 I'd like to welcome you to the third Communications Forum event of the term, an event we're cosponsoring with the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program. And the head of that program, my collaborator in presenting this event today and in getting Jay Rosen to come and address us, will speak after me and give some additional brief remarks and introduce our panelists. I'm David Thorburn, the director of the MIT Communications Forum. I'd like to say two things as preliminary to our event today. The first is to announce our final event of the term, which will take place on Friday, May 4. It's a forum titled Electronic Literature and Future Books. And it runs from 5 to 7 PM in Bartos Theatre in the Media Lab. That event will be the culmination of a day-long, also open to the public, free symposium on the future of the book and on the ways in which the book is being transformed. The title of the whole conference is something like Unbound, the Book in the Digital Age. And you're all invited, of course, to attend any of those sessions. And I especially urge that you consider attending the final conference at which Catherine Hales from Duke, Nick Monford of MIT, and Rita Rayleigh from the University of California, Santa Barbara, will be the panelists. I also want to, just before I introduce my colleague, Phil Hiltz, I'd like to indicate to you, remind those of you who know this and inform those of you who don't know this, and remind those of you who do, that the Communications Forum could be said to have as a continuing theme, a kind of subtext that runs through many, many of our events. The role of journalism in the modern age, and especially the problem that Phil Rosen and Ethan will be addressing today, the problems having to do with the migration of the whole apparatus of print culture into digital formats. It's an immensely complex problem, as I'm sure all of you are aware. And it has a particular salience in a democracy when we consider what's happening to journalism. So I urge you to think about this forum in the context of so many others that we've held. And I'd even urge you to go to the forum website where the last 15 years of our activities are archived very extensively, including video and audio transcripts of every event, and as well as tech summaries. And summaries and other kinds of transcripts, a little less dramatic, are available going back as much as 25 years. With that said, I'd like to introduce my colleague, Phil Hiltz, the Director of the Night Journalism Science Writing Program at MIT to continue the introduction. Thanks. Just want to give you a little bit of background on our guests. Ethan Zuckerman is the Director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab. His research includes the use of technology for international development and the use of new media technologies by activists. His main claim to fame, at least as far as I'm concerned, is Global Voices, a community of bloggers that is worldwide and going strong. You can find his blog at ethansuckerman.com. Jay Rosen has been on the faculty at NYU for 25 years. He's the author of Press Think, a blog about journalism and its ordeals. He's also the author of the book What Are Journalists For? And he's the Director of a new project at NYU called Studio 20. Let me read you one paragraph, the beginning of the blog or the information on the NYU site. The Studio 20 concentration at NYU offers master's level instruction with a focus on innovation and adapting journalism to the web. Curriculum emphasizes project-based learning. Students, faculty, and visiting talent work on editorial and web development projects together, typically with media partners who themselves need to find new approaches or face problems in succeeding online. By participating in these projects and later running their own, students learn to grapple with all the factors that go into updating journalism for the web era, which seems to be kind of the center of the topics that we're all dealing with now. This conversation about the crisis in journalism has been going on for some years now. We still have daily some notes of alarm out there. And then we have this other thing, and notes of frustration and even bordered with the fact that we're going on and on with this conversation. And we're not sure we're getting anywhere, which is the reason why we have these two here now. Because Jay Rosen and Ethan Zuckerman have been the voices out there that have penetrating cogent things to say about these topics, preserving the core of journalism while moving it into the web. So with that, Jay, you want to start? Thank you very much. And thank all of you for coming. It's super exciting for me to be an MIT, which is an institution I admire so much, and to see people who I know here and a whole bunch that I've probably never met. Adapting journalism to the web is something I've been writing, thinking, and talking about for eight years. So I want to start with something I haven't said yet as a way of opening. One way to have a new idea, an underappreciated method of generating insight, is to take things that are closely related to one another and sometimes confused for one another and pull them apart so that there's new space opened between and among them. And one of my intellectual heroes, Hannah Arendt, used to do this constantly in her work. She was a political philosopher, great historian of totalitarianism. And she would take these pairs of terms that are very kind of close and say, actually, these are totally different. So she'd say labor and work. Actually, these don't have anything to do with one another. Let me tell you what labor is, because that's completely different than work. And by separating these two terms, now you could think anew with them. Another one, my favorite one of hers is a distinction that she drew between action and behavior. Wait a minute. These two things are not the same. Behavior is when we lose ourselves in routines, when you do the predictable thing. Action is when we set out on something new. So that's interesting. Now you can use those terms. Now you can play around with it. So what I thought I would do by way of beginning is take some things that have been too closely associated with one another that kind of overlap or they're confused for one another and pull them apart. So the first thing we need to think about when we think about adapting journalism to the web is the practice of journalism. So that's one thing, the practice of journalism. And today, to get ahead of our story a little bit, we have professionals practicing journalism. And we have amateurs practicing journalism. And we have something that I'm really interested in, which is pro-am journalism. The practice is what people do when they're doing journalism. It's active. But that's different than the second thing I want to talk about, which is the underlying media system that the practice runs on. That's different. The underlying media system in the 1950s and 60s was mass circulation newspapers, news magazines, and television stations on some radio. That's a media system. It's used for more than just journalism. So the media system is the way that we produce information, distribute it, connect people to it in society as a whole. That's different than the practice of journalism. The third thing that we should be able to pull apart is the institution of the press, which is actually what I've studied for my entire career. The press as an institution is, first of all, different from country to country. The reason it's different from country to country is that it's very powerfully a product of law. If you don't have law establishing freedom of the press, you don't have any press. You might have journalism. You might have a media system. But you don't have a press because everything that is just a pale reflection of politics. So until you have a public sphere, until you have a free press, until you have legal system that secures the rights of a free press, you can't have a press. So each press is different. For example, in Holland, broadcasting and news was, for a very long time, organized around what the Dutch called the pillars of society. There was a Catholic channel. There was a Protestant channel. There was like a social Democrat channel. There was a conservative channel. And that's how the entire system was organized because that's the way the Dutch did it. So the institution of the press includes the laws that make it possible to practice journalism. It includes not really companies so much as journalistic cultures inside those companies. There's kind of like a wing of the press in the New York Times building. But it's not everything at the New York Times. It's the journalists and the people who support the journalists. So it's institutions. It's professional associations, like the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which dates from the 1920s and which President Obama spoke to this week, if you saw that. And then Romney spoke to them the next day. So professional associations, professional codes, law. And the institution of the press includes what I call and named my blog, press think, meaning the ideas that a given press has about the right way to practice journalism. Just half an hour ago, Ethan and I in his class were talking about how British journalists don't think it's rude at all to interrupt somebody who's not answering the question and say, answer the question. What is this? Whereas in America, you don't do that. So those are different ideas about how. So if we take these things, the practice of journalism, which is how people do it, the underlying media system that journalism runs on, the institution of the press, we realize they're different. Now we have a better way of asking our question, well, how is journalism adapting to the web? Because the changes that Phil referred to in introducing this event, the enormous transformation that's undergone in journalism since, it's hard to say exactly when since, but let's say 1995, when I think the web first made it down to the cover of Time Magazine, are driven by one of those three things, changes in the underlying media system from a basically broadcast dominated system to something much different today, then caused and influenced and made possible lots of changes in the practice of journalism. And then those changes in practice are forcing the institution of the press to change. And so it's the middle term, the media system that's changing the most. It's disrupting the practice of journalism and it's forcing the institution of the press to change. Now just to continue with this tripartite system a little bit, I have different names for the people on the receiving end of these three things. And that's also something that I've studied my whole career. I approached the press by starting with the people on the receiving end rather than starting with professional journalists. So the people on the receiving end in the practice of journalism, I think we should call them the users. That's who they are. That's my term, they're the users. It's the most active, alive concept that I can think of for the people who we do the practice for, we do practice journalism for people who have to put it to some use. So we call them the users. The people on the receiving end of the media system I think we should probably call those people the victims. No, we should probably call those people the audience or the people formerly known as the audience, which was the blog post I wrote in 2006. Because the people formerly known as the audience refers to the fact that the people on the receiving end of the media system can do a lot more than they used to be able to do. So we can't just call them the audience anymore. The people on the receiving end of the press are the public. The press and the public go together. They really are two different ways of naming the same thing. And that's what I did my dissertation about in 1986, is the public as the thing on the receiving end of the press. So the changes started in that middle term there. And they're cascading through the rest of the contraption. Now I want to say one more word about that middle term. When I teach students about the difference the web is making or when I talk to journalists about it, I try to start with something that's very elusive and especially to people who are part of Phil's generation or David's generation, is kind of dissolved into their own practices. And that is the image of the people out there that the media system prior to the internet built up in the minds of journalists. So the way I try to get at this is by showing a clip of a scene that probably most of you know from the movie Network. You know Network? And there's a very famous scene in that movie where the crazed anchor man, Howard Beal, has kind of losing his mind, but he's getting ratings. So they keep him on the air. And one day he literally rises from his anchor man's desk and stares into the camera and tells the people out there that he wants them to get up from their television sets and go to the windows and open the windows and shout out to the world, I'm at his hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. Which later became like a rallying cry for the Tea Party and like 30 years later, four years