 Tonight it's going to be a conversation with Joey Ido and Ethan Zuckerman on journalism and innovation. We're really looking forward to this and we're very grateful actually that it was timed early enough so Patriots fans can leave actually and go back and watch the Patriots Jets game tonight. Anyways, thank you very much. One other thing, sorry, I just wanted to explain, Hacks Hackers is kind of an umbrella group. It's a group of journalists who are interested in media and journalists interested in digital and technologists interested in media, so if you're interested in joining, you can find us on the internet. Thank you very much. Thanks Matt. And thanks for bringing Hacks and Hackers here. This is a terrific institution and we're really happy to have it. So we're really happy to be hosting as the MIT Media Lab and as Center for Civic Media to have this conversation. Those bits of administration, if you hear sounds that sound like we're cooking up terrifying chemicals in this, you're in basically our cafe space and we're hitting the point of the day where people desperately need cappuccino, so just try to roll with it. And I say that not only for our friends in the front row who are sort of freaked out about the cappuccino sounds, but also we are streaming this event. So there's people beyond the numerous people in this room. So if you hear odd sounds, it is not in fact our secret nuclear enrichment program going on in the basement of the media lab. It's significantly more innocent. And we're here. And this is a conversation between me and Joey. I'm Ethan. This is Joey. Joey's tweeting some stuff. No, I just retweeted. In case just because there are probably journalists here, and in case you haven't been paying attention for the last 40 minutes or 38 minutes, at 5 o'clock Twitter just tweeted, we've confidentially submitted an S1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale. So there you go, news. So that's actually not a bad transition to the first question I wanted to ask you. And by the way, our structure for this is I'm going to grill this guy for about half an hour. We're going to open up the floor. You can grill him. You can grill me, although I'm way less interesting than he is. And we'll have a conversation on stage, and then we'll have a conversation with you guys, and then I'm sure we'll peter off in all directions. But I've known you for a long time, and I'm sort of used to thinking of you as perhaps first and foremost a Silicon Valley guy with a strong social conscience with things like Creative Commons. But you've done some really weird things in the last couple of years. You came here, which suggests a really strong commitment to the future of innovation. You got on the board of two massive US foundations, the Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, which suggests thinking about the world of social change. And then the one that just truly baffled me was you got on the board of the New York Times, which suggests that you see media fitting into this somewhere. So help me out. How does Silicon Valley, future of innovation, news, and civic engagement, how does that play together? Since you kind of tied it to biography, I'll just start a little bit there. By the way, for the record, I was interested in corruption before Lessig went into corruption. The reason I met Lessig was he was a constitutional law professor. I was in Japan fighting for a privacy related issue with the National Registry. And I went to Lessig asking advice on how to fix a broken democracy, which I thought Japan was. And he said, well, why don't you try this copyright stuff? It's actually really interesting. So I joined the board of Creative Commons. And then he went on and left me there and went to corruption. But anyway, to me, I've always had this question about whether democracy was working, mainly because I lived in Japan, which is a pretty dysfunctional democracy, comparatively speaking. And a lot of the early stuff that we were working on, the social media. And I wrote the work with everybody this thing about emerging democracy. Is democracy going to change with social media and blogging? So that was always been sort of a theme. And so what I did, my venture capital work, investing in Six Apart and Technorite and stuff, that was when I thought that blogging platforms and social media was going to be a really, it still is, but that that was the way to do the impact. And then as I started to think about it and think more broadly, I realized that, well, we still have these large institutions that do news and that blogging by itself isn't going to fix everything. And so I think there was a period, if you remember, when, and I don't know which side you were on. The technological silverboard. Yeah, it was kind of when we were declaring independence, the cyberspace was independent and the end of the sovereign nation and professional journalists be damned, we're going to take over everything. And it turns out, we know now that this is much more complex. And and that it also is it. So anyway, so now that I realize it was complex, I realize I had to understand it better. And that just doing startups wasn't the way that we were going to fix this problem or to help us get through this valley that seems like it was showing up. And so and and one of the things that I realized when I was watching how blogs took off and why they took off and this ties to something that Nicholas Nicarabante, the founder of the Media Lab, talked about when I was talking to him about the Media Lab, which is the early bloggers, whether it's David Weiner or Ben Amino or they were people who wanted to say something. They were creators, people who were like journalists, but knew how to code. And so they built a platform that wasn't a big IT company, building a humongous content management system for a bunch of people who didn't want to be bothered by technology. Right. And and Nicholas's version, when he talks about the Media Lab and what we what we are doing here is that we're the the the the the design and the engineering and the science and the art have all come together. So he uses example of photography being a very interesting development process because the photographers were also the people working on the chemistry and the glass and the mechanics. So the photographers were very involved in the evolution of the camera. And so it continues to be very sort of artful in its in its progress. Whereas television and in print, there was a separation. And there's two reasons for the separation. One is the editorial has to be isolated from the business. Otherwise it's going to be tainted. It's kind of like tenured faculty, right? You you've got to be completely pure. And so if you're not bothered by the business side, you don't actually get your hands under the hood and understand how the thing works, you don't worry about the technology, you won't worry about the money. So it's very difficult for the people who are actually using the stuff to innovate because they don't understand how the thing works. And and I think that's true with television. It's true with a lot of the other other even non news media. You've separated out, right? Well, so I want to I want to jump on that. Nicholas Negroponte analogy and that analogy that certain types of creativity really move forward when you have people who are building the tech as well as building the content, right? And so Nicholas argues that you've had an explosion of creativity and photography based on the fact that your photographers are also your chemists, your your your optics guys, so on and so forth that that you didn't necessarily get in television. You're taking this a step further and you're suggesting it's not just the tech, it's also the business, right? So you've got a group here, hacks and hackers who sort of in the best sense want to master both the tech and the content. But you seem to be throwing this further challenge out, which is that the real innovation in this is not just necessarily the tech, it's also the business model attached to the tech. And that's that's the element I think that that that you learn in Silicon Valley, which is you can have the best utility product in the world, but without distribution, it goes nowhere. I won't say who but a faculty member here when I first came said, well, I invented Twitter 30 years ago. Yeah, but what does that mean? It means, yeah, we've got one way signal, but technically inventing Twitter and actually executing Twitter are completely different things. And so so I think a lot of academia also thinks about things in a in a in a sort of functional way, but there's a whole business distribution sort of thing and also a lot of it has to do with timing. And and and to be impactful, you have to get that part. And and I think that that the so so so you're right. I'm throwing that in. I don't know if it's just entrepreneurship, but it is an understanding of business and also it's an understanding of risk. So, you know, I would say that I put lawyers and journalists in a similar category. And it's a very interesting thing that I know. So most of my best friends are actually journalists or lawyers of some sort. But journalism and lawyers work with risk all day long. That's all they I mean, that's they're always talking about and working with, but it's other people's risk, right? And lawyers and journalists are so protected from personal risk that they make the worst risk takers. And it's a very odd thing because it's kind of like academics who like study business, but have never done it. I find that it's tricky because if you don't if you know, you don't know like a startup entrepreneur, you fumble, you learn, you know, and you take risks by accident and you learn from them. The problem with journalists, I find and lawyers is they understand risk really well, but they've never taken it before. So it's hard for them to take it. So so I find that it's kind of like a writer's block that you get in getting journalists and lawyers to be entrepreneurial. I mean, I'm sorry to clump them together. They're very different. But but I found and but the ones that get over that hump are often very successful. So but let's let's explore what we mean by risk, right? I mean, there are aspects of being a journalist that are extremely risky. You you take on a story and, you know, as we're discovering, you may have risks of exposing your sources and causing grave harm. You always have the risk of whether the story is going to pan out, whether you're going to get the information or not. It sounds to me like you're you're talking about a