 So please have the opportunity to introduce Ivan Siegel. He is a Berkman Fellow this year. He is the Executive Director of Global Voices, which has been part of the Berkman community for many, many years now. Ivan participates in the network storytelling group here at the Berkman Center. He has worked in media and development for the past 15 years in over 80 countries around the globe. He's currently always traveling as well. He is, anything else else? He has focused on work in the Soviet Union and Asia. And we're just so pleased to have you, Ivan. Welcome. That's great. Thank you. Hi, everyone. So I'm going to try to keep this fairly informal. I'm going to talk for about 20 minutes and then open up for a conversation. And hopefully it'll be interesting. So I was thinking a little bit about how to frame this conversation. And when I came to Berkman at the beginning of this year, I wanted to look at the effects of the latest wave of social media technologies and companies and what they do to a community-based focus of blogging and other kinds of citizen media that has been in decline for the past five or six years. And as I started thinking about that and went back and looked at some old documents again recently, I remembered that just 10 years ago, we still talked about media scarcity as if that was a real problem. And in some places in the world, it is still a real problem. But I had a colleague about 10 years ago who had a grand vision for the future of media, which is that he was going to help set up 10,000 community radio stations. And that was going to be really cool. And as we know, the thing that's occurred instead is that 2.6 billion people have access to the internet and there's something like 5 billion cell phones in the world and there's an alternative path to the way that we communicate other than through even small and medium sized mass media outlets. But in thinking about what the challenges are for those of us who care about media attention, media equity, media access, the thing that really strikes me these days is, of course, something we've said many times now that scarcity is actually in the attention. And even in those communities where there currently is no media access, the numbers show us and the trends are very clear that the processes towards people getting those kinds of access are rapid and increasing. And so I want to talk today not about that so much, it's about the kind of media that we get and who is winning the race for attention and how our conversations, our media focus, is dominated or potentially influenced by the kinds of platforms that we use. And I want to talk about it especially in the context of social movements, digital activism and protest. Digital activism and protest are two of the topics that are most, two of the five or six topics that are most prevalent in the global voices coverage over the last 10 years. So I'm going to take a second preface and say, and ask a quick question, how many of you do not know what global voices he is? OK, so I have to do an introduction. All right, great. So very quickly for those of you who don't know, global voices is a community of, international community of volunteer writers, editors, and translators who all over the world analyze local language, citizen media, and translate them, aggregate them, and explain them for global audiences. So it's been around for about 10 years. It started as a Berkman research project in 2004, and at the time there was a fairly basic idea, which was that there are individuals all over the world blogging, and they are writing about where they're from for people who are living somewhere else. And so what if we put them all together and make a big fat citizen media newswire and what will happen as a result? And today we are a community of, I think last year, about 1,300 people participated in the project in some way. We have an archive of about 80,000 articles in English, and we translate the site into 30 languages. People write and speak about 130 different languages in the community. We cover about 170 countries. We publish, including the translations, around 1,500 articles a month, between 12 and 1,500 articles a month, separate URLs. So that's the old global voices. We were pretty primitive in those days. We were still a culture of blog roles and link backs and really a community. And global voices remains that. It remains, it began as a community of people for whom the primary goal was really to connect each other. And the ethos of the organization has really grown around that idea that we build relationships with each other as individuals through online spaces. And then by virtue of our collaboration, we make something more than what we are as individuals. And that idea is encountering an interesting tension these days with the decline of blogging culture. Now, when we say the decline of blogging culture, we should really say what we mean by that, because WordPress claims, for instance, that they power something like 20% of the active URLs on the internet today. So in theory and in practice, blogging platforms are more popular than ever. But the nature of blogging has changed quite dramatically, it seems to me, in the past five or six years, shifting away from intimate, weak links to promotion of content through social media and a dominant shifting of conversation outside of individual and autonomous blogs into social media and into corporately-owned platforms. So even today, you could consider Tumblr to be a blog, but it's a corporate platform at the same time. And so there are many other examples of that sort. A former Berkman fellow, Lachman Sui, actually wrote his PhD thesis on global voices newsroom, and he wrote it on hospitality as a newsroom value. So that tells you something about where we're coming from, but not necessarily about where we're going. And that's really what I'm going to kind of dig into today. And I'm interested to see whether