 Hello. Good morning. Thank you all so much for coming to WordCamp and to to this talk. I wanted to start by thanking a few folks without whom my work with Linfest wouldn't have been possible. The Linfest Institute overall, Jim Friedlich, Bert Herman, Bert especially, provided a lot of feedback early on in my report that was very very helpful to me. And to Margaret Schneider, the editorial director at Ali, who proofread the entire thing, netting me with a Google doc that had like 1700 comments in it. Margaret wishes that she could be here but she was extremely helpful here. I also wanted to thank Jerry Linfest and remember him for a moment. He passed away earlier this week. He was the founder of the Linfest Institute and was an extraordinarily humble man to the extent that he didn't want the Linfest Institute called that. And he really believed that, oh come on, my laptop's not going to go to sleep here. There we go. He really believed that newspapers are a civic good like museums or libraries. And so, and I think it was 2014, donated the, 2016, 14, 15. A few years ago, he donated the holdings of the Philadelphia Media Network, Media News, to a non-profit organization and Dusty & Choir, Philadelphia & Choir and Daily News became the first Metro Daily newspapers in the country to be owned by a non-profit. So his example is inspiring to me and I encourage you to learn about him if you haven't already. So I do want to talk about what happened this week. A level of familiarity with this story. Anybody has seen this for the first time? Everybody has seen this. I don't believe that. So I accidentally made news this week. I didn't, I didn't mean to. I was doing what I normally do on a Sunday evening which was reading and posting on Hacker News. Anybody else sometimes do that on the Sunday evening? Yeah, I'm seeing some nods. And there's a thread titled, What's the most unethical thing you've ever done as a developer? I, I searched my brain. I, I listed my crimes and I picked the worst, which is that in, in 2012, Jared Kushner who was, was, is the owner of the New York Observer emailed me to ask me to delete an article. And I got requests from him through others in the couple years before and after that too. The article in particular was a, it's a stupid article. It's like, I mean, stupid, an important article in its way, but it wasn't like moving the market or anything. It was that Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, had purchased a brownstone. That's it. And here's the brownstone that he purchased. And Kushner was, I, I, I surmised, friends with Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner and some pressure somewhere caused Kushner to believe that that article should be deleted from the, the newspaper on account of the risks to the personal safety of Silver and his family. So I deleted it. And I know now that I, I shouldn't have. And I want to tell you a, that I hope facing the same request from an editorial organization or from a, a, from any part of the organization other than editorial, you shouldn't do it. And if editorial asks you to do it, you should ask why and, and keep asking why. Ultimately, probably the solution to this is a, some, you know, append only version of, of news software. WordPress doesn't work like that as it stands. So we'd have to, we'd have to have sort of a news mode or some other append only record. There are ideas to do this with, with blockchain. Some of them are promising. Anyway. We'll, we'll not go quite, quite that far. So the, I promise this ties to my talk. And, and, and a couple of important ways that I am going to, I'm going to get back to you. So anyway, on Monday morning, I have an email at my, my work email address from BuzzFeed reporter Steven Proberg. It said, I saw your comment on Hacker News. I would like to talk to you about it. Will you talk to me? And I thought about it for eight seconds. Sure. Yeah. I'm, I'm happy to. Because the truth is, like, this isn't something I was, I was, I had ever really planned on being secretive about it. At least not, not after, you know, really, essentially, I think I went on the record on this. And 2016, the New York, New York magazine wrote a profile of, of Kushner when it became apparent he was going to take a White House role. And they, they called me to just ask about what it was like working with him. And I told him the story, but they didn't print it. So I had this sort of sense in my head that it wasn't news. Or that if it was news, it was like, you know, of all the other terrible things going on. This is just sort of like a little terrible thing. So he calls me and my first question is, is this really news? He was like, yeah, it's news. This is great. So I talked to him. And, and then I got off the phone. I was like, okay, that's it. No more. And, and then then this story went live. And I read it. I was like, oh, okay, that's nice. And I, I tweeted about it. And then I was like, okay, now I'm really going to forget about this and get back to work. But then it just sort of blew up and went all over the internet really pretty quickly. Something like 16 news outlets picked it up. And I spoke again on Tuesday of this week to the Washington Post. And that's after that, I really said like from now on, it's just no comment. I don't have time for repeating the same thing over and over again. Okay, so back to the narrow path for local news. This does connect, I swear. The thing that, the thing that really struck me in all of this was the sort of ringing difficulty of having a publisher in an administration that has condemned the press as the enemy of the people. The press is not the enemy of the people. I feel like I shouldn't have to stand here and say that. But that's, that's the environment that we're in. And, and I also think that the