later. So that's the scene. It's a great scene. It's one of my favorite scenes in media movies because you never see that. You never see somebody on television telling you, stop watching television. It's like the one thing they never say. But what happens in that scene, which I've watched like hundreds of times, which if you think about what's going on in that scene, people are sitting there in their normal state welcome. They're sitting there watching television in what was the normal state for the audience to be in for decade after decade. And that is in your private location, whether it's your living room, watching TV, or the breakfast table with the newspaper, or your car listening to NPR, right? You're in your private location connected up to a big institution like the network or in the case of the State of the Union address, the presidency, connected up receiving images, information, talk, and unable to transmit. And not only that, connected vertically and disconnected from everybody else, right? Or atomized. Now if you try, what I try to get people to do in thinking about what's happening about journalism is actually visualize people that way. Not one person. It's easy to visualize one person. But visualize a million people in that condition, right? Private location, connected up, silent and inert, ready to receive, disconnected from everybody else. That was my childhood. That was the first 20 years of my life. That's basically all I did. I went to school and I did that. Why do you think I study media? As an act of revenge. So what I want you to appreciate is if you can visualize the audience in that fragmented, one way, disconnected, atomized state, then you can realize how weird that is. It's just a strange interval in human history that people were able to be combined in that way. And for example, their attention could be aggregated and sold as a commodity. Strange, weird behavior. So now the underlying media system is changed in a way that it's just as easy to connect horizontally to other people as it is to connect vertically to the media, the president, the company. It's not that we don't connect vertically anymore. We do. We still watch spectacles. We watch the Academy Awards, which is Hollywood and its stars. You're just supposed to bask in their glory, which we continue to do. And at the same time, we're talking horizontally to each other because the underlying media system permits that. So I wrote a piece about that in 2009 called Audience Atomization Overcome, because I think the shortest description I could give for that shift, three words, Audience Atomization Overcome. So when we think about adapting journalism to the web, we have to also talk about that because that to me is really the heart of the change. OK, so that's all I wanted to say at the beginning. Well, that gives us a lot to work with. That was the idea. Just so everyone understands the format here, our goal is to have something of a structured conversation. And the structure means that I'm going to control who has the microphone. But that's pretty much the entirety of the structure that we have for all of this. Jay was going to come in with a provocation, and it's a helpful one. So I'm going to now respond to that in a question that's probably going to take me roughly as long to get through as it was for you to get through that opening statement. I'm heading there. I promise. I'll get there. So after responding and asking a couple of the questions that I want to ask, we're then going to open it up to the two microphones we have on the floor. And that's what I meant by controlling the mic was that this was going to be a question and answer process. So please start thinking about what you want to be asking and how you want to get in the dialogue. But I want to push on a couple of things from the model that you've put forward, Jay. So what I think is very helpful about this is in breaking apart this sort of profound shift that everyone's really been trying to deal with for the last 10 years or so into these three different categories, you give us a chance to confine some of the existing debates that people have spent an enormous amount of time on. So for instance, if we take that the first shift is a shift in the practice of journalism, the idea that journalism for some period of time was the province of a professional class, formally or informally trained, who engage with a certain particular code of ethics, generally paid to do so, although there's always been community reporters who are poorly paid at best, but a strong distinction between professional journalists and the people who they were interacting with, whether they were eyewitnesses, whether they were commentators, expert or inexpert, in one fashion or another. And one of the big shifts that's happened in this space is that that distinction has crumbled quite sharply. It is not that professional journalists have gone away, but we seem to have gotten somewhat beyond the blogger versus journalist topic that would have dominated a gathering like this six or seven years ago. And there is at least some steps towards acceptance that people commit acts of journalism. Some people do them fairly often because it is what they're paid to do. Some people do it often because it is their passion and what they end up doing. And sometimes it is a person in a place who gives a reliable account at the time and attempts to verify it and is able to commit that act of journalism at the time. So there's one set of debates about whose job is this, who has the opportunity to do this that we might be able to put into one box. It's the second set of debates that we might helpfully put in another box, which we might think of as medium debates. And the medium debates actually get pretty rich and complicated because one set of them quickly becomes financial. In a world where you have broadcast control, as you said what you really have is the ability to aggregate attention. We're going to give you the morning news via paper, which suggests that some large fraction of the literate adults in this city are going to read these collected pieces of paper, which means we know where they're spending their attention, which is then a monetizable capacity. We know you're going to be reading this paper. This department store doesn't necessarily care anything about the current situation in Somalia, but they do care about the fact that you are turning from page one to page two and have the opportunity to see the ad at that point. But Best Buy never signed up to fund the Baghdad Bureau as Clay Scherke says. Correct. So we have the shift in business models, where it's becoming very, very clear that attention on the web is not nearly as valuable eyeball to eyeball as we thought it was on an offline world. We may have simply been wrong in an offline world. It's possible that advertising just didn't work the way that we thought it did, but now that we have rationalized the market and people can actually bid for eyeballs one at a time on the web, that market has simply collapsed in price. We've gotten very, very low, very, very quickly. Second in the medium, we have disaggregated. So again, as Scherke has pointed out, if I wanted to pick up a newspaper, mostly because I wanted my local news and I happened to stumble upon that story in Somalia, that is no longer necessary because I am now reading localnews.com where my story about Somalia would be incredibly inappropriate. Or in my case, I'm probably reading about Somalia where the story about what's going on in Roxbury might be incredibly inappropriate. That's called unbundling. So the unbundling argument, the finance argument, the advertising argument, and then third is you were sort of going the isolation argument, which is to say that in the past we were all encountering media. We might occasionally have written to a letter to the editor, which might occasionally have gotten printed, but now some of us find ourselves in a media experience where any broadcast event is simultaneously a vent to connect, to respond back at the same time. My recent experience of this was this American life retracting their Micodesi story in a extremely powerful and uncomfortable radio hour which was released, and I don't know if this happened to you, but as I was listening to this that Friday night, found myself tweeting to the other several hundred thousand people listening to it at the same time and sort of having the post-mortem of how they were doing on the piece as it was going out. It's a very different media experience than it all goes one way and then it all comes another way. So let's put those in those boxes. Now let's get to the one where I'm less comfortable with where you're going because I'm not sure what this debate looks like. Which is this debate about the institution of the press? So if the press is a collection of standards, practices, norms, institutions and ways we think of doing our job. And if it's something that comes into play because of the existence of a particularly legal structure, a particular set of practices that are in place, it seems like this is a deeply unsettled space and a large number of the arguments that are sort of still raging in this space are basically around the question of is that idea that there is a press and a public and that that press is somehow following the set of collective norms and rules and informing a public. Does that make any sense anymore? Now here's where I wanna go with that. One of the things you posit, I think maybe not incorrectly is that a press is something that happens particularly in a free society where it's protected by rule of law where it's possible for people to stand up and say I'm going to speak freely and publish. But now, thanks to those first two changes, we're starting to see a radical shift in that environment. We are seeing people attempting to influence a public whether or not they consider themselves to be part of the press. Or whether or not there is a free press. So let's drill down on something that you and I were both recently reasonably fascinated by which is this Mike Daisy case, right? So for those who don't know the details on this, Mike Daisy is a theatrical performer. He does more or less what we're doing. He sits at a table with a bottle of water and he attempts to tell a compelling story to keep a room like this entertained for some period of time. He's better at it than we are. So he gets larger crowds, they pay money for it. But it's fundamentally the same thing. He's a storyteller who offers stories and essays live on stage. And he's been telling a story that is quite in depth and detailed about the origin of Apple products. It's a story that talks about the psychology of Steve Jobs. It's a story that talks about how products are manufactured in factories. And the center of the story in many ways is Mike telling the story of his trip to Apple factories in China. And he tells us that he stood outside Apple's factory in Shenzhen run by Foxconn and interviewed workers coming out who were 12, 13 and 14 years old. And after telling us about interviewing 12 year olds looks at us and says, do you think Apple really doesn't know? Do you think a company that cares this much about how its products are assembled doesn't know? Very compelling story. Been out there in the theatrical circuit for months. Ira Glass of this American life invited Daisy to come on his show and tell this story. Tells this story. It's one of the best-received episodes of the radio show ever. It then gets fact-checked. It gets fact-checked by someone else in national public radio. And it turns out that basically none of Daisy's facts are verifiable. Many of the stories that he tells can be verified to other journalists, but there's no way to verify it to stories that he saw. And in fact, in fact-checking, they ask his translator and his translator says, no, we didn't see most of those things. What I'm asking is that Daisy is part of a group of people who is trying to influence the public. And they are trying to influence the public through creating media. And we're now capable of creating media in any number of different ways. Now, Daisy is very, very clear that his job is not the press. And in fact, when he apologizes for all of this, he apologizes for this becoming journalism. He apologizes for this becoming press. But what I want to complicate with this idea of the press is we now have many, many different actors trying to figure out how to have this space to inform and influence public. Some people are standing up and saying I'm a journalist. Some people are saying I'm a pro-M journalist. Some are saying I'm doing activist media. Some are saying I'm simply an activist. But everyone is making some claim to attention. Everyone is making some claim to authority. And everyone is making some claim to want to influence behavior in one fashion or another. How do we deal with this concept of the press when you have everyone from Mike Daisy on stage, you have everyone from Invisible Children with the COIN 2012 video producing information that they believe you don't have. You don't yet know about the story in China. You don't yet know about the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda. They're making that reporting claim, but they're following a very