and how we manage to maintain or whether we should be maintaining the values that we began as we are confronted with the dominant trends in the internet today. So really quickly, we stopped calling ourselves bloggers about four years ago. We shifted our focus from blogs as a primary source of coverage to now using the still very unsatisfactory language of citizen media, which stands in for everything that is not published by commercial or large mass media outlets. So if it's made by somebody in their homes or made even by a professional journalist, but not on the clock, we cover it. But we don't really care where it is anymore as long as we can get access to it. But the primary focus of the organization remains an interest in shifting news agendas to focus of local communities. Bridging cultures and languages and identifying sort of building or focusing on individuals as a value over states and other social identifiers. And finally, building a culture of respect and support among the community of people who work with us. But we do also have a new face. And we recently launched a redesign, which is here. And it's pretty different from what we've done. But even as we've built a new page in the last, that's not supposed to happen. It's supposed to play. Play. Anyway, even as we've built a new kind of online presence, we've noticed, and this is something that many of you may already know, that homepages are increasingly irrelevant in the online world. Basic statistics for digital first media outlets, 75% of content comes from social media, 20% from search, 5% from direct visits. Everybody from the New York Times onward has seen a precipitous decline in visits to their homepages. It's still often the primary source. But the idea that you can kind of build a system whereby if you just perfect the image of your page going on back there, that's not what I'm seeing. Sorry, guys. The navigator is not playing properly. It doesn't necessarily, even if you design a page with exquisite kind of flat design and all of the whistles that we love so much with things like parallax sliders, that's not the direction of traffic, actually. And social media sites and digital first media outlets that rely on social to drive traffic have basically decided that, like Buzzfeed, that the home page has become irrelevant. And it's basically just a catch-all categorization for content. So our dynamic and our question really is about whether and how to maintain our community ethos in the face of social. Because without participating in that social process, without participating or making your content visible in the context of attention, you can do the best thing in the world and nobody will notice. And I think it's a real challenge, not just because it requires us to look at audience, which we do anyway, but because it requires what used to be your average blogger to understand user experience, user UX design. And it requires you to spend a lot of time thinking about outreach to the different kinds of audiences that you might be interested in. And it requires you to be extremely persistent in your behavior. And those are not necessarily qualities that volunteer communities really like to participate in. It takes, it can be quite innervating to work endlessly on trying to push your content out. And I feel like a lot of people who used to work as individuals, used to maintain individual blogs in the world. And I think I can probably count some people in this room in this category as an increasingly futile effort. And I've seen friends move from their own spaces to medium to other group commercial-based platforms because they are no longer able to maintain what they feel as a community around their work. So I decided in the context of today to have a think about two different kinds of ways of building a community that still relies on where we came from. The first is to think about expanding, oh, should I take a step back? When we started Global Voices, the big premise behind it was that we would somehow change the news agenda or have influence over the news agenda in the United States, that we would be able to shift people's thinking from international media as foreign or other to a conversation with people around the world. In that we both failed and succeeded. We've succeeded in the sense that we've managed to come up with a new understanding of local proximity that's based not on geography but on network proximity. But we failed in that it hasn't gone beyond the community. So we've identified and helped to create a new community of people who care about that issue. But the number of people that that includes is probably in the range of 100,000. It's not a mass shift, and it doesn't reach the level of social except incrementally. And it seems to me that there are a couple of ways that we might think about trying to create larger effects on this topic. And one of them is building decentralized communities and allowing networks to form on the basis of many small communities who care about that issue, understanding that they will always be local, proximate, and basically know each other. And the second is to engage much more vigorously in the social media game, which in the former it's a very ground based intensive building of relationships and individuals and spending a lot of time traveling and building local networks in which there's local ownership, which is the hard, slow, and expensive way, but ultimately potentially more interesting. And the second way is to think about something like global voices as a verification brand, thinking about syndication, thinking about running at the pace of the modern internet. So I want to talk about this in the context of digital activism, which is one of our main topics. So special coverage sections, as you'll see up here, or yes, it's already run. I'm looking at something different than what you're looking at. Special coverage sections are areas of focus