different sort of risk. So so let's go after two groups of people that I know that you're nervous about at the moment, journalists and tenured faculty. So so so two groups that I know that you're wondering about how do those communities innovate? And one argument I've heard you've made is that in both cases, there may be this sort of blessing and the curse of the firewall between the business side of the industry and the content side of the industry, right? So there's the newspaper tradition, at least in traditional news outlets, not so much in the new news outlets that you have a publisher and you have an editor and never the twain shall meet or or if they do, they meet under very certain rules. And in academic settings, you have the similar thing. You have the university of the corporation, but you have the faculty who shouldn't be under that pressure in one fashion or another. Is that the sort of risk? Do we have to to get it and start breaking down that wall to get to the risk types of risk? One is financial risk, but the other is the risk of fundamentally changing the job. So, you know, I think I think it's it's so so when you're going through a period of massive change, you will like, for instance, I was talking to some people today about the social network platforms, you know, so we have Twitter going public. But right now you have these chat clients and like like in line and and what was it like in Asia, particularly. But you're finding that now they're becoming the primary distribution channel for new stuff. And or like the American version would be Candy Crush, Sega, right, Saga. But there are these content wise. They're suddenly going back to really, really rudimentary stuff. But they've figured out a way to use a social graph as a thing. And and what's what's amazing, though, is that the company is just a few generations ago that we're doing games. I'm going to go into the details. But but they're recycling like every couple of years right now. And I think we're going through a weird period where like where we may go through some really massive changes and there may be a lot of casualties along the way. So so so like too many maybe too many metaphors. But like look at the I see Mark here, so I'm going to think about this. But like look at the form factor of our tablets. So it's a small phone. No tablet, but like the iPad mini probably wouldn't have happened if Samsung hadn't kind of made a bet at this medium sized tablet. Now, I don't think anybody would have been able to predict what the right size is. But the Android market let everything flourish and a couple of them hit. And it's this weird multi. It's like a multi body movement problem. You can't because you can't you're not leading the market. They're not telling you what's going on. And it's this weird iterative process where you get lots of casualties and a lot of experimentation. And my and to now tie it back to journalism. This is why the Knight Foundation is really interesting position to look at things from when I look at the Knight News Challenge. We look at all the crazy stuff that's coming out. There's two things. One is I think we have to experiment like crazy because we haven't found what it is. But the added thing I would add to this, which increases the risk is that even if we find it, it may only be it for a few years before the next it comes out. So so it's even a harder challenge because if you're an entrepreneur in this space, you may become a my space where you're like a hit for a couple of years and you crash. So it's a really tricky space that requires a lot of risk taking a lot of innovation for people who have been trained to be so good at what they do that the cost to them of not doing it anymore is actually pretty high. And so that may be another way of talking about the risk. So so let's unpack kind of the last piece of that, right? So for people who aren't necessarily getting all the shorthand, the Knight News Challenge is a project that Knight Foundation has been running for a couple of years now. Each year they run several iterations of a challenge. It's a very low cost of entry grant process. So you can put in a potential grant. It's quite easy to put it out there. And they end up getting a very wide range of ideas and they fund quite a lot of them at a very high failure rate. So a lot of grants get made, a lot of them turn out not to pan out. Now, one way to look at this would be to say if you really have a fertile energetic market, you would expect to just be getting this out of the market. Why does Knight have to seed the market? But you also seem to be suggesting something else is going on, which is maybe it's really hard constitutionally in some fashion for journalists to be on this innovative side of it. Is is the market failing somehow in this? Is that why Knight has to step in? Do journalists need to step up? Where are you going to get that wealth of new ideas? If, as you're saying, you're going to have a lot of failure and some of those successes are only going to happen for a very short period of time. So I don't have an answer. That's why I'm exploring all different ways to change. Do we does the New York Times iterate? Does one of the new challenges create a new genre? Does social media figure it out or is it a combination? And what's the relationship between journalism and civics, which is what you're working on? I mean, do we completely redefine what what journalism and media is in this relationship with democracy? I mean, there's a there's a lot of different ways that this could. So the easiest way is we replace journalism with something that's very similar to what it is, just as the business model changes. That's the simple version, the very complicated version. We end up with a public sphere that's a combination of civics and journalism and participation and a whole bunch of other things. And it happens in a big blob, but and then a bunch of versions in between. But anyway, we can talk about that. But to answer your question a little bit more on how does it get fixed? So this isn't making a judgment, but just looking historically, if you look at one of the reasons why Silicon Valley was successful or another reason why blogging was successful was massive unemployment. So this is kind of a joke, but kind of true that like Ben Amina had lost their jobs. You know, David Weiner didn't have anything better to do. I mean, a lot of the people who wrote the software and a lot of the people who wrote the blogs were unemployed because we were in a lull economically at the time that the blogs were emerging. So there was a lot of free energy around. I blog a lot less since you hired me, by the way. Yeah, but seriously, it's anecdotal support for that. And then and then if you look at startups in Silicon Valley, it really was when the military complex shut down and you had a lot of really smart, unemployed people who were forced to do new things. Right. So so I'm not saying that unemployment is the driver of everything, but there definitely needs to be a class of entrepreneurial people that free up for a certain category of innovation to happen. Now, the difference, though, is in a question is technical people who lose their jobs can immediately start building a technical thing. One of the problems I find with unemployed journalists is that they haven't been trained and don't understand technology or the business enough. And it's hard for them. And I think this is why these kinds of meetings is important, because I think that the success cases are going to be multiple people co-founded things. But but I do think that that the technical people underestimate the complexity of journalism and civics and the the journalists tend to underestimate the importance of understanding the technology. And I do think that it's getting better, though. I mean, I think these kinds of meetings I look at. But you know, but but still in baby steps. I mean, we can probably fit in this room, all the people who would fit in that category of understanding each other. But but I do think that that creating that category of people and then opening up a little bit of space and then also having investors start looking at that. And so from night's perspective, what we're doing is just trying to make it more likely that people will invest in these things. Because I think that VCs hunt and packs. And if a genre is fashionable, everybody goes after it. And and and having been semi VC, what you really worry about is you invest in a company and you're trying to raise more money and nobody else will come in. So there is a it's not just fashion. It doesn't doesn't really make sense to be the only person in the field because you end up with having to fund everything. So now I think more and more VCs are looking at this space, which I think is a good thing. Well, so let's talk about what constitutes this space. You you put forward a really interesting possible dichotomy, right? So one version of this basically says advertising doesn't work the way that it used to. Circulation numbers are down. It's incredibly hard to keep paying talented people to do work that we still think is very civically important. How do we find the alternative business model? And we've seen nonprofit models and we've seen different approaches to cross subsidy and we've seen paper story. And and none of it seems to be working in overwhelming fashion, although, you know, the New York Times paywall seems to be working a little bit. You just put forth a much more radical idea, which is the idea that news changes, that civics changes, that citizenship, that engagement changes, and that some of that change happens all at the same time. How do you build a company that rides on that? How do you innovate in that space? How do you both change news and civics simultaneously? Yeah, so so it's complicated. And I don't think that I don't think that there is I don't think anyone who says they know the answer. I don't think it's true. I think you have a shifting landscape where the civics is changing. You have the technology is changing so quickly, right? It's not just going to mobile. It's going into all these different permutations. And it would be interesting to see whether the other players can stay in. So what is what does news look like on a mobile device? Everybody's thinking about it. So there's a lot of environmental variables that are changing. And then the the fund. So I just talked about the venture one. There's also, you know, what are the big media companies do? There's a convergence between print and video, right? So CNN and New York Times are competitors now