've got a numbers guy doing that and a reporter says, hmm, I wonder if that means this and that reporter then brings those skills to it and goes and asks them. That notion of a collaborative intelligence that includes the community, that collaborative culture has to start happening in newsrooms or you're going to be sort of as dumb or as smart as the individual reporter again. The old production systems could encourage that because that was the sort of one guy would go out and do the story and then come back and write it and then they print it. Now, you know, but that was an artifact of that production culture. Now the production culture should be very different. It's smarter if it's different. Well, yeah, that's used to be, I mean, there was one thing that we learned from media research from like 80 years of media research was the media don't tell people what to think but they tell them what to think about. They don't do that anymore because I, you know, while I think about things that I'm stimulated to think about, I have a lot more stimuli than I used to. So my daughter who is 18 and is not a news junkie by any means, she's the one who told me initially about protests in Turkey and I said, how do you know about this? My friend put it on Twitter. Now, she's not on Twitter and, you know, her Twitter universe is very different than mine but she had some friend who heard about it because it involved young people or maybe they'd been to Turkey and then she went to Huffington Post to learn more. Now, I don't know who the original source for what it was she learned from Huffington Post. It was hard to tell because I looked at, I said, send me what you've read from Huffington Post. I really couldn't tell who did the original reporting but she learned about it and she sends me all kinds of things from BuzzFeed, by the way. Now, BuzzFeed's an interesting company, fascinating company. That is, those are MIT engineers who have wandered into, who study what makes something viral. So they've created a science out of trying to understand what will make something viral and they use data to figure that out. We also had another idea which is banner ads and pop-up ads suck. We're not going to have any. We're going to invent new advertising that the consumers like and our measure of whether consumers like that advertising is whether it goes viral and so we've wandered into native advertising, sponsored content, whatever you want to call it. What that really is is a movement toward trying to reinvent commercial information on the web because banner ads and pop-up ads not only were unsuccessful on PCs but are going to be even more unsuccessful on mobile. So while this is a scary, you know, this is fraught with ethical issues, it is an effort to try and create advertising. You know, banner ads and pop-up ads were basically, let's take what we did in one medium and just squish it into another. It was not native to those technologies and that. So native advertising is how do we invent advertising that people actually want to engage in? Google did it. Search is, you know, you're typing in a query to something and if you don't see the answer to it, you look up or you look to the right and guess what? Those ads are complementary to the activity you're engaged in. Banner ads and pop-up ads were antithetical to the activity we're engaged in, which is I'm looking, I'm trying to read the story. What the hell is that? So this is also part of what... I think that one of the things that, one of the questions that I used when I was at Pew a lot was, in surveys, was how... and actually got this idea from somebody who did TV research but who did good TV research was how do people use the news? What is it that they do with it? So when we've asked this on surveys, we'll say what is it that... what are the reasons that you consume news? And one of the things that we see is it varies somewhat by market. So if you live in a place like Miami where the TV is very racy and things like that, people answer these questions a little differently than if you live in a place like, say, Boston where, you know, a little more high-toned. But number one reason is people like to talk about news. They like to share news and talk about it with friends and colleagues and family. So that's a social dynamic of news. And things that are bad and sensational certainly, you know, often fit that description. But very high on the list is also I like to figure out what to do with my time. In certain markets, I like to be outdoors. In other places, it's to save money. Advertising particularly in television and print was, you know, one of the reasons people would particularly in print, one of the reasons that people would buy the product. That's about saving money. That's not about, you know, knowing bad news. So there's a much more complex array of reasons that people use news. And by the way, much of the research that we ask is poorly constructed because it asks people about news. So if you ask people, where do you get your news? They'll think of news in a certain context and they'll tell you, I get it here. But when you ask, where do you get information about the stock market, they give you a different answer. Where do you get information about your sports team? They give you a different, they don't even think of those things necessarily when you ask about news. Even though those are all things that are in newscasts or in news products. So part of this is a broader definition of, is a sort of more supple understanding of what people, what information people are getting and how they get it. In Elements, we say that news is something that helps you navigate, that helps you be a citizen in a democracy and also help