for our work that are about topics that have value greater than a single article, or even two or three articles. So Egyptian uprisings, Hurricane Haiyan in the Philippines, stories where we're, spaces where we'll do 10 to 40 stories on a topic. And then we'll collate them and organize them under a special coverage section. We've done probably about 120 of them in the last six years, and 60 of them have a focus on digital activism, which for us is really interesting because we don't predict beforehand what kind of writing we're going to do. We don't say we're setting out to write on digital activism. This is a product of the collective mind of the community that we work with. So it tells us that this is both a community that cares about this topic and a community that writes about this topic at the same time. It's kind of a nice blending of activism and journalism. Additionally, of the 80,000-plus articles we've written, 10,000 of them have a categorization of digital activism, and another nearly 10,000 of them have a categorization of protest. So that's already not a small end in political science parlance, that's a big end. We've got a huge number of articles over the last 10 years that focus on citizen media production and creation and conversation around protest and digital activism as a form. And as I said, it wasn't planned, and it's also lumpy. Not everything that we do corresponds to some kind of universalized set of all protests and all events in some kind of normalized way. It is created by the shape of our community, where we have strengths, where we have weaknesses. So pretty good in the Middle East, weaker in Francophone Africa, that kind of thing. It's also about, to some degree, events that have had the most impact and attention, but there's plenty of events and digital activism movements and occasions that we haven't covered, even though they are interesting or worthwhile cases in their own sense. And so I'm really interested in asking about what we miss and why. So we had 42 different countries of those 60 special coverage sections. That's a pretty good spread, but there have certainly been events, protests, activism in many more countries than that, that's not an even spread. And again, 10,300 articles on digital activism, other top categories for us, politics, human rights, governance, freedom of speech, international relations, law, technology, war, and conflict. So I'm really interested at this point in talking about, oh yeah, I'm going to share this with you right now, because this is the shape of the Global Voices community. As you can see, maybe you can't see because the window is up, but it's just one graphic illustration. This is a map of Twitter followers of Global Voices made by Morningside Analytics. Many of you guys know John Kelly built this last year, and it demonstrates the shape of our network through actual language processing, and a range of other algorithms. And in this case, you'll see that we have very specific groups, technology in Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe, and subheadings about what we talk about, what people care about within the community. So I'm really going to focus the rest of the conversation about things that are important but that don't receive attention, either from us or from anyone else. Countries where there's political repression that makes coverage difficult. Locations where it's risky for our staff and volunteers to cover topics because they live in the places they cover. So our unauthor from Bahrain who can't cover unrest in Bahrain because it's too dangerous for her. A lack of accurate information and facts because of a lack of transparency, a lack of resources or means to get online and linguistic barriers. And that brings us to the realm of events data sets of which one is present in this room in many forms, in the media cloud, and other kinds of databases that attempt to create a universal set of knowledge. And how we might start to think about using those technologies and those platforms for creating a more rigorous understanding of the kind of content that we do or don't want to cover. I'm nearly done, actually. I feel like we should start talking rather than me talking at you. But so I'm going to actually wrap this up into bringing the first idea into the second idea, which is going back to notions of community versus social measurement and whether for these large questions of digital activism and questions of protest and questions of social movements, whether building slowly communities in history and in their own contexts, is somehow both more truthful and more faithful to our origins, but also potentially relegates us to a space in which it will be really hard to communicate on these topics in a world in which media attention is already extremely scarce and trying to figure out for us a balance between maintaining that kind of honesty at the same time as we don't. And also trying at the same time not to become obsolete. I'm going to stop there because I feel like I'm talking too much, but yeah. I will show you one or two more slides. If nobody has any questions, this is the media cloud study of Global Voices, one slice of Media Cod's analysis of Global Voices data in terms of who we do or don't cover. And this shows us, for those of you who are working on the project, that where we're strong and where we're weak, where we have significant absences in terms of data. You can't read that. Yeah, I know. Can you read off, like, the way to the top 10? Top 10 countries? That can do the best. Off the top of my head, I could certainly. Yeah, all I mean to say by showing this is that for those of you with access, you can go and do the numbers yourself. But countries where we do well, I'd say Egypt, Russia, Pakistan, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, those off the top of my head, Thailand, Philippines are all Latin America, a lot of Latin American countries are