 My name is Seth Menukin. I teach here in the Graduate Program in Science Writing and I'm the director of the communications forum and joining me today are three STAT editors and writers. To my immediate left is Rick Burke, the executive editor of STAT, previously a longtime reporter and editor at the Times, mainly in Washington, exclusively in Washington. I was in Washington for like 17 years and then 10 years in New York. Before or after? Well, we can get into that later. Washington and then New York. Okay, I guess that would make sense because you're also a national editor there, an assistant MA and you came, your most recent gig before STAT was editor at Politico. In the middle there is the always charming Carl Zimmer, who is a contributing national correspondent for STAT. He also writes regularly for the New York Times. He has a weekly column there now called Matter. He writes for National Geographic, various other outlets. I always find this a little bit difficult to believe and I feel like you're counting your tattoo book, which might not warrant counting in this, but he is technically the author of a dozen books, including a Parasite Rex Evolution Making Sense of Life and a delightful book on science tattoos, which I own. And at the end there is Rebecca Robbins, who is a reporter at STAT covering money in life sciences. She previously worked at The Washington Post, The Hartford Current and the Santa Barbara Independent. And she was also manager of the Harvard Crimson. So what we're going to do is have a conversation for roughly an hour and then open it up to all of you. When we open it up, we don't have mic stands today unfortunately, but this is being recorded and we won't be able to hear your questions because it strikes from the soundboard unless you ask them into the mic. So please grab one of those mics on the table when the time comes to ask your questions. So I wanted to start just by talking a little bit in case anyone isn't aware just exactly what STAT is. So Rick, why don't you take that one? Sure. If I may, can you just raise your hand if you read STAT, if you've ever read STAT? Oh, that's good. And we'll convert the rest of you in the next hour. So what STAT is, we've been officially launched about three months and it's a publication, online publication with a national international audience focused on health medicine and life sciences and we aim to fill a void that we saw in coverage in terms of writing for an accessible, writing authoritatively, incredibly about these issues for a broader general audience and we have about 50 people total including the editorial and business staff. This was started by John Henry, the owner of the Boston Globe and the owner of the Red Sox, among other entities who saw a need for, who's very passionate about these issues and saw a need just in Kendall Square seeing all these stories are there and there's not enough coverage and he said we can fill the void but he wanted a new digital news organization that could be more nimble than the Boston Globe in covering this. So we're not tied down by traditional ways of doing things or ways of coverage or ways of putting a story online. So the Globe, we're an independent company from the Boston Globe but they're our sister publication and they can run whatever stories they want of STATs in the Globe and we're happy when they do because it helps our, it gets our stories out there and it helps with our readership and they've been a great partner to have. We also run some of their stories on STAT. So that's pretty much what we are and we aim to be a daily readable guide to some of these issues and frankly, we could have twice as many reporters as we have and not cover all the stories that are out there. This is, as you all know, this is such a booming, fascinating area. We also, we have reporters, we're based here but we also have reporters in Washington, New York and San Francisco. And Columbia at the moment. And Columbia, yes. Following the Zika scare in Columbia. And so your background isn't in science or science journalism. Right. So how did that relationship begin? Yeah, maybe we're the last person who should be in this job in some ways. So if anyone out there needs a job and is thinking online. I was rushing from the office Tuesday for a day and dealing with all these issues and rushing over to the Kennedy School to moderate an election night party on the New Hampshire primary. And I thought like I'm changing back to my old world and this was probably the first time in decades that I hadn't either been overseeing political coverage or writing the story or something. And because my whole history has not been in this world but my interest has been when I was at the times I had in various jobs oversight over lots of, you know, all the news coverage and one of my, and I remember calling meetings of the science department and saying we need more energetic reporters. I remember like that was, I mean I knew enough to know what we needed and what stories would interest people. So I've always felt a good story is a good story, whatever the topic and I think I'd like to think that I bring to stats sort of the general reader's interest in going after stories that people want to know about and what we've done is we've assembled some of the most best known and respected people in the country. People like Carl Zimmer who write about these issues in a way that gave us instant credibility to our audience and we have, for those of you who haven't read it, we have this morning newsletter, Morning Rounds that you can sign up for free at statnews.com. I've heard of that. Yes, I think you have. And it comes in every weekday morning at 6 a.m. and to me that's a window into what we try to do because it's a mix of the news that we think you should know. It's not by all means, any means comprehensive, but a window into the news in this world every morning and what's encouraging to me is our open rate which the number of people who open the e-mail is 49% and it's been consistently 49% from launching more than three months ago and that's unheard of in the industry. That's three times the standard for a newsletter like that and that tells me that people have a hunger for a source of this news. People want to read this stuff and so we're building, I think, a very dedicated and reliable audience. I joked and I guess I probably should have said this at the outset that I've heard of that because for about 30 seconds at the launch I was working on the Morning Rounds newsletter until Rick and I both realized that it was insane for me to try and do that and everything else I'm trying to do. Seth just didn't want to get up at 5 in the morning. You're right. That also most definitely true. Yes, that was definitely true. So Carl, when you signed on for STAT you're at a point in your career where you're turning down assignments for want of time. I know you're working on another book. You have your column in The Times. You and I have talked a lot about the future of science journalism and where it's going. What was it that made this appealing to you besides the money? Part of what made it interesting is that I had never really been part of a publication literally from the start. And not only that, that would be interesting enough but to be part of an effort from the start in 2015 is really interesting because you're not spending a lot of time saying, well, who's our printer going to be and what's our schedule going to be for production and so on for the print side and all that sort of traditional stuff. I mean basically what was happening was that Wreck was building a website and bringing in all sorts of interesting people not just straight journalists, but also people who do multimedia, people who do video, people who do animation and people who I as a writer could collaborate with and so it just was a really exciting opportunity. I mean I still get to do that kind of really dig into a subject and write about it in the way that I always have but then I can be just talking with people to sort of figure out how can we make this different, how can we make this really work, how can we make this something somebody really wants to read on their phone, for example. And so it's just been totally fascinating to be a part of it. And Rebecca, it sounds from your bio-like year you have a 15 or 20 year career in journalism but I think that was all crammed into a year or so. Is that right? But when you'd been working for those newspapers you were primarily working on the print side of things. Is that correct? I was writing both for web and for print but in each of those cases these were print publications where that was the main focus. And so coming then to stat what was it that struck you or did anything strike you as being sort of fundamentally different about how that newsroom operates versus how the Washington Post newsroom operates? Yeah, I think as many folks who've worked for both Web only and print publications probably have experienced is that not having to worry about filling space or meeting sort of artificially imposed deadlines as a result of the print schedule is really liberating. And I think working at the stat I've found that we really can run things or schedule the timing for reporting based on what makes the most journalistic sense rather than factoring in other considerations. And I think for me as a reporter whose focus is putting out the best story possible it's been a really great experience. So one of the things I want to talk about is what things are going to look like not for stat but sort of for the industry and for science