 I will introduce the lunch speaker, Joshua Micah Marshall, who I want to just say very briefly it's just a huge honor to be able to do this. You can read about him in the program. He's a man of many accomplishments. And one of the people who's bringing the media and journalism into the world we're heading into, whatever that's going to be. Someone whose work is extraordinary. He's a consummate journalist and someone who's adapted to the new world in ways that I think are really worth paying attention to, including in particular, not just the great journalism that goes on there, but the way he has brought his audience into the journalism, which I'm sure he'll discuss in some part today. One quick thing, I want to also thank the Philip Graham Fund and the McClatchy Company for helping bring him here today. And before I introduce him, finally, the program says that he lives in New York City with his wife, Mila, and their son, Sam and dog, Simon. As of last Thursday, we would add their son, Daniel. And with that, Josh Marshall. Well, thanks for having me. Can everybody on this right? What I want to talk today about is the internet and media, but really internet and journalism, and how the two are affecting each other, or perhaps more to the point how one is destroying and remaking the other one. You know, the internet people live in and are geared to thinking about a world of opportunity and abundance, and that breeds a certain entrepreneurial mentality in the way that they approach everything. You know, startups come and startups go, jobs come and jobs go, but the trajectory is always upward and expanding. After the dot-com bust, I'm sure it didn't seem that way to a lot of people, but I think that's really the world that people who, you know, internet professionals, that's the world that they live in. The journalism world is about as different as you could possibly imagine, especially in the last few years, and probably looking forward into at least the medium-term horizon. I would say it's really a terrorized world. It's almost like the journalistic profession today is almost like a plague city, where everyone assumes they will be dying at some point in the relatively near future, but it's, no one knows quite now when, so you have a mix of fatalism and denial that everybody operates in. Now, this is particularly the case, obviously, in print media, but really all of the existing models, business models and editorial models of journalism. I was, recently, I met a reporter for one of the Nightly News shows, National Nightly News, and he said that in their editorial meetings that everything, the editorial and business, that everything they do is based around a five-year horizon for their even continuing to be a Nightly News. That within five years it will either be broken up and put on the web, maybe there will be no Nightly News at all, so that's the kind of, that's the sort of world that people operate in. On the other hand, I'm always struck by, when you think about, if you go back a century to the beginnings of commercial air flight, and that there were existing huge companies existing based on railroads, that were really transportation companies, but were focused on railroads, and none of them made the switch into air flight. And it's a great question, sort of why, why not, why can't companies, large corporations see what they do beyond the immediate technology that they use to do it. So I was, because we're seen as having a successful new journalism model, I'm constantly, people want to, you know, people, executives from big metropolitan newspapers and whatever want to, want to pick my brain and see what it is we're, you know, what it is we're doing right, which is not, they don't get much out of it because we have this tiny little company that we can, we can barely keep running, but they want to. So it gives me the opportunity to get sort of a sense of what these people are thinking, how they're planning for their future. And if I were, if I were running one of the big metropolitan papers that has pretensions to be a national paper like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, I would be thinking in my long-term business planning, how, how are we going to make the tradition, transition to being a news organization at the point at which we're no longer producing a daily physical paper, and this seems obvious to me. The economics of, of, of print, of print for newspapers doesn't make sense, I think, over the medium term, I mean the, say the 20-year horizon. And so I asked this person, I said, you know, how do you, what's the model, you know, how do you, how are you planning for that transition? And the answer I got was like, we're not, you know, it's sort of facing the obvious and, and, and not, and just being in, in, in complete denial about it. But, so one of the best sort of summaries of what's happening today in journalism and how the internet is really tearing it apart comes from Orville Schell. He has this line where he says that the, the mainstream media, the mass media is like the Roman Empire and we're in the period of its fall and it's breaking apart into what you had in the aftermath of, of the Roman Empire, which is a series of sort of, you know, barbarian fiefdoms, but much more broken up, much more fragmented. And, you know, beside the fact that that sort of puts me in the, in the barbarian category, I think this is, I think this is very apt for what's happening. And it's not, I don't think necessarily a, I don't think necessarily a bad thing. I think there's a lot of romanticism