and they would never have seen that before. And then and then you have the role of government funding and because obviously the civics side or like you look at Al Jazeera and other things like that. And let's so in the US, but the rest of the world trying to figure out how the public broadcaster or government funder although you can theorize that that I mean like you say, OK, well, maybe there should be a bill that says the government will now fund journalism. And this is the way we're going to do it. I mean, I don't think that's going to happen. But but but there's there's there's so many different things. And I think that the the answer is going to be that we have to try all of them. We have to learn from the mistakes and coordinate so that we are learning from them. But I don't I don't I would place a lot of bets right now. And because you see like because there are some I mean, like I think with all of its issues, I think that like Huffington Post is an interesting little thing that is proving something right. And then you have the you know, and then there are also the things that have been holding us back like the the cost and the legal cost of protecting and the physical cost of protecting journalists. But then there's like the idea of doing the Independent Journalist Fund. And and there are things that I would not have thought of that people are thinking of. And so as we stumble along, I think that we're going to see a lot of stuff. But I think the trick is just it's being very irresponsible. We just need to keep moving forward. Oh, you're you're being much more optimistic than I expected from you. I was I was hoping for a slightly more cynical Joey today. But I I I think one of my questions and all this. And so since it's one of my questions, I'll put it to you on this. Is I would hope that some of the entities that we want to innovate in this space are big newspapers. I would hope that we want the New York Times and the Guardian and the Boston Globe and so on and so forth to innovate. And there's two things that make me enormously nervous there. Thing one is the Boston Globe, a very good newspaper, purchased by the New York Times for 1.1 billion, recently sold for 70 million, which sort of suggests that there's a lot less money to play with in this space than there had been. So if we're going broke, it's really hard to know how those entities innovate. And then the second piece of this is you are someone who historically has been extremely skeptical of innovation within large institutions. You're someone who told me that once you have a company that has a chief innovation officer, you know they're in real trouble because they basically tried to put it off in that box and they may not be innovating. How does the New York Times innovate? How does the Guardian innovate? How does CNN innovate? How do these large companies that are having fiscal problems that are big bureaucracies but have at the moment a critical civic role? How do they go after radical change? So I'm not going to speak specifically about the New York Times because I'm not supposed to. But I will say though, thinking about it more broadly about any institution, let's take any institution that is having fundamental existential or business issues, they actually have the opportunity and the mandate to bet the house on new stuff. Because if you're kind of doing OK, a lot of your shareholders are going to say, keep doing whatever you're doing. But if it's clear that you need to think of something really, really drastic, then you can place big bets. And I think that that's, I think like Apple did that before the iMac. It was a sinking ship, and this is a famous story, but Steve Jobs could have cut costs. But he innovated his way out of it, and it's a successor. And now there's different versions of the story. But the idea is when you're sinking, you have two ways to go. You can bet the house on something and go all in. Or you can try to become smaller and smaller and smaller until you disappear. If you're trying to become smaller and smaller and smaller and hold on, I wouldn't be interested in being part of that model because Japan is doing that with a lot of its companies. They just focus on cost cutting. And you can cost cut yourself until you basically disappear. And that's literally sinking with the ship. I think that there are newspaper companies and people buying newspaper companies who believe that with the right bet, we can turn these around. We don't know exactly what that bet is. I mean, the paywall was a little bit. There are other bets that we're working on. But I think that all the smart newspapers are realizing that this is a really important period. And so all of our, let's talk more generally like media, all of our media partners really want to really come to the table, what it feels like on the news and journalism side. And so I think it's an interesting opportunity to, one, get the companies to collaborate with each other. I mean, just short of antitrust. And then, but then to really try to swing for the fences because it's kind of near the end of the game, right? So I think it's exciting actually for me to see large companies placing big bets. So I like the optimism around the sinking ship requires a big bet. I like the idea that you have some changes in news and in civics at the same time. I feel like we're talking at the Warren Buffett level here. I feel like we're talking about, and that's why I went out and bought 40 small-time newspapers because I think we're going to be able to turn this around. Many of the people that we have here in the audience are either journalists for publications that are trying to figure out how to keep their heads about. There's a wake going on on the sixth floor for the late great Boston Phoenix. We timed this really badly. So Boston's other really interesting and intelligent newspaper, yes, I'm dissing the Herald, died recently. And we're sort of mourning their death upstairs. And there are journalists involved with papers worried about what they're going to go. At the same time, we have individual geeks, individual hackers sort of looking for that innovation. Bring this down to the individual level. What do you do within an organization when you feel like there needs to be radical shift and revolution? How do you make that space? How do you find that space to innovate within those sorts of big orcs? So I think if you look at this, let's just take blogging. Because even though that didn't save the world like many of us thought it might, it was a tremendous amount of impact that came from a relatively small number of people that initially kind of figured it out. And it was kind of an obvious idea once they started doing it. But it was completely non-obvious to people who were in the content management industry. They thought content management systems should be big and expensive and workflow and lots of people. But it took a few people who just sort of looked at it differently. And so to me, what's interesting also is all those founding teams are either individuals or very small number of people. So I do think that the, and this is generally true about innovating in big organizations, but I think it's a small number of people who understand enough about what needs to get done that go off and just do it. And this is a completely other random example, but when I was working at Infoseek, we were working with Disney. And there was a couple of engineers who went off on the weekends and created this service called Starwave, which was also kind of a content management thing. And oddly, despite Disney's reputation, these were employees of Disney who had built a signed business, but Disney was good enough to go and then buy it and use it. And it was this really kind of weekend skunkworks project by people who were employed that said, this is how we should really do it, not like that. And then they just do it. And I think that still, it's the model. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is like, this comes from the Silicon Valley thing, but the cost of innovation is so low that with two or so agile engineers and maybe really two or three kind of people, you can make the next blogging system or the next Twitter or the next whatever. And so I think the trick is to keep it small, keep it on the side, and not try to do it institutionally. And then when it happens to be smart enough to embrace it. And I don't think that those people need to quit their day job necessarily to try it. And I think that the large institutions should allow innovation on the edges. But I think that that's the most likely space from which it's gonna come. So I wanna call bullshit on that actually because you and I were talking the other day about how innovation actually seems to be happening in a company like Google. And it's not 20% time. It's not someone who's sort of found a way to sort of go off and doing it. These start becoming very, very big shifts. It's very hard to go off and carve it out. And maybe there's the happy story of folks coming out of infancy. It mostly seems to be about acquisition. It mostly seems to be someone going out starting something fairly new and then getting swallowed into this. Is that where media needs to go? Do you need to have folks in the Boston Globe skunk works create something that the globe can't see how to make it work, but then go out there and sell it to the Guardian or sell it, you know. I think it's both. I think if you look, I mean, Google oversells that 20% time, but there are innovations that have come out of it. And it's not new stuff. I mean, the story that I always like is, I think it was 1925 or so, 1930. But it was before the Great Depression, 3M was a sandpaper company. And this guy who was an engineer sales guy saw them sanding cars to paint, but they were using two-tone painting. So they were using sort of butcher's paper and adhesive tape. And every time they rip it off, it would ruin the paint job. So he said, well, we understand adhesives. We understand paper. I'm gonna invent masking tape. And the boss said, no, you're not. And he did anyway. And the boss came in and saw him working on it and led him anyway. And so then he didn't have the authority. So he wrote $99 checks and built and went into manufacturing. And then masking tape turns out to then evolve into Scotch tape that actually saves 3M through the dispression because people start taping things together instead of buying new stuff. But that was innovation on the edges. It was innovation that was anti-authority. And I think that's the kind... But it was important that that engineer