coverage in general moving forward. And it seems like at the moment stat is doing a pretty broad range of types of stories. In-depth investigative pieces, in-depth features, video-only pieces, newsletters. Is that because you've identified those as areas that you think there's a need or there's a particular desire or is it sort of throw everything against the wall and see what sticks and then modify them online? It's really interesting because it's been interesting starting from the ground up because you don't really know what it's going to be until it happens. We hired all these people and we're all having meetings about stories and everything, but I had no idea really how many stories we'd have a day or what the flow would be. You just don't know. And I had been surprised by frankly the quantity of stories we've had and the range of stories. It's more than I would have guessed. And I think it's because what we're focused on is being sort of journalistically ambitious and telling stories that other people aren't. And our main focus is really not to be boring or to do commodity journalism that other people are doing. And again, there's no magic formula. There's no one way of doing things. We have the luxury of experimentation and we will see what stories do well and not do well, but we're still so new that we have the luxury and thanks to a publisher who's willing, is committed to the subject matter and to the journalism and not just making money immediately off this, we have the luxury of really being focused on the journalism and not overthinking other factors. So we're trying to do a range of stories, everything from investigative stories, an investigative story project that took months on clinical trials to... What was that story? That was a story by Charlie Piller, our West Coast correspondent, on looking at... There's a federal law that requires researchers to publish clinical trials on the results of their clinical trials on clinicaltrials.com, I think it is. Dot gov. Dot gov. And most institutions don't do that and essentially breaking the law, everything from Stanford to Sloan Kettering, big institutions. I don't know where MIT was on that list. I'm sure we read that. And we did a data visualization so you could look up your local institution and see how 90% of the time they didn't share the information that they were required to share and there was a reason why this law was established. I think it all started when Elliot Spitzer was AG in New York and I think some of the drug companies were trying to get away with pushing research that hadn't really been out there. I mean it's all... There's a transparency behind the reason for this law and that story kind of uncovered that. I guess what I'm saying is we do everything from deep investigative stories to a quick piece today about a congressman on a committee today vaping using like an e-cigarette at a hearing today where we jumped on that story. Which congressman? Duncan Hunter. And we got the video of it. I mean what we want to be is... Is vision allowed? Is it new frontier? To a poll we did with... We do a monthly poll with Harvard a national poll. We have a poll today on gene editing and how people don't want designer babies. I mean we sort of try to weigh in on issues that other people aren't weighing into. Maybe it's because of my own political background but we've sent people out on the campaign trail in Iowa and New Hampshire looking for the intersection when these candidates talk about drug companies or other issues related to that we care about. We want to be in on those stories. We write about drug ads, drug companies. We write about... And again, as Carl said, sort of a range of types of stories. Stories that are video first, that are driven by multimedia storytelling rather than text. We've tried to do explainers that using... We have animators, we have people... We really devoted a lot of our resources into making science accessible and interesting and sometimes even injecting a little... And not being afraid to have a little fun and a little whimsy to make stories just a little bit, to make stories just accessible and interesting. When I was at the New York Times, I always said this, and this isn't, for me, something new to stat. When I was at the New York Times, you guys are taking yourselves too seriously. You're saying you're the New York Times? At the Times? At the Times, like this. And I would say, like, lighten up and have a little fun, make your stuff accessible, and there's a danger in journalism when you don't do that. And all three of you know how to write excessively and understand how important that is to make stories readable and interesting. So, speaking of clinical trial stories, Rebecca, I wanted to ask you about... I think it's the first story that appeared under the stat byline several months before the site actually launched. It was a piece you did about a clinical trial. Can you describe that story? Sure. So this is a story that I think telling how I discovered the story in the first place might be most illuminating. So during the summer, when we were preparing to launch stat, I spent a lot of my time, as did other reporters, meeting with people, going to events right here in Kendall Square to try to understand where the stories were and to develop sources. And one of those events that I attended was a panel discussion among some executives and experts on social media use in clinical trials. And so while it was at that panel discussion, most of the discussion was pretty boring and straightforward of regulatory considerations and sort of the common wisdom on this issue. But during the Q&A session, one executive raised her hand and posed a question to the panel of experts about what her company, a small biotech here in Kendall Square, should do about a situation that was driving them crazy and freaking them out. And that was a very strange thing that was happening with their stock price. Their stock price was zigzagging up and down in response, they thought, to social media posts that were being posted by two participants in their clinical trial. And so that sort of short exchange at a panel discussion ended up being the seed for a story that I did. I went ahead and talked to the patients who were posting on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, essentially in real time updating the world on the progress of a company-sponsored clinical trial. It was for a device that they had implanted into their spines because they were both paralyzed in accidents. In this device, they hoped would give them the ability to recover and hopefully ultimately walk again. And so the story that I ultimately wrote I thought was a fascinating intersection of business, of the patient experience, and of sort of the crazy world that social media has created. Ultimately, the company's investors, this is a public company, were watching the social media posts and trading stock accordingly. So it was a really fascinating reporting experience and one that I think hopefully the resulting story encompassed a lot of things that stat wants to be and do. And you have a background in financial journalism. One of the things I found so fascinating about that was it seemed to sort of undercut the idea of rational markets because if you had a clinical trial with two people, those results would never be interpreted as meaning anything. And yet here you had two individuals who not only were going to be influenced by their own hopes and desires and their subjective experiences but other things could be going on. Were you surprised when you saw that having the effect that it did on sort of on stock price on something on the bottom line in that way and pretty significant spikes and drops? There were some significant spikes and drops and it certainly was unusual and interesting to me and when I asked experts about it they really saw this as such an unusual scenario because so rarely do you have a company whose stock price is so dependent on say a single clinical trial. Most big pharma companies have many trials going on and many products in the pipeline. And then still rarer is when you have a clinical trial like this one where it's open label so patients know that they're getting the treatment and where these were the first two human patients to ever get this intervention. So it was sort of this perfect storm as one analyst described it to me. Carl, one of the things you've been doing a lot of is video stories. Science happens, is that what it's called? Can you first just start out by describing what those are? Yeah, so these are, they come out roughly every month and they're around five or six minutes long and basically the concept is very simple. I just show up at a lab and pay a visit and obviously I don't just show up unannounced but what I do do is I look for places where really cool basic research is happening that is potentially going to lead to advances in medicine and they can be all sorts of different things. So the first one that we did was at Johns Hopkins where I went to visit a neurologist who is developing a treatment for stroke which is basically having people play a very immersive video game with a joystick that's very hard to control and you basically become a dolphin so basically he said sit down and you are going to be the dolphin and that was this great way to take you in and you get to meet the neurologist who is dealing with the problems with stroke recovery and all the shortcomings and this new idea about how to retrain the brain and then computer scientists who are trying to do video games that are going to be responsive