about the world that most of us were born into, where no matter which, whichever city you lived in, there were one or two big metropolitan newspapers. There were three national news networks that sort of defined what the news was. And that did give a, basically a common experience across, to a great extent, and across class, across ideological divides that everybody watched, well, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite, whoever, whoever it was. But that's a relatively, that's a relatively new model of what journalism is. And I think there are a lot of reasons why it wasn't necessarily a good one. So the, the breaking up that the internet is forcing, I think is, is a good thing. And what we, I think what we, what we see now, what we've seen for the last decade or so, and what we'll probably see for the next decade or two, is a vast transition. Sort of a, a very, well, very uncomfortable if you're in the journalism field. But an example of, of creative destruction, of seeing one entire model of, of business and news reporting being destroyed and then another one coming into existence. I think it's, I think it's an era of, will be an era of, it's good for journalism, but probably bad for journalists. In the same way that any great economic transition is. I mean, if there are, if you study economic history, the benefits brought about by the industrial revolution are, you can see them everywhere around us. And yet, for a century, for the people who were, ground down in those gears, it was terrible. And I see this in my own work, and it's really, it's, it's hard to even talk about. I get, we hire, we have entry-level jobs, reporting jobs. I hope that's not me. We have entry-level reporting jobs that only pay enough to, you know, support someone relatively recently out of college. These are not, these are not jobs with, with, with great salaries. And yet, each time we, we offer one, I will get some application from a, some very senior, incredibly talented investigative journalist. Some people who are how, at least within the journalism community, people who are household names, applying for one of these jobs. And it gives you who's been, you know, down, you know, laid off from some big newspaper or television network or something like that. And it gives you a chilling feeling for what's happening in this profession, the human costs of the, of the, of that turnover. So, I want to talk about this model that, that we have, either we've created or in some ways I think it's, it's created us. What we do, how we do it, and how it, how it might fit into what the, what the future of journalism, one part of what the future of journalism might be like. The one thing that besides having lower salaries and, and, and working longer hours, the thing that's really distinctive about us as a news organization is the way that we use readers and input from readers as a constituent part of our reporting model. There's a lot of every news organization today. There's a, there's a huge push for interactivity and, and I'll leave it at that, interactivity, which often there's the phrase and then people try to figure out how they can, what they can do with it because it's just an important thing to do. I think often it's, it's, it's packaging and it's, it's seen as kind of window dressing separate from the kind of the, the actual work of reporting, which is fairly similar to what it's been like for half a century at, at, you know, major newspapers and so forth. But for us, it, it really is central. And there's three aspects of that that I want to talk about. I'm going to talk about a few stories that I worked on that, that where the kind of the model came together. The first is intimacy with readers, which is probably something that anybody who's, who's worked in internet journalism will be familiar with. We, you know, before I, before I started doing this, I, I was in print journalism and I'll still occasionally do something in print. And if you write from my experience, maybe it's, maybe it's because of stuff I write in print isn't that interesting. But you, you, when I've written something in, say, The New Yorker, which has this huge circulation, you'll get maybe a couple of responses. You know, three or four people will, will send you an email or a letter kind of, you know, responding to what, to what you wrote. We get on an average day probably anywhere between five and 800 emails. And those are all a great majority of those are real emails with tips, feedback, stuff like that. And we, it's no longer respond, I'm no longer able to, to, to answer all of them. But we're, we're in that constant contact. And so there's that intimacy with the readers that makes the kind of feedback and tips that we need possible. The other is a style of, a style of writing that I would call iterative where instead of having packaged pieces that we work, someone who works a few days on and kind of puts them all together with a, the lead and a nut graph and, and like that, we're doing iterative dispatches as a story evolves. And that means that when we're reporting on a story, it's always sort of in process. And we can, in that sense, make use of that, of that feedback. So the, the two things really lock together. And the last is to be able to access networks of information based on your readership. And so these, these three things are really core to, to what we do and I think how we've been able to, what we have been able to break stories that have at least at first eluded the mainstream media or traditional, traditional press. There