knew the strengths of the company, that it was adhesives and paper. But to turn a sandpaper company into a Scotch tape company was an important iteration. And I think that there's a version of that that could happen possibly in a newsroom with the right person. Is it the hackathon? I mean, this has become the latest trend, right? So we're gonna do the same thing every day and then we're gonna take 48 hours and we're gonna hack. Is that helpful in a big organization to create the space for it? Is it sort of the worst kind of lip service where you basically say, we don't want you to debate the rest of the time, here's the 48 hours where you can do it? How, for people who are sitting here and sort of saying, okay, I'm up for it, I wanna figure out how we turn sandpaper into masking tape, I'm up for that. What's the way that a large institution, whether it's the New York Times or whether it's someone else, how does that space get built? So let's go back to 3M. So 3M figured out that they needed innovation on the edges. So they did, I think it was 15% time. So actually the Google wasn't the first to do it. And I think that's where, I have to check on this, I'm almost positive, that's where the post that came from. And so I think 3M was able very early to institutionalize that and do it fairly well. So I wouldn't be too skeptical about, and again, you don't need them to happen every year in volume. You only need the masking tape and the Post-It every once in a while, every couple of years to get you out into the next thing. And so I don't, I think that if all the newspapers did something like that, and if in the next three years one thing hit, but that was the thing that saved the newspaper, then it would have been worth it. And 15% of everyone's time is definitely worth the investment if the probability of the masking tape goes up. So I wouldn't, but I would say also the possibility of it coming from the outside is high and maybe even higher. So the doing, because part of this was talking about how do you change the institution from the inside? I think that you need to do that and the hackathons and all that's important. But I think that the probability that comes out from left field, so there's two left fields versions. There's the kind of Silicon Valley start up in America thing. But there's, you know, Egypt or some other weird country where we don't have an incumbent big media thing. Or you look like, was it Norway, the VG News portal guys, that website? And there's weird things going on all over the world where you see successes, people making money doing things. And so I think part of this may also not happen in our ecosystem. So I wanna open this up in just one moment, but before we sort of get there, I think the question that I'm most nervous about at the end of this is, what if it turns out that the masking tape basically involves giving up on the civic side of it? What if the success and the way to sort of animate going forward basically says, yes, the Boston Globe, now with four pages of news and 60 pages of sports and 120 pages of lifestyle tips. What if most of those likely models don't recognize that sort of dual bottom line, that need for the civic bottom line and that need for the investigative work, the informative work, the way of holding authority to power. Has anyone done that balance between new product while holding on to that sort of critical responsibility at the same time? And something must be wrong with me because I'm gonna be optimistic again for you. But I think that the purely financially driven single bottom line model of not having any social cause is kind of a blip. I think that that, like if you look at the history of corporations, like in the early days, you really actually had, you couldn't set up a company unless you had a charter. We're gonna build this windmill and it's gonna help the community. So we're gonna sell shares and we're gonna build it and now we got the windmill. I mean, that's how it started. We're gonna Christianize the East Indies and take it over in the process. But like finance used to be very, and it's funny because you just flip it around, foundations were the opposite. You have a pile of money, you don't know what to do. That was, you know, so we're gonna, but anyway, I think that the trend, so I think that the whole philanthropy thing is going through massive change right now. I think that the idea that first you create a tax shelter for big money coming out, create an institution that sits on it and then does good, that's MacArthur night, that's gonna shift. And the future philanthropy is gonna be really interesting because what you're finding with, you know, the services and the Bill Gates is of the world, the people who are still alive and doing it, I think they're all wondering, I mean, like a meteor's trying to do their thing, skull's trying to do their thing. I mean, people are realizing that the way to have impact with their money and we haven't figured that out yet either. So I think that there's a huge pile of money that's looking for a way to be good. And they haven't figured it out and a lot of people are becoming skeptical that charity is the right way to do it. And so when that gets figured out somehow, there is money that will flow into it in a very different style than Wall Street money flows. And again, this will be, and again, we're trying to figure this out on the foundation side. So to me, I am worried about, in the short term, really losing good journalism to pure commercial things. But then I start to think about the nature of institutions and how they get funded is changing and possibly there's an answer to how to fund journalism in the future of philanthropy and foundation as well. I don't know, but maybe. Yeah, no, so I mean, it's sort of summarized a couple of the ideas here that struck me. I'm struck by this idea that the single bottom line might be a moment in time. And that actually really resonates with media companies. Media companies historically were classic double bottom line companies. And they were measured at least as much from their civic impact as they were measured on their financial impact in it. It was sort of the turning newspaper companies into securities in the 80s and 90s and in many ways may have led into sort of where we are right now. So that strikes me as very promising. I wanted to remind people of what I thought was maybe the most radical idea that you'd put out tonight, which was this idea that this may not be about shifting a business model, but it may be about a much larger change in civics, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be a participant, what you need from the news, which suggests a much more difficult path towards innovation of one fashion or another. And I would say getting back to the originally, original sort of confusing metaphor I was trying to give is it's a moving target because the behavior patterns, the consumption patterns and the cognitive models of the people is changing very quickly. So every generation has a very, very different behavior pattern. So if you build something for a particular generation as it ages, everything's changing. And so when you have, and the problem is the companies are not gonna change fast enough, I don't think, to keep up with how quickly people's behavior is changing. And so, and I think behavior is fundamental to civics. And I don't think we can, and like the tablet slides, I don't think you can predict it. And so that's the really, really hard thing. And that's why I think small things doing iteration rather than sort of grand theories about how it's gonna work are more likely to succeed. We've given us a lot to work with. Let's open it up. We've got a mic over here. Feel free to step on over to it. I'm not gonna take directly out of the audience because we are live casting and so it's hard for me just to call, but feel free to queue up and we'll go in the order. Hey, thanks so much. I just went to a Intro to Journalism class here at MIT and the professor asked us who reads newspapers here and not a single person in a 23-person class with their hand, including me. So you guys talked a lot about the responsibility of companies. Like companies need to change, companies need to adapt, but it sounds like the people you're serving, the constituents, the people buying newspapers are, as Ethan, you put it, more interested in sports, the news, more than ever before. I'm just wondering, it is a dying battle because I see businesses as a way to serve the community and if the community is not asking for information, then it seems like a cycle that's just gonna die. Please give me hope. Well, so first, give us your name, identify yourself. Oh, hi, I'm Elliot Headman. Thanks, Elliot. Do you want to take? Well, so, I think it might be a bit of a false comparison, Elliot, right? So a newspaper is a delivery service and in some ways we're using newspapers as sort of shorthand for professional journalism and sort of the idea that someone is paid to have enough time to go out, find the facts behind something, put a layer of interpretation on it and give it to us in one fashion or another. And I'm gonna make the argument that the 23 people aren't devoid of news, although if you're telling me that the 23 MIT students taking an intro journalism class, and I'm assuming this is Seth Newkin's class, are completely devoid of news, then we're in a much more dangerous situation. Which is it? Were they news-free or were they newspaper-free? He actually asked, do we read anything online? Do we read any articles? And most of these students, granted, it's MIT, so we're doing our P-sets and things like that, but there isn't an interest. There didn't seem much interest in finding things. Now maybe, and I don't know, maybe you guys would say things like watching MTV and hearing something on the side or whatever people do. I hang out in the media lab and people tell me things like you guys, but um... So, I don't know that I'm gonna give you hope because that's really depressing. I know, I'm really upset. But let me give you a twist on it. And we're doing a chunk of research right now on sort of media coverage of the California ballot propositions in 2012 and we're trying to track how they were covered online and offline. And we don't have a bunch of data because the answer is they just weren't covered that much. And so at a certain point, you have to sort of go, well, it's not new media, it's not old media. There's just not a lot of conversation about this. And so you can either throw up your hands instead of go, well, geez, maybe we just don't do civics