enough for what he wants, artists who just go and hang out with dolphins for weeks and just do sketches to really make it work. We went to a lab here at the VICE where people are basically engineering bacteria that they want to put into people and basically monitor or manipulate your microbiome. Another thing we did, we went to a lab where basically they try to understand death like why do we die when we die? In five minutes, that's right, yeah. With cameos from Woody Allen and Monty Python as well but what they do is they study thousands and thousands of tiny little worms measuring their life spans under different conditions so for me it's a totally new experience which is one of the things I like about working with STAT but it's a different way of basically telling a story. Unfortunately, I'm working with a really talented producer named Matt Orr and together we find a way to get the scientists to talk about what they do and tell their own story and find sort of visual ways to add to that and then also they're talented animators and put in even more elements in there so it's been a lot of fun. And there's no accompanying, this doesn't go along with the textual piece as well. Those are basically freestanding. I'll write a short piece of text to just kind of introduce it so there's a section of STAT where we've been putting the videos and if you click on one of the videos you can read the text and then watch the video and then just kind of go from there. And so what's the reaction been to those pieces that you've written that have been written in stories? Very positive. And I think the scientists really like it in the sense that this is something where somebody can just sit down in just five minutes and they get a feel for what it is they're doing and why it would matter. I think a lot of scientists are like in a lifelong struggle to explain to their parents why what they're doing is meaningful. So these videos are I think can help at least a few children speak to their parents. But also teachers have told me that they're actually like really helpful to just like here, I'm going to show students a video for five minutes and that's going to jump us into like a broader subject. We'll deal with the textbook stuff as well but this is a way to sort of capture the spirit of this kind of inquiry. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to just capture the feel of these places. And so Rick, in terms of traffic what types of stories are getting the most traffic? Are these stories that also run in the globe? Are they videos? Are they... It really depends on the story. One thing that's surprised me is some of the stories that weren't like listical type stories have done very well. One of... It surprised you that non-listicals have done well. Non-listicals have done well. It doesn't have to be a listical. A lot of faith in the readership. So our best traffic piece of all time was the CRISPR scientist, the fun story that Sharon Bagley did that was like something like 3,000 words. About Eric Lander. No, no, no, no, no. The previous, the previous. But here she's writing about CRISPR and a scientist and it's like 3,000 words and that went through the roof in terms of traffic. And could you tell where that was coming from? It was translated in Chinese and all these worldwide interests. Was it fueled by Twitter or by...? And it was both social and just people sharing the link. There wasn't any... I thought there was one secret, someone putting it up, but it was just generally just really did very well. And another... So you just don't... But also the Eric Lander piece that she did also did very well because I think people like personalities and writing about people... That was a piece about a controversy about a piece Eric Lander had written about CRISPR that was somewhat controversial. And another piece that did very well, another profile with Slava Epstein that Carl wrote that did... A scientist that was kind of someone that isn't a household name that did very well, again, because it's an interesting personality and people want to read about science. And... But I've also found that... Again, some of our listicles have done well too, like the six things that... The six cures that are the most horrible cures that you can imagine. But we try to do everything we do. We try to give it some kind of higher end, high value, added value credibility to it. We had a story that I assigned that ran today and it was a little embarrassing that I assigned it, but I thought we should do it and it's why it's... Trump has called, you know, Rubio kept calling him out for sweating, sweating, sweating publicly. And I said, let's... It's in the public discussion enough that we should explore. Is there some kind of element that Rubio has or people that sweat excessively and drink a lot of water? Is that something we should write? So we took it in a serious way, but not too serious and not too playful. You got to get the tone just right. And I think... And we kind of slaved over just getting the tone right. Because you want it accessible and again, not taking yourself too seriously, but also not... You don't want to make too much light of these issues either. Another story that did very well was Rebecca's story a couple weeks ago on Theranos. All these news organizations have written... And Theranos is just in case anyone does not know. Oh, Theranos is the blood? What would you... It's the company that's claiming that with a tiny prick of blood it can give a whole range of diagnostics that normally would need several files of. And they were like on the... on the rise and being celebrated. Billions of dollars. And will you tell them what you wrote? Sure. So to continue that background, was this Silicon Valley darling until this past fall when the Wall Street Journal started running a series of very critical stories, essentially questioning the premise behind their promise to revolutionize blood testing and diagnostics. And along with these very critical Wall Street Journal pieces, regulators started to sort of... crack down on the company. So this company has been very much under fire for the last few months. And so there's been a ton of reporting done. It certainly is something that most news organizations and all news organizations in this space are paying attention to. And so the piece that I did didn't try to do the tried and true task of journalism of on-the-ground reporting. And that's been being done and been done by these other organizations in this case. And their contribution is very valuable. But my reporting here took a different tack, which was to try to give readers a guide for what to look out for in the next few weeks and months to figure out really whether this company, this once Red Hot Silicon Valley Upstart, was finished whether they could survive. And so I tried to map out for readers what signs to look for, what bellwethers in the coming weeks will perhaps shine light on whether this company is finished or not. And that story, as Rick said, got a lot of attention because I think it laid out in clear and simple terms for readers who haven't been following sort of every milestone development in other reporting what's going on with this company. That's a good example of what we're trying to do here. There's story after story and the Wall Street Journal has done a great job with it in driving the story. But then what we're trying to do with status or how can we kind of zero in there added value in a way that would be helpful to readers and interesting and authoritative. And that's exactly what we did and people want to read that. And one other thing I just want to mention that when you ask about audience and traffic is we did a project on concussions and on this football player Syracuse who had multiple concussions and was kicked off the team and boarded by several other college teams. Lower tier. Lower tier but who didn't really worry about that as much. And that had not been written before and we did a and that got enormous attention and it was a case of this guy A.J.'s personal story and we followed him for like a month or two and we did a video with it and we did a great video with it it was like a four minute video and what's interesting is and this is what's cool about experimenting in the digital age we did the video and it did very well but then we did a truncated version of the video that was like 30 seconds it was like a trail or highlights of the video that featured words on the screen so you could read it at your desktop and it was like crazy because and sometimes you just have to think about how people are getting their information these days. This is something we wouldn't have thought of before but once that happened my next thing was let's do a trailer version of Science Happens so we can experiment with and we did. Carl, I know that you talked to a lot of other science writers were both involved in a community of science writers I'm curious about what the reaction has been generally to STAT and how people are viewing it as something that might portend a different future for science journalism how they see it fitting into the ecosystem because there has been a lot of anxiety within this field over the last decade I think especially over the last probably five years I started like 25 years ago I started out as an assistant copy editor Discover Magazine back when you actually pasted the pages on wax paper so things have changed so much and I would say maybe five years ago I was really like just kind of in a glum mood about what was going to be happening with science writing just because things