 A couple of things I want to just set up straight about the information environment today, because it's radically different than it was when I started doing public affairs in 1991. For one thing, it is much more mobile than it ever was. How many of you get news and information on something permanent, like a TV or a PC, but you also get it on something mobile in your hand? Eight out of ten Americans are in the same boat. They get it through many sources. And so this mobility has hypercharged the information environment in ways that nobody could have predicted. Because now, and we're going to talk about this a little bit more, media organizations are under even increasing pressure to reach you and to reach you wherever you are. And so that has led to a speed and acceleration in the information environment that I don't think anybody could have predicted. The other thing that's different about it is it's very flat. It's very democratic. And the social media now is the obvious example of this. But the point is that almost anybody, and I mean almost anybody, can both produce and consume news often at the same time. In fact, there's a term for it, prosumer, that is who we're dealing with out there. That the average citizen can be not just a reporter, but an editor and a producer all in the same moment just by grabbing a smartphone and documenting something. And then the ways in which that video, that image can be distributed around the world is incredibly now faster and easier than it has ever been before. And then that leads me to the third dynamic of the information environment that's different now. It's the interactivity. So yes, it's flat. And yes, it's democratic. And yes, everybody can participate in it. But now it's much more interactive. They're playing inside the information loop in ways that nobody ever did before. A great example of this. You might remember the protests in Tahrir Square a few years ago. This was not the first round, but the second round. You might remember a news story that was floating around about these young groups of men who were using fairly sophisticated hand signals in Tahrir Square to identify quietly with one another, identify young women, surround them, abduct them, take them off of Tahrir Square and rape, molest, and sometimes even kill them. What happened shortly after was innocent protesters, people that were there to actually protest the political situation in Egypt were seeing this happen. We're seeing these guys with these hand signals doing all this weird stuff. They grabbed their smartphones and they got on Twitter and they started just tweeting what they were seeing, you know, four young men, two of them in black hood sweatshirts, whatever. So who's reading the Twitter feeds? The police and the media and pretty soon these young men were getting these women, they're taking them to a corner or a back alley and they were finding security forces waiting for them there and cameras and the crime stopped just like that. So the interactivity in the information environment is not something we've ever seen before and that is driving huge changes. And it's driving changes for all the four principal stakeholders in the information process and that's what I want to focus my comments on today. Each of those four stakeholders and I'm oversimplifying it because obviously there are many stakeholders but four principal ones that military people need to worry about. There's the principals, commanders, admirals, generals, CEOs, exos. There's the public obviously, there's the press, media, and then there's public affairs officers, people like me who have to advise commanders and inform the public about what the military is doing. Each one of those stakeholders today is living in a completely different world than they ever were before. Certainly before, you know, when I started doing this as I said back in 1991. So let me take each one in turn and tell you what new world I think they're living in. I'm going to start with the principals and I mentioned this exactly this part of the spiel to Admiral Howell this morning when I had a chance to meet with him privately. Principals today are living in what I call a post-interview world and the reason I put it that way is because when they came in and Gardner's no different, he came in in 1984, I came in in 86, there was no internet, there were no blogs, certainly was nothing, you know, Twitter was something a bird did, right? And there was nothing like what we're doing with today and they were trained and grew up to believe that their public communication role was limited and could be concise. In other words, I'll sit down with a local reporter, I'll sit down with Navy Times, I'll do an interview, I'll explain my decisions or my initiatives or my policies, my operations, I'll take a couple of questions and then that's it, I'm done. You know, kind of like a college lecture, right? You get up, you give your themes and messages, you take a couple of questions, you exit stage, right? And the problem is that the information environment is no longer like a college lecture, it's like a college keg party. Everybody's in the room, everybody's yelling, screaming, they want to be heard, they want, this interactivity I talked about, they want to be there, they want to participate not just in the communication but the actual policy discussion. And if you're not in that room with them, if you're not willing to engage in a very democratic, very flat, very authentic way, you're going to miss opportunities to deliver themes and messages and to have those themes and messages understood. So you've got to get commanders, you've got to get beyond this idea that the communication process is very linear, it's not, it's very messy. And so they, what my advice to them is, you know, make sure that in addition to doing the media interviews, which you have to do of course, that you're looking for other ways to communicate and I mean really communicate. So if you're going to endeavor to get into social media, do it yourself, do it authentically, don't staff it out and do it in real time. If you're going to go out and do public speaking, make sure you make time to take questions. Don't just give a speech and then walk off, take some questions, talk to people and look for opportunities to do it in a way that is less formal. When Admiral Mullen was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he started a program called Conversations with the Country and every month we would send him out to some place in America, usually it was a small town, where he would for two days meet local business owners, not in a conference room but at their actual