you navigate your way through your culture. That's a wide array of things. I mean, Clay Scherke and Emily Bell and Kristi Anderson argued that news is really just sort of watchdog and civic information. I couldn't disagree more strongly. News is anything that helps us sort of enrich our lives and news organizations have known that for a very long time. Certainly Joseph Pulitzer knew that when he was inventing the modern newspaper and comic strips and bridge columns and editorial pages and op-eds and things like that. So now when I say we need to understand how people live their lives and build news that helps them, that doesn't mean pander. That doesn't mean figure out what is, you know, what's the most popular thing and let's just do that. Because if you pander, you will lose your credibility, you'll lose your authority, you'll lose your ability to be unique. You know, television went through a lot of this in the 1990s where they said, well, gee, look at all the, you know, we should be more like entertainment. Well, guess what? Once you start trying to compete with entertainment by being entertaining and you're doing news, you know, you're playing on your, you know, to your weaknesses. So it really means understanding the audience better so you can figure out how to inform them. It also does mean to go back to the previous question, figuring out what they're talking about, what they're worried about in other spaces and helping them talk about those things. That's why social media is so important. Traditional media tend to use social media to market their stuff when actually it's a great window into the intelligence of the community but we don't tend to look at it that way. So one of the things I would say in a university context is get with your computer science people and start to try and understand social media and then bring that knowledge, you know, try and bring that knowledge into the news and communications part of the university. That collaboration needs to happen here too, maybe even start here. I mean, this is, there are many kinds of news organizations, right? I mean, there's a thing in Seattle called Geekwire. Now what Geekwire is, it's a website in Seattle that focuses on technology and innovation. So they're already specialized. And by the way, they specialized the topic that the Seattle Times probably should have owned but they were still operating in this idea, you know. So Geekwire's got a small staff but it's about five times of five or three or four but that's much bigger than the Seattle Times has. So they've already, they now own that space or, you know, at least for now. So their model is going to be very different. So I think a more general interest news organization, let's say that covers a town that, you know, is a community news organization. What they need to figure out is what are the most important topics in this community or areas of interest and need in this community and build what I call, I think I may have said this already, a tent pole expertise where you really get good at these handful of things. Maybe it's six things. Again, the Deseret Media, which is in Salt Lake, they identified six topics that they wanted to become world-class. And this is a little paper in Salt Lake City and they said, these are topics that are of interest of people of faith, not just Mormon faith, because the paper is owned by the Mormon Church, but faith all around the world. And they did research and figured out how big that audience was worldwide, what countries they were in, and they have built up real expertise in education, religion, family. I can't remember what the other ones are. But they said, you know, we're going to get better at these things and then we'll figure out how to spend less effort to cover other things that we do. Now, one of the things that they're really good at is BYU football. So these are not all things that are about religion. And then what are the things that we spend a lot of effort on that we don't need to or that we can gather other ways? I'm working with a chain of papers in the Northwest and one of the things that we asked them was, what information do you spend time on or do you provide to your community that they can get better elsewhere? Because one of the things that these challenged or shrunken newsrooms need to do is figure out what can they give up on or spend less time on as they try and figure out what to get better at. But if your strategy is simply, as I said this morning, my old newspaper The LA Times used to have 1,100 editorial personnel it now has 500. Okay, so they've just cut out a lot of things. What you actually need to do is reimagine yourself and figure out what is it we can get better at because we're going to give up a lot of things and people need to notice us getting better at something rather than just shrinking. Otherwise they'll think, God, there isn't much to this publication anymore. It's also important to the morale of the paper. So the answer to your question is, the strategy differs depending on what kind of news operation you are. If you are very niche, then it becomes simpler. If you are somebody who was bigger and is now shrinking, you've got to find some way where people begin in the community to say, you know, they've gotten better at this. Or I read them because of this. They don't do that other thing as well as they used to. But I read them because of this. There has to be a reason now that people choose you because they have so many other choices. You are not their default anymore if you are a news publisher of any kind. Yes, yes. And in fact, this came up this morning also, Dick Costolo, the head of Twitter, even talked about this in the context of Twitter. He