very strong in. Francophone Africa is traditionally quite weak. Turkey is weak. Central Asia has been quite weak. And the Caucasus has been quite weak. It's lumpy because it being a volunteer community, they tend to be lumpy. They tend to be inequitable. This is a slide that shows a traffic pattern over a period of about four years, in which each spike is equated to a major spike in social activism or protest. And this pattern has pretty much dissolved. This doesn't really happen anymore. The correlations now tend to be around social media traffic drivers rather than around only around events. Sometimes there's a correlation. But often there is not. And that, for me, is one of the clearest indicators that the way that we communicate en masse in the online space has really shifted. I'm curious to know whether anybody in the room has seen similar effects in their own research. I'm sure you have, but that's. Please do. I have a few questions. I want to start off with a question or a proposition that perhaps we don't know as much about the decline of front pages as we might be able to do. But even if 70% is via social media, the question is, who got it in circulation first? And if they all pick it up from the front page, then it's effectively helpful. It's often the case that front pages are still the most heavily trafficked page for any one outlet. But there are still media outlets that don't correspond to those numbers. And that's also an American phenomenon right now, a Western European phenomenon. But the internet phenomenons tend to trace from that. And I think if you really wanted to dig into it, we would find a lot of local specificity in terms of what those numbers are. But in terms of the US market, at least, the sites that are most heavily trafficked now mostly have those ratios. And by heavily, I mean, I'm talking about the fact that BuzzFeed has more traffic than the New York Times. So BuzzFeed, Vox, Atlantic Monthly, I mean, the New Atlantics or New Republics, Huffington Post and others all have that kind of statistic. And they have metrics teams embedded in the newsroom, and they drive and they build their traffic, including their home page construction, but they build their headline traffic, and especially their tagging infrastructures of their articles on kind of daily changes by the minute to what they see in terms of what's trending on their sites. So one of them, the Verge, changes home page something like 50 times in the last year. So it took us two years to do it once. There's a difference. I always want to be wary of the metrics that we use, and that there's a whole lot in your presentation. And I'm even in saying this upset with myself for focusing on this, because the work is amazing. But that in focusing on how many hits we get, we're looking at things that are clickable, not at things that actually spur discussion, and that we know are influencing how people interact. I think that's me missing the point of your presentation. No, that's actually really relevant. So to some degree, that's about design, but it's also about attention. So you can design your community or your project to make it more focused on interaction, more focused on conversation or engagement. But it's also a question of whether we see a decline in commenting on the site. And we do. We do see a decline, to some degree. And there's also a question of whether those comments have any value. So there's a lot to be said about that topic. That could be a whole separate conversation. But it's important. Yes, I would too. I think looking at the kind of audience and the kind of engagement, if you're looking for change, sometimes it's not the most frequent, but it's who's reading the story and what kind of change is coming about because of that. So as it's reaching, for instance, in a country, it's circling back to Gambia or to Morocco and being read and talked about by people who can bring about change. Do you, in your monitoring or in your metrics, are you looking at going into the quality of the audience and behavior of the audience? And what have you found out about that? What's that trajectory? So this is a yes, to some degree. But this is also a design issue. So when we started GV, the purpose was to drive traffic to local sources. So we weren't like most mass media outlets do their best to capture, get somebody onto their site and keep them there for as long as possible. And our goal was to offer as many links as possible for you to go find the original source. So we didn't build it to be a honey trap, as it were. We built it, or a salt lick, if you prefer. Natural. We have only recently started thinking about, with this design, this is the first time that we actively thought about how to keep people on the site for more periods of time. And then we have seen a change in the data. It's only been up for two weeks, so it's a little bit premature to say. But it's a couple of percentage points. And I think most websites find that the vast majority of their content is drive-by. That is, people come through social media or through search for the thing that they're looking for. They read that one thing, and then they move on. And numbers for stories, even a site like The New York Times, we'll see precipitous drop in traffic beyond the stories that they heavily promote. So their top stories will get hundreds of thousands, or millions of readers. But their secondary and third-level stories will get tens of thousands or thousands of readers. So it's not, you see a very, that drop-off happens very quickly. I thought at the beginning you were setting up a kind of fundamental tension between maybe what would be called a kind of local engagement process versus a sort of networked community model. And then that kind of dropped away as you were talking about the metrics of the site. So I'm wondering, as you think about the future of this site, and you sort of explained away the local piece as