were drying up and just models didn't seem to be working anymore but I don't know I'm feeling more optimistic now and it's things like STAT it's also places like BuzzFeed for example originally I thought of BuzzFeed as a place that had kittens and obstacles and whatever but then they just decided they were going to just open up a news operation and they did it just on a tremendous scale and then they said okay now we need to have a science desk here and they hired a friend of ours of Virginia Hughes who just then proceeded to hire like six or seven people and they just started doing great stuff and there are other places like Vox and 538 and so on because I have a really active science reporting going on and so will the industry be able to support as many people who were employed and say let's pick a year like 1995 honestly I don't know but I don't look at it apocalyptically but I think actually there are places as places just sort of start up without being legacy places are starting up fresh and figuring out how to run things and experimenting and so on there are a fair number of success stories so that's a good transition Rick I'm curious about what the business plan is for STAT where the money is going from besides John Henry I know that he's made a significant investment in it but I also know he's a very true businessman and would prefer to make money than lose it so what is the business plan moving forward there's we're fortunate that John is a true businessman wants to make money but also understands there's we're all trying to figure this out in journalism and I think what John would like is for this to be an example of a sustainable news organization that can do it and that can make it and I think we've had a lot of discussions about how this might work or not work and I think we've come to the realization that a couple of things is one of our our financial success may ride a lot and I think this is true of all digital news organizations these days on native content that advertisers put in and sponsored content and where it's clearly designated that this is not editorial but it's and so native content produced by the advertiser or produced by the advertiser not produced within STAT not produced within STAT so it would be like we've already had on our site like Johnson & Johnson has had some sponsored content well they'll say some little newsy kind of looking nugget where we say in a different colored sponsored content Johnson & Johnson but it has a little more credibility to them than just some ad that appeared on the site so I think that's the business model for us to sort of encourage more sponsored content that's what we're going after and we're starting to get sponsors that are very interested in that the other thing is we're looking at we have kind of a deep belief that people will pay for good journalism I think you're seeing the the New York Times people pay to the regular users pay money for the journalism the Boston Globe same thing so we're going to be experimenting with different ways like political pro or maybe some paid version maybe a paid version we actually don't have a plan we're discussing just variations you can look at the Wall Street Journal stories you have to pay to get or not get we could do a political pro thing where there's like a Kendall Square newsletter everything you want to know about Kendall Square all the inside dope but you have to pay money for it or not so we're going to experiment with that we're experimenting with but the priority right now is to build the audience and develop fans and is there a time frame for when the audience building is over Seth wrote a book on John you tell me how long is he going to give he told me two more weeks so I mean you were at the event where he said before we launched which I keep repeating and to him I said the runway he said the runway is long and wide and I reminded him yesterday or I told him yesterday he was telling me he loves like newsrooms he was just touring the new Washington Post newsroom and he said they have Nespresso machines all over but you have to bring your own pod they won't pay for the pods and they save 150,000 a year by not buying pods and morale in the Washington Post newsroom is sky high so I told him that I was at the Nespresso store in Boston over the weekend and I saw this $3,800 really cool Nespresso like machine they look like a jukebox I said I really want that for stat but I don't dare do that until we're really in the black maybe they'll give me a deal so I'm going to send them the link but anyway so that's the long answer to my question we're serious about great journalism and the belief that John has that I have and the hope that we can translate great that people will pay for quality journalism that's our bet and we are trying to make that happen so I know that was somewhat ingest but speaking about a $3,800 Nespresso machine I know the relationship with the globe is not a completely smooth one there's been I think the globe has essentially lost all of its science reporters and editors and those positions have not yet been filled is this something that is being imagined as replacing what they had done in terms of science coverage I wouldn't say that I wouldn't say it's not been smooth I would say there's a grievance filed with the union yeah that's a group the spin I would give you is that as a former media reporter here this spin I would give you is that we have been able and this is true and I'll also give you the negative part of it the truth is there's no startup news organization that I can think of that has ever had this independence that we have as our own company yet we can draw on the platform of the globe and the infrastructure of the globe IT support to things that we never could do on our own we never would have been able to start up this quickly without the infrastructure of a legacy news organization and I don't think that's repeated anywhere because in terms of I mean you have like upshot at the New York Times and things like that but that's not a separate self sustaining or trying to be self sustaining operation on the downside it's I think for people who are reporters at the globe who are tied to ways of doing things that are part of a legacy institution as Rebecca says when you have print deadlines and things like home delivery issues that you have to worry about that we don't have to worry about there's going to be a natural tension no matter what in the building there is a grievance from the guild about like what is stat and why are they replacing us but the reality is we haven't replaced the health and science reporters a couple of them took the left or took the buyout they have I think a half dozen right now that's still right for the globe and that we run their stories namely like Rob Weisman who covers biotech has been really helpful to us from the start but I don't think there are any more dedicated science reporters in terms of actual pure science there was more than one and there were also science editors and today I couldn't help but notice one of the arguably biggest science stories of the year the gravitational waves the discovery of gravitational waves the globe ran an AP story today which I think probably a year ago would not have been the case but that's separate from stat that's a it's separate from stat because stat didn't cover the gravitational waves it's separate from stat and that's not part of stat's mandate but to the extent that the globe science section has been replaced by stat I think that there's potentially a relationship there you mean in terms of what we could offer well I think part of the the reason we exist and part of my coming to this was the editor of the globe saying we'd love to have more content and stat it wasn't stat then but like we could use so in many ways we fill a lot of like the business section we have a Monday pages of stat content in the globe so it has benefited to them whether I don't know it has been of benefit and you could argue separately that stat or no stat there's been cut back to the globe anyway alright why don't we open it up I have a couple more questions but I want to make sure you all get a chance to ask questions as well so again make sure you come up to the mic and please do not be shy someone always has to be yeah Wade oh and just again for the recording if you could just identify yourself hi Wade Rache from STS here at MIT so I'm curious about what you're learning about Rick you said you're building your fan base right now so what are you learning about who those people are and I'm curious specifically about whether how you think about you're drawing in different types of audiences right a lot of your stories are very inside baseball like pharmaceutical politics right and others are more about disease treatments and seem to be speaking to the families of kids who have specific conditions and others are about politics right and the campaign trail and so you're going after many different types of readers where you're seeing the response and whether you feel that you can build a modern publication around like a whole zoo of different types of readers right so are you going after pursuers see I would argue that that's what sets us apart that if you look at some other general interest publications that cover some of these areas they're a little they're more narrowly focused and we are embracing stories on the intersection of popular culture and science politics and science but we're not afraid to write about the science of it and the more sort of technical or more narrow issues or about people's human