different set of rules and norms than the rules and norms that you would like to ascribe to a press. How do we start dealing with that? Right. See, I told you I'd open up space because that's a very good question. So I think a number of things are going on there. First, because the media system has changed, lots of people can give us information about the world. And they do. And it comes to us in many different forms. And this is something that most people recognize now. I think to provide us with journalism is a different thing. It's a subset of that larger thing. Now, if we want to say, OK, so when is it journalism, which is a good question, much better question, by the way, than who is a journalist? It's much easier to talk about the act or the practice, as I put it, than it is to decide who's a journalist. And arguments about who's a journalist tend to get unproductive very quickly, primarily because what people are really arguing about is status, not journalism. So if we want to isolate, well, what's the journalistic part of that? I just wrote about this because I think it starts with, and this is very relevant to Daisy, it starts with a particular kind of claim. And when I say starts, I mean the origins of it, way back in the mists of time, or with a particular kind of claim. And the claim goes like this. I'm there. You're not. Let me tell you about it. That's the start of journalistic authority. So if we wanted, for example, say, when did political journalism actually begin? Like, did it have a birthday? The birthday of political journalism for us, for the West, was when the first guy managed to get into parliament and take down what was being said there. Because at one time, debates in parliament, it was illegal to report debates in parliament. You had this weird situation in early part of the 18th century in England where people who were part of parliament had free speech within parliament. You could never be prosecuted. You could say, King George is an ass. And nobody could touch you because you had freedom of speech within the halls of parliament. If you said the same thing outside, you could be arrested in a day. So parliament had freedom of speech. Parliament also had information. They had the budget. They knew what the king was up to. They could ask the ministers of the king to come in and tell parliament what's going on. So parliament, at that stage, had all the rights that we associate with the public. And they called parliament then, this is fascinating, the people indoors. They were called the people because they represented the people because in their minds they were kind of like representing the people compared to the king. So then there was the people out of doors. Who were they? Everybody else. Out of doors, there was no freedom of speech. There was no freedom of press. And it was a crime to tell people what went on in parliament. So through a long series of contestations and protests and heroic actions by subversive people who are basically that century's bloggers, eventually the right to report on debates in parliament was secured. So that person was the first political journalist. Why? Because he's saying, I'm there in parliament inside the building. You're not because you're living your life. But I'm going to tell you what they said. So that's journalism. So the way I think about it, anybody who can make that kind of claim, and that claim has many derivatives, which I'll get to in a second, but anybody who can make that kind of a claim is engaged in the practice of journalism. So that's why we have what you called earlier very helpfully accidental journalists. People who come upon a plane just landed in the Hudson. Outside my window, can you believe that a plane just landed in Hudson? I'm there. You're not. Let me tell you about it. So that's journalism. Now, the variations on that claim involve different kinds of work. So I interviewed that person. You didn't. Let me tell you what he said. I went down to the Hall of Records, and I looked at the property records, and let me tell you something. Cheney owns seven houses. You didn't, and let me tell you about it. So journalism is partly about that. It's about people finding stuff out or being able to tell you something you're interested in because of either where they are, and you're not, or because of work they did, which you didn't do. And that relationship is extremely important. So with Daisy and Coney, part of the problem is he was saying to us and to his audiences as he went around doing his show, I was there outside the gates of the Foxconn apples factory. I saw a 12 and 13-year-old going into work on an apple. Let me tell you about it. Therefore, he tried to claim the sort of authority that a journalist has, and then it turns out he was there a little bit, but he didn't see that. And then they weren't 13, and we can't actually rely on him. So it's a kind of counterfeit authority that he produced that is a problem. Procedural note, for folks sort of squatting in the corners, please feel free to come on in. There are more seats in here. Come be comfortable. We really don't mind. You're not interrupting anything. So one question, Jay, is whether that's the only claim to authority. So one of the other things the journalists end up doing is saying, OK, well, we heard this from the people who were there. Maybe I wasn't there. Maybe I wasn't in Tumbak Tumali, but I spoke to someone there. Or maybe I wasn't in Tumbak Tumali, but here are the reports that came in to me in Dakar Senegal, which happens to be where the near bureau is. But you don't understand it. So let me explain to you what happened. And that's another source of authority that comes into play on all of this. Brick, it's a little tricky in some of this is that the truth is journalism that simply says, I was standing by the Hudson. There was a big thing in the air. It landed. It looks like it is an airplane. Eventually, that's a limit to what it is. What we really want is then that person to sort of say, here's my legitimation for telling you this. Now let me explain the larger thing behind it. Here's the story behind it. Here's what occurred with it. Yeah, so let me just stop you there, because I said the origin was in this claim. That's all. In my piece, I called it, it's like the headwaters for journalistic authority. If you trace it all the way back, it's bubbling up right there. But downstream, lots of other things create. So what that becomes in a mature practice of journalism is what you were referring to, which is sort of the art of verification, generally. So journalistic work in this blooming, buzzing media system we have is identifiable, because it is primarily concerned with verifiable reports about what's going on, as well as, as you said, explanations that bring clarity to public audiences, as opposed to specialized audiences, of what's going on. Now it, I think, is a different activity from, let's say, political persuasion, even though attempts at political persuasion can be very informative. It's also a different activity from stand-up comedy, even though stand-up comedy can teach you a lot about the news. So I think we have to make those kinds of distinctions if we're serious about this idea of the practice of journalism, because not everybody who's informing us about the world is engaged in the practice of journalism, which I think is a very important practice. One of the things that came up, actually, in a class yesterday as we were talking about this, was where that claim to authority comes from. So one of these ideas, when we're not talking about here's the plane that just landed, or here's the rebellion that's taking place, but the question is, how do we unpack the Greek financial crisis? That the claim to authority may be, here are the things I know, here's the context that I can bring into this. So one of my students brought up the idea of Quora, where you have this giant question answering site, where basically the first thing people say is, here is why I have a certain amount of believability associated with this. One of the things that I would point to, and again I'm going to come back to your sort of three part model here, is that the media is changing so that we can sort of say, here are the people who are making the claims of authority based first and foremost on, I was here and I spoke to the Greek Prime Minister and here is what he said today. But there's now a realm of reaction and commentary and so on and so forth that's coming out of this two way media, where what you may be having now are assertions essentially saying, well, so you asked, I am a macroeconomist who focuses on European debt and I am able to tell you, now here's what comes into this. I'm reluctant to call the first just journalism the second just commentary. To me that seems a bit sharp and a bit stark. I think this notion of claim to authority is very, very helpful and I think the notion of journalism is discipline of verification is helpful, but it also seems like you're talking about the easy part of the iceberg. That's the stuff that's sort of above the ground. We can agree that it's journalism if it's about an actuality that someone is reporting and that they're then able to authenticate and verify. But it seems like when we talk about journalism and particularly when we talk about the press and the role of the press to inform the public we're talking about a whole big iceberg that lies below. True. I'm simplifying it too much. Yes. That's what I've been complaining about about everything lately. So I'm gonna complain with you simplifying as well. So how do we go further with this and let me try to steer you back to the question that I really want you to answer which is what's the press now? Right. Is the press just the folks? I mean, you put out a very conservative definition initially of the press. You know, it's the association of newspaper editors. I would hope that the press now isn't just the professional verifiers but is some larger group of people who are engaged in the Journalistic Act which it sounds like we're agreeing is more than just the verification but is the contextualization is the important so on and so forth. It is some group of people that is trying to talk about a real event in the world, a verifiable event in the world and its important significance, relevant so on and so forth to a public somewhere who by the way are now generally speaking back at the same time. Yeah. I don't think we disagree on this. I didn't mean to suggest that when you meet with the American Society of Newspaper Editors you have the entire press in the room. It's just, it's more like a symbolic thing. I assumed you didn't. That's why I wanted to propose. But let me go back to your point about the climate scientist. One thing we left out of this picture that my friend Dave Weiner phrased the best is that because the media system now puts the power to produce media in the hands of everybody as we all know, the sources can go direct. That's how Dave puts it which is a brilliant formulation. The sources can go direct. So the people who in the past had to speak through journalists because the media system was so constricted and ended up trying to kind of smuggle their knowledge into the public sphere by being interviewed, right? Don't have to do that anymore. The sources can go direct. And so if you are an authority on organizational behavior or climate scientist or one of thousands of other domains, you now can contribute directly to public knowledge. Now, what limits you is not the media system anymore. That's what used to limit you. What limits you now is that the more specialized your knowledge is, the more valuable it may be and the less likely it is that you operate in the vernacular. You know what I mean? That is your language that you habitually use to tell us what you know is less likely than ever to be the public language that everybody else uses. Now it's not to say that there aren't specialists who can't communicate to the public. There are, there are a lot of them. In fact, that's sort of what teaching is. So there are a lot of people who are good at that. But that's the problem is, and so yes, it's way more complicated now because we have the people formerly known as the sources can inform us directly. What was the other part of your question that you said you really want? Oh, the press, right. So the press, I think, I think of the press as an institution that is constantly in motion. Like it's actually very difficult to fix in any one place or institution or thing or group of people. And what's so great about the recent changes that we have seen since, let's say 95, is that I think they've brought the press as an institution much closer to the people so that people now realize that they, in a way, own the press. Not that they own the companies, but they own freedom of the press, right? Freedom of the press. When I started teaching journalism at NYU, you're not gonna believe this. Bill, you might believe this. When I started teaching journalism at NYU, it was routine for journalism deans to tell the incoming class of journalism students. Journalism is the only profession that's specifically mentioned in the First Amendment. They would say this. It's a bizarre thing to say, it was routinely