place of business and talk to them about what they were going through, particularly if they were veteran owned or they were hiring vets and he wanted to understand the problems that they were facing. He would meet with chambers of commerce, the Lions Club, he would go to hospitals, not just to visit with wounded troops but to visit with doctors and nurses who were exploring groundbreaking new technologies to kind of figure out where things were going and what we could learn about in the military. He made communication a very personal task and he spent more time listening than he did talking and listening is the most important aspect of communication is also the most overlooked. You've got to listen and that means being willing to just sit and have people explain their perspectives to you. If you can do that then obviously you're going to be more authentic in this new information environment where people do want you to listen to them and then that brings me to them and the new world that the public is in because I think that's one that we really need to understand I think more than any of the others. The public live in what I call a post-audience world. You can see a theme here, post-interview, post-audience you're going to hear more of this. Post-audience world and I mean there's two aspects to that. The first one fairly simple but but worth spending a little time on. When I started doing public affairs in 1991 and they taught me how to write public affairs plans, communication plans, one of the first things you did was you sat down and you wrote who your audiences were Congress, sailors, families, American people, the people who live in Memphis, Tennessee whatever it is. You identified your audiences and then you said okay how what are the messages that I need to deliver to those audiences and you wrote those out and oftentimes they weren't always the same thing right because we had this idea that well we can we need to tell Congress this because Congress needs to understand this aspect of the policy but we don't really need to explain that to sailors and families they don't care about that and we parsed it all out and we wrote this very intricate communication plan. That won't work anymore. There's no such thing as a discreet audience anymore. What you say to one you say to all and you say it instantaneously. As soon as it's out of your mouth or as soon as you put it on Twitter it's gone. Now I know that self-obvious everybody gets that but I don't think while we get it tactically we get it strategically. We don't necessarily understand that you get one shot at a message and you got to make it universal and you got to make it concise and simple so that everybody can understand it. The best military commander that I saw who understood this really well was General John Allen when he was the commander of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan. I had an opportunity to go out and help him for a couple of months. He was in between spokesmen and I was the co-spokesman for Secretary Panetta. He had two of them and they could spare me so I went out for a couple of months to Kabul just to help him get through the gap and I'd really never worked with General Allen much before. We didn't know each other very well but I grew to just have enormous respect for him and he, how many of you have served in Afghanistan? I'll look at the hands so this will probably resonate with you. He knew that everything he did sent a message. Not just everything he said, everything he did sent a message and he also knew that the message was sent to the capitals of Europe, to Washington DC, to the Taliban, to the Afghan people, to village elders all at the same time and so when he tasked the themes and messages out to his strategic communication shop he did it with that in mind that as soon as ISAF said something or as soon as ISAF reacted to something it was going to be consumed in all these different places and people in those different places were going to have a view sometimes a different view of the of that theme or message but that it had to be the same. Whatever he said to one he had to say to all he had to say it instantaneously. I remember just when I got there was when you might remember this when those Karans and religious materials were inadvertently put in an incinerator and then that led to protests in and around the base and then I think it was at Bagram and then also elsewhere throughout the country. One of the first things that that General Allen did and you might remember this he got on an airplane and he flew to some bases and he took a camera crew with him a NATO camera crew he couldn't you know small plane he couldn't take a lot of reporters but he had his remarks documented on video and when he went and he told the troops this isn't who we are this was a mistake we'll get through it this is not who we are this is not about the mission this is not what we're here to do and you know we're going to rebuild the trust and confidence that we that we're beginning to lose now with respect to this incident with the Afghan people he was forceful he was clear he was direct and that video he was smart enough to get it recorded and to get it out there on social media instantly and it made it made headlines immediately back back home some of you may remember seeing it you know his his his lecture to troops out in the field about about this incident but it did a lot to calm the tensions now did it stop every protest no it didn't and i don't think he expected that it would but it certainly calmed the tension it certainly led to a decrease in the violence and it was all based on a very simple message delivered in real time delivered authentically from the commander and done again with an eye towards documenting it and pushing it out there and he really got this idea the post audience world the other aspect of the post audience world and i've kind of touched on this already is that nobody's interested in being an audience anymore and you know we we have this idea that we we can talk to people we need to talk with people and and the people that we are trying to engage in whether it's whether it's an enemy we're trying to influence a local populace we're trying to support a congress we're trying to persuade they now have the same ability we have to talk back and they want to do that they want you didn't they want you to listen to them so this post audience world is very critical we have to understand that that it's really this interactive environment where everybody has a vote everybody has a voice and and you got to listen you've got to spend time understanding that it's it's not it's not the