being expensive, but potentially very powerful. So I'm wondering, as Global Voices develops, do you see that as a tension that you're still, that's still productive, that you're still working with, or are you operating on this model of a kind of global network attention as opposed to local deep ties that are fostered through the Global Voices? So I'll try to be more explicit about what the relationship between those two things is, because it's a little bit hard to make the link. When we're writing, I chose the topics, digital activism and protests, because those are some of the stories that are basically driving a lot of people in our community to participate in the first place. So that is one of the essential elements of the nature of the community that they care about and are often active in their own social movements in their own countries, or when they're writing or blogging. That's one of the reasons they got into it. And so looking for a correlation between people's, the idea that when they're covering those stories or those events, they're also participating in them in some way is what we're looking at, and the reason that I chose that topic. So that is essentially a mapping of the broader first level community outside of our writers in online proximity. When I say that we've got 10,000 stories on digital activism, that means each one of those stories has between five and 20 links to people who are doing something in the way of online activism for each one of those articles. And so that's one step away from the people who are actually making change in their countries. So what does an engagement look like in that context? I mean, we know people, our writers can write those stories because they know those people. They're embedded in those communities. So does that make sense? It does. And just a quick follow up, I think there is that the writers can write the stories because they know those people, but then there's the other side of it, which is the impact of the outcome. So what impact the stories have on the local community and to what extent global voices becomes a kind of amplification tool for the local community as a way of drawing attention from the outside in as opposed to fostering deeper ties within. So I mean, and both of those are valuable, but I wonder if you think about global voices as being one of those things more than this another. The original vision was the ladder was the amplification function, but we have seen numerous cases where it's had the other effect as well. It's really important to mention that a lot of this is not plant. It's kind of the result of people collaborating without an agreed process of saying of not having a clear editorial direction. But I can say for it. I mean, so for instance, I'll give you an example. A group of Ethiopian bloggers were arrested last month. And four of them were global voices, translators, and writers. And we did a lot of advocacy around their case. And that helped their situation by getting the word out about their case to international press, to other activists and advocacy groups, and general public awareness. Sometimes that actually helps, and sometimes it hurts. I mean, advocacy is a tricky thing, and sometimes international exposure is going to help your case. Sometimes it's going to make things harder. So for each one of those kinds of cases, of which there are many, you have to triangulate the needs of the local community with the kind of publicity that they need for their instance. And we've had others in which there have been really difficult situations, and we've kept them completely quiet. So in a sense, it's a different set of calculations when you're talking about local impact. I have some questions about your keeping this website. The first question is how long do you plan to keep all those articles in your database? How long? For example, if we want to have some citation of those articles, and we can expect how long we can. Well, we hope to keep them there forever. But how to die on the internet is a very interesting question. Most people don't do it very gracefully, like in life. The second question is, what about the copyright issue? Those people who post their articles to your website, and do they have a waving of their copyright? We're a Creative Commons site. So we have a 4.0 attribution license now. So they own the copyright, and they can republish anywhere, with images as an exception. Go ahead. You said that you're trying to foster the idea of foreign news, not as foreign news for the audience here, but as a conversation. And for example, I blog occasionally when they're having to post, and I'm from Serbia. Whenever I try to publish something that is about Serbia, about, for example, oppression of bloggers, of an issue not being able to raise to the top of agenda, that's not interesting to them. So have you managed through global voices? Do you think, and to what extent have you managed to actually, on a broader scale, really change that pattern of disinterest in foreign news, and the perception that it's not foreign news, but it's actually topics of common interest that we cluster around? Certainly among the community of people who pays attention to what we do and reads us, that is true. And that's not an insignificant number of people. I mean, our traffic is upwards of 800, 900,000 uniques a month, which is not mass media size, but it's not bad for blog. And we have 40 media partners who republish our content, giving us millions or more visits and page views a month. And we do a lot of media all the time on this topic. So we do get, we do make those changes among that core team. And if you were to write for Global Voices, that would be our central Eastern European editor as Serbian, and she would be happy to have you writing with us instead, I'm sure, and you would be able to do those kinds of stories on TV. Dan. I'm just wondering how much you sort of see that promotion's