taught. It's bizarre for a number of reasons. First of all, I've read the First Amendment. I bet you have too. I have. It does not say anything about journalism in it. That word does not appear in it, okay? So that's the first problem. What were they saying when they said that? They were saying that we professional journalists are not an example of the press. We are the press, right? It is our thing. It's a Kosa Nostra, right? Our thing between us. And that's like, if you think about it, what a fantastic idea, what a fantastic delusion. What human forces could have created that kind of a misreading among educated people who think of the First Amendment as their religion, right? So it's their religion, and they had it long from the first, right? So what's happened since then? We don't teach, nobody teaches that anymore. Because everybody kinda knows, even professional journalists know that freedom of the press doesn't mean this group of people with press cards. It actually is a public possession. It means everybody has the right to the tools of the press, right? And so in that sense, the institution is this fluid, changing thing that has to be continuously rediscovered where it is. So when courts say, yeah, bloggers could be journalists, they deserve protection under something like a shield law, right? The press is moving. It's being redefined. And that's what's great about the present moment because for so long, these things were frozen and now they're very much unfrozen. And when something happens like that, when something that's been set in a pattern for a very long period of time, all of a sudden gets disrupted, people in our business have an opportunity because everything's up for grabs and now there's a chance to rethink some old concept. That's why I started my blog press thing. It's because I felt that because these things that had been frozen for so long were now unsettled and uncertain, now we could rethink a whole bunch of stuff that had become artificially frozen. So the membership of the press is changing. It's no longer the secret fraternity. I notice you're no longer wearing your pinky ring. I think you still have the tattoo. You never get any of these because you're not as usual as a journalism professor and you're not coming from the journalistic fraternity. But for those here in the fraternity, you can show the twos later over drinks. But now we're suggesting that we've sort of moved to a point where this is a different space. It's including some blogger sometime. What I wanna ask now is how this changes the public. So you put forward a very interesting sort of provocative suggestion more than a decade ago about public journalism. And this notion that what you actually want journalists to do is not just give the facts, but make it possible for the public to participate in civic processes in one fashion or another. Now again, we're talking about this major shift that's going on. To review the shift, it's not just one class of people, not one professional tattooed class of people who are reporting from now on. And there's a medium shift which suddenly means that rather than being isolated, rather than sitting alone at my breakfast table saying, oh thank goodness, now I've learned what I should be doing for the public, there's this ability for lateral connection, there's this ability to talk back, there's ability to have conversations going back and forth. How does that notion, how does that notion of public journalism, journalism that makes it possible to be a civic actor, how is that changed by this change that you're talking about? Well, I think there's a simple way of answering that, which is that over time, in the one way broadcast model media system that held for, let's say a century or so, what happened is that a relatively active notion of the public kind of moved closer and closer to the audience until we saw those two things as the same. Public is the audience, inert, as I said, right? So now what's happened is because the underlying media system that we do this with has changed again, they are gradually separating again. And we understand the public in its original meaning, which is people who affected by it talk about the news and act on what they learn. That's what the public really is. It's not a bunch of people listening to a political class and its debates. When that first reporter took down what was said in Parliament, he wasn't doing it just for fun. His intention was to put it into the newspapers and so that people in coffee houses could read it and argue about what the people in Parliament were talking about. So that idea that, and this got lost in the era of dominance by professionals, the idea that the public's job is not to be informed, that's only like the beginning of it. The public's job is once informed to argue about the news, to get outraged or active, right? To take action. And for all the critique that we make, which is good about selectivism and sort of phony forms of action, just the simple fact that people think they should not only know about what's going on, but do something about it, that's a huge thing. So what's happening now is the public and the audience are separating, right? And a more active notion of public is returning and part of what that public does is occasionally filled in in the role of journalists, but more often they're arguing about the news, they're commenting on it, they're sharing it, they're telling other people what's really important, right? Everybody's acting as an editor of everybody else. And that's the way journalism was supposed to be from the beginning, it's like this subversive thing that belongs to the public. What is the alternative to having a public? The alternative is a political class runs everything and the public sphere is people marveling at the majesty of the king as he floats by. So what I think is really nice about detaching public and audience is that it helps us sort of think through these changes going on in the media shift in general, right? So that second shift we move from a broadcast model to a lateral model, a two-way model of one fashion or another. You've got folks like Henry Jenkins sitting here and essentially saying, well, look, you're seeing this in culture as well. Even if you're creating television, even if you're creating the ultimate audience material, you have some percentage of people who are watching season two of Game of Thrones instead of going, wow, that's awfully bloody. And you have some other group of people saying, and I'm going to write a political parody of this, or I'm going to figure out how to extend this with fan culture of one fashion or another. And you might think of this in some ways as sort of moving into how other people are dealing with the journalistic environment. Some percentage of people are watching, and perhaps first and foremost, it's entertaining. Perhaps other people are watching and getting informed. You're then positing sort of multiple pathways to engagement, right? One is that you argue with it. And so in some ways, what we often think of as the cesspits of the internet, the common threads on public newspapers, in many ways are actually what we should be excited by. It's people in one fashion or another trying to figure out some way to debate and engage with what's going on. Another way that people debate and engage with what's going on is they do things. They get active in a community. They get active in a product. One of the very interesting things is that one of the biggest things people do is they amplify. So this is another thing that's now changed within this media environment that we're talking about. If I'm affected by a story, if I'm interested in the story, one of the simplest ways that I can react to it, that I can sort of state, I'm not just an audience, I'm a public, is by saying, and I want you to pay attention to this too, or I wanna pass this on or I somehow wanna gain attention to this. All of which is wonderful. The problem with it is that the one thing that we haven't really figured out how to change in all of this is the supply of attention. And so we're now at a point where rather than a couple of TV stations, a couple of radio stations, a paper in the morning and a paper in the evening, we now have anyone we're interacting with in this network at one level or another with the possibility of making a legitimate claim of our attention. And so you also have people crafting these claims to attention in very interesting ways. Did you know the press, which we don't trust very much, which has something under a 30% approval rating, hasn't told you anything about this horrible thing that I found out about from a 30 minute YouTube video, which now I demand you pay attention to because it is the human rights abuse of our time? Now that becomes a very complicated way to start dealing with a news and information environment when those claims are being made not just by the professionals, but those claims are also now being made by people who are joining the public by getting into that business of amplifying and... Yeah, huge problem. That's the kind of thing I would take years to try and puzzle it out. But let me say a couple of things in reply. One is that the... Clay, my colleague Clay Shurkey, who now has joined me in journalism and NYU, really helps here. So he reminds us that for most of the media system, we have gone from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance, right? So it's obvious why that's the case because the tools for producing media have been distributed to the population at large and the cost of production has plunged and the media system is open. So all these economies of scarcity that once sustained the media business are evaporating. However, the new scarcity is what you mentioned. Is attention, right? So that is a huge, huge problem. The other thing I would say in reply to that is that one of my heroes in media studies, not really well known anymore is Raymond Williams, who was a sociologist basically in the Cold War era in the UK. And William says in one of his books, he says this really profound thing. He's talking about mass communication and he says, look, there are no masses. There are only ways of seeing people as masses. I'm gonna say it again. There are no masses. There are only ways of seeing people as masses. So what does he mean there? He means that you can't actually go into a house in Liverpool and find a mass man and a mass woman. That's a fiction, right? Because everybody is more complicated than that. Whatever class they may be. But what is real, what has a kind of historical reality to it, is that the ways of seeing people and reducing people to masses, those are real, right? So the commercial formula is real, right? The art of attention flow that was practiced, let's say by TV programmers who know how to keep you watching, that's real. Negative advertising, that doesn't have anything to do with the truth, but moves your emotions, that's real. So this idea that the masses are really a fiction, but ways of seeing people as masses are not, is relevant here, why? Because even very quote, unquote, well-intentioned people may practice seeing others as masses. And if, once we learn how to see other people as masses, meaning moving their emotions because you need their emotions to move, not because they are open to that experience, right? Or you're, I have the stimuli, you are the response. Seeing people that way, reducing people that way, in this very highly refracted form, is itself a product of the media age, the media system that we once had. So when people, for example, say, they say, well, we have to learn how to get, we have to get the eyeballs. Think about that phrase. That phrase, like, we couldn't get the eyeballs for our video, right? What it's literally doing is it's taking human beings and it's treating one part of them, which is their eyeballs, right? As the thing, right? So what, the reason I love this phrase from William so much, there aren't no masses, the only ways of seeing people as masses is that those ways of seeing actually migrated out of the media industry and we all know about them now. And the fact that some video maker who wants to draw attention to his cause does that too, doesn't surprise me, but I'm not gonna ennoble it because it's, you know, an amateur, you know, or it's somebody who's well-intentioned because the alternative to seeing people as masses is to treat them as a public. So by the way, I think you've coined perhaps the worst pickup line ever. I have stimuli, you have response. I try it in your favorite bar tonight, see how it does it for you. In the meantime. I have my ways. We, in the meantime. That's not one of them. In the meantime, we wanna introduce you to stop being a mass and start being a public and the way you can do this is by arguing, participating, acting in one fashion or another. The action we would ask you specifically is to step up to a microphone. We would ask you to be pithy and preferably to remember that questions tend to end with an interrogative offered an upward tone at the end of what would, otherwise perhaps be a statement. Wanted to build on the Williams quote that you just mentioned and I think the reason why I'm asking this question is because in some of your comments