 Thank you. Tour of this crucial issue. I'll introduce our other two speakers before asking them to make some opening comments. Adrienne Acosta, immediately to my right, is Chief Executive Officer of Journal Media, where he was also Chief Operating Officer for five years. Adrienne is also Chair of the Native Advertising Council of Interactive Advertising Bureau of Ireland, and he's a graduate of Columbia University. Robert Pitt, next beside Adrienne, is Chief Executive of Independent News and Media. Prior to joining INM as Chief Executive in late 2014, Mr. Pitt held senior management positions in the retail sector in Eastern Europe. In Tesco, he was COO in the Czech Republic. Prior to which he held the position of Managing Director at Tesco Franchise Stores in the Czech Republic and Operations Director, hypermarkets Tesco, Czech Republic and Slovakia. I hope that's broadly accurate. So maybe we can start with you, Robert. Your legacy publisher, you're the dinosaur, you're expected to be the supporter of this copyright directive. Perhaps you'd give us your perspective, Robert, on what the comments you've heard and the directive generally. Sure, well, we're not just a print publisher, we're also the operator of the largest digital news platform in the country, Independent IE, and successfully. So we're very proud of our newspapers, as we are of our independent IE, and the content or the journalism that we put onto our newspapers, we put onto our platform, we're very proud of that too, because a lot of history, expertise, experiences got into creating that and making sure that we can stand over every day what we put in our newspapers and what we put in our online platform, and that's key to what we do. We don't put content out there which we don't think does have a value either to the person who's reading it, in terms of if they want to buy the paper and reward us for that, or reading it and allowing us to monetize around the advertising and on the online platform. And what we're seeing is the whole ecosystem has been very disrupted by fake news and you referred to the Trump election, other events that have happened as well. You have not just fake news, you could call it fake advertising as well with the targeting on Facebook that came out without anti-Semitic advertising and very malign advertising. So it's a worrying world out there. And what I think we have to start looking at is we cannot put the genie back in the bottle on this. We are in a world dominated very much by two operators, Google and Facebook who have excellent platforms. They have done an excellent job of allowing advertisers connect with the audiences that they need to reach with. And Google focus very much on intent of what people are trying to find, what they're trying to do and Facebook focusing on insight and how people behave and so forth now. But we are the fuel that's driving the traffic on that. We are the people who are making people pick up their phone or pick up the newspaper and read content and read a piece and try to be informed. Where do people come once Trump was elected or once Brexit had happened? Our newspaper sales, our traffic actually went up because they were confused and they came to us and they wanted to read about the informed opinions about what's happening and to be reassured and to have insight. And we're a really crucial part of that whole ecosystem and I think this thing about the snippets and that's been tried, okay? And we cannot do something which is going to make the world more complex. If I was looking for help on something now at the moment or if I was looking for a discussion in the environment that we're in, I'd be looking for people to help me do two things if it's Google or it's Facebook, it's to help find people who are willing to reward publishers such as us for good quality journalism to say, actually I believe that what I've read there, it's helped me, it's given me insight and I'd like to reward you for that. So we need the insight back from these giants and from the world of the internet. And we also need to make it easier to in some way get a reward for that. Whether it's true advertising and the rate on advertising or whether it's true some kind of paywall mechanism. Like I don't think you find any publisher who has a dogmatic reason to object to a paywall or to monetization of content because we invest an awful lot of input. We'd like to get rewarded for it. But something, and I'm very encouraged by the news in the last few days where we've seen that Google are working with News Corp, for example, on helping to make pay for content easier, exactly accessible or easier to transact, transact which is a very positive step. These things will help, but it has to be simple because the whole world of the internet is about removing friction. It's about making things simpler and allowing you get what you want quicker. And we welcome that. Journalism has read more people than it ever was before. Our stories are more widely disseminated. We've earned more respect. There was the Reuters report that came out and said we have a trusted platform, we're very proud of that and we will never give that up. And that's the line of the sand which I think all of us publishers will not go across. We will not enter into the fake news sector or arena. We're proud of what we do. We have too long a tradition in terms of publishing a paper since 1913 to give this away. And we're very resilient businesses. I don't think that we're going anywhere. We have a challenge. We'll get through it and we'll move on and we're still going to be here and we're still going to have very good journalists reporting on very good stories and helping people. Excellent, so you're embracing the disruption and the disruption that's sitting beside you here. Classic journal of media as a board of politicians myself, myself Catherine, who reflected in some of the common sense of these, we've said it very typical for others to share with us. It has been a tremendous success and some spin-outs from it. So Adrian, perhaps you would give your experience of the last seven years of journal of media and how you've broken through in those years. Okay, thank you