 happy to see you in the audience. I'm David Thorburn, the director of the MIT Communications Forum. My job today is entirely ceremonial. I want to mention, however, in a tone of not lamentation exactly, but some nostalgia, that this marks the final forum in which the MIT Communications Forum and the Center for Future Civic Media are collaborating. And I wanted to say, again, what I said last week, that this forum, which is, I think, bred the 13th or the 14th. I think it's the 14th forum that the Center for Civic Media and the Communications Forum have jointly sponsored. It's been one of the most productive and nourishing relationships that the Communications Forum has ever had. I'm especially grateful to Chris, to the staff at the center, some of many of whom I have now departed. But we're very helpful to us in the beginning of this project. And I want to express my gratitude to them and my pride in the accomplishments of these 14 forums. The Center for Future Civic Media is moving off. We'll continue running events of this sort. But without our collaboration, I want to wish them the best of luck and promise as much support as we're able to give. I also wanted to say one other word about the project of the Center for Future Media, which I much admire. And one of the reasons I admire it is that it treads, it walks an awfully dangerous thin line. And so far, at least, it seems to me to have walked it with astonishing grace. And the line, of course, is the line between significant, if not objective at least, serious and thoughtful discourse on the one side and advocacy on the other. It's a profoundly difficult task to balance those two. And the Center for Future Civic Media is, I think, at least so far in its remarkable career, an exemplary instance of a project working within the confines of a university, generating significant discourse of a rigorous and, if not scholarly, deeply citizenly kind. And some of it is a scholarly discourse as well. Yet, at the same time, respecting that rigor also committed to some forms of citizen activism that any reasonable person would feel is appropriate and valuable. It's a very complicated and, I think, quite remarkable achievement on the part of the Center. And today's forum is an instance of the kind of problem that's such a combination of interest in serious attention to the problems of the society, coupled with a commitment to empowering citizens to do something about them. It's a very remarkable project. And so far, it seems to me, the Center for Civic Media has set an example of great excellence and intelligence. My task now is simply to turn the podium over to Andrew Whitaker, who is the chief organizer of this particular forum. And I thought I would end by saying, watching Andrew struggle with the complexities of trying to set up the forum, my admiration for him, which was already high increased. And if this forum is a success, no matter how eloquent and articulate your speakers are or your wonderful moderator is, Andrew deserves much of the credit. Andrew. Thank you, David. I guess my role is equally ceremonial in being able to thank you for allowing the Center for Future Civic Media to share in a number of communications forums over the last few years. It's given us great access to a built-in audience and given us a chance to really learn how these kind of events can be pulled off in the MIT environment with MIT audiences. And the attendance tonight, the speakers that we have, the interest that we have afterwards online, is testament to, I think, a really great collaboration. The only other thing I want to say before I hand it over to Tom is to give a little bit of background about where this came from. We happened back in August to be looking at some ideas for what we could do for our forum in the semester. And it happened to be right around the time of the BP oil spill. A question came to my mind then of what happened after the well was capped. How do you keep a country's attention on an issue that's going to be around for many years with a region recovering, businesses coming back to life, regulations, new regimes, all kinds of interests in an area that is going to need media attention, but we don't necessarily know how to do it the best way. How can we prevent something like this from happening in the future through journalism or through other kinds of civic media? So that's when people like Abram came to mind, as someone who has covered the Gulf region for a while. And related to that, it brought up a number of other questions of whether or not traditional journalism is the best way to talk about slow moving crises, these kinds of crises that evolve over time or could be warned about years ahead of time and need action but don't necessarily get it. So that's where we came to our other speakers to be able to talk a little bit about imaginative literature or science writing, to be able to really understand the variety or the spectrum of reportage of storytelling for these kinds of issues to be able to prevent them or act on them in the future. So that's where it kind of came from and I thought of Tom as well as a great person to be able to moderate this. So with that, I'd like to hand it over to Tom Levinson. Thank you, Andrew. I'm gonna speak very, very briefly because these people have much more important things to say than anything I could come up with. And thank you all for coming. It's a great crowd for this edge of the holiday season and I'm very grateful to you for showing up. On the issue of slow moving crises or more particularly the problem journalism has in covering time bound, time weighted stories, it has a kind of recursive quality to it because dealing with those stories is at the center of just about every conversation you have about journalism and public or civic media in part because those activities are in the midst of a slow moving crisis that we're all very well aware of. We could report on ourselves and get some insight into this difficulty. It's cliche of course and I'm not gonna go deep into it here but obviously there's a wealth of new technology that fosters or seems to ubiquitous and instantaneous coverage which can lead to both greater transparency and greater democratization of the choice of stories, the coverage of stories, all the ways we create a shared experience of the world, a shared understanding of the world. And that's the good spin. There is this lovely possibility here that many, many people are genuinely exploiting. It's a spin but it's also got significant elements of truth in it. But obviously there's the other side that also has a great deal of truth in it which is that all the Twitter and blogging and instant video and everything else that we can do I mean I love the fact that you can take an iPhone, edit and stream live to the web with a few hundred dollar device that will operate presumably anywhere in the world or many places in the world. I mean for somebody who started my filmmaking career working with Aton cameras and Steenbeck flatbed editing machines, this is a revelation. It's just insane that you can do this. And it creates a whole different approach to the world but it also fosters an updated version of the old it bleeds it leads approach. One can see how the continuous updating, the continuous emergence of the new and the continuous explosion of the amount of information, the amount of websites you can go to, the complexity of the web connection. There's a fellow in the audience, Ralph Lombrelia who gave us a wonderful talk about how all the ways we are organizing information on the web is gonna collapse under its own weight within a very few years if we don't figure out some very important problems there. There's a lot of problems with this notion that somehow just the explosion of the availability of information and technology to distribute it quickly is going to give us anything remotely like what we either want or need out of journalism. And it's clearly a problem for any story that requires more than the least quantum of journalistic attention to cover. I'm not even talking about here the problems of the quantum of audience attention. I think the panel will talk about that but you can see there's this huge issue. Excuse me, that's supposed to be off. It is now. By the way, every crisis there's a deeper problem or rather there's a problem you can look at not from the technology side but from the actual story side which is we talk about slow moving crises as a specific problem but every crisis is slow moving at least over part of its life cycle. I mean it's easy to see how the Gulf oil spill is slow moving sort of forward in time. The well blows and then there are consequences and even after the well is capped there are consequences that are going to unfold over decades and we have to find some way of keeping on top of that. But I don't know how many of you here are remember Burton Ruchet's marvelous series in the New York or the disease detectives. That's a slow moving crisis in the other direction in time. Something happens, people die and Burton Ruchet did these marvelous stories where he would go back and uncover what had happened and what it took to actually unravel this human tragedy, human pain and what its significance might be for doing anything we might wanna do in the future. And these were enormously complicated stories to do but they reflect the fact that you can have somebody shot on the street corner in Boston and the story seems to be that murder but that story leads to all kinds of other stories which may unravel in both directions in great distances of time and we haven't got necessarily very good tools for covering them. So enough of that, clearly this is the area for the panel to discover and I wanna leave them all the time we can for that. Just wanna say that this is clearly one of the reasons at MIT, the Center for Future Civic Media the communications forum, the various folks here who are concerned with interpreting the made world are doing what universities and journalists are both trying to do which is to construct stories that open up this extension of their subjects in time forward or back finding or making the technologies and the forms such stories need to find audiences out there in the world and to be found and then, you know and to exist in forms that the audiences can find them it's obviously a two history. And I hope we're gonna learn more about both the context of this problem and specific responses to it from our panel. So that's a swift cut through this. Let's turn to that panel. We have three speakers and I'll give a brief bio for each as their turn emerges but I'd like to ask them to go in this order. We're gonna ask Rosalind Williams to speak first and then Abram Lustgarten and finally Andrea Pitzer. There's method here and that Ros is gonna look at some of the ways a historian can understand the idea of crisis excuse me, English is my first language just I wrestle with it sometime, it wins. The idea, so Ros is gonna look at the historians take on this problem. Andrew is going to talk to us not so much I hear about BP but about another energy related story that has a similar long tail and I'm not sure which direction he's gonna point that tail for us we're gonna learn more about that. And Andrea is gonna speak to us on the idea of narrative on story on how reporting should can maybe done now and in the near future. She's not gonna go millions of miles out but she's gonna give us a sense of the lay of the land now and in the near future. Format, I'm asking each speaker to speak for 15 minutes and then we'll have five minutes or so of questions directed to that speaker so that you can pull something out of the talk right away. At the end I'll take the moderator's privilege and probably ask a couple of questions of my own but then it'll be a free for all for around an hour and we'll have some fun. And that's where it'll go. So let's begin with Ros Williams. Let me give you a brief introduction to Ros whose career is such that brevity does great damage to the extent of her work and accomplishments. For the purposes of this audience I wanna note a couple of things. I mean, first of all, Ros is a professor at MIT in the science, technology and society program. She's been associated with MIT for a very long time. She has a depth of knowledge of this institution and of scholarship in science and technology studies, the history of science and technology that runs really deep. What I loved in looking over the biography, the short bio that I got for this is a reminder that Ros has been thinking about the kinds of questions that we're addressing today. Since the very beginning of her career, her first book, Dreamworld's Mass Consumption in Late 19th Century France, 1982 explores the complicated relations between technological change, cultural values and marketing techniques at a point when the consumer society was first emerging. So one of the important things about long tail stories is those long tails take us deep into the history of the modern world and Ros is the perfect person to tell us about that. She's written three other books, a fourth is on the way, she's done everything you can do at MIT both in service to the institution and