mentioned, one of the things that's happening right now is this opportunity to look at conventions and things that had been solidified for a short period of time and see them becoming unfixed and so I wanna follow up on that a bit. So the idea is I think you could build on Williams to say something like there is no news, there are only ways of seeing certain kinds of stories as news and historically that's happened in different ways. So going back to the 19th century to build on this idea of I was there, you weren't, I'll tell you a story about it, I would argue that at least in some aspects of American journalism at the end of the 19th century it was I was there, I'm also a very keen imaginative observer and I'm gonna tell you a story that will be credible to you, credible might not be the right word for the 19th century but will appear to you as news. And so actually the example from this American life that story of I was there and I'm sort of mixing something together that's part truth and part what I was hearing from other people that might actually be a sort of model that was 19th century journalism. Most famously that's a model that war correspondence for the Cuban, the Spanish Cuban American war at times used and were criticized for and I would argue as part of the reason why we moved into- Or for instance in Claire, I mean so it's worked even fairly recently. And then in the 20th century you moved to a paradigm where it's not just I was there but I was there, I'm part of this institution and set of standards that allows me to tell a story that is credible because it has two sides and because it's referring to certain facts. And I think now some of those things such as two sides of the story are moving away. I think it's very interesting. I was reading recently that NPR put in its new ethics manual that it's no longer requiring reporters to tell both sides of the story, it's requiring reporters to adhere to the truth in whatever- Yeah, you're gonna die on my blog. So that's, okay. So getting to the question, so now we're at this point where once again I think what we're looking at is a shift. It's not just a shift in audience, it's also a shift in how we're looking at news. And so what do you see as some of the new conventions that are not yet conventions that are coming up? Yeah, that's a great question. I'll tell you the one that interests me the most and it is again it's this American life and our glass but it doesn't involve the Daisy story. Before the Daisy episode, I believe the most downloaded episode of this American life was the Giant Pool of Money which was their one hour explainer on the roots of the financial crisis. And it's a great, it's like to me it's one of the most fantastic works of journalism ever. And I've listened to it a number of times. And what's great about it is the way that they put it together and sort of the nature of the rhetorical appeal that they made. Because what they are saying in that documentary is not, we're financial journalists and we know this stuff so let us tell you what happened. Or we got the best economists in the world to explain to you what happened and we got them, right? Because we went to MIT and we went to NYU which actually has a better economics department than MIT. Oh, Chicago. Okay, so they didn't say that but here's what they said. They said, you know what? We were as confused as you were about this. We hear all this stuff about subprime mortgages. We can't believe that our financial system is falling apart because of bad mortgages. It doesn't make any sense. So we're gonna go out and try to explain to ourselves what went on and we're gonna find the smartest people we can to explain it to us and we're gonna go and talk to people at every level of the system from the guy who sold the junk mortgages in Kansas City to the local banker who didn't care whether they got repaid or not because you're selling them to somebody else to the guy in Wall Street who's packaging these mortgages into these fancy instruments to the global investor who's buying them thinking this is a great return. We're gonna talk to all of those people and we're gonna keep talking to them until we understand how this happened. And once we understand it as just regular people who have the ability to ask questions we'll explain it to you so that you can understand it, right? So that's not two sides of the story. Well, it doesn't really matter if it happened or not because it's a good tale and it's not institutional authority based, we talk to the best economists. That's we were as confused as you were so we went out and we understood it ourselves so now we can explain it to you, right? And I think there's a lot in that form of journalism that we should be developing. One of the bits of that journalistic practice that's sort of wonderful, the people who put that together have become the planet money team. Right, and they spawn planet money and they keep doing this. One of the things that they've said is that the reporting tactic is to find someone who's knowledgeable about a particular topic and they say, can you explain this to me in terms that I can actually understand? Right. The person responds and they say, could you try that again? Right. And it often takes four or five times through it but what's interesting about it is two things emerge from it. The first is that, unlike in the 19th century model, the Mike Daisy model, the words that you're getting is someone telling you their experience and their understanding of something. It's getting you much closer to an actuality. The actuality may be the interpretation of someone who's part of the system but that's that claimed authenticity. The claimed authenticity is not, I am the most knowledgeable person about economics ever, it is that I found this person that is what they're saying. So that has a rooting and a grounding to it that's very interesting. The second thing that's fascinating about it that's coming out of this is that one of the other flaws of the sort of left right he said, she said, well we'll have to leave it at that, CNN, is this sense that everything comes down to left right which has become a massive societal dysfunction for us. And what's interesting in many of these stories is that it doesn't come down to the evil banks have been systematically screwing the homeowners and harming all of us or if you read the Wall Street Journal, the evil homeowners have been systematically screwing the banks and ruining all of us. What it actually comes down to here's a very complicated system of actors all acting within what they thought were their best interests and here's this mess that it's ended up with. And so for me, that's the hope for where the storytelling gets is that it's not just that it gets us beyond sort of civic fictions and actualities if that gets us into these systems of a great deal of complexity. Phil. Yeah, one thing I'm worried about is the users. The New York Times used to make my basket for me in the morning, put all my news in there and now I have to make my own basket. I got to go find the bloggers, more work. And I wonder if, as I'm doing this, I'm building my own particular taste of basket and then somebody's building a different one what you talk about left and right. Are we all running off in different directions like the universe, everything flying apart from everything else? Are we building fissures because it's harder and you can find more of what you want? Right, so this is known as the echo chamber problem. Sometimes I think that people who complain about the echo chamber are just listening to each other. Get it? But I think that complain or observation is partly a result of an historical accident which is when you had a media system with all these choke points, yeah, people had to pay attention to the same things, not because they were in love with the common culture, right? Or they all thought themselves part of the same country but because there were only three fucking channels, you know, so that's the reality, right? And they all pretty much did the same thing. So it was just a result of the media system at the time and we shouldn't romanticize it, but we also should say, but maybe, even though it was an historical accident, something is lost, right? I think that's a very valid point and I think it's probably true. Something was lost when we moved to the world of 400 channels and thousands of people. The other thing that is really important for people in the university to understand is that we really have to look carefully at the people in these echo chambers and look at their behavior to know whether this argument is true. For example, is it true that the denizens of the most right-wing political blogs don't know anything about the denizens of the most left-wing blogs? I bet you it's not true. In fact, I bet you the people who know the most about the left-wing blogs are the people at the extreme right-wing blogs and there are, by the way, some studies that show that. So I don't think we should assume we know sort of from this deductive way of approaching a question. It's really an inductive question of let's find out whether the people populating these so-called echo chambers know less or more about the other echo chambers or not. So I think it's a complicated sort of question. So I take echo chambers more seriously than you do. I know you do. I actually think this is one of the problems that we do have to address in a fairly serious way and I think in some ways reducing it to left and right oversimplifies the problem. Here's how I would rather frame it. We head back to a broadcast era and you have media that's mostly controlled by a curator. That curator is an editor, maybe the curator is an anchor. The curator is someone essentially saying here's your basket. Here's what you need to pay attention to today. There are lots of flaws with that model. We can certainly go and find systematic biases and distortions, but it is interesting that someone is taking on what is to a certain extent a civic role of saying I'm gonna keep you interested and I'm also gonna try to give you some aspect of variety. We then shift paradigms. We move into much more of a search paradigm. You don't care very much about Japanese sumo. I do and so I get to look up the website where I can get my sumo results for every basho and you don't have to worry about it and we're in a world of much more choice because you can worry about what you wanna worry about and I worry about what I wanna worry about and that's where the echo chamber argument emerges. The problem with that is that we start having problems with discovery function. There might be something over in what I'm reading that you really wanna find out about and so we move to social. You and I are in the same social network and so I find something wonderful about Japanese sumo that actually you really need to know which is great, you found it via social but we tend to be birds of a feather who flock together and our social network gives us information from some people and not from other people and so for me what I'm now waiting for is sort of that next step. It's something that has some of the same concerns of curation of making sure that we're getting a lot of ideas from a lot of different places that takes advantage of this new medium and our ability to talk back to it and to share and to spread but in some ways takes very seriously this notion that I'm a public and that I'm not an audience and takes seriously this notion that here are things that I'm discovering in my own searching and my own social that you might need to know and that might be a way to go further. I don't think we're there yet. I think we're pretty far from having the serendipity engine that takes what's good about those other three methods in getting us there but I think it's an interesting solution to something that I actually see as a real problem. So how do you see somebody like Maria, a brain picker in that model? In what specific sense? Well, I mean, here's somebody who's curating from across the web all kinds of things that I didn't ask for, right? But she's very popular. She's not an isolated specialist person. She's somebody that has bailing up a general audience. I think one of the things that's starting to emerge are curators who are really good at it are really good at it and are really going after that serendipity function which is starting to be missing within the ecosystem. Yeah, yeah. See, I think there what you want in that curator for let's say the public sphere, which is the part I tend to be most concerned about even though it's the same problem basically in the cultural sphere, is you want somebody who's attentive to data, aware of what people quote unquote want, like what tends to get them excited, but also aware that this serendipity thing is also something people want, right? Like it's kind of paradox when you say, well, what would you like? And you say, surprise me, right? What you're really saying is, I don't know what I want, right? So surprise me, right? So it's partly that. And then there's also gotta be certain things everybody has to know, right? And we need our curators to kind of like use their judgment about that. But yeah, I think we're gonna, we're moving towards a solution to this