for that. Thank you. So we've been publishing for seven years and I think what has worked for us was to accept that perhaps the distribution of information had changed fundamentally and there was no go back. So we had to focus in how to get to our readers in a different way. We didn't know the distribution anymore. We had to cater for how readers wanted to consume content as opposed to tell them, here's how you're going to consume content. And I think that's what worked for us. So we focus earlier on delivering news for a digital platform, a platform that's likely to be mobile, a platform that's likely to be social media. And I suppose in the context of this discussion, what's worrying about, for example, the proposal for having to seek a license to use snippets of content, that it's more likely than not going to exacerbate the matter of using single sources or creating silence of information or creating misinformation even because it kind of shackles aggregators into giving you an idea of what you're about to read should you choose to click on a link. So I would think that it'd be a very bad thing should that happen. I think it'd be a very bad thing for readers, first of all, but also a very bad thing for publishers because ultimately I don't think making news less accessible is something that would benefit publishers even if there is, I suppose, the smallest fee going to travel along the value chain that way. In terms of the other two items, the one about data mining and the one about the filters, to wonder about data mining, I don't understand why it has to be so narrow, but that's just, so it's more a question than a commentary. And the one around filters, I suppose, the concern is what kind of empowerment and responsibility are we having on the two platforms? And what are the consequences of monitoring content or enabling platforms to monitor content, like it is a really serious question. And when you look at all three together, what you're seeing is, or what I see anyway, is perhaps, and I look at that, focus is more on business models that need to be kind of protected, I suppose, to, well, how are we using technology today? Technology, the two shifts of the last, say, 20 years, say, smartphone has only 10 years, right? And then the internet, okay, a bit more, but from the point where we have a connected device that we carry with ourselves all the time, like, that's it. Like you said, the genes are involved, that's it. So what we need to do is we need to figure out how to work with that, as opposed to put barriers that will impede new entries to the market, that will make things more complicated, that will ultimately, in the context of news, in particular, create more misinformation. Okay, thank you, Adrian. Maybe just to, Catherine, to come back to you on, fleshing out the political context of what's going on here, and you've said you, it's great, actually, to hear the European Parliament is looking at this, from a citizen's point of view, very strictly, where is the imperative coming from? Where do you find the battles you're, where's the battlegrounds that you're having, and who are the personnel, I mean, we've heard from Robert that he's sympathetic with it, with your point of view, he's sympathetic with the point of view of the publishers. Perhaps you could build out that context, and also, where are we with the directive? How long is it going to take for it to come into force? So in the 18 years I've been in the Parliament, I've never seen a lobby like this, particularly on issues around the living and on issues around 13, which is not citizens-orientated, but about protecting interests. I mean, Lisa will share with you, Lisa, who works with me, I mean, we had a vote in the internal market committee in June, and up to 10 minutes before that vote, I didn't know whether that vote would take place or not. I managed to get consensus at 6pm the night before, by 10 o'clock it started to fold, and by the morning, when we got into the office at 7, we didn't know whether we'd actually get it through. And to just give you a picture of some of the lobbying, some people have a lot of money to put a lot of lobbying together. That's, I guess, why I felt that libraries need to have a say in some of this, because if you don't have some way to have a public voice, you're not going to have a balance in some of the debate. But that week, my Spanish colleague had nine phone calls demanding certain ways to vote, and if we'd delayed it any longer, I mentioned that I managed to get success in 13, where we managed to get a compromise, but I lost nearly everything else. And that was a real pity to me, because the internal market committee, which is meant to be looking at the single market, you would think that you'd be able to get some things through. But on 13, where we had a joint competence, and the thing that we actually mattered, the thing that we actually joined responsibility for with the Legal Affairs Committee in the Parliament, so that when I'm in the negotiation, I can stand up for what the internal market had voted on. We got a good compromise and something that I hope will stick. But it's just, I mean, I've worked on tobacco, I've worked on, but I've never seen anything quite like this. The resource that's been put in, the way people are lobbied at. And it's also made me reflect as well, I have to be honest with you, about lobbying in the European Parliament, about people having access, about how lobbying is conducted. And I think there really has to be serious questions where people can roam corridors and target people. And also, it's not just the MEPs, it's the staff. I mean, our staff, the kind of abuse some people have been taking, is not good. And you think people would learn lessons or lobbyists would learn. But for many, it's very high stakes. So I'm very pleased that the vote on the internal market committee took place. The reason there's delays in legal affairs is because there are huge issues at stake and there's a new rapporteur, because the existing rapporteur went, it was elected to the Maltese Parliament and left. So that left a gap and it meant that the new rapporteur had to take up the file and