life life experiences and we have this column called end notes about the end of life it's a very human type of approach I guess what I would say is I mean you raise a fair good point and what we are finding so far from early metrics is that people first of all our audience is about 25% international it's do you know what's the globe stat for that I assume that that's I don't know I assume it's much lower so we have international audience is that higher than you expected I didn't really that's impressive and we have the biggest state we have is Massachusetts I think because we're based here and because of the globe connection and then California and then New York but it's pretty much scheduled we have readers in every state except I think North Dakota I think there's like zero but and in terms of demographics we're finding a more male than I expected like a majority male and I'm not sure why that is it's also younger than I expected I don't have the numbers offhand but it was like most readers seem to be 30s or 40s or 20 you know just they're very few retirees or like 5% or something of our and a lot of people who are in a lot of students which I get to be think of medical students business people again I I don't have it in front of me but but one thing that has surprised me in terms of what people want to read like I thought I did it like I had us do a story on Charlie Sheen's doctor when Charlie Sheen said he was HIV positive it's that's obligation who else is going to sit down in Hollywood with Sheen's doctor and I thought that would get a lot of attention that didn't it did okay but not great because I think people are coming to us for more science and the health I think people aren't necessarily trained to come to us for necessarily the popular culture stuff that said is I don't know the answer of whether like I think it's way too early for us to react to what people want I think we have to trust our gut in just offering interesting stories and see where that takes us and I'm sort of happy with the sort of buffet of interesting stories rather than like we had a story that Ellie Duggan did about what was that micro sound like microchondria no yeah and that to me was a very like you have to the guy who wrote our newsletter is a PhD and like he's you've got to know this stuff to write about it and I thought this is really authoritative and really interesting but I also thought well get an audience that was one of our most popular stories today because I think people are going to us for serious stories but also our story on Bernie Sanders returning his donation from Martin before we even launched went viral so we just don't it's kind of too early to tell we're trying to hit business stories science stories sort of consumer not consumer but patient stories and we are one thing we're trying to avoid is health policy per say because I think too many there's plenty of places to go for that for like the latest Obamacare twist everyone loves a good microchondria story yeah hi I'm David Chandler I'm now at the MIT news office but I spent 16 years at the Boston Globe Health and Science section and so I'm really curious about this new model and how it differs from what we used to do in the health and science section and what this new framework allows you to do that's different a lot of the pieces are the same a lot of the elements are the same you say you have two pages in the Monday paper we had three pages in the Monday paper all of us who worked on the section you know also wrote for the daily paper we had stories coming out every day all of our stories also ran online on Boston.com all of the individual pieces seem very similar so I'm really curious about this new model I'm quite excited about it I think this is fascinating and very promising but I'm really curious about what it is that this new structure this new framework enables what it lets you do that's different than what happens under the more traditional framework of you know back when the Globe Health and Science section was thriving there were dozens of similar sections in newspapers all around the country they've all gone away except for the New York Times section pretty much now what do you get out of this new structure what does it give you what does it let you do yeah that's a very good question and probably the best person to answer would be getting Gil who's our managing editor for Enterprise who you probably worked with at the Globe who went from he's the one person who went from the Globe to STAT and so I wasn't at the Globe I've only been doing this for X amount of time so I'm not the best person to answer that on the other hand I can tell you what I do think it's there's a liberating you're liberated from the requirements of a print news organization and I found this at Politico when I went from the New York Times to Politico I mean at the times I was very involved in us moving toward the web and digital and but it's nothing is like being I go to Politico and nothing's like it like you don't the world is not geared around delivery and print and writing headlines to fit a certain space and writing a story to fit a certain space you can think of an idea ask for the story and there it is on the site you know in a flash an hour and two hours you don't have to go through the bureaucracy and what I would say is if there's a nimbleness that I think you have to have to be competitive in and certainly in any new digital enterprise but to be in journalism you have to be fast and quick and able to turn things around in a creative way and I could just say from a purely bureaucratic point of view had had the money that was taken for stat gone to the globe let's say if John Henry let's rebuild the globe's coverage and put all that money into stat there's no way that in X amount of months we could have hired dozens and dozens of people it's just impossible because that's not how the world works and the culture and the bureaucracy of any any traditional news organization no matter how well intended or no matter what the quality we can move on things and we can push things out we can design beats and ways of coverage that may seem like they've been done before but we don't have to think about any old ways of doing things or ways that were done before we can experiment and create and probably the biggest difference and something Carl talked about is multimedia I mean stat I would say like maybe 20 percent of 25 percent of our newsroom is geared to multimedia, data visualization animation, storytelling that's not text driven and that's totally different from the New York Times well maybe they'll watch both now any traditional news organization and that's probably the biggest difference I mean just to add to that I write every week for the New York Times I've written for them I guess 10 years now and I write for magazines and other places and each place has a different kind of culture and style and newspapers you write things for newspapers in a certain way I go to the Times with certain ideas and I write about them in sort of the Times style and if I don't what is that certain way how would you describe the difference there not that much of a personal voice you know just sort of like you can sort of like you can have a sense of humor you can be graceful with your language but it's gotta be kind of within okay you're writing for the Times like that's how they do it and that's fine and I have no quarrel with it and it's a great place to write about other areas of science but then at a place like STAT you know like it's just different there are things that I've been proposing to STAT that I just would not have proposed to the Science Times or the Health Section of the New York Times so like just a case in point so like okay so I'm on I'm kind of addicted to Twitter so I'm on Twitter and I kind of yeah and so something sort of flashes up about someone's talking about Craig Venter you know genome pioneer he's got this big hotshot company out in California and he's making all these claims about sequencing your genome and it's gonna be great for your health and all of that and it's gonna be this sort of $20,000 concierge health exam and so I'm like you know so I'm just like I think I'm skeptical and as are lots of people for good reasons many good reasons and I know that you know Craig Venter is on Twitter so like I just say basically like tweeted like okay Craig Venter like how's this not gonna be you know just a whole kind of banquet of false positives you know just come on and he emailed he didn't email on Twitter he just said like that's very naive of you you know and I was like okay well so I went to Jason and I was like okay Craig Venter just called me naive Jason Uckman who's my editor at STAT like Craig Venter just called me naive so do you mind if I write an article about what they're doing and so like that I was writing an article you know there's no like running in a flagpole or whatever like I was on it and I was just working on it and it was a very sort of like and so was that the germ of the article or was that part of the article was your exchange with Craig Venter? I don't think I ended up mentioning it in there but it was just I was just like hey come on and you know like there are certain places where you would have to like laboriously work up a proposal and you would have to go around a bunch of people and get scored about whether to do it or not and I was like let's just do this and it was a it felt more like a magaziney piece being very sort of like this is I mean excuse my French but essentially it's like this is bullshit you know and Venter