are three, I started doing this in, in at the very end of 2000. So I've been doing it for about eight years. And from the beginning, that aspect of, of that kind of interaction with readers and how I was able to draw on that knowledge base, to draw on, to readers could become sources that had special knowledge of particular, you know, particular areas, was always clear to me intuitively and I used it. But it wasn't until the middle, a period of about six or seven months, starting in late 2004, where there were, there were a few stories that were actually the kind of reporting I do is, is always, it's definitely opinion journalism and there's always been a sort of a backdrop of, of, of activism in it. But three, three stories that were probably in themselves more, more activism than I would normally be comfortable with, but they seemed at, at the time to, to, to merit it. The first was, this is a, I don't know how many people will remember this story, but Sinclair Broadcasting is a company that owns local TV stations around the United States. And towards the end of the 2004 presidential race, they, it's, it's owned by a, the ownership is, is very right wing. And they were going to broadcast a, you know, kind of a, a made for TV movie, which was basically a Swiftboat movie. It was the people who had made the Swiftboat commercials and they were going to do like a whole Swiftboat documentary. So it was a case of something that campaign finance laws are really not quite equipped to deal with and it seemed outrageous to me and I was writing about it and, and, you know, can we do a kind of going back and forth with readers? Can we do FCC complaints or, you know, what, it's, it's, it's so outrageous how, what, what can be done about this besides the, you know, sort of militant whining that is one normally resorts to. And I got an, an email from a reader who said in so many words, you know, I've worked in local broadcast my whole life and they couldn't care less about your FCC complaint and they don't care about whatever stupid, you know, list of signatures you put together or whatever, you know, it doesn't matter and even if the FCC does something it'll be five years from now and they'll pay a thousand dollars and they won't care. But the keys are local advertisers, not the national advertisers, but the local advertisers that advertise on the individual stations. So whatever that local station is in Minneapolis, who are their local advertisers? And, you know, I know nothing about how that industry works. So this was sort of one of those things that makes sense once you hear it, but, you know, I didn't know that and that led to getting readers in these different markets to find out who the advertisers were, publish the list of advertisers which then led other people to basically threaten to boycott the products of the advertisers that were indirectly underwriting this movie. And before long there was a database that someone else had set up about, you know, all the advertisers in all the different markets and, you know, it evolved very quickly and it actually had some measure of success. A few months after obviously the profoundly disappointing result of the 2004 presidential election there was another case where the House Republican caucus sort of flushed with their victory, went ahead and changed the rules that governed the leadership of their caucus. And one of those rules was that if a member of the leadership were indicted, he had to step down. And this was right about the time when Tom DeLay knew he was about to be indicted. So their first act as a re-elected majority was to, you know, enable Tom DeLay's criminal actions sort of in advance, which is not the kind of thing you would think that a politician would want to do, you know, out in the light of day. They did it in a private meeting with a show of, unrecorded show of hands and so forth. And it struck me, this was one of those cases where if light could be shined on the individual people in question, no one could, no one would stand behind this. And so what I ended up doing was getting readers to call the offices of their local representatives and ask. And it's easy to blow off a journalist, but it's much harder to do that with constituents. And not surprisingly, no one wanted to admit whether they had voted for this thing or not. And so we were able to, or at the time it was just me, able to mobilize a few thousand people across the country who were relatively quickly able to reveal who had voted what way on this measure. And eventually it led to, repeal isn't exactly the right word, but they basically couldn't stand behind it and it eventually ended up being withdrawn. And then the following year during the President Bush's attempt to privatize social security, by this point with these other cases, I was getting more of a sense of how it was possible in cases like this to mobilize these networks of people that were able to bring forward information that conventional journalism was both unable and in some ways uninterested in pulling together. And the focus there was to find out where individual members of Congress stood on this issue, whether they supported privatization of social security or not. And so we came up with short lists, just the people who are on an odd side of the issue, Democrats who were supporting it, Republicans who were against it. And during that period, you know, there are insider trade sheets in Washington, D.C. that the political class basically uses, the hotline, the national journal group stuff, where this kind of information