also put things on that they would like to see and make the file their own as well. So that means that there's delays. So the vote is set in the committee for December, that would mean the vote in Plenary probably spring early next year, but then that would go into a trialogue. And at the moment, if the council is divided and the Parliament is divided, the idea that somehow we're going to get something through even this side of 2019 in this Parliament, then it's put into question. So, yeah, it's an interesting moment, but also it's quite a worrying moment. If we can't even do reform and copyright and get something through, then the digital single market for me is really threatened. And I think that's a real pity because it's something that is transformative for the European economy and it's something that's meant to be central to the five-year plan of this particular European commission. And it really needs to be taken more seriously. Yeah, such a critical battle, and you've described it very well. Robert, you've kind of emphasised that you want this legislation to be as simple as possible. And as an English language publisher, it's a different experience for you in competing against publishers in Danish, or... Well, I don't support the snippets, the tax on snippets that's called, I don't think it's going to work. I think the solution has to come along, which helps publishers monetise or get rewarded for what they do. Yes, for the English language, for us it means that our competition is the world. We compete with American publishers, English publishers, we're very, very vulnerable. A lot of you have heard my experience. When I worked in Germany, Czech, Slovakia, China, language protects them an awful lot. It's a very, very closed environment you're in and we're very, very exposed to that. But on the other hand, we get quite a lot of traffic from the UK, we get quite a lot of traffic from the US as well. So we can monetise it, it offers us opportunity. And this is, I think this is the point, is that the world has changed and it's up to us to take advantage of that as well as we can. And our businesses, whether we're only here for seven years or we're here for a hundred years, we've shown that we will do that. What I would like to see is, I would like to see simpler ways to do this, simpler ways to engage directly with customers. So for example, what I referred to with Google about sites that are behind paywalls, that's a very interesting move. Traditionally they weren't ranked very, very low. Now they're being put up near the top of the search listings. Well, does that offer a way that longer term, more of us can monetise directly with the customer? And the customer can tell me, I value your content, not some kind of overall tax on the internet where everybody's getting tired of the same. But you have to reward people for the quality of what they do, for the integrity of their journalism. That's the really important bit. It can't be communism. So it's a strange word to use. But everybody's getting rewarded the same, but it has to be that the people who do their job, who do their job, will get rewarded well. And that's what I'd like to say. And then the other bit, which is really important, and I think Google and Facebook and others can help us is, the data they have on people, they know what people think, how they behave, and they can bring people to us who will be more inclined to spend more time with us, maybe reward us directly or reward us by engaging more with our advertisers, which leads to higher yield on the advertising that we have. But I mean, that's really important, the data that's there, because we're helping create that data and legally it belongs to Google, but it can be shared. It can be invested back in, that you can have investment back into our industry, which is the DMI initiative, which is very welcome. But you can also invest back in by sharing with us what you know and how we can use that to widen our audience, deepen the engagement that we have with people. And you've identified the story as being, I think it was in one of the newspapers this morning, but the thought maybe in the relationship between the publishers and Google and Facebook in relation to assisting publishers and finding ways to monetize to the use of their algorithms to be an emerging story at the moment. Adrian, perhaps you could comment on this. I mean, is your business model a stable, sustainable business model? All the focus is on the more traditional publishing platforms. What about digital only, like yourself? Well, I think that the challenge is a challenge to all publishers, whether print or digital or both. And we're talking earlier on about broadcasters as well. Like, fundamentally, again, this division has changed and platforms have managed to do a terrific job there. And, you know, their model is more efficient and is taking the land share of advertising, which was the main pillar of funding for both print publishers and digital publishers. So the challenge is, well, how do we work with these platforms and how do we maintain a quality of service that we want to offer? And there are two ways of doing that, I think. One is through advertising and the other one is through subscriptions. And these two platforms, there's more, actually. I actually think that Apple News, for example, is also worth considering, and I think in the near future, Amazon as well, is worth considering, particularly, in terms of connectivity with home items. So, you know, there's four or five platforms that are the ones that are dominant platforms and we have to work with them because they have the main relationship with the audience and we just need to figure out different ways of creating a new way of doing business with these platforms. So, I believe it is sustainable, to answer your question. I just think that it has to be. We'd like to say anything else this morning. You've heard it. I just don't believe that it has been fully figured out and I don't believe that, I think we're still in flux. I don't think that, okay, smartphone, we're done now. I think there are new things coming that can be shifts that are nearly as significant as mobile.