press not being the enemy of the people should sort of, sort of be at the top of our agenda, even as news technologists. This should sort of be at the top of our agenda. I think it's more important than the open web. I would love to talk about the open web, but first I would like to talk about guaranteeing that we have first amendment protections to do our work and to support the journalists who rely on us to, to spread the news. So that in part was sort of like, you know, why be secretive about this one sort of editorial sin that, that, that Jared made. I have sort of a second quibble with the open web. Now we're kind of moving towards the, the narrow path, which is this is a one quote, but it's indicative of sort of a line of reasoning about news organizations vis-a-vis Twitter and Facebook or Facebook and Google. I'll read it. What will happen when the Times in New Yorker and other pubs own up to the simple fact that they are just as guilty as Facebook of leaking their readers data to other parties for God knows what purposes besides interest-based advertising. And this is from Doc Searles, a really well-known internet critic and a important voice in open source software and in some ways in the movement towards an open web. Just as guilty as Facebook. I don't think, I don't think anybody can be just as guilty as Facebook right now. Come on. Okay, maybe with the qualifier of leaking their readers data to other parties. I don't really think that the Times gave their reader data to Cambridge Analytica. Did they? Did I miss that? So there's this, there's this sort of like slur against, against like internet attention-based businesses overall that, that I think is really, really harmful, unintentionally so, but, but harmful to sort of the, not just the revenue models, but also sort of the core press freedoms here. Oh, I forgot to mention that, that photo of the Abraham Lincoln quote, that's from the, I'll go back to it. Anybody recognize that word, where this engraving is? Yep, the Tribune Tower Lobby slash something, something condominiums now is just like, I've been there a few times and I, I took this picture a couple of years ago when they knew that they were, that they were going to leave their, their headquarters. I don't think I could go to work there every day. I think I would just choke up walking through the lobby because it's like, like inscription after inscription about how important a free press is. It's sort of like, like, like when I go to the museum in Washington D.C. it's just sort of like very emotional. It's a shame that they, they sold it. Okay, back to this. So my question about the open web is, would we rather have slow websites and walled gardens or a society without journalism? I would rather have slow websites. Sign me up for the slow websites if it means that we get to keep the journalism. Sign me up for no internet if it means that we get to keep the journalism. That's, that's why I do what I do. And I believe that it's why a lot of us do what we do. I don't, I don't think that it has to be there, there has to be this dichotomy. I don't think, I don't think we have to say like, oh, yeah, we definitely are going to have slow websites. If we're going to serve journalism on the internet for some variety of reasons. But we, we got here over like slowly over time for reasons of the news organizations wanting to continue paying their journalists. And, and it is the likes of Facebook and Google that have, that have brought us to this place of, of needing to have slow websites laden with ad tech. So it's, it stings a little, it stings a little when Google says, make your websites faster. It's like, we could have faster websites if we didn't have to have all this freaking ad tech, and we have all this ad tech because you blew up the market. Like it's, there's this sort of, there's this sort of train to the history of the attention economy. I don't want to spend too much time on it. Although I wrote pages on it, I could, I could do that for the rest of my life. It's so fascinating. There's this great book. If, if anybody here read this book. Yes, it's fantastic. If, if you are looking for a history of sort of how advertising came to dominate news media, this is a great place to start. So I learned firsthand a problem of the attention economy this week. I'm not going to stand there anymore. That, and this is specifically a problem with national news, but you see it a little bit in local news. This is a CNN money article about the thing that I did earlier this week. They embedded my tweets. Good, good SEO. They didn't contact me for comment. They, they just, it's like, sort of like rewrote the BuzzFeed article, dropped in some of my tweets and got comment, I think, from maybe one or two other people. Now I, I guess they're doing some reporting here through Twitter, but it wasn't just CNN. It was like, like 16 other, other news organizations, essentially rewriting the same story over and over again. Do we need that? Is that fulfilling some information need of our society? Yeah. Is that fulfilling some information need of our society to have 16 versions of the same story? Probably not. So I, I, that's why I think local news is so interesting as a topic to me, because we're, we're able to tell stories that aren't told 16 times over and over again. Although it does, it does certainly happen in local markets where a TV station will rip off something from another TV station. So if you take away one thing from, from these 45 minutes and from my work, it's the success for local news requires both local equity and also an economy of scale, which are difficult things to have at the same time. And I'm going to spend most of the rest of the time talking about that. But in brief, local equity means that you're, you're reliant on audience