same as it was it's not a fire and forget mission kind of thing um and that leads me to the the media because the media are a big stakeholder in this in this process and while i know as i said we have all kinds of tools uh interactively to engage to get our message out without the filter of an independent media and we should use all those tools twitter facebook all that stuff but we have to understand that you still need the verification the independent verification and the support of third party media the traditional media and they live in what i call a post message world and there's two things i want to camp out on this first this thing called strategic communications it it uh strategic communications as an experiment has pretty much failed and i'm not surprised by its failure because we never really understood what we meant by it we didn't do a really great job at defining it and even as we said about trying to do strategic communications it got perceived out there as propaganda as an effort to control the narrative control the message and you can't do that anymore and the media know we're trying to do that and they're not going to succumb to it they know that we sit and write themes and messages for the commander they know that when i get up at the podium i've got my talking points about whatever the issue is they want to get beyond that the most common question that i got as the pentagon press secretary and that i still get now at the state department from reporters is why why are you doing that why are you sending that ship there why did you say this about barundi yesterday and you're saying this about barundi today why why why they want context they want to understand and this gets back to the post interview world that the commander is in i want commanders to get comfortable explaining to reporters and developing relationships with them even if it's off the record and there is such a thing as off the record folks but explaining why decisions are made because that is what makes for more accurate more contextual more nuanced stories and if ever you look around at the issues that were involved in syria the fight against isle the south china sea and the tensions with china all of these issues russia ukraine all of them cry out for nuance all of them cry out for context all of them demand explication and you can't do that if you're not willing to develop a relationship with a reporter and have those kinds of meaningful conversations if you want to have a conversation with the public great also make sure we're having those conversations with reporters get beyond the talking points there's a place in the time for talking points i use them every day but i also spend almost as much time if not more every day talking to reporters in other attributions than on the record and on camera explaining why secretary carrier is going to this country and why is he going to deliver this message versus one that he might have delivered two months ago it's the context it's the understanding it makes for a more a rich environment the other thing that you need to understand about the media is the hypercharged environment that they're in now it's competitive in ways that nobody could have predicted some of that is due to technology we've talked about that a little bit um and some of it's due to media ownership and i just want to spend a couple of minutes on both those issues let's talk about media ownership for a second when i came into the navy in 1986 90 percent of the media in this country was owned by 50 companies 50 anybody got an idea of what it is now six six companies and it's probably going to be smaller than that in coming years media businesses are being conglomerated in ways nobody could have predicted and of those six companies only four four of four of the six weren't aren't rooted in news they're entertainment companies or internet companies not they didn't start as news companies um and what this means is that on any given day somewhere between 200 and 250 executives are deciding what is and what isn't news for you the consumer of that information so i'm sure this isn't going to come as a shock but if you were to flip around today you go you go back to your office and you turn on the tv and you flip around i'm guessing you're going to see the same story on just about every network in some form or fashion and if you go online and you look at the major news outlet sites you're probably going to see that the headlines are roughly similar that's because again there are fewer and fewer people deciding and they all have to compete for now a smaller market share so they're going to try to cover the same kinds of stories i don't think that's necessarily healthy for the republic and i worry about that because it certainly is in my perch now at the state department i i see things happening all over the world and important issues that are being ignored and not covered because everybody's trying to chase the revenue that comes from the ratings that come from covering the stories that can make the get most you know the most viewers to to watch and the media is a business let's not forget that uh reporters are they believe themselves to be and i believe them to be public servants and they are they believe that they're endowed with very special responsibilities and they take those responsibilities seriously but they ultimately are working for for money making ventures and those the decisions about what they get to cover aren't all theirs and that's another thing that we need to remember when you're talking to reporters they don't write the headlines and oftentimes they don't assign themselves the jobs and the and the stories that they're going to to write they have their they're told to do it but this but this competition at the top for market share leads to what we call at the bottom convergence journalism convergence journalism is is a phenomenon that describes the content of what reporters now have to cover and and how it's merging the lines are all blurring about content and the way in which they cover it so let me give you what i mean by this i uh when i was the chin foe uh one of my first stops was to san diego i wanted to go visit the news outlets out there and sailors obviously um san diego is a big media market for the navy uh and i went to see uh the new owners of the san diego union tribune they had just bought the paper uh a few weeks prior and the owner told me that on his first day as owner of the san diego union tribune he gathered the staff into an auditorium and he said congratulations today's your last day as a newspaper you are now a multimedia organization and then he spent about