anymore. Or maybe the answer is we do it in some other places. And so I run into a lot of people who are college students who are not directly related in civics and politics but might be deeply enmeshed in some of the debates about feminism and misogyny online that have been sort of raging in the last week with people sort of weighing in on misogyny and tech culture instead of where all of that is going. And so for me, one of the questions is has just the space shifted? Are we looking in the wrong space? Is it just about looking for engagement with the political process? Is it about looking for engagement with social issues, with other forms of issues? And is that engagement happening in other spaces? But I do think that's terribly depressing. And I would hope that the response would be, well, if none of you read news, why the hell are you taking this course? I have to think that there's some sort of exaggeration going on in there, but maybe it is really a profound shift of sort of where that's happening. Do you have any hope at all? You're in a much better mood than I am tonight. No, that was shocking to me too. But then I reflect on myself. I didn't really care about current events when I was in college that much either. I think that it grew on me as I started hanging out in the real world. So, I don't know, that's optimistic, but maybe kids will learn. You really are a good note. Next. Bob Frankston. Okay, I'm weird because I read The New York Times since elementary school. I'm not a good sample. But I also think back to the journalism before advertising when you had Thomas Jefferson writing his stories. I don't know if it's unclear whether it's worse now, but are we trying to reduce a very complex issue to a simple point. What problem are we trying to solve? Keeping the newspaper artifacts alive is a side issue. It's sort of like the railroads trying to apply the business model to sidewalks. And the real issue is a combination. We've become so good financially at funding parts. We've lost the ability to do holes. We expect little magical devices to solve climate change without solving the hole. So, the real question, I think the previous question for the right point is how do we get an informed, I was gonna say electorate, but it's really informed population. I mean, the idea that it has to be electorate is going too far, but is it part of education? How do we fund things that are larger than the next sports event? There's two pieces. There's the reader's side, which I'm gonna let Ethan talk about. For me, when I think about, so this, I guess I can say, but one of my first New York Times board meetings, they sent me home with all the Pulitzer Prize nominations from the Boston Globe in the New York Times. It was a packet like this. And I read every single article. It's kind of like the best of, right? And you see article after article where a journalist has spent a year in the middle of tremendous risk to uncover this corruption that's coming somebody or this company that did this thing. And bloggers don't have the freedom to do that. They don't have the legal support. They don't have the military support. They don't have the funding or the training to do this. Now, there are things that bloggers do really well, like with the Dan Rather thing, whether that was a good thing or not. I mean, bloggers are good at digging up certain types of facts. There's crowds, there's a bunch of stuff, but there's a certain category of investigative journalism that keeps power in check, whether that's the NSA or the federal government or big companies, that right now we don't have anything that replaces that category of professional journalism. And that may not be the article that everybody reads, but that has a tremendously important public function of keeping these people on their toes. These people, I mean, people empower on their toes. So that I feel is a function that is important, that is part of the democracy system, which is different than the engagement of the readers and the civics part. I don't know, I think you think you've thought about that part more than me. Well, I mean, the smorgasbord that is a conversation with you lets me sort of pick and choose. And so the idea that I enjoyed from this evening was this idea of not fixing business models, but fixing something much broader. And I find myself sort of wondering whether what we actually need to fix is citizenship to one extent or another. I'm getting a lot out of Michael Shudson's work and I've gone back to a book that he wrote now 14 years ago called The Good Citizen, where he basically says that so much of what we think about in journalism is this sort of model of we get informed, we read everything very carefully and then we go and vote and that's our civic duty. And he basically says, that's bullshit. Like, who actually reads the 400 page voters guide and then goes and votes on all the propositions? It absolutely doesn't happen. Because that sort of progressive era model of citizenship doesn't work, doesn't also mean that you sort of throw out all the other aspects of the democracy. And he basically says, we've moved into this rights discourse, we use the courts, we use other ways to sort of get through citizenship. I think we're moving to a place where attention is one of the most important things that we sort of work on this. And I think citizens try to figure out how they use and shape attention. This is what happens when someone finds an issue that they care about and they share it with all of their Facebook friends and maybe that's how our friends are sort of finding out about it. And I think that professional news organizations who still incredibly powerful actors within that space, whether it's putting the resources in themselves to sort of find malfeasance and draw attention to it, or whether it's a much more complex process where you have someone like a Snowden working with a Greenwald who's somewhere between journalist and amateur and has sort of an amateur who's gone pro. And then the platform that comes off of something like The Guardian or The Washington Post. But I'm starting to wonder if what's really going on here is just a shift in how we do civics and that the elections in some ways are getting less important than how we're driving attention in one sort of direction or another. And if we do have this sort of big seismic shift, is this where we go? This still doesn't get us out of the problem of needing to have journalists who can do really high quality verification, who can gather large audiences, but it also does mean that that landscape is gonna shift and that it's not just gonna be the times or sort of other organizations, it's gonna be new entities that also sort of command those massive audiences at the same time. I absolutely agree with you on the Snowden Greenwald thing and that it's kind of a... I think there are signs of different ways to do this sort of thing, but just if you think about the sheer volume of work we still need to do, we just don't have that replacement yet. I think it's a dip. There's a lot of stuff going on that I'm very impressed by. So I don't wanna diss the amateurs because I think that's a big part of it. And then on the collective, you talk about this a lot when you talk about Tunisia and the relationship between Al Jazeera, Facebook and was a noot, right? That triangle right now is really important and I think that part of the solution of where we're going may be looking at these ecosystems where the mainstream media, the sort of social media or amateur media and the activists kind of work together, whether it's in Tahir Square or wherever, we've worked mostly in toppling things, but we're now trying to experiment and building things, but I think there's a there there and that I think that experimentation may be happening in a more interesting way outside of America where you have more... Harder to topple things here. Let's go next. Hi, thank you guys both. My name's Laura Miko. I'm a journalist and entrepreneur and a Berkman affiliate. My question is in regards to leadership and it's because we discussed risk and innovation and journalists on the ground and hackers on the ground. My question for you, Joey, is whether we have the leadership in organizations in media right now to really bring these changes that maybe we see on the ground to fruition and make them happen. And perhaps if we don't have the leadership that we need, where we might look for models to find it. And I just want to put some context for not everyone who knows who Laura is. Laura is one of the co-founders of an amazing journalism project called Homicide Watch that really sort of redefined what we expect out of coverage of homicide first in the city of D.C. and then sort of going on elsewhere. But it's also a project that's had a very hard time finding support, ultimately went out to Kickstarter, got great community support to keep going. But may have suffered some of those real questions of who's gonna have the leadership to make decisions. So are you talking about leadership in the media institutions or just generally or? Both, frankly. Whether we might find leadership from the outside is going to rise in the coming years or whether there's the vision for leadership inside of organizations now that we are going to wait and see germinate. Yeah, so I kind of go back and forth on leadership. I sometimes feel like leadership is overrated and I see a lot of really important movements where the leader is emergent. That just happens to be the person in the middle but that whether it's, I mean so like a really good question if you ask Wikipedia is the founder Jimmy Wales, what was his role and what was the level of the importance of that being Jimmy? Jimmy himself will thoughtfully think about that question. So sometimes I wonder whether it's leadership or it's the kind of the right timing and the right context and then the person being a catalyst but I don't think you can lead a bunch of people who don't wanna go. Basically the leader is the one who jumps in front of the parade. And so in a sense when I think about it and even at the Media Lab, I mean yes I'm the director of the Media Lab, do people do what I tell them to do? No, so what's my role here? I have a certain role of creating certain, allowing certain types of things to happen but I can't force anything. And so I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that I think leadership is important but I think it's more important to find the timing and the context and the right network and being in the right place at the right time then somebody kind of figuring