in pursuit of scholarship. And with that, please, Ros, take it away. Thank you, and thank you all for coming. It's kind of a slow time of the day. It was slow moving day, it was a slow time, so I appreciate you showing up. And I feel sort of like an interloper being the historian and I haven't done journalism since high school. So I'm very aware that I'm not sure how this is going to go over with you, but I'm gonna give it a try because historians and journalists do deal with a lot of the same material. The events are very similar and I think there's some friendly competition about who gets the most fun with the events and can you hear me in the back? Yeah, okay. So Mark Twain seemed to think that journalists had the fun with the news and the historians are just the pale reflectors later on. On the other hand, a historian like Garten Ash is trying to write a history of the present because he's very intrigued by the connections between the journalism and the hysterism views of the same material. So basically there's convergence or I might say friendly competition. The main difference is that the obvious one that the journalists are dealing with short-term events as they happen. They wanna be first of all, what did Twain say, first and best. The historians are trying to get more of a distance in time, the pale reflection. So the difference is time constant. It's the rate of change or the time element is the obvious distinction between the two types of professions, but then this brings us to the concept of crisis. And Tom, we all wrestle with the language and that's one of the things we should be doing. So a crisis comes from the Greek word which I'm told is pronounced Kieran and it's a very kind of harsh verb. It's to separate or cut or shear. So there's nothing subtle about it and nothing slow moving. It's making a cut. So for example, the same word is the root of the word certain as in date certain. Boom, that's it, that's the date. So it's fixed and settled and stated. That's what crisis means. And the definition of it therefore is of a decisive stage. There can be a long series of events but the crisis is a turning point or a decisive point in those series of events when change for better or for worse happens. So it can be a medical term. The illness leads to a crisis for better or for worse. The patient recovers or doesn't. It also has astrological meaning and it was used in the sense from the 1500s. Now if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary you can see as early in the 1600s people are using crisis in the sense of relating to politics or human events, the news if you will. And as if on Q, it's in the middle of the 1800s, the 19th century where the word crisis begins to be turned into double words or used in somewhat more metaphorical senses or combined with other words to make compound ones. So from the mid 1800s on the word crisis is being used in this way. It can be collective, it can be individual, you can have a life crisis, a personal crisis but it's an unstable state of affairs reaches a decisive point, that's a crisis. So the word crisis combined with slow moving is an oxymoron, it doesn't make sense. It's a deliberate, it's a contradiction. And that to me is very interesting because that tells us that something is happening in the world that hasn't happened before and our language has not caught up with the events. And that's what interests me about slow moving crisis because we all sort of say yeah, we have some intuitive sense of what that means but it's not inherent in the word and in fact it contradicts the meaning of the word. So I'm gonna propose that we are faced with what my colleague Leo Marx calls a semantic void. And this is the article just published this past summer where he talks about what a semantic void is and briefly it's where you have events, things happening and we don't have language, we don't have words and concepts to fit those events. And he uses this concept to refer to the word technology pointing out that it only emerged really in, really, okay MIT is named in 1861 but that's rare. It's only in the 1930s, 40s and particularly the post-war world that that word is important. Now, okay that's telling you that something is happening where we need a word that we hadn't had before. So my question for you is what historical experience or experiences are happening that make us need the concept in words slow moving crisis and maybe we'll get a better word in time but for now that's what we have. So I'm gonna propose there are two types of events that are new and distinctive that drive us to this phrasing. So I wanna first bring up the concept of slow history to classical writers like Herodotus or whatever. The classical historians history consists of human actions, deeds and words that take place on a stage called the world. And that stage is quite stable. It has cycles, recurring cycles but that stage is utterly predictable. And human life cuts across, walks out on that stage and acts and the frailty of the individual human is contrasted to the recurred cycles of that stage called the world. So the first idea that maybe the stage could be part of history, that it changes with history, that the world is something that historians should pay attention to. That only happens in the 1920s, about the same time the word technology is appearing. And every historian takes historiography and we learn about the Nall School and we learn about Brodell and Laudri and we learn that they brought the world onto the historical, into the historical texts. And you'll notice that Brodell's book is called the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world. Okay, the world becomes a subject of history. The famous book, The Peasants of Limewood Doc, the writer explains that the protagonist of the book, Laudri says, is the great agrarian cycle lasting from the end of the 15th century to the beginning of the 18th. And the agrarian cycle is the actor. So this is a new kind of history. And the Nall School is proposing there are three time constants or wavelengths of history. And they are proposing that structure, geography, environment, we would now say, the long durée, the long duration, belongs in history and they begin to write about it for the first time really. Then on a sort of medium wavelength is the Kongzhong Shure, which is social and political history which might run out to two or three centuries and then there are events, the history of events and this is the short duration, events, politics, individual people with individual names. So these are the three time constants. Now you'll notice the implication that there is a substructure. I mean, they're saying there's a structure to history that's not human. It's beyond consciousness. It's the environment we live in and it very much influences us. It's very, I don't know if you wanna say deterministic but it's certainly shaping of events but it's not human, at least conscious human effort. So that's the idea of the long duration history. Well, what happens in the next, well, it's not even a century since the 1920s. What happens is that people realize that that history, the long duration, is being sped up incredibly. Now there's environmental change no longer takes centuries and centuries. It takes sometimes decades. And I'm just gonna, these are very typical charts that you will, the chart is harder to read. These kinds of things are easier to read. And anytime you teach world history, you have graphs like this and they are all the same graph because they're all pretty flat and then about the 1870s, maybe 1850, it starts going up, it's the hockey stick, same graph, whatever. So I'm just saying that there are new inputs into history that are reflected in these graphs that show an amazing rate of change just within decades. There's nothing long about this duray. This is really short. So something is screwed up, the takeoff point of environmental change is no longer centuries, it's decades. Here are some others. These are all graphs of energy systems but I'm just showing, it's the shape that I'm asking you to look at. So that's an incredible change in how history works. Something is going on that's different. And the fact that you call something an industrial revolution, that's a term from 1884, on the model of the French Revolution shows it by the late 1800s, people are beginning to realize that something is happening in history that hasn't happened before and has to do with environmental change. Okay, but at the same time, deceleration is also happening. There are events that you used to think happened and were over and they take a much longer time. They are never over. And my, of course, my favorite example and anybody's example is the financial crisis of 2008. Is it over? I mean officially, but I'm a member of a workshop that Manuel Castells has organized meeting at the Golbenkian Foundation and being supported by the Golbenkian Foundation about in the title of the workshop is the aftermath of the financial crisis. It's not the crisis. We're studying the aftermath and it's almost three years and we're still studying it and we're not close to feeling that that event is over. So that's the aftermath network. And I'm just, you know, I made me start thinking about other events that are never over. So I think in retrospect, the presidential election of 2000 was really a bellwether. I mean, was Bush elected or not? I mean, it went on for weeks. You know, you wake up and usually have an election and it happens. This went on and on and on. So Obama gets elected, but the minute you have another election, well then you're gonna repeal healthcare, which was a signature accomplishment of his first half of his first term. If you do something in politics now, there's a sense of, well, you may get the majority, but now you need a supermajority. Well, we're gonna have a recall election. We're gonna repeal this. I mean, when is something decided? And I don't have to mention, of course, in military affairs. That's, you know, Joe Haldeman's title of his book about Vietnam, the forever war. Could be Vietnam, it could be Iraq, it certainly could be Afghanistan. And as we get into the so-called end game of Iraq, you know, quoting Dexter Filkins, you know, the question is, you know, when does the end game end? So I just point, I point out that there are aftermaths. Now, history seems to be slowing down. It's getting like molasses. It's like the oil spill. And I'll just point out the aftermath. Again, if you look up the meaning of the word, it's, if you mow a lawn, the aftermath is what grows up after you mow. And then you have to mow it again. And one of the first uses of the term that really struck me is John Hersey's use of it. When he, you know, he wrote Hiroshima the year after the bomb was dropped. He went back 40 years later, interviewed the same people and their surviving families. That's called aftermath. 40 years later, the bomb is still being dropped. So why is this? I mean, this sounds contradictory. Things are happening much faster and happening much slower. And I say the answer is the same answer that we're working in a new historical medium. In other words, it's not so much the time constant. It's the density of human presence on the planet which both speeds up environmental change and slows down political change. And here I call it the viscosity. Things move slower in political affairs but in environmental affairs, the human presence is much more immediate because it's just much denser. So it's, I'm making the claim that we are not dealing here with a matter of how you report differently. I'm saying history is working differently and journalists and historians both have to take account of that. And this is the chart that really shows the story. When I'm talking about density and viscosity of human presence, that's what I mean. That's the big one. So it makes it very hard for historians to be reflective when things are moving much faster for historians. You know, the saying of historians is the owl of Minerva of wisdom, Athena's owl, takes wing only at the dusk when the day is over but what if the day is never over? What if it just keeps going? If the sun never sets on history then historians are really challenged. There's also the problem, the human problem, that understanding for all of us, not just historians, comes with an ending, with a story that has an end as Appleby says. Stories start with an end. We have to understand the story in that context. So if it's a never ending story, then you don't understand the world. You don't understand human life. People need a sense of an ending and that's the title of a very famous book of literary criticism by Cormode who actually just talked about an ending. He just died recently, which sent me back to the book which made me realize how pertinent it is, storytelling and fiction for this idea of an ending. So Cormode talks about the idea of crisis having been imminent, that there's some ending that's imminent and says now there's an immanence to it. In other words, it's not impending or near at hand. Just like that sense of things going on and on and maybe ending, but never quite ending, that's become something constant, something we live with. And I just point out, this goes back to that OED slide I showed you earlier, just tucked in it was another literary critic, William Emsen. In 1940, at the edge of the war, saying there is a crisis feeling and the point is to join it up to what we experience in everyday life. So a slow moving crisis, the slowest moving crisis is just saying it's everyday life. This is an image of crisis. This is actually a famous, let's see. This is Angelus Novus. This is a Paul Clay watercolor now in Jerusalem. And it's most famous not from Clay's watercolor, but from what Walter Benjamin said about this watercolor. And I'm gonna read it to you. He says, Benjamin says, this is the angel of history. This is the angel of history. It shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned to the past. When we perceive a chain of events, where we perceive a chain of events, the angel sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, he would like to awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed, but a storm is blowing in from paradise. It has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close his wings. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned. While the pile of debris before him grows skyward, the storm is what we call progress. So in progress it's assumed that we humans are running this never ending cycle of improvement, never ending process of improvement. But what I've tried to say today is that cycle has two effects that are new. One is it speeds up events, environmental events, so they feel now like nature, but nature on speed, literally. It also makes us feel that change is out of control because things never really change, politics is clogged up. And so even though we try to act, nothing happens. So my ending plea is to avoid the grand illusion of reification, which means that things and technologies and items and the stuff of the world that they are making things different. What's making things different is human dominance as never before. And so the story for journalists, for any crisis, slow or fast moving is not so much the pace, it's who's responsible, who's acting, pointing to the people and not to the stuff of history. So that's it. Thank you, Russ, that was wonderful. Taking notes as fast as you could speak. Okay, that talk is an example why I wanted to have a few moments for questions right now because there's a richness to it that if you have an immediate reaction or question, could you please come up to one of the mics as this is being recorded and that will enable us to get your brilliant words on the tape and ask Ross. Thank you, that was terrific. It stitches so many things together that haven't stitched together well. Here's a question. Have we gone from assembly line storytelling to a world that defies that? And so we need relational storytelling which would suggest we map things and show the actors and the effects in real time, over time, and we can go back and forth and see how somebody did something over here and it changed things over here. In other words, it's what the systems engineering department would look at and say that system is engineering storytelling. Yeah. And then you fit out all the facts in and all the stuff of the moment so you can rock back and forth over time. You know, my trade, if I have to define it, is called history of technology. And in history of technology, there's a big trend or technique called actor network theory. And just what you're saying, you kind of make a huge map of actors, some of which can be human and some of which can be institutional and some can be non-human and the idea is to fit them all together and is very similar to the systems analysis that ESD and others would undertake. I think it's very useful but I have two cautions. One is that if you draw that kind of a map, very often you're avoiding the decision about causality and who's really responsible and it allows you to fudge it, okay? The second thing is people are different because people have consciousness. And I know that, you know, non-conscious actors are important but I refuse to put them all in the same soup. So just a quick follow up. Maybe what we have to see is emergent. Maybe what history teaches us is the pattern over time. If you've ever had a kid in soccer, you play a soccer game for them fast and they see the patterns of attack and regrouping but in normal time to a kid who doesn't know soccer they don't know what they're looking at. Just a thought. And I think the technique of mapping processes and especially dynamic mapping where you speed things up, it's really, really useful precisely in helping answer questions of causality. And if you'll excuse the word responsibility, that's exactly what I'm afraid gets lost when it's only a big system that's drawn. But you have an open exploration of what might have happened. It's a heuristic device, yeah. Great, thank you. Could you please identify yourself? Sure, Mark, Tommy Zala, six degrees of innovation. We're mapping social and trust and competency served for instant neural networks that could get things done quickly without coercion, which includes without money, without formal organizational structure. So I'd love to continue the conversation. I hope you're interested. Thanks. I'm Peter Walsh with Global Narratives, Incorporated. My question is, when you speak of viscosity, are you speaking of the size of the human population or are the complexity and collisions a result from that size, in other words? Yeah, both, just the extentsification and intensification, just, I mean, actually, that word was, I came up with it this morning because I was trying to find something different from time constant, which is also a kind of a physics analogy. My husband studied chemical engineering here. So I said, viscosity, does that say it? He said, yeah, that's close enough. So this is a very loose analogy. But I'm trying to get the sense of the thickness of the human presence as a property of a medium. Like the thickness of Shanghai and population density. You can also think of the thickness of human populations because of communications. We're now interacting in ways with Islamic fundamentalists and the Southern Hemisphere and the interior of Africa and the Gulf Coast and so on in all sorts of ways that we're not. It's not sheer numbers. It's also all these interrelations. I mean, the other analogy I was thinking of is that great scene in Close Encounters where Richard Dreyfus is sculpting mashed potatoes. Says, this means something. I know this. And I feel like when humanity is more like mashed potatoes than like a liquid, it's just a different medium anyway. But let's play with this some more. This is just a proposal. Thank you, Ross. Thank you, questioners. Now on to talk number two, Abraham Lustgardner. I'm sorry. I really am having trouble today and I apologize to everyone, especially to Abraham, whose name I butchered in every way possible, Abraham Lustgardner is an investigative reporter for ProPublica, and he has been focused on oil and gas industry investigative work. He's got a wonderful background in dead tree journalism, which is where I got started. And it's a great thing to be involved in. He was a staff writer and contributor for Fortune. And he's written for New Media Salon, Old Media Esquire, The Washington Post, The New York Times. And he has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He's worked in law and form. He's an author of the book China's Great Train, Beijing's Drive West, and the Campaign to Remake Tibet, which had MacArthur Foundation funding. And he's working on a new book, tentatively titled Run to Failure About BP's Management Culture and the Years Leading Up to the Oil Spill in the Gulf. I'm sure if you press him on it, he'll talk about BP, but he's got some other things to tell us about some work that he's driving forward right now. So please, Abram. Thanks very much. I gave you a little bit of red herring, but I am going to stay focused on BP, I think, and we can diverge afterwards. It's a pleasure to be here, so thank you for having me. I wanted to start by just telling you a little bit about ProPublica, the organization that I work for, in part because nobody knows much about it, and it's also very relevant to what I'll say about our reporting process. It's a nonprofit, and it's focused on investigative journalism. And it was founded in 2008 with the purpose of enhancing accountability, a very idealistic goal, and in particular to do that at a time when newspaper budgets were shrinking and most of the function of the journalism community was contracting and going in exactly the opposite direction that we wanted to go in. Our stories are all published under Creative Commons license, and the idea is to give them away for free and disseminate them as widely as possible, and just to increase transparency and spread our work. We cover finance and environment and energy and national security and most of the typical beats. I mention that now because it affords a certain amount of flexibility and funding and leeway to do creative reporting and very long-term reporting projects, which is essentially what I will describe as one way to deal with covering a slowly unfolding crisis. So since I started with ProPublica, I've covered essentially two topics, and it's taken me over almost three years. I'm just going to give you a sense of how slowly that goes. One is natural gas drilling, and in particular the topic of hydraulic fracturing and the environmental impacts of that. And that's what I was deciding at the last moment not to talk about in prepared remarks, but we'd be happy to talk about it in questions. And the second, as you've heard, is BP and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Both are relevant to this conversation. But in talking about my coverage of BP and the oil spill, I wanted to focus a bit more on our decision-making process as opposed to the actual reporting techniques because I found it a little bit more, well, I thought more interesting in terms of approach to slow moving crisis, but I'm happy again to talk about the actual reporting if it comes up later. So I wanted to start by telling you how we covered the spill in the Gulf. It's one of several ways to cover this idea of a slow-moving news event. When we looked at the events unfolding in the Gulf, first of all, we got in late. The explosion on the rig had happened and the spill had begun and about two weeks later we decided that we would actually cover this, which isn't exactly breaking news pacing. We didn't want to jump into this pool of daily coverage, in part because we're still a growing website, still working hard to seek partnerships and outlets to publish our stories and everybody was there covering it and there was a great breadth of very thorough journalism already taking place and we wanted to both do something more creative and also find a niche where we would actually make a contribution. So it was a mixture of self-interest and also trying to find a deeper way to cover this story. But the non-self-interested side of us was looking for a new opportunity in our approach. So we sat down and raised some very early questions about what was the nature of the disaster that we're looking at and was it as obvious as what we were seeing in the headlines of the papers on a daily basis at that point. There were very clear, obvious tangible crisis that we could latch on to. There was the explosion itself. There were the deaths of 11 workers. There was the subsequent sinking of the Beepwater Horizon rig and then the spill and the blowout preventer and the actual gushing of oil into the water and all of that kind of immediate environmental crisis. We started to realize quickly through talking about all of this that none of those things were particularly interesting to us or opened the kind of opportunities that we were looking for. And what we wanted to focus on was more in the background to varying degrees was the slower moving part of this crisis. I think all those other aspects were relatively fast moving things happening over a long period of time. So we considered things like the story of inadequate regulation by the government, which did ultimately get quite a bit of good attention, exploration in the press. We were interested in the complicated history of BP, its track record and how that might be an indicator of what kind of culpability there should be for this company. We're interested, of course, in the environmental catastrophe in a longer term sense than just looking at oil slicks on the surface of the water. And I was personally very interested in what this accident meant in terms of the slowest moving interpretation of this, which is the question of what kind of risk are we as a society assuming or do we understand the risks that we assume environmentally when we have the kind of energy demands and energy intensive lifestyles that we maintain? There's a little bit of a wake up call and what happened in the Gulf about what kind of risks we do assume and what we can expect to happen in terms of crisis in the future. It turns out that we chose one path and we were equally interested in each of those. And we ended up looking at the history of