support. I'm, I'm being a little loose with the word equity, which is I think, you know, commonly understood to mean direct ownership. And there are some cases where direct ownership could be a possibility. But at minimum, you need to have buy in, you need to have like some degree of investment, financial, emotional time, energy from your audience. And you need to own the relationship with your audience. You need to leverage some extent of scale technology and operations. As developers, how does this resonate with with you that you feel like you spend your entire life like re implementing the same article page design, the same hamburger menu. Yeah, ambivalent nonce. I'll take it. And you need to vertically integrate production and distribution. This is a little complicated. So I'll come back to that. And you need to be able to weather a storm. You know, one bad thing happening to your news organization shouldn't wipe you out. So there's, there needs to be some mechanism for resiliency in local news. I saw a sign when I was not a sign, I was walking by somebody's desk in a newsroom, not a local newsroom. And written on their whiteboard was this, if it doesn't make money or attract page views, don't do it. I think that they were an audience development. I think that this is a good start, but I think you could simplify it. Just say if it doesn't make money, don't do it. And attracting attention is great. Getting page views is, is, is good. Having your readers read your stuff is good. But if you can't track that with, you know, with some reasonable metrics and some reasonable expectation of return to your bottom line, then, then why are you doing it? Right? So there's this like this chase for eyeballs that I think we're accustomed to because of the attention economy. Because we are used to needing to just serve as many ads as possible to as many readers as possible. If we can break out of that mindset and instead just sort of look at what moves the needle, I think that we'll make better decisions about what happens in our, our news organizations. By extension, and this, this is easy advice, but hard, very hard to implement because we have built essentially a history of readers expecting to get local news for free. I think you need to deliver an indispensable product. And, you know, moving behind a paywall, or the sort of like discourse of like paywalls in general, I think doesn't help us a lot here. You know, when we're moving content behind a paywall, we're taking something away. And we need to find a way to, to make it look better than taking something away. That we are, we are giving you our audience these great things because you're now paying for our content. And in that sense, like, like paywalls are about restriction, but memberships are about inclusion. And you don't even necessarily have to have, and I guess that's the difference between, you know, a membership program and a paywall, is that you don't even have to have a paywall in order to have a successful membership program. The Guardian, I think, is a pretty famous example of a news organization that has become more reliant on, on memberships while also providing open access to their journalism. But that's a, I think that would be a very difficult model to replicate in, in, in the context of local news. I also think that local news needs to get better at engaging their audience's ideas, not just their attention. You know, if it's, how we have taken so long to get to this point, it's a little beyond me. But the notion of like engaging eyeballs and advertising has always struck me as a little bit like, weirdly anatomical. We need to engage users whole brain and, and recruit them to help us do our jobs. And as technologists, there are things that we can do. There are ways, there are ways that we can build our websites. There are ways, there are tools that we can integrate. I mean, there's a whole sort of news media startup sector designed around this problem of, of listening to your audience that I think is only going to grow in importance. Also, your revenue strategy should be clear from your user experience. This is, I think, one of the toughest problems facing technology for local news at this point, in that news products are essentially trying to, trying to sell themselves twice, once to advertisers and once to readers. And I, I believe and I hypothesize that, that that's detrimental to the, detrimental to their chances of converting readers to subscribers. So, simply put, if you show display ads, you're going to lower your chances of, of converting readers to a subscription. I think that there have been some experiments done in-house around this, but the amount of data that's out there is pretty narrow. One kind of interesting public study that was, that was done, was done by Pandora, the radio streaming service. And what they found is that, if they promised, essentially if they, as part of the subscription package, if they tell you, like, we're going to take away the advertising, if you buy a subscription, that, that boosted their conversion rate, which isn't, isn't the most useful, you know, idea for, for us, because the most news organizations don't, don't really do that. There are some that change the ad experience, whether you're logged in or logged out. But it is a signal that, that, that's stating the obvious. Readers don't really like advertising. So this is the, the Star Tribune, it's an article page on the Star Tribune. This is, I colorized the parts of the page by kind of what they're doing. So this top script here is recirculation. There's a little bit of marketing, maybe, you know, log in, subscriptions. And here's the editorial, right? I wasn't logged in. I'm visiting their site. This is their chance to sort of pitch me on why I should become a subscriber. And they're