it out and the other reason I would, like I'm gonna go off slightly attention. But I think the reason East Coast Venture Capital failed and West Coast was successful and nothing against them because they're my friends but like Ev Williams or Zuckerberg, they're not impressive people. Like when you meet them, if a venture capitalist meets them, East Coast venture capitalists who are into big companies, they wanted people that looked like they could sell lots of enterprise software. Impressive people who wore business suits who could be articulate. The people who are building these disruptive companies, the Larry's and the Sergei's, they're not traditional leaders. They're people who know how to code, who are very good at product, who can see the timing but they'd also lead in a very, very different way and so I think that the successful media landscape that we're gonna see, we're gonna see a different category of leadership and if you look at open source projects and their leaders, they tend to have a very different kind of personality whether you take a Linus Torvalds, you probably don't know who runs Perl right now or Python or Apache. I mean, and they're very, they're much more kind of community organizers than they are sort of leader leaders and so I think, I don't know, I'm not sure if I'm answering your question. I think that the big media companies too, a lot of it is about the, so there's another saying that I hear a lot where you always have incentive to bullshit your boss. So by the time you get to the top of the organization, all you have is bullshit left and so in a company where you kind of, they're doing the same thing and repeating, it doesn't really matter if the boss doesn't know what's going on because the thing kind of runs itself but when you're trying to figure out what's going on, the leader is not necessarily the one who should be making any important decisions. They're the ones that make room so that the people who know what they're doing can do what they should do and so I think right now it's the best leaders are the ones who enable things to happen rather than cause them themselves. So Laura, I'm gonna answer the question differently and I'm gonna translate somewhat from Joey. I don't know what I'm translating from Joey too but I'm gonna translate from Joey. One of the reasons I think people get excited and probably overexcited about Silicon Valley and innovation is that people like you who start something radical and different that gets a lot of attention and a lot of support then end up being the head of these companies and that's not really how media companies have been shaping things over time and you don't get to be the editor in chief of the Boston Globe by starting Homicide Watch and it's actually kind of interesting to think about whether things would look better, whether they would look worse, whether they would look different if people who had interesting media startups suddenly found themselves sort of vaulting into power in one fashion or another. I'm very interested in this new West Coast Venture Capital Fund that's only funding guys who look exactly like Mark Zuckerberg. I thought that was very, very promising. But it is... The companies have increased. It is an interesting question of what it would take for someone like you who really is doing something very innovative to find herself sort of in that very senior position. I think that's an interesting question on this. Thank you for the answers. Rodrigo. Hi, Rodrigo Davis from the Center for Civic Media. We've been talking about this kind of short cycle, short sort of entrepreneurial cycle as being central to innovation where there are lots of casualties, there's lots of disruption. Venture Capitalists entrepreneurs are rewarded for taking on that risk. But that also obviously comes at a cost to the user. The user is also disrupted, which in some categories is great because I have all this choice of, say, food products. But what about areas of life in which users perhaps don't want so much change? I would probably put government in that category. Maybe even your sort of major media diet. Some people would even say, you know, they're bookmarking service. They don't want it to change very often. I guess my question was, are those areas where innovation does need to come from within the company? Because, you know, the New York Times can try or the Guardian can try something innovative. But if that breaks, at least I know the Guardian will still be there tomorrow when I want it. So I think the way, so there's two pieces to this. This is some things are better to not change from the user's perspective. There's another version of the side of this, which is if you have a tremendous brand, you have sort of a responsibility to deliver a reliable service and not jeopardize the brand equity for irresponsible risk. And I think the answer part of this is, again, that the innovation happens on the edges with the users who want, because there are certain users who try new bookmarking service every day and don't care. And they might, after a while, discover one that they all like and maybe they get older and decide they're gonna stick to it. If you look at, for instance, it's very interesting. I don't know if they have them in the United States, but you have the electric organs. So if you look at the evolution of the synthesizer, at some point along the way, the electric organ forked off and stayed the same. And synthesizers kept moving for a while. And it's very interesting to see where you have these little communities where they still like, like blackberry users still like the keyboard and other people are moving on. So the interface part, I think you have to look at it as clusters. And what you want to do is you want to experiment on the edges. And with government, I think you go to a place where they have no government. And so something is better than nothing. So they really don't have anything to lose to try something innovative and new. Whereas in the United States, the cost of redoing something is really high. And so I think what you do is not in addition to the cost of innovation for the innovator, there's a cost of innovation to the user. And it's a combination of personality and the environment that they're in. Now, if something's super successful and it tracks, this is what big IT companies or service companies like Microsoft and the Googles will buy those companies and say, okay, we need, you know, a photo service. We need a mobile thing and they buy it and they integrate it. And so that's the way they can eliminate some of that risk is to have it being tested on the outside, bring it in, explain to their users and manage it. But I think that right now that the risk taking, it's very difficult to do it on the core product of a big domain. I agree with you on that. But I guess I'll just add one, but, but like the Kindle, they did it in Palo Alto away from home base and there's the Skunkworks model or the Off-Brand model, which big companies can fund and it's a hybrid I think between the venture model. Chris? Hi there, Chris Peterson for the Center for Civic Media. Two quick questions. Joey, you talked a lot about failing fast and a lot of things will fail and a few will succeed and we'll know from there. But I'd be curious in listening to more about how you recognize a success and how you recognize a failure. And this gets to Ethan's I think last dystopian question of whether success or failure in this space means capital revenue, whether it means some civic thing that we're trying to measure in some other way and how we can separate the two when it's not obvious. And the second thing is you mentioned the Media Lab professor who posted 30 years ago of having invented Twitter. You mentioned that a lot of this success, whatever it looks like is timing, but if it's timing, I'm wondering how much you think of it is actually planning and executable and how much of it is kind of random contingency interpreted after the fact as vision and timing. And if it's mostly random contingency, it seems to me that while the systemic incentive is to have as many people trying new things and failing, the incentive of any one individual actor or whether it's institution or entrepreneur is not to do that because that's actually entirely outside their control. So how do you change or strengthen those incentives other than saying, well, if you don't, you're all out of a job, so you might as well? Right, so it's a complicated question, but let me try to answer it. As a punishment, I'm actually gonna make him diagram it on the backboard, right? But first of all, the unemployed thing that I mentioned that actually is a very interesting driver because like I was saying, if you have nothing to lose, you might as well take risks. So that's the easiest ways to have a lot of unemployed smart people who may even have money and then it's even better. But absent that, you know, I think that a couple, there's a couple of things that the, I think I destroyed 10 companies before I even was able to make one that actually made money. And I think that failing is a really, really important element of learning. And I think most people don't get the first one right. And then even if you get it right, it's very hard to get the second one right. I mean, if serial entrepreneurs are really rare, but you have to train. And so for me, you just assume that your first couple are just gonna fail and you try to learn, okay, now I learned accounting on this one. Now I learned that I need to do this and I need to, so to me it's a learning exercise rather than, oh my God, I'm afraid to fail. And that's why failing fast is important. But I will say that, I often say compass over maps. Like, so if you, I use this example in other places, but like if you talk to, YouTube 2005 was a dating site with video. The default was IML looking for anyone between 18 and 35 upload video, right? So they pivoted though and they were flicker with video and then they then latched onto MySpace. So they, but they always knew they wanted to be a big humongous video site, but their failures were in that particular implementation but they kept along the path. Now, sometimes you should just terminate the long-term vision as well, just because it's just a dead end. But a lot of times when we say failure, it's that particular iteration that's failing and to pivot instead of saying, well we spent $200 million and created a whole group to make this video dating site. Let's try it for another couple years. That's what I mean by failing fast is if it's not working, pivot, right? Now, and