problem, but it's not gonna be an echo chamber and it's not gonna be the voice of God. So let's not get lost in serendipity, let's go. We're gonna get lost because I'm gonna follow up on that question, which is about curation and as a consumer of news, I'm just tired of having to look everywhere at everything and read tweets and look at Facebook and look at this and look at that. I can go to the supermarket and see a wall of serials and I can pick one off the shelf and I can know how much fiber is in it and I can know whatever. So I don't wanna know necessarily right or left about my curator. I wanna know a lot more. I want all the nutritional label I can get on these sources. Can I get that? I'm working on it and more to the point, a number of the folks in this room are working on it. This is one of the big projects that we took on at Center for Civic Media and we started sort of from the same basic notion, which is to say, attention's the scarce commodity. There's only so many places that we can look. It's not necessarily that I want an even balance between left-wing and right-wing news, but maybe I do want some sense that I'm getting some views from different parts of the globe. Maybe I want a sense that I'm getting some views for people who have different views, different perspectives, so on and so forth. Maybe I wanna make sure that I'm getting some science versus some health, so on and so forth. The first way to do this is to think about this from a nutritional information perspective and the first way that you have to do this is you have to break apart what a nutrition information label is. The first thing that a label is is it's a statement of contents. These are things that are in this and yes, you could figure it out by flipping through the whole paper and saying, oh, interestingly enough, 12% of what I read was Obama, but it's really helpful to have that sort of show up very early on and say, here's the geographic distribution, here's the topic distribution, so on and so forth. The second thing a nutrition information label says is here's how much of it you should eat. I don't wanna do that. I actually think it's very important to split the descriptive and the normative. I think sitting there and essentially saying, bad New York times, you've only got 20% international news today. The recommended daily allowance is 25. It's probably a very, very poor idea, but I do think going and saying, here is what you're consistently getting from the sources that you're going to. Now where I think we really wanna go over time is to get beyond label reading and get to something that's much closer to the quantified self movement. So some number of people in this room are carrying in their pocket shiny little pedometers, Fitbits, because this is a fairly popular thing at the MIT Media Lab, and they're pedometers that measure your steps per day, the floors you climb, they put it into your computer. If you're good about it, you can also add in how much food you've eaten and sort of get a general sense of your physical activity over the day. And what it gives you is this sort of dashboard on certain aspects of your health. And one of the questions becomes to the extent that we all start becoming digital consumers. It seems reasonable that we can start doing this for what we're consuming into our heads as well. It's not hard to set something up that essentially says here are all the webpages that I read, that's very easy to do. Getting from that to sort of generalize and say, oh, actually I have spent 45% of my time today reading about Sumo and only 5% reading about the presidential election and then looking at that and saying, maybe I wanna change my behavior. That's a much harder problem. But that's one of the things that we're working on here right now is both sort of building those systems first around being able to put those descriptive but not normative labels on media and then making it possible to sort of internalize it to the point where you can then look at your diet and say, my gosh, that's a lot of Justin Bieber. I'm gonna crank that down a little bit. And at that point we could then possibly say to you the people around you are reading something different or really smart people in Nigeria are reading something different or people who are highly knowledgeable about journalism or about health or something else are reading this instead. And to me, that's where some of the serendipity solutions come from. I would like to see a different approach. I like that approach. I think I love your question. I would like to see an approach sort of like this where I can sign up for, what do I wanna be an informed person about? And I can measure how I'm doing through some sort of quiz. And then I can adjust my information diet based on the competence I wanna reach, right? So I wanna say to my new system, keep me informed about this, okay? And rather than just get a diet of aimless news stories about that, I have an actual way to know. Can we give you a five? Can we give you badges? You used that word. I did not, I carefully avoided that word. But you, all right, but anyway, that's the system I want. Sir. On the previous question, I'm one of the people who fact check the fact checkers and who gather information on various topics around the world and let other people know. My job is how to get education to a billion children and end poverty. And so that's the primary focus of my news gathering. Now, actually, I'd like to ask you questions about roughly half of what you said, but I won't. We appreciate that. I wanna observe that science has a partial answer to the question of journalism, which is that it isn't what you think you know, it's whether you have the right questions. But my actual question to you is, I believe, I'm kinda hoping I misunderstood you. I believe you said something about mass media creating this notion of people as masses. Except that as far as I can tell, this is prehistoric and simply comes out of tribalism. Is that right? Because there's an old Zen koan which I can simplify in a sense as, there are two kinds of people in this world. Those who divide everybody into two kinds, us versus them and those who don't. Well, tribalism is important in that, the history of it is certainly relevant to this discussion because tribalism is, like you said, birds of a feather flock together. The origins of modern journalism are very tied up with the origins of something else, which is the nation state itself. Yeah, it's probably, yeah, that's right. It's probably some part of human nature in some way. Jay specifically putting it on mass media. And I think if the question is, did the notion of the mass perceived mass media? No, I don't think I said that, no, no, no. But okay. So let's take a question over here. So Jay, I really liked your description of the historical relations which characterize journalism as a profession. I'm there, you are not in the other ways that primitive journalism justified itself and imprint the curatorial powers of a newspaper editor were driven by practical considerations. There's only so many pages you have available, only so much newsprint is the result of a historical accident. Suppose Clay and the others are right when the production scarcity is over and the new relevant scarcity is attention as you two were just discussing about Maria Brain Picker and so forth. How does the professionalization of an attention curator change in terms of training, accreditation, expertise, and daily practice? Is it a different sort of scarcity and basically the same professionalization system that produces attention curators? Or is there a more fundamental shift in how these new curators of information understand and legitimize themselves? Chris, by the way, just came out of a session that we were having down at Center for Civic Media about questions. So we just spent two hours talking about what it means to have a good question. And how you would try to get people to write better questions over time and praise good questions and complain about other questions. So I just want to give the backdrop to that particular, extremely fine question. So I think what you're asking, Chris, is that your name, Chris? Is sort of in a world where attention is the scarcity, what does a good curator do? Like what's the code of ethics? What is the practice based on? And I haven't really thought a lot about that, but I think there are a few starting points. One of them is you respect people's time. That's probably the most important one. You respect people's time, you don't waste their time. And you help them save time. I often tell my students the simplest way to create value in journalism is to save the user time. So that's number one. Secondly, good curators are good not because they're world's greatest authority or because they've been certified by somebody, but because they are themselves richly interactive with the people they are curating for. So that would be the second thing. Respect the user's time and interact with the users so you know who you're curating for. That person, in other words, has to be very two-way. Third is we can use data to help us. So because we have good data about what people actually use that we're putting out, we have to learn how to read that data without becoming enslaved to it. So smart uses of the data help us be better curators. And I think also that the people who are really good at this, Marie is a good example, but there are others, have this latent thing that actually has been part of journalism since there was an occupation of journalism, which is a very, very strong curiosity about stuff. Like they just like to know weird stuff. You know anybody like that? Yeah, they like. Never met anyone that time. They just love to know weird stuff and they're much more likely to ask a question about you than they are to tell you what they think because they can sense an opportunity to satisfy their curiosity. So that'd be sort of where I would start. But I think we could probably get a better answer by looking at the people who are really good at it and studying them and breaking down what they do. One reminder in all of this might be that when we talk about the profession of journalism, we tend to focus a great deal on the man or woman with the pad and camera at the scene of an event, taking down the notes and coming back and writing up the story. And in many cases we actually want to think about the curation aspect of this as well. What goes in, what gets cut, what gets killed, what gets page one, how it gets prioritized, that's been part of a journalistic profession. And in the same way that that's now moving into pro-M and citizen models, it's possible to commit an act of curation much as it's possible to commit an act of journalism and that may actually happen much more often than the acts of journalism. Editors have always been the behind the scenes journalist that matter as much as the person with the pen, but that function has been democratized, please. So I think the previous question assumed a scarcity of attention and my question somewhat questions that assumption. And my question is, is there a competition between the millions of people who practice journalism and professional journalists and is that competition healthy? And if so, who wins? Well, there is competition in certain ways. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that. Do you start your day with a news site, to kind of reorient yourself to the public world? Or do you start your day by looking at your favorite blogger or curation site? Or do you start your day by looking at what your friends are recommending? That's a competition. Who to listen to for post-debate analysis is a competition. You can turn to the professional pundits, right? Or you can look at what the chatter is in social media. So I think that's actually happening, it's real. And it's a good thing because those things shouldn't be closed activities. What we don't need is, I'm a journalist, you're not. That doesn't help us. Competition isn't just between the journalists. It's between journalists and advertisers. It's between journalists and entertainers. It's between citizen curators and journalists. I mean, I think what's so hard about the competition in some ways is that I do think attention is scarce. I think at a certain point, you can only subdivide the hours of the day so many times. And so what you're choosing to pay attention to, you have an entire industry essentially dedicated to trying to figure out how to capture and then sell your attention. That's what advertising is, basically. And so that's always been a competition. It's been sort of an interesting symbiotic relationship historically with entertainment and with news media, but that's moved into a much more competitive space. And now I think there's a competitive space between the professionals, the amateurs, and sort of everyone engaged in that. Please. One of the claims that journalists have also made is that we're going to tell you what is important. In addition, and that maybe, and in the old days, you would see on the front page what was the stories you needed to know about to be an informed citizen on your way to the comics, on your way to the classified ads, on the way to all the other things that you probably actually bought the paper for. And now we have this unbundling and this scarcity of attention. And people are, most people most of the time would rather read about Justin Bieber or watch cat videos instead of becoming informed to members of the public. And what takes over that role of making sure that people check their nutrition labels? Right. That's a question I've been asked like 400 times in one way or another, which doesn't mean it's a bad question. It means it's a very important question. And the first 200 times I was asked it, I had a really crappy answer. So I figured I should think about this. And here's the best answer I have for you. It's true that at one time we had this group of people, we could call them pre-slee if we wanted to, you could just say they're professionals who were able to say to us, this is what's important. And it was hard to generate alternatives to that. So now we're in this much more open system where this is a good way of thinking about that competition. There's everybody trying to say to you, this is what's important to you now, right? Everybody from activists to journalists to friends to advertisers to spectacle makers, right? And so what happens to that function? So I think what we really want is not somebody who can say to us, this is important. What we want is somebody who can say to us, this is important, who we trust and believe. And in order for journalists to play that role so that when they say, you're not paying attention to this, you're actually more interested in your video game or your pop star or your latest movie, but you should, what we want is for that recommendation to actually stick, right? We want people who can say that, who are persuasive. And in order for those people to be persuasive when they say, you're not paying attention to this, but you should, because this is really important. They need to understand us. They need to be in interaction with us. They need to be accessible in some way. We have to be able to talk to them, right? We have to be able to reach them. Gloria Borger who just wrote an unbelievably moronic column in CNN about how the failure of healthcare is both parties fall down. This is somebody who I need to reach if I'm ever gonna listen to her. I have to be able to talk to this person if I'm ever gonna listen to anything she says again. And so I think for the people who would fill that role of saying this is really important and you need to pay attention to it, those people have to become much more available, interactive, honest, two-way, reachable, genuine, and they have to get out of their priestly role. Otherwise that function is just gonna disappear. Please. Hi, I've been in the media business my entire career and I don't really care about journalists any more than I care about plumbers. They're important obviously, but I care very much about sources of good civic information that I can get efficiently and so forth. My question is this. Could the source, and it addresses the previous guy's question as well, could the source of good information be a new kind of political party based on modern information technology governed through modern technology and basically based on the premise of efficiently delivering valuable civic information, most of which, by the way, is pretty boring, to citizens so that they can conduct themselves in their civic life, which is a very small portion of their life, efficiently? Yeah, that's a very good point. If you look at the growth of the federal government, what you find in the 20th century is that under pressure from essentially the progressive movement, government began to become a recorder and reporter of reality. So all these things that we make news from now, like labor statistics that tell us the unemployment rate, right? Commerce department's measurement of economic output or even something as simple as the number of people who are minors or somebody who are engaged in this area of the economy or that, that whole apparatus, which we take for granted, was created by the federal government in order that people could understand what was going on. So we already have a system where government is itself a huge producer of civic information that helps people understand what's going on. And more and more of that data now is being put online and that's a huge movement that we haven't talked about at all, the government 2.0 transparency movement, right? Which is very related to this question. And if you can find out yourself about those earmarked appropriations that Congress approved, you don't necessarily need a professional journalist down there researching all the earmarks if you can look them up. So part of the functions of journalism can actually be kind of transferred to data information services, but of course we have to trust the people who are producing those things. Political parties could possibly become sources of reliable information, not the political parties we have. They're not going to do it, but it's naive to think that all of the information we need to figure out what's happening in our world comes from journalists. Journalists themselves are working with information that's produced by other institutions. They're parasitic on those other institutions. But I'm going to argue perhaps the opposite here, which is that I think trust is not the main constraint on all of this. So I'm putting together a conference right now and the title of it is the story and the algorithm. And the reason this came up is that a lot of the people who are sort of working in this space are looking at some of these transparency efforts and some of these efforts to do a new form of journalism through aggregating data. Probably the best known of this is a project called Every Block, where you have a brilliant technologist in Chicago essentially saying, can we take all the information that comes out for the city of Chicago? Can we lay it on a map and can we make it possible for you to find out everything you would need to know about what was going on in your neighborhood what you were directly affected by? It's a lovely idea in the sense that it's taking advantage of this transparent information. It's finding ways to make it real to you because it's on the map. You can find it exactly where you are, exactly what happened with the liquor store getting a license or the robbery on the corner. It's not done very well as a journalistic project. And it turns out that there's a big difference between data and story. And most of us don't deal very well with data. Even if we get a large data set, we may need to do a lot of work before that data set makes any sense for us. And even if we find random correlations in that data set getting to the point where we actually understand what's the narrative behind it and then particularly getting to the point where we actually care about it seems to be very, very complicated. And so my feeling is in some ways, I think your suggestion is very much in line with sort of the zeitgeist of maybe the last half decade or so. And I think it's absolutely the right direction. And I think we're now sort of starting to bump into some of the limits of it. Where this is working really powerfully is where transparency efforts, whether they're government or whether theoretically coming from political party, is starting to meet the ability of someone to pull stories from them. And I don't necessarily mean stories in the sense of fables. I mean stories in the sense of being able to tell a story through the data and start explaining something that was perhaps hard to explain previously. Right, so where do the experts in data meet the experts in narrative? Where do they come together? You had a follower. It's an interesting statistic. And it's a nice clarification. Thank you. Let's go over here. A question which I guess kind of pertains to the title of the event, Adapting Journalism to the Web. The question is, do we generally in the grand scheme of things think that journalism has really been adapted to the web? My theory is that this really hasn't happened on a couple of levels. I mean, what you're talking about here, for example, data journalism, I think it's interesting is the most high profile story there was the WikiLeaks. And originally they worked with the original press, so Spiegel, New York Times, Guardian, to get the information out. You also mentioned before that how do you start your mornings? I don't traditionally read the newspaper, but even before I roll out of bed, I read my Twitter feeds. But then again, most of those links go back to the original press, New York Times, Guardian, Spiegel, Austrian newspapers, things like that. And the third observation is that I think a lot of journalism these days that you can find on the web actually isn't really adapted to the web, because one of the things that personally drives me insane is that when I find an article and it says, and according to Eurostat statistics so and so, that's what's happening. That's the context, and there's no freaking link to get back to the source. Because the people who write it generally still think about the print where you can't have a hyperlink. So I'm really wondering how far has journalism been adapted? And if so, what do you think really needs to happen on a practice level, not on a consumption level, for it to really adapt and use the possibilities of the web? Right. Well, there's a reason for that. There's a reason why that frustration, which I share, is still there. And the reason is that when the major news operations first created their sites, which was around 95, 96, the first thing they thought of to do with them was to repurpose their content. And you could understand why they did that. They had already made the print newspaper. It was already in a digital form because they used computers to make the print newspaper. So they basically dumped their print product online. And it made sense in a way economically, but it had one huge problem, which was when you start that way, you don't get around to asking, wait a minute, what's the web good at? What is it really able to do? Because it actually is a very flexible platform. And if what you want to do is dump data on it from a prior platform, the web says, OK, yeah. Sure, we can do that. I mean, if that's what you really want to do, we can do that. And so what happened was that the question, wait a minute, what's the web really good at for journalism? Didn't get asked until maybe eight, nine years after these news organizations started their sites and their systems aren't. So I agree with you that we are actually very poor in models and inspiration and adapting journalism to the web. Those who have probably made the most progress are the born and the web news organizations. And that's why there's such a split between the old media and the new. The new media never had this problem of repurposing content, which was such a huge factor in those sites. So I think we're on our last two questions here. Let's take a quick question here, and then we'll Now, what you just said is an example of what I meant earlier about asking the right questions. And that's the entire topic of the book, The Innovator's Dilemma, where you repurpose what you already do, but you don't ask the question about what comes next. But the previous question was, who's good at taking data and turning it into a story? And I don't have the answer, because there isn't such a thing. But an answer is GapMinders, which recently was featured on TED Talks, where they take the data and they use everything in Edward Tufty on visualizing quantitative information. And they do four and five dimensional graphics to tell you what's really going on country by country across the entire world and hundreds of different measures of what's important. What's challenging about Hans Rosling's project is that you're dealing with someone who has 40 years of development economics and health experience, working with his son who's been a visualization and graphic designer for 20 years. So they took the platform, they brought it over to Google, and everyone said, well, this is great. Now we have GapMinder for everything. And actually very little has come out on GapMinder because it turns out that what you actually need is the incredibly deep expertise with the data plus the close relationship with someone with a tool. So it's a bit of a high bar to set. I think anyone who's looked at Hans's work will happily agree that that's pretty much what we all aspire to. What's a little tricky is that we're also dealing with this in an environment where it's very, very difficult to make the finances work in this field. And so one of the questions becomes, how do we get to a world where perhaps we get better at bringing the people who are the scientists who have that very deep understanding of the data together with the people who can do the storytelling? And I think that's what I wanted to get at. We can actually ask the question now. And some of us will get, some of us who are motivated will get answers and do more. Just one thing on this before we wrap up. Maybe we're going about this the wrong way. What if we compensated and rewarded and glamorized journalists and news organizations by how much their users learned of the world? You're back to the