BP, BP's management and the topic of the book that I'm working on as you just heard about. It was an exercise in commitment in part because we were torn and not especially decisive about which of those avenues would be the most fruitful. I spent the next six months reporting on BP's management on the company's cultural issues and eventually presented that work through a series of newspaper reports, shorter blog postings on our website and a television collaboration with PBS Frontline. To do that reporting, interesting in the context of our last conversation because I essentially went back and took a historical perspective and worked up until the present as opposed to working with the present forward. We worked around the perimeter of this issue of what was happening in the Gulf and thereby found a lot of space in terms of competition with other media. We were extraordinarily dependent on documents, on archives of past congressional hearings and transcripts and depositions from previous lawsuits against BP and in a close analysis of accidents that the company had had in the past and essentially looked for context in those events to help explain what we were learning about what was happening in the present that the New York Times and the Daily Papers were doing a great job of showing up at the hearings on a daily basis and repeating whatever was being told there. And we knew from the beginning that to tell a story with this somewhat less sexy material would require a really intensive narrative focus and a little bit of narrative depth to keep it interesting and to engage our readers. So the verdict is out on whether that was effective or not, I hope that it was. But one of the things that was interesting for me was throughout that process, it was very difficult for both me and for ProPublica to stay committed to that track. And I think that's one of the lessons about trying to cover a slow-moving crisis in that way. We had many moments of feeling torn away as the story changed directions, as we had insight or scoops into very incremental changes that could grab a daily headline but distract us from this larger purpose of creating a bigger picture and a bigger sense of context. And it was very difficult to just stay focused on what we had decided to do and to simply see it through. And it was really an exercise in discipline. I hope that the final product winds up lending a sense of depth and breadth that can capture the imagination of an audience and can convey news through a lot of old events in that it shares a context and presents a picture that really nobody else was looking at as events unfolded in the Gulf and therefore find something new in a collection of things that were actually very old. So it brings me to the core of the challenge that I think that we face, just speaking very generally, in covering these sorts of issues that sort of state the obvious a little bit, but the public and to some extent, the government and even big business seems very unable to comprehend threats that are further out, that are out of reach or kind of fuzzy on the horizon. Coverage of climate change is a good example of that. This issue of the risks of energy dependence and exploration that I mentioned and certainly the issue of trying to comprehend the long-term environmental implications of something like the Gulf spill. We know both as reporters and I think as the public, we know on some cerebral level that there's a real concern there, that there's something that we should be interested in, but it's still very difficult to feel concerned and as a reporter to then convey that concern, in part because we get in the habit of and in some sense need this sense of an anchor or an example or an event and an immediacy to tell a story. And so in the case of the Gulf environmental story, we tend to cling to daily developments of oil on the beaches or oil on birds or strong visual images that again make it very difficult to actually consider what I think the real substance of the environmental story is which is a much longer-term intangible topic. But we know or we should know that telling that deeper story, the one that we might have an aversion to will take many months if not years and that when we do tell it or when you do read it, it will be about something that's happening at a microscopic level or even invisibly somewhere in the food chain or somewhere in incremental shifts in air quality figures or something like that. And we should know upfront that it will never be the same kind of headline grabbing of incident or disaster that makes for easy reading. So the challenge is again, whether it's through narrative or multimedia or whatever is how to get people interested or excited in this quote unquote soon to be urgent or near future issue that we kind of know is important but have difficulty conveying its importance. And the fact that we're surrounded by this overwhelming sense of urgency and every other matter at every other moment doesn't make it any easier that we work in this environment, a flood of data and information that I think confuses all of us about what actually is urgent in the present and what is a crisis in the present. So through that deliberation, there are a lot of topics that can tend to slip through the cracks and in this sense, the Gulf environmental issue is one of them. I mean, where is this Gulf environment story now? From an ecological standpoint, this is probably the most critical stage. Now, months after the spill, we might finally be able to actually begin to see what the effects are on the ecology in the Gulf and observe where the chemicals in the oil have reached but this is the moment when coverage of that issue has tapered off to virtual standstill. It's lost its appeal at exactly the moment when I think that the story is potentially beginning. And the reason for that is that the Gulf never provided the kind of visual disaster that say the Exxon Valdez spill did, which is what can maintain that momentum and that public interest. So what is the solution? One of the things that ProPublica has tried to do is address two challenges. One is to keep people engaged and two is to convey this large sense of this total body work, the collective impact of a lot of stories as opposed to one or two or three singular blockbuster stories. And I think that one effective way to do this is to create a bit of a drumbeat of communication. And it's something that we've been experimenting with quite a bit and that's to, rather than having one critical climax to six months of reporting, we will repeatedly publish again and again and again in incremental bits in addition to a large feature story. And somehow by just reiterating our point or our findings on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, it can find a pathway through the sort of clamor that's so distracting. So in our experience in the Gulf, we decided early on that it would take a combination of many articles and in some cases a blog approach. And at the same time that we had those early discussions about what aspects of the Gulf story we wanted to cover, we decided we staffed to do both of these avenues kind of separately. We created a daily blogger who would work on one part of that drumbeat and create a steady stream of provocative and revealing stories and also point to other news coverage in a way that put them in the tone in the context of our larger project. And at the same time, I embarked on our longer form reporting project which wound up in, as I mentioned, a couple longer features in this television partnership. This is where, this is something that I think for a public has been uniquely able to do to experiment with because of our freedom and our funding and our lack of time pressure and the form of our media. We're on a printing press cost. We are fortunate to have very deep funding and I'm fortunate to have editors who aren't demanding anything more of me than I see a story through until it reaches its kind of organic closure. And that's something that I think is absolutely essential to covering a crisis like what's happening in the Gulf or any crisis as you define it where it will take a long-term engagement like my natural gas coverage which has been a two and a half year project. And so the thought that I would leave you on is that like what ProPublica has allowed me to do, coverage of these kind of crisis in general requires an extraordinary amount of depth and commitment and resources. And part of why it's been difficult to get good coverage of these kind of events these days is because those resources are diminishing at most other publications and outlets that are out there. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I was, when I heard that two and a half years on a story, I'm thinking, I can't remember the last time I heard a mainstream media publication devote that kind of resource to a story. It needs to happen all the time. Much more than it does. Questions? Any immediate questions? Yes, I see one coming. Tell us who you are, Chris. Sure. Chris, let me direct the Center for Future Civic Media here. And I guess the main question I have to ask is you talked a little bit about the contrast with the natural gas stories. But the natural gas stories don't yet have that kind of single coherent event. And how did that process start? How did you decide to prioritize that? And have you seen other organized organizations respond to that kind of slow-moving crisis? So the alternative lecture that I might. Yeah, thank you. I mean, that's why I was indecisive about which of these topics to convey today. I mean, they're very different in that the Gulf was a very defined crisis. And we were a very defined crisis that was going to take place over a long period of time. We knew the coverage would drop off. And we were looking for a creative way to take that long approach. Gas drilling is the complete opposite. It wasn't much of an issue at all until I began covering it. And long after I began covering it, it was very, very difficult to both get people's attention for it and get some legitimacy. It happened to coincide with the launching of ProPublica. And we hadn't established ourselves in terms of credentials or a track record of stories. To back up for two seconds, the topic is essentially looking at whether new technology to extract natural gas from new gas bearing formations in the United States can harm drinking water, both underground and as the chemicals that are used in this process are disposed of or handled on the surface. And generally, I've found that they can, but I'm not a scientist. And I've been pushing the questioning in that direction and looking for more research and more study on that topic. So that, in a way, is a much better example, I think, of a slow moving crisis. And it hasn't yet reached its climax or any kind of definitive turning point. And I think that maybe that's happening now. And it's also a better example of this kind of drumbeat approach that I mentioned, where first no one listened, or first no one understood. And then there was resistance to listening. Then there were questions about legitimacy of the reporting and a little bit of a battle between what I was finding and what the industry might communicate through their PR channels. And then finally, a resonance that led to an acceptance that this was a legitimate issue and kind of a reaching of a critical mass where other media started covering it and it became the subject of documentary films and television programs and fiction and nonfiction and reaching a general awareness where I think that there's enough focus now on the problems to start taking seriously the question of what is the actual risk and what might we do to mitigate it. So a very, very slow moving crisis that has yet to become a crisis is more of a warning of a crisis. So Andrew Whitaker from the Center for Future Civic Media. I guess combining your talk and Roz's, whether it was ever true or not, the traditional, like, Metro daily thought of itself as covering everything, whether it was sports to city council to federal government, whatever. ProPublica has decided that it's going to focus on particular topics. So A, how does ProPublica go about choosing what it's going to cover, since it doesn't try to cover everything or claim to? And then B, how do you decide when you're done with the story? If you've been working on something for two and a half years, you've put a lot of resources into it. With the Metro daily, the news event ends and they go on to something else. But how would you decide, all right, we've done enough on this or we've accomplished our goal? How do you decide that? Yeah, I don't have good answers to either one of those questions. It's very organic. We generally do stories according to the interests of the reporters who are working there. A lot of reporters came to ProPublica with expertise in a certain area. And I came with an interest in environment and water issues. And it was through early reporting on that that I stumbled on this topic of hydraulic fracturing. So we've taken a very kind of serendipitous approach to whatever seems to be allowing us to move forward and whatever continues to prove interesting we'll