a million bucks and he built the tv studio on the ground floor and he issued digital cameras to all the reporters uh and they now all had to not only go write a story they had to shoot the video shoot the photos come back write a web piece for it get something ready for the paper the next day and oh by the way go into the tv studio and record something for cable tv about it so what was done by four or five different staff was now being done by one and when we would plan trips uh for admiral mullen i would try to pick reporters back in the early days i try to pick reporters that one daily newspaper one wire one radio one tv now if i want to cover all those media i can do it with one guy i can take jim muck szefsky from nbc and say mick come on and mick will have to write something for the web he'll have to shoot pictures he'll have to do video and he'll have to get up there and and do a hit with lester holt for nbc nightly news one guy this has led obviously to newsrooms shutting down all over the country you may have seen a few years ago one of the chicago newspapers i think it was the sun times fired their photography staff in one day 30 people show up for work got pink slips because they don't they didn't need a full photography staff anymore thanks to technology this is driving the media towards something i call niche journalism now this convergence journalism is causing them to do what i call niche reporting um and the best example of this that i can give uh is the day after the bin laden raid i was the joint staff public affairs officer at the time um and the the day after was monday and uh i showed up for work just like i normally did obviously it's the biggest story in a decade and all day long there was a line of reporters outside my office um and they would come in one by one into my office and close the door because they didn't want the guy behind them in line to hear what they were asking me and and they all asked me something very specific and very different about the bin laden raid they were all looking for one way to cover it differently one edge it was the biggest story everybody was going to be covering it at that day there wasn't a lot of operational detail out at that time now some details leak later but they all were hungry for that one thing i mean one of the questions i got was what is the name of the dog that the seals had on one of the helicopters i mean it was that specific they all wanted to know something unique about it um because they all were looking for that competitive edge this is the world they're living in and i think it's important for us to understand it if we're going to effectively communicate with them we get to enamored of our ability today to communicate without the media and i love those vehicles i use twitter in my state department spokesman role we use facebook at the state department we have a instagram account we just started snapchat i mean we're certainly out there and we're not afraid to directly communicate to domestic and foreign audiences what our priorities are but we also have a very healthy relationship with the with the state department press corps we take reporters on every trip secretary spends time with them he just had a breakfast this morning with a group of reporters uh i mean this is something that he takes very seriously and we take very seriously because if you can get independent reporting that properly captures the why the context of what you're trying to do then it's yet one more way of authenticating the policies that you're pursuing doesn't mean that you have to like every headline or what they write i mean a good balance story is going to be just that it's going to be balanced and there's probably going to be stuff in there that you're not crazy about and there's probably going to be quotes in there from some expert or some anonymous source that it runs contrary to what the institution believes that's okay all of that and your ability to live in that environment shows that you're not afraid and and your policies are valuable and that they are worth talking about and they're worth debating about you know disagreement is not dissent uh you know treasonous it's not something to get upset about it's actually something to embrace and to welcome one of the things i learned here at the war college was the value of of counter argument and accepting it knowing you're going to get it preparing for it being able to rebut it and having that discussion and that's a very healthy place to be too often i certainly when i was in uniform i heard from you know commanders that you know didn't want to engage because they didn't want to be argued with by anybody out there or once they got engaged and and there was a contrary source in a story they just threw up their hands and well why did i do that why why did i spend time with that reporter when somebody else was refuting exactly what i said in the same story the reason is because now you're in that story your side's being told you're out there you're engaging you're having a conversation and you can't convince you can't persuade you can't inform you can't educate if you're not willing to open yourself up to criticism and scrutiny and that leads me because i promised i wouldn't talk for long and i'm already talking longer than i should but that leads me to the last stakeholder who i'm actually pretty partial to and that's the public affairs officer and the public affairs officer lives in what i call post clandestine world it doesn't mean that i think operational security should be violated or that the pao should be free to just talk about whatever they want to talk about what i mean is that oftentimes uh well not oftentimes every day things are going to get out into the media space that we didn't plan on and that we don't like and that we can't stop and some of it has to do with operations now hopefully it's not about future operations but sometimes it is and if your public affairs officer if you as the commander don't keep them informed if they don't know what's going on if they don't know where your headspace is they can't properly articulate and defend the institution in that information environment it's going to get out almost always it's going to get out now again there are lots of things that never get out and and i'm appreciative of that but by and large the approach that you as leaders need to take is that it's probably going to get out and how are we going to shape it when it does or alternatively should we just get it out there ourselves rather than wait for it to get out again operational security has to has to be dominant here i'm not suggesting at all that you know