said, we consider the tweet to be the caption to whatever content people are linking to. Increasingly, they want that content to be visual. They want it to be video. Why? Well, for one thing, there's strong indication that video ads may be tolerated and may be more effective on the internet than text ads are. Is it a six-second role? Is it a 15-second role? What length of ad is successful? That's kind of an open question. But Twitter now has an advertise, you know, an ad lead-in company that they've acquired. And you're going to see a lot of this. The other thing, and we talked about this this morning, it could have been one of the parts of this talk, is I believe that in a user-controlled media world where the consumer decides when and how they want to get information, that the story really, the event and the question that people have about it determines which medium and which platform they go to. So if you were seeing that slide presentation, you'd see, you know, a picture of the towers on fire on 9-11, and I'd say some events you want to see live in real-time. Other events are really well-covered. School shooting, you know, somewhere that's happening in real-time. Social media, or somebody organizing social media and organizing the multiple vantage points of the community is a very good way of learning that. When things were breaking in Egypt, the New York Times had two kinds of content you could look at. One was what they called their live blog, and what that was was, actually they called it the lead, and what it was is they just aggregated social media components from everywhere and they topped their story with whatever was most recent. Next to it was a news story, that was a conventional news story that was like a summary if you had knew nothing. So if you were coming to this and hadn't known anything for 18 hours, that news story would catch you up, but if you had spent any time on this topic at all, knew anything, the live, the lead blog was far better because you only had to read down as long until you got to the last thing that you, you know, where you had left the story. And if you'd read that conventional story, looking for what was new, it was incredibly frustrating to read this very conventional news lead about events in Egypt erupted today, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You wanted to, you know, it was, it made you sort of hate everything about old media. They served both things. Some stories are better told visually. Some stories are better told in a chart. For some things, the timeline seems to be the perfect answer. There's a website called Deeply Syria that only tells the story of what's going on in the Civil War in Syria. And it's fascinating because their whole idea is that the barrier to entry for a story like Syria, which has been going on for quite a long time, is people, and this is a problem with news in general, news is like a cocktail party that you're invited to and you show up late and you don't really know that many people. So you eavesdrop on different conversations and you go, people don't really know me, they're not really engaging with me, this party sucks, I'm leaving. Tube often news is like that where you think, oh, well, here's the latest development on this shutdown. Well, I haven't been reading about it. I don't really know what's going on and I don't quite get who that guy is. So Deeply Syria and other micro sites that are very, that are specific to a specific story or event offer you many windows in, right? Okay, here's some basic vocabulary terms that I don't quite know. That's really helpful. Here's the latest Twitter stuff that they've got. Here's a Google Hangout going on over here. Which of these doors do I want to enter into the Syria story today? I know a lot about the Syria story. I'm really interested in the refugees. Here's a blog about just refugees or here's just refugees telling their stories. This is a fascinating way to think about covering an event. But it only, it works for a long trending event. It wouldn't work for an event that's very ephemeral and it's going to be gone in three days. So I think the story, as I said this morning, Marshall McLuhan, even though he's a great Canadian, was wrong when he said the medium is the message. The story is the message and it's going to dictate which medium you want to use to tell the story. Again, this is like enormously sophisticated, complicated. Wow, what a challenge for a newspaper. Suddenly you've got to do all this stuff? Yes. So that means pick the things you really want to do well and do them across many platforms and people will say, oh, that's pretty good. That's a good question. It's so easy to be up here and pontificate and not sure the things connect. One thing I think that means is that we need to understand that the audience is moving to mobile devices and they use them differently than they use PCs. So if you say, and this is, by the way, a challenge for everybody. At Facebook they were discovering that their mobile devices looked awful. So they do these things they call mobile days where they tell everybody in the building, you cannot look at Facebook today on a computer. You must look at it on a mobile device first and it's sort of revelatory to them and they make them do that now pretty often because they discover that, oh, God, it looks awful. It's not working. This is terrible. It's just a way of forcing them to be where the audience is. So that's one part of it. Another is to say, social and, well, mobile is very social and social is very mobile. Another part of this is to try and figure out what are the differences between a tablet and a smartphone and how do you do this? Not long ago, three years ago, people