it's a lot easier when you have a smaller number of people because you have written less code and invested less money so that the assets that you flushed down the toilet when you pivot are a lot smaller with a smaller group and it's the least like Sean Fanning when I was hanging out with him more in California. Like every single weekend, he would show me another site that he'd written over the weekend. They all were usually unreleasable because they were, you know, here's this cool interface I made for Pirate Bay that gets data from Amazon and then lets you search it and downloads it and plays it. But he would hack something out every single weekend that was really, really interesting and that's how he kept his brain going and he would get his reaction from his friends. Then occasionally you find one that was actually legal and then he would launch it, you know. But it's like a muscle, you know, to do this and it's really, really hard to do it at the beginning. So that's why I think that it's not, I wouldn't think about it as one big risk but a whole bunch of, I mean, you're taking a risk being here for a couple of years. I mean, what you learn with Ethan may end up being completely irrelevant for your future. You may end up becoming something else, right? And so it depends on what, because it's just time. If it's just you and a couple of friends hacking, yes, you get your stipend here and stuff like that, but still everything that you do is a risk. Doing nothing is a risk too. So I think that when people say failure, it's, to me, failure, sorry, I'm gonna, because failure I think is a, people have the wrong image of what people mean when they say failure. So for me, I always say like, when somebody used to say that's hot, I wouldn't believe them, I touch it and it's, oh, it's hot, okay, I got it. So that's failure. Failure is that it was hot, but then that becomes information. So for me, failures are the creation of facts. If you theorize it and you don't do it, you end up with a theory, but not a fact. If you try it and you fail, you know you were wrong, right? And so then you learn it better. So certain people learn better through failure than they do through theory and, you know. So the ludicrously complicated second part of the question said, if we don't know whether success or failure is a matter of timing or external factors or so on and so forth, if we don't know that the faculty member, you know, who claims to have created Twitter might have failed because the world wasn't ready for as genius at that point, how do you then take that leap if you sort of know that failure may be actually sort of out of your hands? It may not actually be your fault when you end up failing at that point. So I would, I hypothesize or something, I don't know for sure, but I would say that there's a certain level of intuition that you get after being in the market and failing in different ways of getting when the timing is right. And then there's definitely kind of almost like a motor skill in knowing when to iterate and knowing when to pivot and knowing how much energy to put into stuff. And you get that through doing. You don't get that through studying it. And that's why I would suggest, and sometimes you get lucky on the first one and you go, but sometimes you fail a couple of times, but you do get better at it. I guess that's my point from my experience is every single company that I started, I got better at it every time. The first couple were just terrible. You know, I was stupid, but I was trainable. And after a while, I got good at it. And so I think that that's what I would say. And I think that the timing and the context part, while the risk is always there, you can greatly minimize the risk by doing two things. One is having a wide network. Because the good venture capitalists and the good entrepreneurs know what everybody else that is doing anything is doing. And so you know what's going on. You know, like I know, people send me emails saying, hey, have you seen this new social thing in Korea? Or did you see that line just past 400 million users? And all these different places and things going on, that information helps you judge. And when you're new, you don't have access to that information. And that's another thing that you can develop that helps you mitigate the timing and the competition problem. Please. George Mokrei, I published a weekly that looks at what's happening at the local colleges and universities about energy and other things. And since about 1989, I've been going to all of these open events at Harvard, MIT, and other colleges and universities around. A lot of it about journalism. And at the same time I got online. And what I've noticed is that journalism is not a business. It's a subset of advertising, at least in the United States. And that in the transformation of the media landscape, the publishers of newspapers and magazines still haven't understood that it's a community conversation. Because journalism is not really a business, there's a kind of chip on their shoulders. And in elitism, I feel, for instance, David Gregory, suggesting that perhaps Greenwald should be arrested as a spy. We're gonna do a question. So I would like you to address those ideas. Advertising as the overarching business model for journalism, which is just a lost leader, and the elitism or the lack of a communitarian idea within the professional and journalistic community. The good news on this is that if you're worried about journalism being an extension of advertising, you don't have to worry for that much longer. That model's dying, and it's dying very, very quickly. And to the extent that professional journalism is gonna sort of continue in this fashion, I don't think it's gonna be able to survive in a serious fashion around that same journalistic model. I haven't done my backstory on stage here because there's a conversation with Joey, but my first company, the only company that I've had any meaningful success with, went into business selling web banner ads at $75 for 1,000 of them. And anyone who's bought advertising on the web knows just how ludicrous that is. And we're now, for banner ads, you might be talking some tiny fraction of a penny. And so that market rationalized over the course of 20 years by a factor of more than 1,000. And it wasn't just my ludicrous little company, going from what at that point was a very reasonable print, CPM, down to this absurd, low web CPM, which is the reality of today, it was the entire advertising industry discovering that they'd created such massive oversupply that the bottom completely fell out of that market. So yes, there's enormous problems of newspapers not recognizing themselves as community actors. And I think in fairness, there's a great deal of insecurity because institutions that have been important community actors for a long time are now going through this very radical shift. And the answer may be that you end up in a place where the only way to support a Boston Globe is through something much closer to an NPR type membership where people become Boston Globe members and actually feel like they have some ownership over it and feel like they have part of that community. So they're jointly coming together and finding some way to sort of support that. So I think that's coming. And I think sort of stripping away maybe some of the angry part of that question. I actually think you may be pointing towards the future, George. I don't know if that's something you want to ref on at all. No, I think you're right. I think the, I have to say this carefully, but. The large publicly traded company that you are on the board of that I basically just predicted will become a membership organization and hand that to you. Whether there's a great meme and article, right? I think on membership models, which I like. But I do think that there definitely is a sort of amateur versus professional thing that seems to be melting over time, but still exists. And I think that different institutions have different levels of it. And I'll just leave it at that. I guess I'm just saying I identify that as still an issue that I think, and then there's also the curation versus original work thing. And I think different publications have different levels of comfort in acknowledging different types of sources. I think the really, I guess one point I will make is Muadad Khamfar, who was the director general of Al Jazeera when he was here. He made a really great point, which was they would not have used these amateur stringers and the social media if they had a choice. But at the time of Arab Spring, in many cases, they didn't have a choice. They used them and then they turned out to be awesome. And then they became friends and then he hired them. And so it was out of necessity that they broke that professional journalism sort of bar at some level. And I think that it was interesting to hear him sort of tell it that it was kind of an accident. Yeah, and then I think there's been a lot of that transformation and a lot of institutions. Guys, I think we got time for two more, but let's try to go quick. My name is Drew Hans. I'm with a project called Track 180. I'm gonna address two things. One is the civic side and getting community involvement. And the other one is the business model, but instead of the backend business model, I'm gonna look towards the customer. So what we looked at doing is figuring out how to get people more involved with an issue that's happening around the world. So what we would do is we would take, say an issue that's happening in Myanmar towards girls in schools. So what we would do is we would take multiple perspectives around it and actually direct people directly to the people that are doing something about it. So once they got engaged, they could feel empowered to do something. So the way that we came up with the multiple perspectives was we looked at some of the Pew data that said basically the news consumer is unhappy. And some of that data from the 2011 is stories are inaccurate, 66%. Stories tend to favor one side, 77%. And are often influenced at 80%. Those are pretty staggering numbers. So what we found is if we looked at how to address that issue, which I'm gonna ask of, I think that's the problem in Jeff's purchase of the Washington Post was saying that's specifically what he's gonna look at. What is the customer, the reader gonna do? So I think the ability for the shift of opening up to what the consumer is actually concerned about, bias, whatnot, and then connecting them directly to the issue to make a difference, I think it's gonna be a very