responsibility for individual writers, or how many of your writers sort of tried actively, they're paying to use of their articles and their brand versus the sort of, are you guys more just concerned about the Global Voices brand and readership as a whole? I'm not sure I quite sure I follow you. And I just wondered if like different writers publish it for certain writers who they're more interested in sort of using Global Voices sort of as a platform in the way somebody would use Tumblr as a platform. At least themselves as a part of a community. Right, you can't really do that in TV. I mean you have to, people use, people do write on Global Voices in order to further their careers as writers and that actually works very well because it is a pretty well-known platform among some kinds of people who are interested in international relations and international stories. And there have been quite a few people who have started at GV and then gone on to much larger assignments. But while you're writing on GV, it's hard to, I mean we're trying to keep things in a basic tone. Yeah. I've been sort of looking at Global Voices as the redesign of it a lot too often. Now it's just, it's a new site. Where did you sit in five years time? Because when it first came along, I, well, maybe see what happened. When it first came along, it was, journalists from mainstream organizations. Well, different kinds of content, different voices that were not here. We weren't tapping into that stuff at all. Now that we and others are doing that, what is that you do in years time? That's true. The BBC has had a social media news gathering team for five years now. And in a sense, in some cases, one of the things that we did was teach mass media how to do this. So we embedded one of our writers in the BBC news desk for two weeks, about three years ago. And it was a really interesting experience to see the different work cultures and also the different values. And the real difference still is in the value set by which we frame stories. And we see again and again that there's still a, so I'll give you a single example. There's something called the protest paradigm and news agenda framing, which in which mass media outlets have a tendency when talking about protest to emphasize the sensational and the conflict over the process and the contextual and a tendency to emphasize voices of authority over the voices of protesters and opinions coming from individuals and authority over the voices of, perspectives of individuals in protest. And a couple of academics from the University of Texas did a study on global voices, Nick Kristof and New York Times coverage comparing the three in the context of the Egyptian uprisings and found a significant difference in terms of who was interviewed, how the events were talked about, what was emphasized. So there is in which the Times was playing the traditional protest paradigm role, sensationalizing and denigrating the protesters and our coverage was not basically. So that remains true, but the broader point still relevant, which is that if we move out of the focus of community and try to participate at this level of social then we basically just become another news outlet and then we are competing instead of being different. And what happens then? So then we have to win, just like you. I have a question about censorship and you said you're working in many different countries. Have subjects been censorship or not? I'm sorry, my voice is wrong. Yes, we have. How do you deal with it? Well, we're blocked in China. And we have- In China? Yeah, in China. And periodically have been blocked in other countries. There's formal censorship and then there's, the most important thing for us in that context is to make sure that our contributors are safe. So we don't want to do anything that puts volunteers at risk. And then there's a lot of self-censorship that can occur in different times. People know that they don't have the protections. They don't have a newsroom. They don't necessarily have lawyers. So we're very careful around sort of making safety the primary focus of that issue. So Ivan, you've talked about kind of developments and efforts that people are making on the social media marketing side and the corporations that are playing that game. I'm wondering where the kind of models and inspiration are coming from on the conversation side. Are there people that we can point to who are curating really amazing conversations or who are really good at? Yeah, so like Metafilter is an inspiration. Where else are we seeing that? Because obviously there are companies that are trying to own conversations, whether it's branch or discuss. But that's different from being able to create great conversations. Me, Don. I actually don't. I mean, there's a lot of specialized lists and topical pages and where conversation is alive and well on the internet. But in the context of international conversations in the way that you mean, I'm not seeing a lot of it. And we do have some of that, but the way our site is currently built is not built to favor it. It's built to report on those conversations rather than to actually start them or make them. And it is something we've talked about and you and I have talked about that too. Oh, I tell you, it's going on you, okay. You said your original model was that people come to your homepage and they quickly leave it and go to, I guess, individual bloggers' sites that were not on Global Voices itself but were hosted elsewhere. And so does that mean that now you're hosting most of the content? No, no, no. We're still doing that. We still, I mean, what Hassid said, we still, which unlike mass media outlets or many, I mean, getting a link on a BBC article to an external page is not that easy to do. It's easier than it used to be, but it's still not that easy to do. It's way more encouraged than it used to be and it's evolving, but it used to be impossible. Used