using a very fractional bit of their real estate to make that pitch. This is a Boston Globe story. They do a little bit better. And they have, they've done a lot of experimenting with calls to action and subscriptions. So they have a whole bar down at the bottom. And then the bulk of the top header is kind of dedicated to subscription marketing. Here's Netflix, which is a favorite sort of point of aspirational comparison for new news products. Along the lines of, yeah, if anybody here heard like the general concept like Netflix for news, like we're gonna, we're just gonna bundle everything and you're gonna pay, you know, nine bucks a month or twelve bucks a month or something and you're gonna get it all. I don't really think that's how Netflix works. Netflix, Netflix is paying for and producing a ton of its own content. And when it buys shows out of syndication, you know, they're kind of good forever. Or, you know, like Friends has some shelf life that's well beyond its like 2002 series end. Whereas news articles from 2002 are valuable really only from like a research perspective. It's good to have them there, but you can't kind of continuously extract value from this, from this archive. Anyway, here's how they do it. It's all marketing, except for that little chunk of editorial there, like in case you happened upon the House of Cards logged out landing page and you wanted to know about House of Cards, here's some information. Otherwise, sign up for Netflix already. Yeah, a tiny bit of editorial. So look on these really needs to not play the attention game. We're losing when we play it and we're losing in more ways than one. It's a big part of what makes our website slow. Hopefully we can kind of kill both of these problems at once. We can convert to audience support and be better citizens of the open web, because if we're not tracking you to sell your data to advertisers, we don't have to track you at all. That's great. But making that conversion is, I think, again, easier said than done. Again, this is just a hypothesis and it would be difficult to know more about this without a really large scale study. But I really think that news could do better by their communities by cutting out the whole like, oh, we're so important to the health of the community, or the holding government accountable. It's really great, but it's not personal. If you look at the way that healthy lifestyle brands communicate with individual customers, it's all about individual empowerment, we're making your life better because you can work out at this fancy jam and buy chia seeds. You don't get a lot of that from news media. It's all about, I think that there's even some sort of fear, like if we weren't here what would happen? And while that's true, and I confess, I'm afraid, I think that should be obvious, I don't know how well that resonates with potential customers. Again, just a hypothesis, an idea. Here's a tricky one that we deal with at Alley pretty frequently. When you synchronize your products, your weakest product will define your whole business. Another way of putting that is if you have a holistic workflow for a newspaper that involves digital assets flowing into the print edition, your website is going to come to be defined by the constraints of the print edition. Even if that's not the required pattern, even if it's possible to do more on the web than you could export into the print CMS, we've seen over and over again that the minimum viable thing for the most restrictive product is what's going to rule the day 80% of the time, which is how you end up with 300-word articles with one picture, being the most common kind of news on a newspaper website. So when I talk about economies of scale, being a core requirement for local news, I'm talking about things like content management. This is a problem of we're implementing the Sam Hamburger menu over and over again. We're implementing a custom workflow for every publisher because every publisher is special. I might argue that it would be more productive to seek ways to become less special than to continually pay for these imagined reasons of specialness. Key to this problem is that content management isn't nearly enough. I think that's important to say to this room is that one WordPress installation does not a news product make. You need more than that. You need audience technology, some way to take their money for looking at the stories if that's in your model. You need advertising technology, some way to pay for the content that you're producing. The instrumentation about that really needs to mature and that's a place that we can I think really benefit from some scale. Netflix decides what they decide what kinds of news series to make or buy based on very complicated data science. With few exceptions we're not doing that in news media and the organizations that can do it are only like the very biggest and for most for the most part you could hardly classify them as local news. I think special as some specialized editorial services you know I know of a lot of newspapers that now have a sort of central layout office. I think that's worth scaling. But I think it's risky to have journalists and editors covering local topics who aren't local that's obvious. The other thing I think is a byproduct of the sort of chase for attention is the tendency of national networks of local news sites to build like a national news desk that is going to circulate evergreen lifestyle content and some sort of empty notion of national news. Which is sort of not something that we need a lot more of like I said. My one little story was reprinted something like 16 times. Also like the local marketing ground game you know if you're building a news organization getting it to the cut like the customers of one local market I think