powerful piece. And in a lot of the roles that we've come across is people were hesitant to actually connect that bridge. And so I think that's an old school model. And I think for me personally, I see a movie, I'm engaged, I'm upset, I'm pissed off, I'm sad. I wanna do something about it now. Give me some choices so that I can help this group or that group, which is the democracy of information. So I think what I'm sharing is what we've seen in the data and our project and we're getting a lot of favor on it. So on a big commercial level is the big commercial side willing to address that dissatisfaction and are they willing to cross that bridge of saying these are your options? So I'm gonna grab this one if I may. So I'm really interested in people who are trying to link reporting and action. Because I have the same sense that you do. I think a lot of what's not working well for news organizations is reporting stories that no one feels like there's anything they can do about, they're not motivated to act on. So I'm interested in projects like yours, I'm following closely projects like Shout About and such. I would say there's a couple of places where there's obvious problems and obvious tensions, right? So the first is that I think if you go into an existing journalistic organization and you sort of say I want you to write stories that end up with and here are things you could do about it, everyone immediately puts up and says that's advocacy journalism, we don't do that. And there are some reasons to have that response. When Fox News goes out and essentially says you know what's wrong with America, it's too much taxation, too much regulation. And by the way, if you'd like to do something about it, there's this amazing group that's doing a rally in your city this weekend, you could be there. It's really hard to sort of know how to take seriously an outlet that has sort of put together a package of reportage and then sort of a specific action to demand. The flip side is on a lot of these other situations, I can report to you a horrific situation in Somalia and if I don't give you anything that you can sort of end up doing on that, you might end up being sort of more disempowered at the end. So finding some solution to the, is there something between the journalism of pure detachment informed citizen model and the advocacy journalism model that freaks everybody out, is there a middle ground? I think the second is this question of, I think there's an enormous gap between finding in the Pew data that people think that news is biased and projecting a giant audience of people who wanna read news and go out and get engaged. My guess is that that may be a subset of the audience and I think it's probably a small subset of the audience. I don't know that we can expect every reader to sort of pick up the newspaper and then figure out how to engage at any time and again by newspaper I mean sort of any sort of news piece of it. So I absolutely think it's a piece of the equation but I'm curious sort of whether those hyper-engaged readers who are following an issue because they're passionate about making change around that issue, whether that can be the backbone of a model for journalism going forward. But there's a lot in there that I think is really promising and really rewarding. The one thing I wanna add to that, what we found in our click-throughs are that whether or not they actually give to the organization or do anything, them finding out what that organization is doing is actually adding information to what they're learning about. I'd like to take these two questions just really quick, like one after another and we'll let Joey respond and then we gotta wrap up. Okay, just quickly going to Joey's earlier point about how valuable information is coming through the network for assessing what kind of decisions you make in the future, where innovation is going. I'm wondering if you think there's ways to provide economic valuations for journalism and for information that are a little bit more complex than just clicks or that really provide a more holistic picture to the actual value and even the economic value of good information, good journalism. And you are? I'm Philip Guerra, I'm new to MIT at the Sloan School. Awesome, welcome to you all. And then one more quick question. Hi, my name is Jonathan Barenville. I'm a software developer and my question is in the area of software and innovation. So like, what would you say like somebody, like a young software engineer like me that has like ideas, like world changing ideas, like things you know would change a lot of things of like how the world works and stuff like that. And you would like to commit to them full time or something, but you don't really see how you could do that, you know, without being able, basically you wanna be able to commit to it full time, right? And I know like there are stuff out there like Kickstarter where you could create a great campaign, but that will only support you for a certain amount of time. So like, how would you say somebody approached that where like you wanna really change something and you have the idea and you can't actually do it, but you don't, you just wanna be able to commit to it. So two questions. Alternative metrics for news, value, what's news worth and what do you do when you know you have world changing ideas and you need to find ways to explore and get it out there. They both relate with money. What's interesting, so you use the word value. But value is a really difficult word and some people I've talked to recently who are very smart don't believe there is such a thing as value. Because it's value to who? And the problem when you try to link financial value, you know, it's like Ethan may not want to read the news about this, but this person may want Ethan to read the news. And so it's kind of like, it's very difficult to take a thing like news and create an absolute value for it. I think it really depends on who does it benefit and is that person capable of paying for that? And then it turns into, on the one hand, you may have, and advertising is a version of that. It's some sort of information about something that wants to be transmitted so it's got energy behind it. And the consumer, the problem is, and I don't wanna go long on this, but this is a sports thing. I mean, most of the people want stuff that's not necessarily gonna make them better at being civic citizens. They want junk food and sports and all this other stuff. That's the buy side. The pushing side, if you take reporters as a proxy for more of a bigger thing, which would be say the common good, then who funds that, and this starts to tie to the other question, which is if there's something that's very important that, and this is, I think journalism kind of falls in that category as does a lot of things that are good for your health. But the person that you wanna deliver it to either doesn't have the money or doesn't want it, then who pays for it, right? And it can be government, it can be foundations, it can be a private interest that happens to have an alignment with the common good or it could go against the common good. And you may find it easier to get funding for a newspaper that's very heavily leaning in a political direction. So I think it's a really tricky thing to ask about because also you're making a judgment also when you say I have a great idea. Well, great idea for who, right? I have a great idea to make a very racist site to go after all those bad people that I hate so much. Or somebody I read an article that said New York Times is exactly 56% left or something like that. But what does that mean, right? And so it's really tricky. Now I'm just talking kind of from a content perspective. Now I think there are great ideas for business models and structural stuff and that ought to be funded and we won't go into all the detail here, but that's one of the things that Knight Foundation's trying to figure out. So we invest in for-profits, we give grants through non-profits, we do little grants, we do big grants. So in the journalism space, I mean I would say if you think it's a great idea, I'd love for you to pitch it tonight. I mean this is kind of what we do. And now if it's a for-profit, we are starting to create a network of other investors that we bring into the deals. But we're trying to, that's a problem that we're trying to focus on. So I want to offer maybe a piece of practical information on that, which is absolutely, look for opportunities, put the idea out there, look for ways that people can fund it. But one of the best things to do is to figure out a group of people who are really willing to listen to the idea and willing to critique it and willing to get on board with you when it's a really great idea and are willing to help you sort of shape it and push it. And sometimes that means finding an institution that is trying to bring on smart young people and sort of find a way to change. And I would say some of the better news organizations actually probably fit that bill. You can do this outside, you can do this inside. Part of that process of sort of building up the skillset that Joey's been talking about throughout is that process of sort of iterating and failing and sort of getting there and reducing your cost of failure, particularly early on in your career, may actually be a really interesting way to go about it. Thank you. One last very surreal thing. I'm getting text messages from people in the New York Times newsroom who are following New York Times fridge who are tweeting about this. And so it's this very surreal thing where high professional journalists, I do think that this coupling of, I mean, a lot of people are paying attention to this right now. And I think that we're, I end up, I just want to end on an optimistic note that everybody wants this to get figured out. And I think everybody realizes what the issues are at some level. And I do think that it's, we're in a moment where the antagonism between the amateurs and the professionals has died down and turned much more collaborative than I've felt it, I mean, it's continuing process. But I think it's a really important time right now where you have the hackers and the Boston Globe coming together. You have newsroom reporters in the New York Times watching this and commenting on it. And everybody's, I think it's, everybody's a little bit kind of needs to do something right now. And it's very different than it was, I think five years ago. On that hopeful note, many thanks to Joey. Many thanks to the Media Lab. Many thanks to Hacks and Hackers. Thanks for coming.