continue to report on without necessarily saying we have to have 15 environmental stories and 15 national security stories in a six month period. And that might change as we go forward and the holes in our coverage are more easy to identify. But that's the way it's been for the first two years or two and a half years of our existence. And as to when you're done, in some sense, you could never be done. I've been super saturated with this issue of gas drilling for a long time and eager to move on from it. And the Gulf spill was one opportunity to do that. But like I was saying, the issue is taking on a little bit of a life of its own lately. And that's starting to mean that it's not done. And rather than moving on to 10 other things that I've been anxious to cover, we'll probably go back to it and we'll work on it further. So there's a couple different ways of evaluating that. If you go back to our mission statement, it's to bring attention to issues that other news organizations aren't focusing on. And so I guess on some technical level, that means that if we've raised the level of conversation that it's carrying on its own, then we don't have to hang around and facilitate it for too much longer. That obviously tends to conflict with the competitive nature of a reporter wanting to own a story and also the level of expertise that you get after a long period of time. So it becomes this fight between do you stay in and say something a little bit smarter or deeper than the next person at every turn, or do you step back and move on to the next topic? We haven't figured out how to answer that yet. Thank you. More chances for questions coming up shortly. But I want to make sure that we have the luxury of relaxed time to get through our program. Because Andrea Pitzer has some extremely important stuff to tell us. She's somebody who thinks deeply about technique and practice, how to do story in new media, not in new media in this new environment, not exclusively in new media, which is a terrible term anyway, but in this new environment where we have this enormous spectrum of media, we have a wide spectrum of audiences, a wide spectrum of expectations. And Andrea at the Nieman Foundation with her Nieman storyboard project is one of the people really at the heart of the question about how to proceed in this area. Now Andrea did send me some stuff for her bio. She's got an incredibly distinguished career. She's done work across an enormous range of topics. She's currently researching on SIDS, an infant death syndrome, the legacy of American eugenics, and Vladimir Novikov, which is not a triplet that I expected to say tonight. It's not one story. I did get that. I was trying to highlight them. But she did also send me the following sentence. So I'm just going to, and inevitably, if it bleeds, it bleeds, these are the details with which I will end her introduction. She wrote to me, if you want some details on the latter side, I have a black belt in karate, once helped foil an armed robbery, and ate only pop tarts for a month as part of a pretty abysmal experiment. Andrea, please. Thank you for that introduction. I want to talk a little bit about ways that we might communicate when reporting on these simmering or long-term crises, and not surprisingly, given my job. I have an interest in narratives and story and the role that storytelling plays in how we might cover these things. But first up, what is a story? You can put your hand out. What elements do you need to have to have a story? Any takers? Anybody? What do you need to have a story? If you're going to be shy. I have prizes. OK. It's a prize. No, no, no. You don't get to find out what the prize is first. What is your answer? Why invest? How? OK, well, let's break it down even further. All right, so who? We'll start with who. You have to have some characters. OK, so hold on. I'll give out the prizes later, but it's cookies. Or you can have Play-Doh, if you like Play-Doh better. I've got cookies and Play-Doh. OK, so you need characters. What else do you need? A setting. Who said location? Did you say location? So you're supposed to put your hand up. So I'll think about cookies for you if I haven't. And what else? Structure helps. Yes, structure definitely helps. There's one other key thing you need. You need characters in a setting, and you need. You need an audience. Oh, you know what? I didn't even start thinking of it. Yes, that's what this is all about. You're going to get like double cookies for that, OK? And Megan, what else do you need? Move it through time. Move it through time. And that can be a change in events. That can be a change in the past that you hit at that point in your story. Or that can be the possibility of change, sometimes simply that a possibility is open or something is offered. But there has to be some implication that you're going to go from A to B. And so those are the key things that you have to have to have a story in place. And if we think of, has everybody here seen Star Wars? I was trying to think of a movie that everybody would have seen no matter what generation you're from. We have Luke, right? We have Tatooine. He finds the droids. So we've got characters. We've got a setting. And then he sees the holograph of Princess Leia. And that's the point at which something is going to happen. So whatever comes next, we've got a whole story there. And so those are the things that you have to have to make a story function. And so why does story matter? Why story matters is because story is what moves public opinion. So if we're talking about covering long-term crises or addressing or reporting on long-term crises, we need to be having stories that people can have these elements and recognize these elements and understand what we're telling them. And story is really what makes for effective news delivery. I'll talk a little bit later about what I call empty-calorie narratives. So I'm not just talking about puff pieces or a profile of the congressman that says everything nice about him. We're talking about real reporting. But story is a really critical element of it. And studies have shown pretty consistently. Now, some of these studies were more or less rigorous. But every study that I've seen has shown in the 70s, in the 90s, two years ago in Scandinavia, most recently with a fellow that's at another program, the ethics program at Harvard, showing that narrative is really how people understand public crises. It's how they understand public policy issues and that by not giving them narratives, we are in some ways denying them the ability to understand what we're saying. Most recently, this fellow at the Safer Center, Michael Jones, has noted that, and you guys can hear me, right? OK, so it's the computer, not the mic. All right. He has not studied journalism directly, but his cohorts have. And his own work with them has looked at taking the same information and presenting it in different ways, and only changing about 25% of the material. So it's the same information, more or less. But one is in a story form. One is more a bulleted list of facts. You can imagine these different ways you consume news, if you will. And what he's found is that very, very consistently that the narrative is what gets people's attention, gets them to buy into the information that they're getting. The other studies have found that people actually retain more for longer, given these kinds of structures. And the studies done by Jones collaborators, their own work, has shown that, in fact, a lot of news narratives that are not necessarily structured in the way that you think of narrative storytelling still have all those elements. They're still functioning as news narratives. And that even if the journalists aren't aware, they're presenting the information that way, they're actually using a lot of narrative models. And so part of what he's calling for is a much greater awareness of journalists in how narrative functions and how they may actually be advocating for policies and their stories and not even be aware of it. And I think that as we are more and more aware of how story works and doesn't work, it's going to be more incumbent on us to resolve some of these issues of advocacy and transparency and things that have come up. But we're not going to be able to sort of turn back the clock and pretend like we don't know what these stories are that we're telling. So anyway, that's a little bit about why is story relevant? Because this is the way the general public can sort of most access these stories and most comprehend these stories. And there are risks of using a storytelling model in this long-term simmering crises that we're talking about. And I don't want to pretend that it isn't problematic. Particularly if we're addressing technological issues, right now a lot of the people who can make and tell and disseminate their stories are people with access to pretty advanced technology and networks to do so. And so I think one of the things that we'll have to be looking at is where are these stories coming from. And certainly a number of people already are and I'll be highlighting a couple of projects where people are looking for voices that we don't necessarily hear and getting the stories that we don't to help fill out the narratives that we can do through our own investigative work and talking to people. But also, sometimes your target isn't the general public. And in that case, you may be dealing with a cohort of people that are pretty suspicious of story. In fact, there's a number of journalists that are suspicious of story. It's like, well, if you're telling me a story, then you must be trying to sell me something. And so I'm gonna be resistant to that. And particularly if you're looking to establish your authority within a certain community of people that you want to get to respond to you, particularly if it's a research community or an industry community and you're trying to reach across the aisle or you're just trying to inform them. And I'm speaking here not about journalism but about, I know many of you are also involved in public communications and other aspects. But even in journalism, sometimes the target audience for a publication on the hill is not every living room in America. It's the people that are working on the hill. And so I do think you have to be aware of your audience. But I don't think that you want to abandon story if you're not going for a general public. I think you just want to tilt more heavily to somebody in the meeting a little bit ago was calling stories with teeth. You might put more teeth in the story for an audience that already understands the basic problem that you're presenting. And you want to make sure you get the data and the information across more thoroughly, more deeply to convince them that you have a legitimate story to tell. Also one of the issues in a lot of classic narrative storytelling and I'm thinking Blackhawk down and to give you guys all, that's the classic narrative journalism. I ran the Philadelphia Inquirer. I think it was a 21 installment series. I mean, you don't see a lot of projects like that now, but there's a big narrative, a text heavy research intensive project. But a lot of those classic narratives really only involve, and Blackhawk down is actually an exception, but one or two people, you really focus very intensely. And sometimes one of the issues with storytelling is that one or two people may not be really representative. And so part of what I think is exciting about some of the new media opportunities is that we can actually access and follow and reflect more experiences. Even if we may hone in on one or two people, there's a way to include other stories so that we can make apparent what the larger story frame is even if we're telling one piece of that. So I think that's an important thing to be aware of is that you know, Islam and Indonesia, you're probably not gonna pick one person who's gonna be able to completely personify that in a meaningful way on every subject. And the other thing that happens in some of the new media frontiers is that you can create a story, but you don't necessarily get to keep control of it. There's sort of two directions this goes. You can invite other people into add content to something that you've created, but your story can also become part of somebody else's view, whether it's the person at home who's reading or viewing your story, or whether it's somebody who's actually doing their own reporting. And there's a lot more cross-reporting. It used to be you worked at a daily newspaper, you never mentioned a competition. Well, now online, you start to see some of these walls falling down and people will cite other people's work as they add their own piece to the next part of it. But where this can kind of be a little problematic is I think that's because narrative is so powerful, because it does convince people and it does engage them and they remember what they read. I'm thinking of the New York Times did a profile of Freeman Dyson a few months ago. Does anybody see that? And basically you have this very practical minded super genius who has been right about a lot of things in his life. And it was a really interesting profile and it was