being like hey like you know they don't get it like it was a very very brightly colored story and I could do it at STAT I don't think I would try to write it for a straight newspaper and for people who haven't worked at newspapers so the difference there between what would happen to the newspaper is you would need to see if there was room in the next day's paper it would need to go to the page one meeting the section meeting and a couple hours later you might get a decision and that may or may not be too late you're on an aircraft carrier does that make sense I mean it still seems nebulous in that I'm not sure that I couldn't have proposed a story like that for the print paper but I see your point that there's certainly my experience and let me give you an example that I can say or a sense very directly there are many stories we do for STAT that we offer to the globe that they run three or four days later and we love that when they do it we pitch them to and but they have to it has to go through a process like any traditional news or it has to go through do we have the space what's it competing against what is the can we put it in our content management system that works we have to write the headline for it there's a copy editing there's a process so routinely there's stories that we've had in STAT and again we have a certain benefit of being smaller and we can just put up what we want to put up when but there is a certain fleet footedness that you have in a purely digital news organization where you can get things out and I'll give you one example like we started this thing a week or two ago called that every day runs Zika in 30 seconds and the whole idea is what you need to know about Zika and it's a way of showing that we want to own this coverage we do a lot of in depth deeper stories we have this guy that's been in Columbia writing stories we have we'll have a video series starting tomorrow from Brazil but we want to show that like if you need a quick fix then here's where to go and I said let's just do this and there's some people that said like should we do it or not do it if I had been at the New York Times taking weeks to like figure it out and go up the flagpole at first I said let's do it Zika in 60 seconds and then I said now let's make it 30 seconds it's just like you can just try things and it happens immediate and there's a sense of news urgency that's always important in the print world but it's even more important in the digital world that we can do I mean just again to broaden it out I mean we're talking about like the future science journalism here and I don't see things as going from like a certain set of publications they all disappear and they're replaced by things like staff that's not going to happen and you know there are unquestionably like big advantages to different kinds of formats so like you know if you want to go really extreme you know you can go to something like National Geographic magazine so there like you can propose a piece if you like go from the time that you you know I've gone through this and other people have as well put a pin on when you and your editor first kind of started talking about a story when it finally came out you could be talking three years I'm not kidding at all I'm not kidding at all and when it comes out you could go much longer three years oh my god I'm not kidding and what comes out is gorgeous because like they basically say now we're going to take a photographer and send them out for six months to just like take thousands of pictures and we're going to you know we will do the most beautiful story out there about this and we're going to work really hard on the pros as well and that's fantastic and I you know that's going to still be around that's going to stick around but it's going to be and there are things you know stat can't really do that so there are lips to Rupert's ears we'll see what Rupert Murdoch thinks about all that but you know but they will be sort of a room for things like stat that's my prediction so Rebecca speaking of pieces that might not have run in the paper but something that got picked up by a lot of places you had another Screlly story besides the Bernie one can you describe that with his feed sure so the Bernie Sanders donation or the Merton Screlly's donation to Bernie Sanders which Bernie Sanders ultimately returned was not a story I did one of my colleagues did but relatively early in the hubbub over Merton Screlly I wrote a piece that as many story ideas are now inspired was inspired just by being on Twitter and seeing him post occasionally in fact frequently actually posting links to a live stream that he was doing on YouTube and other sites and so I started watching out of curiosity does everyone know who Merton Screlly is the evil Marvel comic villain so I started watching his live stream and this was in November so it was sort of after he had gained notoriety but before he was arrested on charges of securities fraud and so the piece that I did while he was sort of at the rising in the public consciousness was on this sort of bizarre and fascinating live stream that he was doing of himself sitting in his pajamas playing guitar playing chess playing video games and so now after he was arrested in recent weeks a lot of folks have done stories on his live stream so I think one advantage that Stat had was to be having reporters paying attention to those sort of things early on and you can certainly make arguments one way or another about the value of a piece like that it may not have advanced the serious public policy debate about drug pricing but what I think we're encouraged to value and what editors at Stat value is the human side of stories and it's certainly fascinating in telling of our 2015 and now 2016 world that the pharmaceutical executive who's at the center of this hubbub over high drug prices is spending 10 hours a day online live streaming his everyday moves sitting in his office at work and that kind of insight that live real-time window into his thinking and his rambling I think is fascinating and we saw value news value there as well Yeah, Jenny Hi, Jenny Rood I'm a writer at the Broad Institute I wanted to go back to something that you spoke about earlier which was filling this need for this kind of coverage and in addition to the wonderful variety of topics that you cover in the health and life sciences fields one of the things I think is really fascinating about Stat is the variety of the columns so I mean Carl's videos or Sharon Bakley's gut check or to have the action watch Ivan Ransky and Adam Marcus writing about problems with scientific publications and to have that all under one roof so my question is how early in the conception of stat did you have ideas for things that you wanted to be regular columns then obviously you have things that pop up after Stat has launched like Zika that you've decided this is something we're going to do everyday or concussions we're going to do a regular series on What it kind of all just came together I think one thing perhaps my biggest fear at the beginning was knowing how sensitive and complicated this kind of coverage can be and especially speaking from someone who doesn't have this background I was worried that we would we would not be credible and I mean I wasn't like losing sleep over but I wanted to make sure we were credible and so we hired editor we had a mix of editors but editors who knew what they were talking about who could identify like is this a bogus study or is this not or what's the proper way to describe this story and there's a tension again between making we're pushing out things we want to be like ahead of the game on stories and there's no there's no room to be to get beat by anyone on any story so I'm eager to be ahead of the game and give added value content whether it's on Screlli's live streaming or whether something more serious about developments with Zika and so there's this tension between being fast and nimble and quick but also being accurate and right and part of that way we're able so far not going to be able to do that is to have authorities in their fields as an important part of our coverage from Carl to Helen Branswell who covers infectious disease who moved here from Canada to be one of our senior writers to Sharon Bagley who came from Reuters moved from New York to join us we've had to my delight a lot of people who have taken a risk to join a brand startup who've given up secure jobs or would seem to be secure jobs at the Wall Street Journal New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters Bloomberg, Politico so they've a huge group and people that are knowledgeable and respected from the get go then you layer over that some of the most talented younger journalists of their generation and I put Rebecca at the top of the list and we have some of the best and brightest around the country so that mix just brings a great energy and authority to our coverage more, yep. Hi, my name is Frankie Shembury and I'm an undergraduate here at MIT studying science writing and as someone who kind of wants to break into the field what do you think sort of sets apart a great reporter in science writing especially in this century? I think a problem is a problem that science writing faces is more so than other kinds of journalism is kind of a sort of a packed mentality and everybody going sort of obediently like following the same press release and writing it up and basically all telling the same story and sometimes you got to do it so today it was gravitational waves I mean everyone's got to write their gravitational