were saying, oh, you know what, apps, we didn't need those. We could do responsive design. Let's just teach responsive design. Whatever you do for your computer, it just reforms itself for a tablet and then it reforms itself for a smartphone. Problem solved. We don't have to spend all this money. Well, it turns out it's not that simple. On mobile phones, four out of five minutes are spent in apps, okay? And those apps are not portal apps. They are task apps. The most popular apps on the iPhone are, I'm not going to remember this, but they're things like maps, iTunes. They're a way to do certain things. So if you're a news publisher, you should be thinking about what apps would help people in our community. The Lancaster, Pennsylvania newspaper, we're thinking at this lunch. I didn't even, you know, like Lancaster, that's the Amish country. Do they even need a website? Their readers don't have electricity, many of them, right? Well, it turns out that they're very, it's very wireless. You can't have wires, but you can have wireless. And so one of, they've created an app which is where are the farm stands on the weekends? It's a mobile app and it tells you where you can buy what agricultural products on what road. Very, very useful. Another place that I know of, another, also a small paper, has Garage Sale apps that they do. These are, this is helping people in the community. Now, you might not think about it as journalism, but I do. I think it's helping people live their lives and if it helps finance coverage of the city council. But it's also what your students need to be thinking about. What's helpful to people and how do apps do that? So if you just decide, let's teach responsive design and we're done, you're gonna miss all of that. It also involves the idea that at the Washington Post, they figured out that they were really struggling with this balance of should we iterate the news or should we, or how do we spend time to do what we do best which is we think long form analytical journalism. And they finally, and they were looking at their mobile data and they finally came to the conclusion that on something like the jobs report comes out on Fridays in Washington, D.C. the jobs data. By looking very closely at user data, they came to the conclusion that what they should do is when the job report comes out, they should do one sentence and they should do that very quickly, put it on the website, put it in social media, put it everywhere they can. And then for the next half hour or so, update with whatever they've got about a sentence at a time. And after about an hour, they should stop. They shouldn't then build tomorrow's story one sentence or two paragraphs at a time all through the course of the day. They should let their reporter, their economics reporter go and spend the day and then post a story by about four o'clock that is a really in-depth analysis of that event. And by the way, they should pick and choose which stories are appropriate to be iterated in this way and which are not. Some stories, obviously, you will iterate all through the day. But while this seems pretty obvious, two years ago I got a call from MSNBC that said from one of their strategists who said, and this is the website now, NBC.com, and they said, we're thinking at MSNBC that people prefer to have the news iterated. I said, what does that mean? And they said, you know, just cover it as it comes in and not do it any other way. Reading stories, complete stories is obsolete. So this is what I mean by we need to teach mobile. We also need to teach, I mean, I have a whole thing about what are the skills that students would need if you were going to invent a journalism program from scratch. And platform is one of them, obviously, that craft approach that we traditionally have taken. But since the technology is changing so quickly, you should teach just enough of the platform so that students can get a sense of how to teach themselves the next platform. We should teach this discipline of verification as the spine of it. But we should also teach technology, I mean, we should also teach data and how to study your audience and how to understand the economics of news so that your journalists are not afraid of this. Because one of the things that has withered newsrooms is that when the business people come in or the data people come in and say, justify what you're doing in our terms, we say, go away. How dare you? You've breached the ethical line. That's not only been a losing argument from the 90s on when people were saying, maximize your profits, but now it's a losing argument when they can say, justify your editorial decisions in terms of audience numbers. So we need to get on top of that and be creating our own metrics and not just inheriting these ones. And again, that's more likely to start in the university than it is in any news company today, which is strapped for resources. That's a good and a hard... All these questions are hard. I think this is one of those areas where context matters. What's the context in which people read those magazines? By the way, talk about sponsored content or native advertising. Vogue's been there forever. If you can tell me the difference between what was editorial and what was advertising, you're more perceptive about fashion magazines than I am. That's not a hard bar to meet, by the way. So, you know, there's a reason that Time Magazine and Newsweek and U.S. News have suffered mightily, but magazines that people want to read on airplanes, like InStyle and, you know, I was looking at some of these this morning at the airport, I can't remember what they are, are doing fine. The New Yorker is doing fine. The Economist is doing fine. It's not