well reported and I don't think it was one-sided at all, but an important piece of what came out in it is that he's been a climate change skeptic for, I don't remember if it's fully 30 years now, but it's around 30 years. And here we have certainly one of the 20th century's legendary and interesting, really compelling scientific characters and he's a climate change skeptic. And so for the nugget of that piece itself in the magazine, I don't think that it's badly reported, it's certainly not badly written. But in the overall context into which that story drops, then we have, there's a slow simmering crisis issue here we've just added to sort of unintentionally. So I do think with narratives you have to be careful since you're dropping in a really compelling individual's story, what pot are you dropping it into? And I think that that's something that does have to be kept in mind. And so, but I don't wanna just say it's all risky because I think storytelling actually has a really good important role. And so what are some of the game changing, I'm thinking particularly here of journalism, narratives that you have read or seen, so I'm not just limiting it to text. What are some of the game changing narratives that you can think of? Stories that came out and weren't just important, well researched, a long time spent on them, but really the public responded to. Again, hands up, I do have prizes, so please do come get them at the end. Okay, what else? Anybody? Game changing narratives. Game changing any, it doesn't even have to be narratives. Carson, Silent Spring. Okay. And I'm thinking that's a fabulous example. Let's go to reported stuff like in like, let's say the last 30 years, okay? But that's absolutely a fabulous answer. What else? Greed and sweater. I'm thinking of the New York Times after September 11 where they get all those individual profiles of the people who died. I don't know if it changed the game, but it had a lot of insight. So the September 11th profiles, to sort of it. To have a community of understanding, processing of this event. Okay, what else? Watergate. Watergate, I think we can probably agree on that. And I mean, there's one where it's interesting because some of the individual stories weren't narratives. But what a narrative. You've got under cover, you know, garages. I mean, it doesn't, you know, the fall of a presidency, it doesn't get any bigger. We're going to ask Boing Boing's coverage of WikiLeaks. Okay, the Boing Boing WikiLeaks coverage. I think you can start with the other places, but Boing Boing Broke. And what do you think was game changing about that? It was just, it really opened up this huge discussion about, I mean, I don't know if it was game changing in anything but the discussion of WikiLeaks. But I think it really brought to bear, because there are all these like really sexy elements of it. You know, you had this particular person who was leaking military documents. And it just seems like it brought WikiLeaks to the public eye in a way that it hadn't previously been very public. Okay, great, what else? Michael Hastings coverage of demo crystal. Yeah, I'm a crystal. Actually, that was one of the things I had noted. I was thinking of like the recent things. Yes, what else? Paul, did you have your hand? I'll toss, there are two on very different sort of levels. Okay. One is, of course, Pentagon Papers because it changed media relationship to power and reports. And the other is an event rather than a story, but it was the founding and very rapid initial success of People Magazine. That's the next one I wouldn't thought of. So like that's great, because I think there's a lot of interesting stories out there. But if you think about those stories and why they stick in your mind, whether or not they were written out as the way you would write out a novel with all the fictional techniques, which is an important, which is the historical component of narrative journalism. There's character, you've got a really strong character and there's something happens. There's something dramatic, it has consequences. And that gets communicated by how that coverage happens. Some of the things I noted before I was coming over was Anne Hull and Dana Priest's coverage of the Walter Reed stuff in the Washington Post, the terrible treatment of the returning vets. Giant pool of money, which I cannot believe anybody in this playroom hasn't heard at some point in time. The New Yorker David Grandpiece about the potentially wrongful execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, which I would say has had an impact because there was just a guy written about in Texas Monthly that was released this month. I don't know if you saw that, but I think that again, where you have multiple stories that kind of aggregate to a bigger story that goes to the kinds of stories that ProPublica does, where they're stringing this clothesline across of what's the story behind all these stories so that we have a place to hang these individual pieces from and we understand the bigger part of what's happening. The abrogate photos on 60 Minutes, I think, are another, you know, and this because, and it was interesting. I think that does, on the one hand, sometimes the story isn't sexy because it doesn't have the visuals. But on the other hand, sometimes boy, if you've got the visuals, you've got the story because that's what they didn't want to let out. If you remember, it was written about, it was known that this happened, but the photos were the game changer. So I think sometimes the narrative can be really powerful with words and then sometimes an image can do a lot, not necessarily totally on its own. You have to have some context for it, but narratives can take place in a lot of different ways. At any rate, and then I was also thinking of an inconvenient truth, which Davis Guggenheim very much shaped as a narrative. Again, most of you've probably seen it or at least know about it, but he kept saying to Gore, like, we can't just do the PowerPoint presentation. I want this to be about your life. And there are, you know, and so there's all this stuff from his life that's in there. And I don't think that he was comfortable with that. It's the sense that I've gotten in some of the stuff that I've read about it. But I think Guggenheim knew what he was doing to make that impact. And for those of us who might be deep researchers or really like the long-term projects, you might be averse to that. But I'm just being practical. In terms of the big game-changing narratives, often there's a story attached or a story grows up around it. And that is why the larger public gets hold of it. So I think that it's important moving forward as we cover these kinds of things to find those stories that are legitimate, ethical, responsible, representative reporting that will get to the heart of those things. And there are the things that we've named are pretty much long-term traditional types of projects other than maybe boing-boing, that people investigated and spent a lot of time on and developed as a story. And so for right now, I think the most powerful narratives for public policy and for journalism are still the things that we already know how to make well and the things the public knows how to engage with. But I don't think that that's gonna be permanently the way everything works. And there are already some promising projects where we can imagine earlier in the meeting that some of us were talking about Ushady. There are tools where we can start networking and building communities and awareness of communities and getting information on the ground in ways that I think are already changing stories and are only gonna change them more. And I also think of the Washington Post Extraordinary Renditions story where they had a network of people spotting these planes. And this is how they put the story together, was these people who spotted the planes and realized that these transports were happening and then they were able to identify where these prisons were. And so this idea of networks, I think is only gonna become more important as time goes on. But I did wanna show a few of the projects that I think in the near future, there are people obviously at MIT working on some really, really, really forward-looking and amazing things. But I wanted to show you some things, if can we get it on or no? All right, so it's a two-minute sleeper thing. All right, so if we can get that up there. This is a project that the GDP did and it was interesting that Ross talked about the aftermath because the project that the National Film Board of Canada did was to spend a year after the collapse looking at what happens to regular Canadians. And they sent out a team of photographers and videographers and they stayed with the same people. And so these stories, the code I think, I think the green are the comments and the red are the videos and the yellow are photo essays. And so they spent a year chronicling the aftermath of this event in Canada. And the comments, people could add media themselves, they could make movies and upload it, they could just do typical text comments on the stories. One artist actually created a graffiti series of places that were featured in the film project and graffiti and it was all about the responsibility and who was responsible for what had happened. So it was this really interesting feedback loop of their viewers that got involved. And I don't know, I actually wrote and asked for the final numbers from them which I didn't get and I suspect that this wasn't a vastly participatory project. But I think it's an interesting way in which making narratives when the story isn't over which is part of your challenge is telling the story. If the story is still ongoing, how do you do that? These guys were making monthly films about the people that they had chosen to focus on that those people could see before they came back the next day to shoot footage for the next film. And it's a kind of a strange way to think of this ongoing rolling narrative when you don't know what the end is because traditionally we think of stories as a very shaped thing. And they are looking at actually doing some of that shaping and doing a longer narrative. This is something called the whale hunt. I don't know if anybody's seen this but this is I believe a couple thousand pictures and someone following a traditional whale hunt. So each one of those is a picture. You can watch it timeline, you can reorganize it, you can break it out into different chapters that it's divided into. So it's a very different way of experiencing story. And I think this is one of the things we're gonna see in the future is you may craft your story but you're gonna give people different ways to pull out the parts that they want that will still be a coherent story for them. So this was one project that I thought was really interestingly done. And in terms of community voices, telling their own stories, I don't know how many people are familiar with global voices, but it's like local bloggers and communities around the world and it's a network opportunity for them to get the benefits that come from being part of the group but for us to hear voices on things that, it's interesting if you watch this site for very long, you will realize that there are stories going on in the world that are very important to people who live in local areas that you would have no idea are really the central burning issues of their lives even if you've been reading reporting about that country. And I think sites like this are gonna become more and more important and even play into some of the kind of reporting that we're doing. In terms of new formats, this is TBD, which is a DC based new news organization, but one of the things that they did recently that was interesting and actually, Megan Garber who's here from Neiman Lab wrote about this on Neiman Journalism Lab, was this use of a tool called Storify. And she didn't write about this, she wrote about her own interesting take on Storify, but Storify lets you pull in social media. So people who've tweeted things, people who've posted photos, all different things you can pull together to create a story. Now many journalists have a heart attack when they hear this. This is like, and actually one person, I don't know if it was on your site or on Neiman's storyboard wrote, like journalists using curated tweets for a story like just shoot me now was basically what they were saying. But what I found fascinating about this particular take on it is that it really captured, for people who didn't know anything about the story, this timeline, there was a lot of stuff that people didn't know right in that moment. And that were still questions a couple days later. And so in the midst of that, when there were still no answers and they weren't gonna be answers for a couple days, TBD set this up and they pulled in tweets as reports were coming in. So you could understand how it had unfolded and what people didn't know and when they didn't know it and when the news did come through. So it's recreating that narrative of how the information is evolving and how the events are changing. And now they've done other coverage since that's more