quizzes. Yeah. Yeah. And the badges. Yeah. If we did it that way, I bet you some of these things would start to happen, right? Like you get promoted, you get your prize if the users actually learned a lot more about how things work in this world. Matt Stempek, who's in the audience somewhere, probably frantically blogging this talk and he's now trying to blog while I'm talking about him has been sketching out a game which is basically, it's the game of risk, but it's updated for a news age and you only get to invade Kamchatka. If you read enough about Kamchatka that you can answer the questions about Kamchatka. So if you wanna win this sort of Facebook game of risk against everybody else, you have to be sufficiently knowledgeable about the consonants that you're talking about. My family will test drive this game. I have 14 year old with a 10 year old and I would love for them to know. Matt, I know you're down to two hours of sleep at night. We'd like you to take it down to one, so. There are complaints about it. Ah! I'll put, let's put that on the microphone. He said there are complaints about colonialism with that game model. Wouldn't have gotten it. I think defending the Cold War view of risk is probably gonna be a hard thing for me to do in an academic stage. I think the joke of it is that if you're gonna play a game, it's not a bad game to sort of think about what a world map looks like. You could do that in world of war. True. David. I don't wanna make, prolong the day and this has been a productive and very interesting session. I think the questions from the audience were particularly helpful and interesting. But I wanna express one sort of perspective and ask Jay especially to respond to it. I guess I was surprised, Jay, that a teacher of journalism would show such easy dismissive, such an easy dismissive attitude toward the quote expert, although I understand where it's coming from. And I had, but more than that, the notion that that's all a journalist is or that that's primarily what a journalist is seems to me problematic. So what surprised me about the whole conversation essentially was how optimistic it is, how happy you seem to be. And I don't mean that there isn't reason for optimism and great excitement about what these new systems and new technologies and so forth are making available to us. But I think that most people who pay attention to the news and public affairs who have been alive for more than 15 years, adults for more than 15 years might certainly feel that in today's environment, we are, we may be data rich and noise rich, but we're not really, we're not really, we haven't really been enriched at all in terms of our understanding of public affairs. And it's even possible to make very powerful arguments that the decline of the so-called professional journalist has had catastrophic, at least immediate consequences, the stuff that I'm sure you know better than I do, Jay, the disappearance of investigative journalism, the absolute gutting of CBS's news as distinguished foreign bureaus, the disappearance of so many foreign bureaus from newspapers around the country, we're almost to the point now where there's only one serious newspaper in the United States. And it seems to me that it would please me if you would address some of the difficulties that this remarkable transition has offered and perhaps talk more directly about the extent to which one way to think about a journalist is not as an expert or someone who's handing down obiter dicta from on high, but rather as a mediator, a trained, intelligent mediator who goes and studies or does a form of study of particular topics that ordinary citizens don't have the time to do and reports back to them to help them. That's the idea of journalism that I was aware of when I was in journalism school. That's the idea of journalism that sort of inspired generations of people to think that being a journalist was a noble profession. And I'm disturbed by the extent to which I understand that idea of journalism has been under attack and that in many ways it was a fiction, just as the fiction of objectivity is a fiction but an incredibly valuable one. Just because a pure objectivity is impossible doesn't mean you can't try to be fair, but especially right wing media and right wing politicians have spent so much time over the last 15 years arguing that the mainstream media is completely biased that trust in what the media says has broken down. What I'm wondering about is whether or not there also haven't been terrible losses involved in these advances and whether you would at least address them briefly before we close. Sure. Well, it's true. There's a crisis of employment in professional journalism and we see it in the thinning out of staff. We see it in the lost eyes on power in places like state capitals, city halls. We see it in the thinness of the product. If you pick up a metropolitan newspaper most places in this country, there's very little in it. You're talking about organizations now that are perhaps capable of producing maybe five, six stories a day and that's all that they can do. And so there has been a huge loss of capacity in mainstream journalism and the newsrooms that are powerfully associated with it. One of the reasons I didn't talk about it that much is that the forces that are creating those losses are so large and global and undeniable that to solve that problem, it's almost like you would have to say something really sarcastic and even more annoying than I've been which is what are you gonna do? Uninvent the internet? Because that's what you would have to do to bring that situation back. The problem of how do you economically support those reporters, those boots on the ground that have been lost to these changes is right now an unsolved problem. Of course, but one way to sort of point up this disagreement or this reservation I have about the tone of the discussion is to say why does it follow from that that we should denigrate what a journalist is? In other words, it seems to me. Well, I don't agree that I'm denigrating what a journalist is. It seems to me that we were reducing professional journalists to irrelevancy in this discussion that we were essentially saying nobody really needs these kinds of mediators anymore. Mostly they belong to elitist publications that hand down information to the stupid masses and the fact that we're now in an environment where we can look at sumo wrestling as much as we want and log on only to those people with whose opinions we agree that that circumstance is somehow superior. It doesn't- David, I don't think either person on the stage was making that argument tonight. I don't mean to say that we're making the argument, but I do mean that it was an implication of the extent to which we've undermined the idea. You're not someone here who's spent 10 years in conversations this last decade over and over and over again that sort of start with the crisis. Right. And in many ways, Jay sort of gave a rough outline of the crisis and not just the crisis, but the causes of the crisis. But what you have here and who you were, by the way, why isn't up to invite was someone who is very much engaged with trying to figure out how you make journalism a viable, survivable, professional field in this decade. In a way, that was my question. I mean, I have this absolutely good. Listen, I mean, I have the, as Jay knows, I mean, I have the tremendous admiration for the work that he does. I was talking about the tone of our conversation, the direction it had gone. It seemed to me that it was an unintended consequence because I know everybody. I mean, in fact, I know you respect journalists too. But it does seem to me that it would be valuable to talk about the advantages and professional seriousness of the old ideal of journalism and ask whether or not it's valuable to transfer those qualities onto the web. Perhaps the reason you're sensing this, David, is that I do have a belief, which I didn't articulate here today, that at some point in its evolution, probably mid-century, 20th century, professional journalism went awry in some way. I believe that. I don't think most people who spent their careers in it believed that. This is a point of tension and disagreement between me and a lot of people. I think something happened, partly in the development of what they call objectivity, not that there's something necessarily bad about objectivity about, partly in the ways that journalists compromise with the advertisers, partly it had to do with the media system and how constricted it was. But in somewhere in there, rising to a peak somewhere in the late 70s, a missing element in professional journalism started to loom larger than all the good things that were also in professional journalism. And I haven't been able to trace it back to its source. It's something that we could talk about for quite a long time. But I do think that in some way or another, it's like the foundation was wrongly constructed. And the longer that thing went on, the worse it got. And I think you can see this in things like trust figures. The peak of trust in the news media is like 1976. And then it goes down from there with a real acceleration after 2000. And during that period from 1976 to let's say 2006, one of the strange things about that period is that journalists were becoming during that time more educated, more likely to go to journalism school. More professional standards were on the rise during that time. And the journalist as a cultural figure was becoming more respected and it became more of a respectable occupation, a more desirable occupation, so that you had elites that used to go into law and banking and politics would also start going into journalism. And that's what I think is the most important thing that banking and politics would also start going into journalism. So how can it be that you have more educated people, more well-trained, rising professional standards, rising cultural status, at the same time that you have declining trust? To me, that's a puzzle, right? I call it the trust puzzler in journalism. And I don't know the answer to that question, but I think I gave you the start of the answer, which is that there was something awry in professional journalism. Now, I teach people who want to be journalists. That's all I teach. We don't have a PhD program at NYU. We don't educate public relations people. We don't educate people to go into entertainment. The only people I see in my classes are people who want to be journalists. Now, I am not so perverse as to spend 25 years of my life educating those people because I hate journalism, okay? So I want them to improve journalism. I believe in the profession of journalism. And the main reason I believe in it is that you need some people who do all these things full-time. You need people full-time on the case of monitoring power, not because they're the only ones who can monitor power, but because the full-time people can do something that the part-time people cannot. You need somebody full-time on understanding the financial industry because it's a complicated thing. And they are not the only ones, but okay. So I want there to be those people. And I want to be part of the figuring out how they can have careers because I want my students to get jobs because if my students don't get jobs, I won't have any students. If I don't have any students, now this really good life that I have will just disappear. So I have every motivation to continue the project of professional journalism, but I am also obligated to look at it as a critic and say, here's what's wrong with this picture. And very often when I do that, I just wrote about this the other day the answer I get back is, well, what would you know you've never worked as a journalist? Which is true, you know? Because I don't really have a career as a journalist. But if you think about it, that's kind of an odd thing for journalists to say, isn't it? I mean, here you have all these people who write reviews of plays, but they've never been playwrights, right? They report on Major League Baseball, but they couldn't make their high school team, you know, they're out there reporting about Wall Street, but they've never run a financial firm, right? And they're saying to me, what would you know? You've never been a journalist, you know? It's a little bit, a little bit odd. However, not only do I believe in the profession of journalism, but I think it's really important that at a certain time, it tried to professionalize itself. Because what happens when a group of workers try to professionalize themselves is, yes, they try to claim status, they try to claim exclusive rights, there's all these negative things about it. But there's a very positive thing about it, which is the only way you can claim that what you do is a profession. Is that you have put at the heart of it public service. That's what a profession is. Because there is no such thing as a profession that's just there for the good of the profession, right? A profession is based on a notion of public service and nothing is more valuable in journalism than that. In the spirit of my best CNN moderator, I'm gonna say, and we'll have to leave it at that. So thank you everyone for being here. Thanks for being part of the conversation.