wave story that's fine but which of those hundred gravitational wave stories was the one to read honestly I don't know but I do know like I like to read Dennis Overby so I'll read his because I know about him already because he's developed a voice and he's written about things that I haven't seen elsewhere so I think you know I think what science writers really need to do to make names for themselves is to wean themselves from the press release from the embargo system from being told by press offices what to write about and to find the stories themselves and just and you know and look for good stories so and you got to be sort of asking yourself about that I mean you might be like you know Rebecca may be like looking for be looking around and being like whoa wait a minute like this is weird and important and no one has seen this before and I'm going to write about it or you just I don't know like I mean Rick mentioned this story I wrote about the scientist named Slava Epstein his stuff's been written about before it's not like a scoop or anything like that it's just that I just sort of you know he and I had spoken on the phone and he just sounded like a really interesting person and so I wanted to meet him so I hung out with him and I was like this guy he's just got such a strange story like he was a scientist in the Soviet Union who was just basically like he was Jewish and so he was a marine biologist and he was like they're not going to let me get on a boat because I think I'm going to escape the first port we get to but you know of course he's saying it's all and it's one of the Russian Jews but you know like it's fine I don't want to be on a boat with some drunk captain who's going to just destroy my experiments I'll just sit on the beach and do my research there he's that kind of a guy and then he comes to America and he works the night shift at a parking garage you know and then like goes on to discover antibiotics and no one else has found it and I'm like that's a story I'm not like I'm not off of a press release it's like I found a story and so that you know I think that's the main way to sort of like kind of make people recognize who you are as a science writer because otherwise if they look at your CV and they're like yeah okay you got that press release too okay fine whatever to build a little bit on what Carl said there are many many more good writers than there is space to print good writers virtually or in the physical world that is not true of reporters so if you're trying to figure out what to focus on focus on reporting you know thinking about the stories that we've been talking about here that have made a mark they're all they're not all but a lot of them are stories that no one else had seen or no one else had made the calls you know that is there and I was cooked that's what an old boss of mine used to call like a scoop of analysis but it's coming at it and making the calls but that's the one thing that I see more than anything else when people are sort of frustrated about where they're going with their career or what their prospects are there is always a need for good journalists and if you have a story that no one else has there will always be someone to survey you for it Hi I'm Jane Roberts I'm associate editor of Undark which is a new science magazine starting at KSJ I was interested in learning more about the native advertising I was interning at Forbes before and that's a big part of their strategy but wondering if you've actually how far you are along in the process of deciding who you would allow to advertise on your side and if you think that will affect the way that your ability I I should the person really should address this as our revenue officer but in general for example I don't think we haven't gotten any kind of pushback from anyone about our advertising or our native advertising or in our morning rounds we've started running various sponsored by J&J or whatever and we've gotten I think we got like three emails from people complaining or something but people are kind of used to that as long as it's clearly marked and in terms of sponsored content we've begun to do that in on our site and again it's clearly labeled and we and I'd have to defer to Angus about what we might not use but we're certainly there's certainly certain basic principles of with any advertiser if there's something that we think is false or wrong or misleading or whatever there's certain advertising standards in what will run but in terms of clearly marked sponsored native ads I don't I think that's you're going to see more and more of it whether it's STAT or other news organizations you know the New York Times is talking about the Washington but that's just the way of the world and let me just say there's things that are happening now that if you would ask me ten years ago oh my god native advertising or an ad in the front page of the New York Times I was at the New York Times we cannot have ads on the front page of the New York Times I remember Arthur Salzburg was the publisher saying we will never have an ad I remember him saying we will never have an ad on the front page of the New York Times boy just the whole world we've all seen it has so changed he also told me once that he wasn't worried about the internet because people couldn't read the paper in the bathroom or their computers um other questions all right yes in the back yeah you need to I'm Kariy O'Brien I'm a public relations specialist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute what's your process for finding original content besides Twitter it does sort of seem like the main reporting tool. It's the main thing I've been hearing since I got here. Yeah, so I can answer that as a reporter always on the hunt for story ideas. I definitely find my stories from a variety of places. Some of it is social media and what I'm seeing the conversation about. But I find stories from just reading other news pieces that other reporters have done. Perhaps a line in a story will tip me off that there's something more there. Other times, just in a conversation with a source about a different topic or in just a conversation to check in about what they're doing, they'll mention something that triggers an idea. And in some cases, too, press people have pitched me ideas that I'll say oftentimes the specific pitch that tends to be a little more incremental. I don't ultimately run with. But there have been instances where an element of a pitch from a press person might inspire us to take a different approach or a broader approach to something that gets pitched. So in some, I would say, looking in as many places as possible. And for both of you, too, do you ever make calls and just sort of call around and say, what do you got? Call to your sources. Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. No, as much as I can. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because you want to find out what's going on. And maybe there's something that's sitting there just hiding in plain view. And sometimes, I mean, I deal a lot with public information officers, but if they're saying, but sometimes I have to sort of explain to them how our interaction can be useful to me. So if they contact me at 9 AM on a Tuesday and say, hey, I've got a press release about a gigantic, complicated paper that's going to be coming out at 2 o'clock today, I'll be like, OK, great. So there's going to be a huge amount of superficial coverage of this. And I don't have the time right now to write the kind of story I'd want. So you're not helping me. And I'll just be honest about it. Or with science that happens with the video series, I would go to places and I'd talk to people and be like, OK, I'm looking for people that maybe I could visit. And here's what I need. I need to go someplace where people are not afraid of the camera. They actually want to talk. And maybe we can do stuff, look at things. It's not just sort of anonymous sort of beige boxes. So can you help me with that? And sometimes I'll say, oh, here's the list of our top hot scientists. I'll be like, well, that's not what I asked you for. And so let's try that again. So that's a big part of it. It does take work. And a lot of what I do is just talk to sort of a network of scientists and be like, what's going on out there? Like were you just at a meeting? Did you see something at that meeting that I should know about? That's how I do it. And I'll add on to that. I think, as Carl alluded to earlier, the packed mentality that you sometimes see in science journalism can create a situation where if a researcher hasn't put out a paper in the past two years, no one's written about her for the past two years. And so I have that situation with a researcher working on a topic I was very interested in, which is medication adherence. And he had been doing some very interesting work that was written about two years ago and previously, but no one had written a thing since then. So I got on the phone with him, and he's been very busy. And his technology has been adopted all over the place in a way that is actually making a meaningful impact in clinics and to patients. But because he hasn't put out a paper in that time period when, in fact, his research is making news in a meaningful way, nobody's been writing about it. So I think those are the kind of stories that are independent of press releases or the manufactured news events that the release of a paper can represent that we're interested in and always trying to chase. Yeah, those big papers can be like, people can make such a fetish of them. There's such a