traditional coverage and now that things have happened and it's clear. But in the moment they didn't have that. And so they tried to create a moment by moment breakdown of what was happening and when did they find out which elements. And you can add text in to storify. You can shape that story yourself. It's actually was created by a former AP reporter. And I think it's a really interesting tool and I think we'll see more of that in terms of using traditional reporting techniques but pulling in some of the networks and information from social media. One of the other things I think is gonna happen is that you're gonna see statistics and story being pushed closer and closer together and our ability, data visualization, data visualization, data visualization. But it's a way to have authority with communities that are data focused while still being able to push things toward a story that the public can understand. And so you have word clouds and so you have different things. And one of the things that I like about this or that's intriguing to me is that you've got, this is IBM's Mini Eyes which you can go in and upload a data set and it will create a data visualization for you. And there are existing data sets in there. There are already a whole bunch of them. GapMinder which is one of the most interesting iterations of this. I'm gonna play for you this thing just because anybody's ever seen me talk before. I apologize because I love this video. But here we start, this is the y-axis is life expectancy, the x-axis is income per person and these colored dots are countries of the world by region, same color, our same region. And we are going through 200 years of time. So we have characters as countries. Countries here are characters. We have a setting which is our planet and we have change over 200 years. And at the beginning, every single country starts inside this box of $1,000 per person per year and 40 year lifespan. And by the end of this period of time we're moving through, everybody is outside of that. Now the problem with data visualization of course is it's an incomplete story. Why did this happen? We don't know. But we see it looking more and more like story to where it's giving us pieces of information that people who watch 60 Minutes, that people who like their Sunday comics and they wanna read a story about people that they can imagine, they can connect with some of these data visualizations. And so I think that it's gonna be really important to be open to these new tools in addition to the traditional documentary film, in addition to the traditional text-based stories as we move forward in the future. But I don't think stories importance is gonna go away. So just a few things to leave you with. I think that we wanna get more powerful with telling visual narratives in different lengths so that we can reach different audiences. And one of the values of visual narratives is that they can cross borders a lot more easily. You need to do much less with them to be able to share them with the world. And sometimes they don't even need captioning or subtitles to be intentional. I think we need to find ways to meet more people where they're at. I absolutely love ProPublica and I want it to continue forever and we need it. And not everybody's gonna have those kinds of deep pockets. And so I think that we have to balance the news we need to get across to people with the ways that they can understand it now. And hopefully we'll find ways to do that that are financially renewable and we'll have lots and lots of long-term research and reporting that's gonna get to the bottoms of these things. In the meantime, I think we do need to see where can people catch and understand these stories. Even as we do string these clothes lines where we have the larger story in the background and we are providing that for readers, we are letting them see where this thing fits into the larger arc even if we're telling one piece of that story. I think that we also need to figure out, this is really, I'm 40 and I think people who are 30 or already in this world and people who are 20 can't imagine another world, we need to get people to have a stake in the stories. I'm giving you cookies for giving me answers but that's a really simple version of it. But people want the story to belong to them too. I think people who grow up commenting on all their friends' lives every moment of the day and that doesn't mean you have to dumb it down and that doesn't mean you have, these stories are relevant to their lives and if you give them, if we are better at storytelling and making those links apparent to them, I think it'll become easier to engage them and then to become the kind of narratives where there's really, really good public policy outcomes even if we ourselves as journalists may not be advocates, we'll be presenting information that people will really understand what their choices are in ways that their choices will affect what happens in the future. So there's a lot more but I'll stop there. First, if we could have questions, a couple of questions for Andrea. Are you, okay, well let's start with that then. Oh, he's been waiting, okay. I know. I've just premed a little early. Can you identify? I'm a Berkman fellow at Harvard and I spent, I'm 68 years old I should add because I have a little longer view. Much of my career was devoted to directing very large reporting projects for places like the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times and the Center for Public Integrity and I say that to give myself a little bit of a sort of my cultural sighting but it also is context for the fact that I don't experience very much investigative reporting as game changing. I have seen an awful lot of it, I've overseen a lot of it that seems to change a game but the change then the game just slides back to where it was and often veers off in worse directions than it was before the reporting was done, not as a cause and effect, it just has a momentary thing. I do think that some things are inflection points, Abu Ghraib, I think it was fully an inflection point, Watergate is an inflection point but the great stream of stuff goes on and so what I'm wondering is whether you see, any of you see anything in the way that reporting is changing that all these wonderful new tools that actually could lead to journalism that makes the game, changes the game so that it stays changed as opposed to simply have a little blip of interest and that goes away. Well I can say something to that which is what you're saying is absolutely true and I was just thinking as I was talking about the Dana Priest and Anne Hall thing like gosh, did that really totally change? I should go look and see if Walter Reed, like what's the situation there because I don't know that that was a long term game changer even as I was saying it. One of the things that I think that some of the new technologies help with is it's a lot easier to find out what's gone before. There was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year for feature writing, I think it was feature writing, I don't think it was investigative reporting, that was the St. Petersburg Times, it was a project called for their own good and it was about just horrific abuse at a boys detention center in Florida and what most impressed me about the project was they went back and they looked in the newspaper, their own newspaper archives and they found that you know what? This story had popped up every 15 years or so, I'm making up that number but every certain cycle for a century so then the story became 100 years and I don't know, I mean I know that Ben is still Ben Montgomery and William Moore are still following up on that story. I mean really awful abuse, stuff that you know you just wouldn't believe and I know they're still following up on that story so it's good that the Times isn't letting go of it but I have to think that having access that some of the tools we have to access prior research information and check people, make people accountable for things that were said or done in prior things allow us to present those stories like that in a slightly different way so it isn't just the sexy if it leads a lead thing, you know abuse at boys home, well here look dear readers, 100 years and I, we can't you know, our role as advocates are not, again it's an important question, I have talked to many journalists now who simply say they are advocates, I think that's still something we have to resolve but I think making the public accountable to its own history is a way, in a way that they can actually hear may help with that but it's certainly a long term issue. Jim? Jim Parity compared to media studies, I'm wondering about stories because I worry about stories, I think of you know Glenn Beck and George Soros and you know the various tales the way in which people create stories and the necessity in a story to reduce elements in order to get the story to work and you know the corrections, the need for corrections and how do we counter the problems that stories raise because so much news gets storified and you know the whole problem of tabloid news and creating the great story and the effect of the great story and so forth, how do we control this? Well I think it's a pressure that you find in any kind of reporting it just shifts depending on what kind of reporting it is. If you're a inverted pyramid reporter and you're rushing to get that story in, you've got a different kind of pressure but it's just the same pressure that might require corrections. I mean so that I think is a different issue than narrative. There's the pressure to have a great story to you know maybe you haven't checked everything yet maybe you haven't and you wanna go with it and you know and so it's the ethics of any kind of reporting I think have to be brought to bear the same way on Storytellers but certainly there are some destructive aspects of storytelling, it can be reductive, it can generalize I think unfortunately or fortunately it's how people understand things. So to say I'm not gonna do that because it might because people I don't like do it or because it might cause problems I think may not be that useful an approach and it is a difficult question because did you ever do, did you do reporting yourself? I assume that at some point you're doing reporting and you probably talked to academics at some point and you probably said I can't put that in the paper can you tell it to me in a way that my readers will get it? So I think any kind of journalism is an effort to take very very very specific community by information from experts and bring it to a different community in a way that they can understand it. It is always a process of reduction and generalization. The problem is when you over reduce oversimplify or over generalize which again I think is more an attitude of doing quality work and that's important. I think simply using story techniques again some of these studies have shown that reporters who aren't doing narrative reporting in their minds are already doing this. So it's better that we be aware of how people and you know what if you have a partial narrative in there people will make up the rest of it. This is one of the things that they found they will complete the narrative themselves sometimes in profoundly incorrect ways. Now I'm serious and so I think one of the things we have to keep in mind is if people are already doing this what is the most ethical responsible complete way we can do it that is not so specific and jargonese that they can't understand it. Just for the comment I mean in some ways this is where the historian meets the journalist because the historian has the same problem and that is even the most massive history is in some way it is bent. So I mean we're constantly fighting this problem of creating the illusion or I mean there's always an element of illusion in the story. So and that's a legitimate thing in storytelling but you know when we're trying to report facts and events and things with as much accuracy as possible it seems that you know in some ways we're caught in this. If we want the speed of the 24 hour news cycle and the accuracy of peer review journals that's gonna clash sometimes. There's gonna be casualties of that. I think we'd try to honor both things as much as we can but also to realize that I mean I don't think story is inherently evil and that the more. It's not inherently good either. No it isn't it's a tool and so but I think that if we know that it is often what ends up being a game changer and if these are important stories then I think to never use story to address them is probably a mistake but also I'm not saying everything every time should be a story but when you have these individual inverted pyramid pieces that are coming out or blips that are 300 word briefs on the web that the people are trying to digest if we don't provide that longer stretch for them to put them in context then just giving them those pieces is not doing them a service. I think that the giant pool of money was a really good example of that. You read all this stuff and if you're not a finance person you catch little bits of it but it may not be sticking but you hear that and you're