to be impossible. So do you understand what that means? So when we're still doing that extensively, we still, every article still has five to 15 links to external sources. And so we're happy to have you do that. You're hosting some articles and you're linking out those. No, no, no, we're hosting our own articles. We're linking to externals. So when I say that we're thinking about designing differently, it's little things like we used to structure the page such that if you clicked on the hyperlink, it would just open in that window. And we only changed that about six months ago. Yeah. Because that was our focus. It was fine. And now it opens in a new window, which means that our page is still open. So little things like that are design cues to encourage people to stick around that we hadn't built. That's what I mean. Do you have a paid staff? A big, what's your workforce? What are your troops? We have about 10 or 11 core staff that includes, we have some specialized projects as well in addition to the main newsroom. So that includes the executive part of the organization, managing and running the organization. We're a Dutch nonprofit, by the way. That includes an editorial team of four people. And an advocacy director, a director for projects in kind of outreach to help people who can't get online easily. The project's called Rising Voices. Then we have about 20 part-time editors around the world who focus on region and language, and they manage teams of volunteers. In a typical month, we'll have between four and 600 people contributing to the site in some way. Writing, translating, and editing. So a story can go through many iterations. It can be built by multiple people in different parts of the world. There's usually some translation support for each one, and then it gets picked up and translated by as many as 30 different teams. So there are a lot of different roles that are volunteer. To query your world of writers on a given subject and try and focus attention on a specific issue. We can and do. But we try not to, we don't wanna do that all the time because we're really interested in the serendipity effect. The focus is very much about what people themselves care about and what they are surfacing and what they're finding. Rather than us telling them, we want you to cover this topic. So we do do that sometimes, but we try to make sure that it's always balanced. That's a lot of local attention. One of the ways people describe the shifts in media and media systems is that in the old world, media would tell us where we should devote attention. The audience tells media where they would like media to focus attention to. Global voices sounds like it's neither one of those, but a third thing to it. Are you in a happy place where you are? Is that, or would you like to be pushing more into where the news gathering and reporting goes, So there's sort of a couple of ways of thinking about that. One of them is we naturally do a lot of agenda setting questions, reframing questions and stories that are done by the mass media and saying, actually that's not the way a local community will talk about a topic. So fighting a frame or reasserting a frame. Another is expanding a frame or a news agenda in ways that other kinds of media outlets don't cover that. And we want to be more intentional about those two things, I think. But it's, yeah, fair enough. Though I think it's really about the framing rather than about, it's not about, it's not saying we're writing stories saying the New York Times is wrong and here's why. It's more about offering a different agenda setting, a different agenda for how we cover a story rather than saying, whoa, they're wrong or they're bad. I mean, I think the hectoring tone doesn't really play very well over time for what we're, for a community interested in being positive, expressing positive views around the world. Mr. Runder, to what extent do you sort of chase the page views and sort of adjust your coverage to be what would give you the most traffic and to what extent do you sort of trust your writers or whatever to decide what's important? This is the crux of this conversation because if we try to be like the Huffington Post, I mean, we already do write headlines. We already make this to some degree, we make this kind of change. So we write the URLs for search and we write the headlines for social at this point, which is a pretty standard practice. The difference is that Upworthy will write 25 headlines and we'll shift them, we'll keep running through them until one of them happens to work and they've got people who do nothing but keep reworking their material until it fits into a trend line. And that's very labor intensive and it's also the case that that's kind of a race to the bottom in terms of unfortunately because we know what sells and those kinds of memes are, look what's around the corner, you won't believe it. And we've tried, or listicles and we've tried some of that but we're also very aware that if we become that then there's really, it's hard to distinguish what we do from others but that's where traffic actually works and that's the kind of difficult thing about this topic is that we're trying to find the balance between our identity and just being absorbed back into the net. How are you funded these days and do you have something you would call a business model or a business plan? Or a non-profit. Yes, we do. We do have a plan and we are funded, we have about five or six primary foundation partners and then we have individual donations and co-productions as revenue models. So right now that's about, it's around 70% foundation funding and 30% is, and then we have a lot of in-kind support as well. Sort of following up on what David said, it's more of a comment than a question really but it seems like if you are, if you, maybe you're better off sort of trying to be the thoughtful alternative to the trends that you're talking