fiction that that's what it's all about. That's just like putting out a formal presentation of some results, but the world doesn't revolve around the paper. So before we go, I just want to ask each of you one last question. So Rebecca, you're two years out of school. When you talk to your peers who are at other, who are at newspapers or websites or other, who are working in other areas of journalism, is there anything that strikes you as being fundamentally different about what you're doing in your experience than some of them? And if so, what? That's a good question. Most of my friends who are working in journalism are not working in science journalism. And so I think the reaction that I get from a lot of my friends who are working in other fields of journalism is that sounds really hard and complicated, particularly because I don't have a science background. I was a history major in college. And so what I have said to them is that I really approach this first foray that I am in in science journalism the way I would with any other stories, which is, why does this matter and how can I explain it and bring to light the most interesting and important elements in a way that's accessible? And how do I get to the important and good story? And I don't think that's different for science journalism as opposed to other fields. So I think my experience at STAT has given me that perhaps other peers that I know are at other publications might not have is, I think, to some degree, access to a great multimedia team, as Rick has talked about, and the capabilities that we have there. But I think also the opportunity to really specialize and get to know this field well has been something valuable. And Carl, for a non-STAT question, I'm curious about where you are finding the most interesting long-form journalism outside of STAT. What types of places, what types of outlets? I know there's been a lot of places that have either started doing that recently or have actually started from scratch. So I'm curious about. Yeah, I mean, I forage pretty widely. What's nice is that with science, there are places like STAT that have a lot of specialization on it. But there are a lot of general interest places as well that have recognized the importance of it. It being science. Science and medicine and so on. The New Yorker has been doing some really good stuff in the past few years. On rare diseases, especially. Well, yeah, that's right. If you haven't read Seth's piece in The New Yorker, go check it out. But the thing is, the fact is that I would say 10 years ago, The New Yorker had relatively little. I was like, maybe John McPhee talking about earthquakes. That's about it. Or oranges. Yeah, oranges, whatever. But now it's like they had a Michael Spector wrote a great big piece on CRISPR, which I thought was really excellent. So The New Yorker has been doing a great job. The New York Times Magazine has been really starting to pull its own weight. And so these are general interest places that are doing science. And I think that's great because, and you don't want science to sort of fall into just like a little niche somewhere that only people who sort of self-identify as, well, I like to read about science. Read about it. And so the fact that there are people at STAT who do not have a very sort of narrow sort of science or medicine reporting background, I think it's fantastic. Because we don't want a narrow audience. We want a broad one, so. And Rick, has it been a year or a little less? Yeah, I came here like late February of last year. So I think I ran into you not that long after you were here. And we were talking about how you sort of didn't know what to expect. I mean, it was both in terms of subject matter and also it seemed like something that, to some extent, it was like stepping off a boat. And we were interested to find out what would happen. Maybe a cliff isn't the best analogy because there's only one thing related. It doesn't happen when you step off a cliff. But closing your eyes and making a leap of faith. So now a year out, I'm curious as to what has surprised you, what's been radically different than what you expected, what's been frustrating, what's been satisfying. I guess what I would say is that it's like it was this whole new world of not knowing what to expect and never having done a startup before. And not knowing how it's going to be or what form it will take or who will do it with you. It's just it's been a whole mystery. But what's been great about it is I've just learned so much, not only about the field, but about building an organization and building a company and what it takes and things you don't think about. And I guess what I would say, the most surprising, ratifying part of it is I didn't really, I said earlier I was worried about our credibility, but I didn't realize the extent to which there really seems to be a hunger for what we're doing and a real dedication of people saying, I swear to you, and this sounds like I'm just promoting us, which I am, but it's like every day, I swear to you, every day I get a tweet or email or for someone saying, thank, we're so grateful you're doing this, or I just heard you're doing this every single day. And I never really anticipated that, and it's been nice to see the interest. And I think because again, someone like me from a political background, there's a million sites and publications and newsletters on the campaign, and it's nice to be able to cover an area that's so important that where there is an opening, where there is an opportunity, and it touches everyone. I feel like on the one hand, I don't have the specialization, but on the other hand, these are stories that matter to all of us, and I think the trick is, as you said, is to have deep, good reporting and be aggressive with reporting, but also in a way, I mean, Carl has made a mark for years in making science accessible and pulling people in, and a lot of people can't do that. So it's been fun for me learning this, building this, bringing people in, and what's really cool about a startup as opposed to anywhere else I've worked is I can pick everyone that I want to work with, and every single hire is someone that we've vetted through a process, and I would say pound for pound, like person for me, that. Well, look what happened, but person for person, these are the most talented collection of editors and reporters that I've worked with, because you say, oh, you're at the New York Times, but the New York Times, you inherit different people and people come different ways, but here you can start anew with the very best people that make a sort of dynamic team, and just one thing that's kind of fun is the mixing and matching. Carl's editor purposely was, we hired from the Washington Post, who was deputy national security editor at the Post, no background in this field whatsoever, but a great reputation as an editor, and I love that because we don't need, Carl doesn't need an editor who knows more than science than he does, he needs just a great editor, and so I love seeing these combinations work, and the other thing that I would say that's been a surprise to me is that I thought the hard part would be launching the site, the hard part, and it was like all consuming and busy for all of us, but it gets harder as you go along. It's fun and invigorating, but my job is harder, and I don't know how you all would see it, but we're now up and running, and now there's like the demands of a real news organization every day where challenges come up and things we need to do, and how do we build the audience, and how do we, like I'm very restless, we're all very restless because we want to establish ourselves even more. It's never enough, we want to get out there and be known and do good stuff. I want to be out. When I saw this New York Times Zika big takeout over on Sunday, I thought, why? I didn't even think of doing that, and so there's challenges every day to be journalistically competitive, so it's harder, but it's fun to have the challenge. And let me, if I may, take one minute because part of the challenge I have is to be sort of a huckster for what we're doing, and I would say most of you said you know you see stat or read stat, but it takes, we're trying to build an audience organically, person by person. You can't just, we had advertising on the New York Times website, didn't do a thing for our, that I saw for our traffic because it's got to be person to person building the audience, and we're gaining an audience every day, it creeps up, but I would ask you to, if you haven't already, to sign up for morning rounds, which is free on the site because it's really a great window into what we do every day, 6 AM every morning, and also if you're on Twitter or Facebook to like us or follow us because really it's just building person per person, building an audience, and so far I'm very grateful for the audience and for these international readers, but I won't be satisfied until it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and where we can start supporting ourselves. One word answer. Who has thinner skin? Politicians or scientists? Yeah, yeah. Carl's never done with politicians. I don't write about politics. I would say scientists because they're not used to the coverage in that kind of way. I would agree. Yeah, I would agree. All right, there you go. Thank you guys so much for coming. Let's give a huge round of applause. Carl came down from Connecticut. Rebecca and Rick both have a ton of work to do. Thank you guys so much for joining us. And this will be posted online within the next couple of days.