is generally put together. But I think during that period of time, I don't think there's any question that our site, Talking Points Memo, had the best intelligence than anybody had, than the people in the White House had, than the people in Congress had, over just where each member of Congress stood. And that was very powerful to have that information and be able to shine a light on the different people. And that was all from having, out of an audience of, say, 150,000 readers a day, five, 10,000 readers who were going to town hall meetings and asking questions and recording what was said, who were receiving constituent mails, who were calling the offices of their representatives. And we didn't pass this on without checking it, but stuff like that is easy to verify once you know what to look for. So we were able to find out, I don't have any doubt, we were able to find out when people were changing their positions before the leadership in the Congress were finding out, for the people in the White House. In fact, I know we were usually ahead of what the White House knew. Now, these were each, this is journalism, but with a heavy tinge of activism to it. But it was at that point that I really could sort of see, like, wow, if you did this in a concerted way for reporting on political corruption, you know, you could do some amazing things. And that's when I started basically hiring other reporters and we built out sort of to the organization that we have right now where this is the model that we use in everything, in all the reporting that we do. We're heavily dependent on the tips, the feedback and the specialized knowledge of different readers when we come to different stories. Now, one thing to say about this, I think in traditional journalism, journalists get used to using what I would call professional sources. If you're a political reporter in Washington, D.C., you have the people you talk to, those sources have always been sources. They're sources for other reporters. It's kind of in the nature of what they do. Sometimes they're actually like, you know, press secretaries and stuff like that. But more often they are people who are acculturated to the way that journalism works. They know how to contact reporters. They know how to be contacted. And those can be very valuable, especially for stories where you're trying to find out some specific thing that happened in the White House or something like that. But there's a lot of other information out there, a lot of other knowledge out there. Not by people who just have some opinion, but often by people who have the most specialized knowledge or the most inside knowledge of a given topic. But they're not acculturated to the way that journalism works. They don't know how to, it wouldn't occur to them to pick up a phone and call David Broder and tell them, you know, whatever it is that whatever piece of information they have. And that intimacy and that iterative approach that we have to our journalism, they come to us. And that, again, is what gives us often a, you know, competitive advantage against more traditional news organizations. So, you know, we've been doing this as a group for about three years now. And we've had a number of stories that I think we've been able to get a jump on because of this model. And there's a lot of attention to it because the rest of the journalism community is under so much stress, both in editorial and in business terms. So, to conclude, there's, you know, we exist in kind of, we're new players in the existing journalistic ecosystem. We're both, I think the traditional press is to some degree dependent on us because they often find stories that they later report on, come up to us originally. And in our reporting, we're obviously highly dependent on them because we make use of the legwork that traditional news organizations do. So it's a very interdependent kind of relationship. There's a lot of fear today about the future of journalism. And I think a lot of journalists understandably worry whether there's going to be the money, the business models to sustain journalism as they know it even over into the next few years. I don't have any doubt, I mean, there's one issue and that's the fault of Craig's list, that that has really been a sock at the gut at newspapers because in the old technological world, newspapers were the only place you could place classified ads. And that was a huge source of revenue and that's gone and going. But for the rest of advertising, you know, you're not going to run out of people who want to advertise and I don't think you're going to run out of people who are interested in news. So I don't have much doubt that journalism will be just as vibrant 20 years from now as it is today. I would say even probably more vibrant because I think that broken up, more fragmented series of fiefdoms or, you know, Germanic successor states of news organizations brings more vitality and more cross-cutting opinions to news. Having said that, it goes back to what I said at the beginning of my talk about thinking about something like the Industrial Revolution. These things tend to work out well over the 50-year time horizon, but in the short term, the human cost is awful and the journalistic cost I think will be under a great deal of stress over that period of time. So I think the question that journalists and people who are trying to figure out how the Internet is affecting journalism are asking is how do you come up, not just with editorial models, but business models that will allow the kind of, you know, if you