like oh that's what this guy does and that's why this happened. I think that's an important story. So I'm gonna sneak in ahead of you. I'm gonna impose a little moderator's privilege now. That was Andrew that was wonderful and this panel has I think hit from three sides as a question in a way I found enormously valuable. There were two things. One is a comment which on this question of story and facts, this is an old, old argument. I'm always reminded of, I'm a science journalist to begin with and I'm reminded of Henri Poincaré's comment way back in 1900 or so and in this new century as we accumulate all the scientific knowledge our biggest responsibility is to decide which facts are worthy of being discovered and that's the storyteller's task all the time. But the question I had that's editorializing the question I have and it's really addressed to all of you. We've talked about story, we've talked about story making we've talked about ways to think about and the sort of framework in which we can understand why crises are not crises anymore but crises embedded in this sort of much larger matrix of events that have to be understood. And that's been great and I'm gonna take it home and think about it for a long time. But one thing we haven't talked about is the connection of this thinking to its audience and I'm thinking specifically if any of you have any thoughts on distribution channels or distribution forms that will accommodate storytelling that extends over a long time like what ProPublica has done on some of its stories or that extends over a range of media or accumulation of stuff from audience, the sort that you were talking about Andrea. How do we construct a media or how do we evoke a media distribution channel that will do better than the patchwork we've got now? I think you, his organization has a fabulous example. I mean, and it's still evolving. These are not things that have set answers but Frontline has been doing some fabulous partnerships and they've got the law and order website that basically there were these murders, there were these deaths in New Orleans post Katrina and I believe it was a joint ProPublica and Times-Pakayun project that Frontline got involved in. They started investigating and they said, you know what, there's a story here, we don't know what it is yet but we're gonna start rolling it out now and they set up a website and they actually put out calls for information from the community and they let people see what they were up to. Now I'm sure some things, you know, they kept close to their chest so that they wouldn't blow things that they were trying to get out of police agencies but I think that that, which ends up, you know, they didn't know quite where they were going in the beginning with it, the Frontline people were telling me but they wanted to get stuff up on the website, they wanted to get things out and that's already made a tremendous difference and I don't think they're even done with it yet but I don't know if you want to, if you have anything to say about that. Do you know about that project at all? I only know a little bit about that project which is something we're very proud of. I think that the incremental stories that you're talking about were stories that we saw fit to be daily news stories that weren't, that, you know, they were the dots and there was always this larger intention of connecting them at some point both through the television program and through the reporting that my colleague, A.C. Thompson would do and that's kind of how that has come to be and just aside from that while I have the microphone, I was just gonna say that I think that there's also a longevity issue, a benefit that's coming from that project, from the presence on the web of news that will preserve the impact, I think, of these investigative projects so that they don't just slip away into history and be forgotten and let the things that they're supposed to impact revert to how they were before stories published so I think that's one of the shifts that we're seeing as well. I wanted to try to tie the three things together to the three angles. So what if the problem is actually that we're trying to interpret things before we have enough data and that's what stories become. Too much data, too little time to interpret the patterns. So what if we think about this as meaning making and there's constantly a map of information and we're trying to navigate that as people who are in the moment, in the experience or slightly at a distance, which would suggest we need harvesters of situations, curation, pattern detection, interpretation and prediction so we can see how good people are at interpreting. In other words, scary thing, how accurate is a reporter at finding the right patterns? And we could also be tracking the predictions and we could have pros who are paid doing that along with people on the ground who aren't paid but have more local knowledge. That would get rid of the real time. I mean, now you have the melding of history and story. You have local knowledge along with regional and national experts. You kind of create a sphere of information. But how, I mean, how does this differ from journalism? So I work for CBS and my cousin work for NBC. It's become a lot of mad libs journalism. People are filling in the blanks because they get the press release. They hear what other experts are saying and they start to look for those quotes. They sense what they need. Balskowsky has written about this phenomenon. So, you know, that's what you do when the pattern's rushing, the stuff is rushing at you too fast. If you play rock band and try to play drums, same thing. So the question is, is patterns the way for us to all navigate massive amounts of data? In fact, that maps to the mind. That's neural networks. I'm wondering if we're in a real time neural network. There are other patterns. I mean, I couldn't agree more. The stuff, the things, the information is overwhelming. So, but I'm just trying to say the patterns you want to follow are those of people and power. And, you know, if you're missing that, then you're reifying the stuff and you're missing the story, but I don't see how it differs from what journalists always talk about. Well, a quick follow up to wherever Chris is. I've been in a number of these things and one of the questions is where is power? Is it the top of the pyramid or at the base? And so, traditional journalism has been about top-down interpretation for the masses, for the base. And I'm wondering if we actually look at it the other way, do we find an intersection and the patterns match? Well, I mean, I've been thinking about this very interesting question of, I would say, does journalism ever change the game? I mean, let's just take it as a hypothetical. Because you can, I can think of many things where journalists report on what's happening, but in terms of actually instigating change. I mean, if I think of things that are, to me, historical events in my lifetime, okay? I think of the civil rights movement as first and foremost. And that was not, that was not from journalism. That was really grassroots. I mean, the war, the Pentagon papers, that was fine, but it didn't stop the war, the enemies stopped the war. But they get insights into the system of how power was being used. But that wasn't the question that, I mean, if you use the word game changer, it sounds like there's a causal, you know. Anyway, I just. If you get people into the system with knowledge, they can start to try to exert agency. That a lot of people don't know where to push. Yeah. It's just a comment. I was trying to tie together kind of the sense of the barriers and see if there's one there, there, that can then fall out into traditional journalism as well as real-time data visualization as well as to the little thing that becomes the big thing, and then becomes a small thing again. I would like to just toss in on game changer. So thank you. Because I'm not necessarily advocating for journalists as advocates, by game changer, I mean, that change the public's complete understanding and awareness of a story. That change the, that are these moments. I mean, it's certainly not the longue durée that change history as we think of long-term history, but make it possible for the public to understand and engage with events that affect them in a way that they were not aware of or engaging with it before. And so that, I think, that journalism and a lot of different kinds of public communication can do. And I would like to just toss in one comment that I've heard a couple of times from a Pulitzer Prize winner, long-form writer, Daki Banashinsky, who's done a lot of fabulous, fabulous work narrative and otherwise. And she talks about when she first started out as a reporter, they had the morning edition, they had the evening edition, they had, I mean, they were putting stuff out all the time. She was redoing, updating, revising her stories all the time. And so part of this, everything rushing at us, I think, is a real feeling. But I think part of it is also that there was this lull between in journalism history where it was pretty well funded and people could focus in a way that maybe they didn't 10, 20 years before. I mean, I think that the well-fed, well-nourished journalists who could really spend a long time on a story was advertising money at a specific sort of point in time. I don't think that was the eternal ideal that happened for any long period before technology hit us. I think that this is just a new iteration of something that we've experienced in some ways before. All right, we've got two minutes of seven. So I'm just curious if any member of the panel has a question they would like to put to any other member of the panel before calling it a night. Is there anything that was said to you that struck you in any way or just rage curiosity? I've stunned you into silence. I have a lot of questions for the audience. I would not, you know, but including like actually the style we just had in terms of, well, what is journalism? I mean, are we seeing anything different than what, I mean, is there anything new in this whole concept of slow moving crises? I mean, to come back to that, because that really is our topic. So I mean, full time afterwards, but I would love to know if you've reached any conclusions or, you know, if there's anything enlightening about the session that you're taking away with you. Mike, from please, you can't escape, but tell us who you are. This will be the last comment. Oh, sorry. No, don't apologize. Just be wonderful. Somebody's got it. Janet Aldrich and the Coalition of Preserve of the Public Record, I've been working on this little project for the past seven years. And I think that journalism is really like wide open right now, I think it's changing immensely. And I am a senior. And I think there are many people who are really floating out their potential journalists that have lived a lot of life right now that have a lot to offer in perspective and watching a slow moving crisis. And what forced me into this scene a long time ago, I reported on a few towns. And so I had that in my blood. Once you start the reporting scene, it gets in you. You don't realize it, but I'm always reporting something. But what I do is video journaling. And I have a website, so I comment on it. And I'm really not expertise, and I really should go back and take about 10 courses in language and whatever. But I really want to say that it's like I have really challenged myself in 10 years to learn videography, to start a website, to a blog. I've put up 600 films on blip. I have had 13,000 views in the last less than 12 months. And 20% are embedding them in their website. I am a news outlet. The Hill is following me. And in 98, my son handed me a computer and said, I said, aren't you going to help me with it? No. He says, I think you can do it. So I think that if we challenge ourselves and stretch and allow these not just block people like me, but what I've been doing is capturing public hearings, press conferences, and events. And what I have been doing is to my own investigative report on how the media reports. And so I started out by just saying I was doing documentary. And so they would let me just settle right up beside them. And so I would just take whatever they were taping, and then I would take them. And I have tons of footage of streams of cameras and little people and big people and all sorts of media disruption that has a form story. So I love what I'm doing. And I'm about to set it off like pro, what did you call? Pro? ProPublica. ProPublica. I'm setting this up as the Coalition and Preserve of the Public Record Archive Project. I want it to go national. And I want people, journalists, to put their footage into this project as public record documents. So I think, yeah, there's a lot of money that needs to be found to do this sort of thing. But you know what, 13,000 views with no advertisement says that the public wants the story. And they want to see what a journalist says about the story. But they want the story. They want to read it. They want to have that story and own it. So that's my comment. Thank you. Thank you. And can we now thank our panelists?