like they've updated their looks dramatically in the last week. So, the context and the nature of the content matters. My guess is bridal magazines are going to be in print for a long time. Vogue, yes. But there's a reason, I think, that gourmet and bon appetit have suffered because recipes are something that are really easy to look up online when you need them. It's more convenient to do that than to say, oh, this is really good. I'm going to tear this out and save it. Where did I put that thing now that I want to cook something? So, convenience and how people use this, I think, really, really matters. Will print go away completely? No. In fact, as a, you know, as somebody who tries to use this stuff and tries to understand it, I go through these phases who are, you know, I used my e-reader constantly and stopped buying hardcover books, which is a terrible thing to do if somebody reads books. And I'm finding myself gravitating back to hardcover books because I'm learning more about which books work for me and the distraction level of having your books inside a machine where you could also just go, you know, read your email. And I want to read books. So, my behavior is evolving. And the other thing is being first at something and being early to something matters, but then it loses some of its luster after a while. I'm sure we've all had this experience where you're like, oh, man, this is great. I spent all my, like, how many people spent a lot of time with angry birds for a while? Raise your hand. And then you stopped, right? So, this is also something that's gonna have more of our media consumption. We'll say, okay, I did that and now I'm tired of that and I'm gonna go back to some trustee. Convenience matters a lot. And this is something I said to the students this morning. If you see something out there in the media world and you think, this product, it sucks. It's inconvenient this way, that way, the other way. There's gotta be a better version, a way to do this better. There is. And now you can invent it. And you can invent it. The Today Show and The Morning Show is a perfect example to me. Okay, this is a show that goes on for two hours and there's about 15 minutes that might interest me maybe some days. And it's like, I think, this is a very large country, the United States. How is it that the Today Show, Good Morning America, and seems so vapid to me? Is there not enough people like me that there could be a morning show that I would actually wanna watch? And it turns out that on the internet there are a bunch of people trying to create exactly that solution. If you see something you think, there's gotta be a better version of this, now it is createable. And you don't need a huge audience to create it. I think there's a line that can be drawn between what's journalism and what isn't, but not who's a journalist and who isn't. Long time ago, like 18 years ago, we were holding meetings around the country to talk about what are the elements of journalism. And Phil Donahue, remember Phil Donahue? He was the first talk show host before there was Oprah. And he said, as far as, and he was considered sort of edgy, you know, he would be considered very not edgy now. He said, as far as he was concerned, the guy who wandered into a bar in Chernobyl and said it just blew about the nuclear plant at that moment had committed an act of journalism because he was an eyewitness and it was true. So I think the key issue is does something meet the criteria of being journalistic? And that means that it was, you know, that there's evidence that an effort was made to say it was true that the intention behind it was to inform people and not to manipulate them. And that could come from many places. In fact, now it is coming from many places. Whether you like it or not, political parties and corporations and think tanks and activists are creating news teams, often made up of people who are former journalists. We just held a gathering on sponsored content in Washington and Dell and Xerox have big news teams now and are hiring journalists, award-winning journalists, to do graphics and write articles for them that they're putting in the sponsored content. Now, these aren't advertorials about how great Dell is. They're things about computing life and life for young moms in the digital space. Why? Because they think that that will get people to move into a Dell blog and while they're there, they might buy a Dell computer. So the content is actually very journalistic. What this means is it's important that consumers be able to recognize quality content and it's also a reason that I think, as I said in the presentation, that good journalism in the future needs to show the work, show how the evidence for who the sources are and why they should be believed. And by the way, the net makes this much more palatable. Hyperlinks and all kinds of other things that essentially become kind of digital footnotes that make any piece of content a kind of doorway into a lot of other material. The more your article or your content can sort of justify itself to me, the better. And that's how we know, oh, this is really a work of journalism. I'd also want to know, by the way, and we say this in the new ethics of journalism, transparency means I need to know a lot about the author and I need to know about... I don't mean I need to know who the author voted for, but who is this person? What's their resume sort of? And what's this publication I'm reading? If this is a political action group and the content is fine, I still need to know what their intention is by publishing it. And this demand for transparency, by the way, will redown to the benefit of more traditional news operations or more