requires more local context and connection than you could get if you're sort of doing it from New York City. Vertical integration I think looks like using Facebook and Google the way Netflix does. Which is to buy ads and measure the results. Or treat your content as advertising and measure the results like vis-a-vis how many users you convert to paying subscribers. I think it's key to understand that vertical integration in this case means that you have to own the relationship with your audience rather than just tether all of your products together and kind of let them let them snack wherever they are. And as I mentioned tightly coupled workflows involving legacy products it's a good way to have your website look like a newspaper. One and this is what I'm talking about one key opportunity here for an economy of scale is the fact that the vast majority of news articles are read on mobile phones and the vast majority of mobile news websites look a lot alike. So I'll show you one. So you have the logo of opportunity to convert the in that case you know that engagement opportunity a little bit of revenue opportunity at the bottom photo big photo. These are very very different news outlets and they all follow like a really similar UX pattern. There's NBC's New York TV station. It's the Miami New Tropic which is a whereby us publication a new pretty cool actually you should look into them if you're not familiar with them. And then that's info wars. So this this UX pattern is like has just become ubiquitous. We don't and I guarantee you that these four these four publications all you know built and paid for this stuff separately. Obviously it's not the biggest expense in the world. Obviously there are there are there are more costly things that you're doing in your news operation. But I think this is emblematic of the way that we could be more cooperative as an as an industry and that companies that own multiple news properties can do a better job of sharing. This is what I'm saying be less special. It's it's it's really hard. It's it's much it's much harder than than than making a hamburger menu icon. But it is it will save a lot more money than the mess. So so local equity. This is sort of the other part of the recipe here. Says that readers have a stake in the news. You could be more particular and say that it means that readers have a bested financial interest in the outcome. Now I would argue that readers already have a bested financial interest in the outcome because we know that local but you know cities in America that have better coverage of their local governments use their tax dollars more efficiently. So there's essentially a built-in stake right there. But that's not that's not it's not felt. So it this may be more like readers have to feel like they have something at stake. And so if you sort of look at this this set of needs here this these economies of scale and the need for local equity you could kind of approximate a grid on which you could place any news organization. So low equity low scale is like like I you could call that the death quadrant. It's where it's where independent news organizations pass through on their way to not not existing anymore. And maybe it's also where some good independent news organizations start. It's you know you're you're you're writing something but your readers don't feel it and and you're not doing very much of it. High equity low scale is an interesting quadrant because it's it's there's a lot of opportunity here. And the opportunity for organizations here is to find ways to put themselves in the higher scale you know towards the higher scale quadrant. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be part of a newspaper chain in order to get some economy of scale. But it might mean that you're entering into an agreement with them with other news organizations to all purchase the same CMS and to share some costs of customization. And that's happening in newspapers even independently on newspapers. This is also true of a lot of like independent sort of pure play or digital only news organizations like that. I would put the Texas Tribune in this quadrant as and probably as an example of what success could look like in this in this quadrant. Low equity high scale is a source of a lot I think a lot of our problems because that's where the publicly traded media companies live for the most part. And those are the ones that are most likely to be engaged in this sort of chase for attention. And so they're all about they're all about eyeballs. Whereas you know there there's some service paid towards towards memberships but TV I think TV station ownership groups can often fall in this category too and TV stations aren't going to start charging readers for online access anytime soon. High equity and high scale there are only a couple of examples and and and civil is still very like theoretical but I think NPR is a good example of of sort of what's possible when you when you get readers to feel that they have a stake in your news organization. And true also I think of a lot of nonprofits you know you're not going to issue shares to your to your audience but by by having you know a membership program and mailing them a tote bag you develop a deeper relationship than you would if you're just showing them a nightly news broadcast on television. So this is a real risk of this high equity or sorry low equity high scale thing oh it didn't even play let's up there we go. I'm only going to show you 30 seconds of this and I assume most people have seen it. Fox San Antonio's Jessica Hedley. Our greatest responsibility is to serve our Treasure Valley communities. Do you have to pass a Las Cruces community? Iowa communities. Mid-Michigan communities. We are extremely proud of the quality balanced journalism that CBS4 