about because chasing them makes you too, would make you too much, you would remove your differentiation from the garbage out there. I mean, I heard people mention upworthy BuzzFeed and Huffington Post and none of those are considered to be sources of quality information. So if you, I think the only one I heard that strikes me is that they've tried to maintain their thoughtfulness while getting a mass audience at The Atlantic. Well, I mean, I think what you'll find is that there's some, what looks like short-term kind of bottom feeding, I suppose you could call it, but that will result in it. No, I think it's something else. So BuzzFeed started that way and Vice Magazine did too, but you know, Vice Magazine last, Vice started in that kind of mode, but this year they hired 100 journalists and they're competing. It's about to buy them apparently. And they're competing against the times for coverage. I mean, and BuzzFeed's doing the same thing. And the HuffPost started out with SEO that was all about sex and then they were sold for more money than the value of the Washington Post. And so what a lot of those companies have realized is that you need capital in order to compete. And we chose a very different direction. We chose to create a strong community that cares about something and is in the free culture space. But it's a very different way of working. Economy as well. I mean, it's not necessarily the case that the packaging describes the content. If there's a sexy headline or a list of colds that gets readers to read about issues in Serbia that they could not have read about otherwise, then why not? I mean, is there, what's the downside to trying to improve the attractiveness of your products? It's not necessarily a slowly slow visit or a worry. I mean, I think it's complicated because it's also about different kinds of audiences and different generational preferences. So if you think about who watches, the gold standard for news in the U.S. used to be television broadcast news. For better or worse, that's what it used to be. Well, they would like to think that that's true. But in terms of mass audience, in terms of... But today, most people who watch, and in the U.S., television news is still the primary source, the still the largest single news source. That may not be true forever, but it is still true. But most of those audiences are, for instance, CNN and Fox and people like that. They're mostly white men over 55 years old. And no offense to any white male over 55 in this room, but this is the audience for those kinds of publications. And if you're somebody like Buzzfeed, your audience is 18 to 34. And you're trying to create a different... You're trying to create content for different... For people who don't watch the television at seven o'clock every night. So it's a different equation. What are your demographics? Our demographics are about 30% of our audiences in the U.S. 30% is in a range of 10 countries, which is a shifting pool of about 20, which other than Australia and the U.K. and Canada is pretty diverse. It's everything from one-month Bahrain will be in there, the next month it'll be the Philippines, the next month it'll be Egypt. It depends on what we're writing about. And the final third is the rest of the world. Our community tends to be multilingual, college-educated. And our readers tend to be also similar. Maybe write for college-educated people. Are they 18 to 34 or are they 55? They are 25 to 45. Oh yeah? Yeah, absolutely. Ivan, what stories do you think I'll swear and what makes global voices if you give me a conversation about what you're doing? What stories aren't covered? One or two things which you think are just not gaining enough attention, whatever reason that is, and why is global voices in a unique position to do something about that? So when you say not covered, I assume you mean by the mainstream. By the mainstream, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I probably could come up with a lot of different examples of that. So I can give you some big examples. We covered the Tunisian uprisings for a month before the New York Times did. And we had worked on that story for eight years before, before it became a popular news subject. We first interviewed Alexi Navalny. We were the first organization to interview Alexi Navalny in English in 2009, 2010. We first started writing about him in 2008. There are a good number of cases like that. The Iranian Revolution in 2009, we covered it for about six months before it started. We covered the uprest, like the building protests for the election. So what we find often is that when it's a story that we know well, we'll be on it well before the mainstream media and stick with it well after. And so our attention tends to be longer. Our attention span on those topics tends to be longer. And does that have an impact on your truck? By being first and staying, you get more hits and more hits. Well, when the world's attention focuses on it, yes, it does matter. And we'll be interviewed by and picked up by. So in 2008, there was a, 2009, there was a coup in Madagascar. And there were no international journalists there at the time. So our team were the only people reporting that coup for about two weeks. That kind of thing happens on a reasonably, a couple of times a year in some form or fashion. But it happens less over time because there's more and more information and more and more networks and we're more and more interconnected. And so one thing that we think about is trying to maintain a value which is trying to maintain our value set which gives us a distinctiveness as those networks grow more intense. Because again, going back to the first point, when the challenge is about attention, the issue is not whether you get information, it's about what kind of information you're getting. It's supposed to stop between 130 and 145. So maybe one more, why don't you more questions here? We're not.