legitimate people with more legitimate or journalistic intentions because they can be very transparent and if you've got something to hide, you're going to be less transparent. Well, okay. It's easier to predict about just social media because what I was saying this morning was social media is you can sort of trace an arc from blogging to Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest and Instagram and the common denominator in each of those is they're easier, right? Sustaining a blog with a lot of work, sustaining your Facebook newsfeed actually turns out to be more work. Sometimes you have to go cold turkey and stop. But Pinterest and Instagram are easier. They're even demographic and educational breakdowns about who uses these things that are interesting. And I think ease of use is going to be, you know, and cool factor is also a part of this. Particularly for the young, as we were talking about this morning, one of the motivations for young people, particularly at a certain age, is to be in a space that's theirs and not an adult space. In the news realm we're talking about places that are public and people don't care about that. But some of the social media stuff, like Tumblr or Facebook, started with people who were in the pre-news age cohort, right? Okay, so where is news going? I don't really know. I think print will continue to shrink. I think display advertising and print will continue to shrink. The print newspaper on Sunday will probably remain for quite a long time because in North America most newspapers make most of their, often close to 50% of all their money just on Sunday because there's a lot of... Is it Sunday or is it Saturday? But the weekly sort of one that has, you know, the inserts and all. I think that advertising is going to move away from the thing we used to call advertising to the thing that we would call transactional e-commerce information. How many of you have heard of showrooming? Raise your hand if you've heard the word showrooming. Okay, showrooming is you're in a store and you go, huh, that's kind of interesting. I might want to buy that. I wonder if I can find it cheaper somewhere else. That's showrooming. If you're a retailer, a store who's a traditional advertiser, you're in a war for your survival against Amazon, against showrooming. So you want to figure out some way where people go, I wonder if I can get that cheaper. Oh, there's a thing here that says that if I can find it cheaper, they'll match the price. Or if I subscribe to the newspaper, I can get everything here much cheaper. So there are potential collaborations that would lead me to want to subscribe to a publication so that I can save money in all the local stores. Things like that. Or maybe my subscription gives me coupons that show up on my mobile phone and I just go to the coupon site because I subscribe to the publication. So the notion of almost the American Express idea that with membership comes benefits and privileges, and that means saving money, that might replace particularly in a mobile context what we think of as advertising. Because display average, there isn't enough room to display anything. But information that actually helps me learn and save money, get product reviews and other things, I think that's where the potential is. So what we used to think of as advertising was think of e-commerce. And I think specialization has clearly got to be part of the trend for journalism because this is almost simple physics or simple economics. With many more outlets out there competing for attention, the audience and revenue of each particular place is shrinking and that's going to continue. So you have to create a reason for people to want you in particular and geography is going to be less and less a dictator of that. Now the one thing that goes back to mobile is if you are a local or community-based publisher, mobile is more important to you. Why? Because mobile is local. It's about walking around. It's about I'm here, what's near me. So this should be a very important part. The irony is that these local publishers are the ones who are at least likely to have the wherewithal to do those kinds of apps and things like that. So the other thing that that suggests is consolidation. Bringing many small places together under one roof where they could have the engineering wherewithal. Some of these trends are potentially positive and some are not and that's potentially a good place to end because I get asked all the time, so okay, everything that's going on, is this going to be better or worse? And the answer is always the same, yes. Thank you. I noticed the person who came up to ask the last question, her T-shirt said, panic in the disco. And so we could all be wearing them saying, you know, panic in the newsroom or in the world of journalism. I think both this morning when you spoke to the class and here it's overwhelmingly positive what you have to say and I think especially when you talked about the future belonging to people who actually think there is a future. So thank you for sharing that because I'm constantly asked by people why am I doing this? I mean by students why are we doing this? Why are we here? Why are we even preparing to enter this profession? So it's nice to hear a positive message and a lot to think about. And I wanted to give you something, a small present since you are a man of letters and in case anyone hasn't heard the news if I can share with you that Alice Monroe won the Nobel Prize for Literature today. Did anyone not know that? Just to check on the world of news. Well, here we go. So I want to share with you the pride of Canada. So thank you very much for coming everyone and especially thank you Tom for your time.