take the thousand plus editorial staff at the New York Times, where's the business model that will allow that kind of journalistic experience and professionalism and output, what will sustain it? Because that's really not clear right now. Again, I have no doubt that eventually, I was going to say Ford Motors, but they might not be around in 20 years, but whoever is, whoever's selling stuff, they'll still want to advertise and the news will give them a place to advertise. But that's, again, that's the medium to long-term time horizon and it's really a question and I think one that is going to require a great deal of creativity and a great deal of, frankly, for journalists, human suffering to figure out what those are so you can continue to sustain all that makes journalism important in a democratic society. That's what I have to say. I guess we're going to do Q&A now. So do you want to? Sure. Can I forgive one small indulgence? When Colin McClay was talking about the wonderful staff here, he didn't talk about himself, the guy who runs the Berkman Center on a day-to-day basis, and Colin's one of the reasons it's so great to be a fellow at the Berkman Center. Okay, this works now, too loud. So let's get quickly going with Q&A with Josh. By the way, he is too modest to tell you that one of his recent projects of this sort led to his winning of a George Polk Award, which, in a business that hands itself awards on a ridiculously constant basis, actually means something. It's a great thing to get, and amazing that we have you here. Let's start here. Shout it out, please. All right. Shout out your question. Do we have only one, Mike? Okay. Thanks. Hi. My name is Tim Wu. I was a Berkman alumni 10 years ago when I was a law student here. My question, I've sort of spent the same thinking about the same thing a lot as what the, you know, what are the business structures that might survive in 10 years from now? And I was wondering if you had thought that the newspapers to survive may have to be more in some sense like universities. That is to say that maybe the only things that will really survive in the future are organizations with giant endowments that maybe, I mean, when you look at them, you know, I agree with the way the economy is that the math doesn't add up. I write for another magazine which barely breaks even, Slate Magazine, and they're doing everything they can. And you know, that's paying people very poorly and so on and so forth. So maybe the only way you can have the sort of Baghdad bureau with 60 people working in it in New York Times, the only times we have these things are in non-commercial entities and maybe the future has to be in giant endowment based media. I guess I feel like the answer is, well, there's definitely a huge place for a non-profit sector in media, but my own sense is that media really has to be able to exist in the marketplace to be sustainable, to be independent in a way that it needs to be, to be hungry for lack of a better word. I mean, I, when I first sort of transitioned out of academics into journalism, my first experience was working in a, you know, for a non-profit based political magazine that, you know, lost money like crazy. And we blew a lot of money because we weren't existing in a market context. Now, I'm not, there's a very important place for a non-profit sector, but I feel like, again, for the dominant media I think has to be able to survive and sustain itself in the market economy. And that probably means, I think that probably means a number of smaller, hungrier, more flexible organizations. I mean, this is, I don't necessarily like the political import of what I'm saying, but I think that's probably where we're going. Hello, hello. I'm Lewis Hyde. I'm a fellow here at Berkman. And when I'm not a Berkman, I teach at a little college in Ohio. And I would like, as you talked, I thought, well, I would love to use this, a Talking Points Memo person to help me with a project of my own. And so my question is twofold. One is, how do you deal with people who come and want to use you? And then I'll explain what I'd like to use for. I cover a lot of ground. I think this fall there's going to be a concerted attempt to suppress the student vote. And it's an issue at my college, Kenyon College in Ohio. So we're going to try to document it and watch what's happening and stuff. But it would be wonderful to have this be visible nationally and coordinated and so forth. So I'm thinking, gosh, I'll write this guy some memos. And we, a lot of, we often take information that people have put together from whatever, whatever means. And then we check it out, see if it, you know, if it checks out. And then we'll publicize it. And one of the freedoms that we have, because we're sort of a niche publication, we have a trust relationship with our readers that they'll often let us sort of take them on what may seem like an out of the way or kind of, you know, even down a rabbit hole. But they trust us enough that it's, that there's something there that's important, which is, which is a real freedom we have. So we're always looking for stuff like that, is I guess what I would say. Phil Hallenbaker, back in 92 when we were building the web, a big part of what we were trying to achieve was actually keeping the mainstream media accountable. And so now you've basically slain the mainstream media. How are we going to hold you accountable? I don't think we have to worry about that. You know, I think this, well, of course. Of course. I totally agree with you. I, you know, I think the same means that have been used to date. I mean, I think that, you know, one of the, there's always been a lot of technological triumphalism swirling around discussions of the web. And I think a lot of it doesn't hold up. But one of the things that does, and I think has withstood all of the incursions of corporate power and wealth and government and everything, is that at the end of the day it is still very cheap, almost costless to start putting out information, to start publishing information. And I think that that is, the web is not going to develop in a way that evolves past that. So it is always going to be, you're always going to have very low barriers of entry to publicizing adversarial or critical voices. So I think basically the same way. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, hi, I'm Richard Sobel and I was a fellow a long time ago and partly an academic and have a project called the Cyber Privacy Project. This follows up a little on our conversation earlier and the comment about student voter suppression. I'm interested in your thoughts on voter suppression generally and how it relates to sort of obscure issues of the firing of U.S. attorneys who did not pursue voter allegations for fraud. The idea that there is a lot of voter fraud, the use of IDs to skew votes, some of the substantive of politics that you're familiar with and written about. I think voter suppression is a very important and too little talked about issue. I think that even though there were a lot of different issues behind why those U.S. attorneys were fired, that most of them were fired because they were not willing to use the power of their office in basically the service of the Republican party by going out and I would say trumping up cases of alleged voter fraud to create basic, you know, to create political mechanisms to make it harder for people to vote. So I think it's a very important issue. I think it is one that the Republican party has exploited to try to prevent Democrats from voting. That's what I would say. Edward Pincas, the Sunday edition of the New York Times costs $5 at the newsstand, $0.75 to download it to your Amazon Kindle. And, you know, and free if you just want to see it on the web. You know, I think that, I don't think the economics makes sense to produce physical papers anymore and, you know, I'm old enough that I definitely, that's a real bummer on any number of levels. I think on the web you lose the serendipitous nature of physical newspaper that you're reading the story, or for me, you know, I'm reading the story about something happening in Washington and there's, you know, laying right next to it the story about something going on in India that I wanted, that I actually want to read but I never would have known I wanted to read it until I happened across it. That said, I think the financial aspects of it are too obvious to miss. And frankly, the environmental aspects of it, I mean, I think when you think about it, we all treat it as, at least those of us who are over 30 probably treat it as just a given that there's, you know, that we produce these big physical newspapers that have a shelf life of a few hours. I mean, how many trees go into making the full production of the Sunday Times and how much ink that I'm sure has some kind of toxic, whatever. So I, you know, I don't say this lightly. I think it's a profound cultural loss to lose what we all know as reading physical newspapers. But I think they're unsustainable financially because it's cheaper and quicker to do it online. Eric Roxas with Cades Foundation. I'd like to know your thoughts on the recent agreement between TechCrunch, very popular technology business news blog, now being republished now on the Washington Post website. They've now kept out the comment section, which is probably what makes TechCrunch quite interesting. But still there's an interesting melding there and also subsequently wired reaction to it that's saying the Washington Post, now you've given up all integrity because you're partnered with Michael Irvington. You know, there's been, we get approached a lot by people who want to buy us or do whatever with us and it's happening all over the place. And even sort of from the inside, I mean, one of the things that I like about the Times is it's blogs. I think the blogs that the Times has created on its own are really, I enjoy them, I think they're good. I think this is the kind of evolution, the sort of incremental evolution of new models and consolidation and trying to bring some of what these non-traditional medias have and the relationship with their audiences. That these big companies that have tons and tons of capital who can give it to these people who own these websites are doing. And I guess that's about all I think. I think it's just natural. And I think it's just part of the experimenting process we're seeing. Hi, I'm wondering another piece of what's come along with the expanded information communication capacities that we've got with the internet and with blogging has to do with the capacity of the state to engage in surveillance and extra legal measures against journalists to suppress information that they don't like. And I'm wondering from your experience whether you feel that the kinds of protections that exist for journalists of the old school media are sufficient or whether the way that they're being adapted is meeting the needs of political bloggers like yourself. You know, I think all of our laws and traditions that protect journalists supposedly in the role they're supposed to play in society, were all