that we that we treat classified information lightly or we we put people at risk but i think we need to approach the operational world from the expectation that because everybody has a smartphone because they're going to be on the ground documenting things when the bombs drop we need to be ready to speak to that we need to be loaded up and that means your pao is got to be close to you you've got to develop a relationship a trusting relationship with a public affairs officer it also means that the public affairs officers today have got a special responsibility on of their own they have to prove to be trustworthy they have to prove to be good counselors and not be afraid to speak truth to power this is one of the problems that i saw as the chin foe that we had a young generation of paos that were very talented very smart very adroit in this new information environment that we're living in but hadn't been told that was okay to argue with the boss to come in and say you know what sir you shouldn't say it that way here's the way it should be said or you shouldn't make this decision it should be this one of the things that i love the most about working for admiral mullen was he expected me to be in the room at almost every turn there were very few meetings where i was not expected to attend when he was doing flag officer detailing obviously he didn't want me in there for that and when he was getting briefed on special access programs that i wasn't cleared for obviously i had no place being in the room for that but pretty much every other kind of meeting i was welcome if not desired and what he expected of me was that i wasn't just going to pipe up when i thought there was a communication gap forming or when i thought something should be messaged a certain way he wanted me to give advice and counsel on the actual decisions he was making the policies that he was pursuing the advice that he was preparing to give to the secretaries of defense or the president he wanted a communicator in the room to kind of help him think through how is that advice going to land out there in this dynamic interactive democratic mobile information environment and how should we craft it differently and it forced me to broaden my own perspective that as a pao i wasn't just a communicator i was a true counselor and that's what i want the young ones to be but they some of them have trouble i spoke to to many of them this morning in a little bit of in this very room some of them are working for commanders who think that still think regrettably that communications is a tangential affair something for somebody else to do not them they very much don't believe they live in a post interview world and they only want to see the pao when there's something wrong that needs to needs to be fixed or press release needs to be sent and they're they're missing so many key opportunities but as i said there's a responsibility by the pao and that they have to prove themselves worthy of that trust and prove themselves courageous enough to speak truth to power and to to be engaged and we i think the navy does a good job of this in the community in terms of developing good competent public affairs officers it's not all the services i think approach it the same way but they're getting better and and it's important you cannot go to war anymore without public affairs whether they whether you believe it or not it's true i i'll end with this anecdote i i remember when i became a pao uh first of all i didn't choose the community it chose me i i was teaching at the naval academy i didn't necessarily want to stay surface warfare but i didn't want to leave the navy so i didn't know what i was going to do so a friend of mine who felt the same way we went and got a paper plate and we drew with a marker eight slices of pie on this paper plate and we went to the clinic at the naval academy and we got a tongue depressor and we drew an arrow on the tongue depressor and we stuck the tongue depressor to the plate with a tack and every day we spun the tongue depressor and every day it landed on a different piece of pie in which we had written a community that we could transfer into intel supply cryptology we even had one for the coast guard because you could back then you could lateral transfer from the navy into the coast guard and public affairs was obviously one of the slices of pie on after two weeks i don't know what made us do it but we shook hands we said today's the day and and here i am i became a pao that way um but i remember that and i'm not recommending this as a career development tool i got lucky but it's not not the way you should do it um but after a few months i remember writing down in a journal and if you don't keep a journal i highly recommend you do that but i wrote down in my journal i think i had made a mistake that that um that was my belief you know as a brand new pao and this was in 1991 that that if every i actually wrote this if every public affairs officer in the navy dropped dead the navy could still do its job could still deliver ordinance it could still uh you know enforce presence it could still project power it could still bolster alliances i don't believe that for a second anymore and most commanders don't believe it either you cannot you cannot conduct effective military operations today without factoring into the information environment and i'm not talking about the trons i'm not talking about cyber i'm talking about the public information environment because everything we do now just like this lecture everything we do now can be documented and preserved for posterity forever it's out there and it's visible instantaneously everything and we all have to get comfortable there and it's an uncomfortable place to be but we got to learn to be comfortable in it and that's why these new worlds are all so important and i think uh understanding not only the world whatever you are if you're a future admiral or general understanding the uh the world you're in but also understanding the new worlds that the other stakeholders are in because it's only going to get more dynamic it's only going to get faster uh it's only going to get more interactive uh and that happens not just every year it happens every day every day do you know that in one minute there are four million likes on facebook there are 400 hours of video posted to youtube every minute of the day there's something like 400 000 uh uh tweets every minute of the day i mean it's it's incredible and again i don't see any way that that slows down so i would just say lastly buckle up because you're going to need it it's uh things are going fast and i'll stop thank you very much