News produces. But we are concerned about the struggle and training that is responsible one side of news stories playing in our country. Plagging our country. The Sharon. Oh yeah let's let's just pour one out real quick for the Sinclair Tribune merger. That that was a happy happy accident that that that happened today of all days. I'm running out of time here so I want to just talk briefly about billionaire owners which I spent a lot of time researching because there's some interesting dynamics and I think that there's a sort of a natural sort of hope and attraction of newspapers in particular to you know be acquired by a billionaire on a white horse. In fact I know of at least at least two editors of Metro Dailies that are like really trying hard to find a billionaire buyer for their product. So that yeah top that's Glenn Taylor who's the owner of the Star Tribune and you know under his ownership they've really made a lot of progress towards relying on their audience instead of on advertising and then bottom is Jerry Lindfest. But some billion like some billionaire owners are less less good for their communities. Top that is Sheldon Natelson who I'm not going to tell the whole story but secretly bought the newspaper in Las Vegas and then essentially ordered three of their reporters to investigate a judge who he had casino business before and bottom is Jared Kushner who you know maybe not fair to him to put him in the because he didn't know in a Metro daily he owned a weekly that had more to do with lifestyle than politics. But I think this is the sort of key tension here if it's if it's if we're wishing for a billionaire to buy our newspaper like how do we how do we protect our integrity in case they turn out to be one of the bad billionaires and again I think that there are technology solutions for this that that could be possible. Building resilience again I think that you can kind of look at this equity scale quadrant and and and find a way to go up and to the right. I think for local television it looks like learning about and engaging with with audience and for a long time they will continue to provide free access to their websites to like literally just so they can undercut newspapers. And they also if you are really interested in local television the Knight Foundation and I think March or April released a really long and interesting report on on local TV. One of their key findings was that outside of the top 25 media markets a local TV station is the number one source for for news. Top 25 markets still rely more on one newspaper than they do on any one TV station but in the rest of the country in other words after the 25th market maybe with a couple exceptions TV stations are the dominant source of local news. So I think as media professionals we should we should we should essentially help if this is where if this is where attention is going if this is if this is becoming a valuable part of the local news ecosystem then we should ask ourselves what we can do to help them better serve their communities. NPR I think is in is in pretty good shape because they can focus on on you know building their communities is a means to motivate donations. Pure play or you know digital only publications I think really need to to use their disruptive capacity to innovate not just the format of the news but also like how the news is owned and distributed. Newspapers I think are going to have the hardest time here I think that they've had the hardest time on the internet overall to date. They really need to take steps to reduce dependency on advertising and convincing readers to pay. Yes same same basic idea. So that's that that's it if again if if you leave with one thing I hope it's that that the challenge and really it is a tough challenge is to find a way to scale your product beyond sort of just I'm building this one thing for my one local news website to we're all building a better local news ecosystem everywhere and that in whatever way it means that that you can take this opportunity to to build some equity to give some equity to your to your audience. Thanks questions. One minute. How do you scale the product when there's smaller newspapers my hometown newspaper when from many many pages to news to really produce content or a product that's valuable enough to support paper? Yeah that's a great question I think that they should probably stop printing a newspaper I mean I know that that's like a very hard step and there's a lot of sort of a community ego built into having a printed newspaper that you could have delivered if you wanted but this is I think another artifact of the attention economy we have daily newspapers because people wanted to know the news every day but then you know along comes the internet sort of steals the attention economy but we still have daily newspapers because we still are earning some shred of revenue from from from print advertising so I think you know if if we can break our dependence on advertising we can we only have to put stories up when they when they matter and we're you know reporters are free to really focus on deep important reporting rather than just filling a paper every day I think for especially for a small community that's not that that can't be really a worthwhile endeavor so you end up supporting your people but yeah I yeah I would argue that that I would argue that's exactly what that's exactly what they should do I mean maybe it maybe maybe there's some some print artifact that comes out occasionally that that could be interesting I've heard of a couple experiments of pure play websites where you know they're they're going to make a quarterly chat book or something Hey Austin, hey, or, hey Brent. So we're in a realm of people creating CMSs I'm just wondering if you think about about WordPress