put together without a lot of thought, conscious thought of the key barrier to entry issue. And that was that you didn't really have to worry too much about who's a journalist and who's not a journalist because once someone spends five million dollars to open a newspaper, they must be journalists because why would someone blow that kind of money? So this issue of who's a journalist and who's not, you know, it's natural to kind of say, well, everybody's a journalist now, but that can't be entirely true because the same protections can't necessarily, you know, you're going to have people using it for other, using those protections for other means. You know, I would, I think I would say that in my experience, we have not had a lot of problems with that. I mean, I don't know why I'm attempting fate here. You know, we do all the things to protect ourselves that conventional news organizations do. We make sure, we make sure what we're saying is accurate. We have insurance protections and so forth. You know, I think that's really the key, the key, almost everything is in that key right there that everything that exists at the moment is premised on not needing to really determine who's a journalist and who's not. And clearly in this environment where the cost to entry is so low, that kind of throws everything, that doesn't work anymore. I don't know how you, I don't know of a good mechanism to make those determinations, but I would say that from my experience, almost everything that matters comes down to finding a new way to make that determination. I'm, we're going to do a lightning round of four questions, the four people who caught my eye and then we'll ask Josh to respond to any of those and then we're going to wrap up because we're already slightly over time. So first person. You said that competition and urgency are one of the reasons that the, that nonprofits won't work for journalism. Aren't there sort of abundant examples like Wikipedia and Global Voices of situations where nonprofits have created great content in journalism? Absolutely. Let me just quickly break the lightning round rules. I think, I think nonprofits are very important and they do all sorts, there's all sorts of things that they can do uniquely. I guess my point is I don't think it is, I don't think it's sustainable for what, for what the fourth estate needs to be that we say that it no longer, you can no longer make money in, you know, producing journalism. So we're going to, we're going to assume it's all money losing. We're going to do it in the nonprofit sector. I don't think as a whole that's workable. It's not that I don't think that there are all sorts of places where journalism on a nonprofit model makes sense and can do things better than for profit. Okay, now the lightning round. All right. Oh, I already went. All right. Real quick. Can you speak a little bit about intimacy as one of your goals and how it applies to other sort of community aggregated data websites? I'm wondering if you can tell us what you think you should be called. We want to frame you. You're not a traditional journalist. Somebody described you as a political blogger. You said you were a opinion journalist with an activist streak. Is there a word to describe you? I think just journalist opinion journalist. Yeah. Last one here. What's your evaluation of the emergence of blogging by traditional news organizations, particularly around the 2008 campaign, I mean, the Atlantic Monthly, the Tribune, etc., etc., etc. You know, I think it's great. I think it's inevitable. I think some of my, a few of my former employees who are making more money now that they're working for these other organizations, I think it is, again, part of this natural evolution. I think some of these organizations are doing it really well in a way that isn't just kind of using the blog name, but taking advantage of some of the unique possibilities of blogs on the intimacy question, whether it's the trust of our readers, the ability for them to feel comfortable to come forward to us, it's really all about creating a kind of an atmosphere of trust between ourselves, our organization, people who make it up, and readers, so information, I guess I would say, it's really so information can move as fluidly as possible in both directions, and that is, obviously, you want to be credible to them. We also write in ways that are very different from the way that traditional journalists use. We will use the first person. We will talk about the process of reporting in the reports. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the more conventional way of doing it. I was taught to do that, but I do think it creates a distance between readers and reporters that makes drawing on that knowledge base more difficult, how I put it. What do you call yourself? Journalist. Opinion journalism? Journalism? A blogger, I think, is sort of like, well, what I mean by that is I think all sorts of things can exist in that medium. Certain things are not journalism at all. It's kind of an open form of diary, and other things that are journalism, so it's not at all to denigrate. I mean, this is the model that I've kind of built my professional life around. It's just that I think to say someone's a blogger is sort of like, you know, to say I'm on TV, you know, it doesn't say enough. You're unlikely to see a photo of a newborn baby on the front page of the New York Times. However, if you go back to the last Thursday, you will see a lovely picture of Daniel on the Talking Points memo front page. Let's thank Josh Marshall.