and you said we should do things at scale don't everybody be special unique flowers but is WordPress built for local news like other things that it doesn't do or other you know closed systems people are turning to like ARC or you know Vox's new CMS that they're going to sell to people I don't think I don't think that that local news organizations should look too hard at chorus yeah yeah I'm I'm an open book yeah please Daniel it's observer software employee yeah yeah I you know I I think that word WordPress is not just for local news but for a lot of sectors WordPress is a place to start but like I said it is not it is not a stand-up digital news product on its own there are more places to scale and I would argue more important places of scale in terms of like again audience technology conversion revenue payments and with WordPress there are ways to sort of couple things together but as a news production tool yeah WordPress is almost ready for the job out of the box but as a news engagement tool I think that you would need you would need a lot so ARC has a essentially a microservice architecture that that brings more of these components to the table with the flip side being that it's it's proprietary it's you know it's it's owned by by Jeff Bezos which is a turn off for for especially some big local news organizations yeah Davis a great talk Austin really interesting so I wanted to follow up on the advertising point advertising has been part of the American news economy since colonial times and I'm interested if you think that this is a temporary retreat from advertising as a business model for news or a permanent you know title change and how the news is paid for I think it's a it may be a permanent change in how journalism is paid for well I mean we live we live sort of on a spectrum right of media is much bigger media is much broader than than news and news is maybe a little broader than than journalism I you know I think that there are there are still some not like some forms of national especially like entertainment news that is not going to lose advertising anytime soon I think you know for local news it is more likely that this shift will be permanent and that's that's I mean really really really attention merchants really that's I think largely owing to just a total shift in the whole idea of media now maybe there's a there's a form shift maybe that once we stop writing 300 word articles about everything that happens there will be a more sort of internet native digital native news format that is more supportive of advertising but and maybe you know maybe ultimately we will succeed in convincing Facebook to pay news organizations to really truly pay news organizations for engagement or or Google for example to pay news organization for essentially like ceding their universe of information for free it's free now maybe that's a way back into the attention economy for for news but I don't like the attention economy it's you know it's it it's always kind of sucked so I I hope that there'll be an option of you know 20 years from now maybe there are some ad supported formats but I really hope that there are some that are you know purely audience driven we're telling you this because you need to know it not so that we have another opportunity to pop something in front of your eyeballs sites like next door or you know Google groups or Facebook a Facebook group that's local I mean I I I sort of think that next door is like like more media than journalism I I haven't spent a lot of time with with next door but that's sort of like like purely ground up yeah I think that that there are there are fragments of this all over the place but there's there's a whole lot of like things like next door or you know email lists for particular neighborhoods but not and then there are a lot of like journalism organizations that are sort of passing down news articles from on high but not not enough in the middle I can't think of a great example that is that is doing both and I don't know that it has to I don't I don't know that it has to look like a forum specifically and that like a source of information I mean if you're if you're speaking to an audience I mean there's obviously an audience there they're creating the content that they're all reading so it would be a good source of packaging that together yeah yeah I think that that's a core aim of civil as a as a platform I I also you know would just shout out the coral project both of their both of their products talk and ask are really built around engaging audiences also Harkin the startup that is trying to help news organizations better listen to their to their audiences but in terms of like like really successful we did it we made it local news I can't I can't I can't really I can't really think of any get any can anybody else successful audience engaged like like and and but but are they like really listening and engaging to their audiences like giving their audience voice okay again my my little bit of a quibble there is that this isn't this isn't yet really truly at scale you know a million bucks a year is is great but that's not supporting the kind of like enterprise newsroom that most communities need yeah I I totally agree with you I totally agree with you and and you know I think that the that on a national scale the New York Times has actually done a pretty good job of delivering a solid experience and and still having advertising and I think I read earlier this week that there's something like two-thirds subscription now yeah and I think that that's a great a great place where local news organizations should seek some technology scale rather than all building their own version of the yeah exactly so I think we're 10 minutes over and I just want to say thank you very much again for for all of us