 I came by the need to moderate the panel, particularly to Rook. I got to admit when I said, okay, to moderate the panel, my organization, I worked for a free press. Another media was on public issues here in the DC. And we don't work on copyright issues, more and more we get into the debate because of so-called people and all that. But it's not a main focus of our organization. But as a journalist, I'm a former journalist and someone who still writes a lot, the issue of fair use always comes up in a very negative way in journalism. As a reason why journalism is declined, that content is being stolen. And it obscures the facts of the other, the real reasons I believe that journalism is not declined, the news model for news organizations are broken and it's been exposed. Newspapers no longer have a monopoly over local ad markets as they once had. And all the consolidation of newspapers has found newspapers now unable to pay back the debts they collected. Amounted in continuing to get bigger and their revenue continues to shrink. They just can't pay back the debt. And in homeownership, you see what happens when homeowners get vilified from being able to pay back the debts. But newspapers want to blame news aggregators and the internet, which is false. But is there real concerns about, are we insensitive enough about copyright folks who actually have created the visual content? But I would say that another reason I was concerned because I really haven't thought much about fair use except when we see these articles that you hear then down the call, you know, Huffington Post is always like, it's mostly Zarrows. Primarily parasites that we're going to have the journalism produced by others. Or Bill Keller, who was particularly, especially mean to the Huffington Post saying, buying an aggregator and calling it content, a content place like a company announced a plan to improve this catch position by hiring a counterfeit. So, as a person who has been in journalism and never really thought about fair use, I feel good about being here today because I was reading the American University reports on fair use. And I'm going to start off with Angie in a second. What most journalists have a little idea of what fair use is. It's like anything else. Journalists have a little idea about the impact of media policy on newsrooms. They have a little idea that they're actually using fair use to report and actually to make sure that the public remains informed. And so it wasn't surprising that they have little knowledge of fair use, even though the fair use gets vilified. From the report that came out earlier this year from the Center for Social Media called Copyright Re-Speeding, the public right to know how journalists think about fair use is a quote that I want to share. It says, journalists show a strong intuitive sense of the logic of fair use while rarely demonstrating common or even explicit knowledge of the policy. I would love it, this is a quote from a report, I would love it if you could define fair use for me because I'm not entirely sure what it means. Then you have another journalist who said that one reporter referred to fair use as common sense. You have to have common sense about this. You should just know in general you shouldn't walk too close to a hydrant. Now that is not a great grasp for journalists what fair use is and the fact that they don't have good grasp of fair use is actually hurting their ability to actually report. So with that I want to introduce the panel's real quick, Josh Burrys, he's the editor of the slaters and Josh is the former energy reporter for political and prior to political he was the former energy reporter for political and prior to joining political he covered energy and transportation policies and policies for E&E publishing, Greenwire and E&E Daily. Ryan Grimm is the Washington Post's Chief of Public Policy. He's a former staff reporter for political as well and Washington City paper and author of This Is Your Country on Drugs and Angie Chong, we're going to start with the assistant professor of School of Communication at American University. She studies the representation of race and ethnic identity in news media and has developed a new class called Race, Ethnic and Community Reporting. She joined the AU in 2007 after a 13 year career of working with journalists at the Oregonian, the Arthur Kern, and the Los Angeles Times. So Angie, my first question to get this conversation going is what are the common mistakes journalists make about venues? What is the commonest perception about it? Thanks, Joe. That was a great introduction to the American University School of Communication Center for Social Media Report, which if you go out on the table there's a bunch of postcards you can google on the website. I really encourage you to take a look at the support. It was compiled with 80 interviews with journals and industry leaders, online media leaders, working journalists and what we found is not so much that people aren't making mistakes it's that people aren't thinking about it. And having been a working journalist for 13 years, I understand that I don't think I ever uttered the word scare and use in my career. We talked about LIGO, we talked about obscenity, we talked about many other issues but never scare and use. And I think one of the reasons is because it's misunderstood, it's very hard to define because in general the courts and other industries have not fully defined barriers for developed best practices. And that's one thing the Center for Social Media is trying to do with the collaboration of those industries whether it be documentary filmmakers, poets, academic researchers and now journals. And it's very, very important that journals have a voice in developing these principles and best practices. I think in most newsrooms the idea is you put your blinders on you get what you need to get and it's sort of better to ask forgiveness and permission. Because if you ask permission you might get lawyer and no reporter wants to get lawyer because it means that you're probably going to get restricted. And it's the idea. And there's this sort of resentment of the other set of barriers that you mentioned with the fear of co-opting your journalistic material or the discomfort with aggregation. I think right now it's great time to start developing these codes of best practices because we're looking at two significant strengths. The courts and corporations that own material are getting much more aggressive about enforcing copyright. And this will, if it hasn't already, affect a journalist. I'm sure many of you who do online media have had the experience of getting incidental music in a video and then having it wiped off the internet because the incidental music violated some of these copyrights or the ability to use a movie clip. Shooting a picture and having somebody have a t-shirt in the picture that has a copyrighted logo. These are all things that every journalist would encounter and could potentially be considered questionable under a copyright. So the idea is to promote better knowledge and understanding of their use to give journalists more tools to be able to use more material freely, to not feel like they would have to center themselves or be insured or put themselves at risk. The other trend that's happening is with the more aggressive enforcement in court and the newer forms of media, that there's a lot of ambiguity about social media, about tweeting, about re-tweeting and reusing material. Like I said, the aggregation, the kind of flap over Romanesco, even though that wasn't portrayed as a fairer musician, is a fairer musician. So I'm sure we'll get into a lot of interesting discussions, but that's sort of the overview. Great. And we'll start with Josh and Ryan as well. Next, it's like, Josh, so I was reading a quote from you in Pointer where you had an article back in December saying that the biggest challenge in giving media is enough information to understand the story without giving it all away. And I guess one of the common criticisms of news every year is that you're providing too much information and making the link hard to find, so folks can get back to the visual source and you see that obviously there's no fast and hard rule. So I mean, how do you go about trying to determine what is fair use and what are the conversations you actually have within the slayers about this and so that's what the viewer... Well, I mean, it's certainly the most typical part of kind of what you step out and think about how you're going to aggregate something. Because ultimately, if you do a good job, right, you summarize it all. If you do the absolute perfect summary of something, you give them all the information. They're not going to click through, which on the one hand, especially when you're working with younger reporters and in terms of really ambitious things, they want to do their best job, they're trying to do that and it's difficult to tell them, no, you can't give it all away. You have to do an integral job. And our value as an aggregator is giving those summaries and giving our readers a point with write-up. We can say something in too much of words that took someone else to say a thousand, but that's a transport of value right there. And we're giving them that. As far as making those decisions as we move, the easy part for us is I'm a former reporter, I'm the people that I work with, I'm either reporters, one of your reporters or older reporters. You're borrowing from any interior colleagues, so there's this idea that if someone were aggregating me the way that I'm aggregating them, would they be comfortable with it? And that's, I think, the ground goal where we base everything that we go off of. It is ultimately that intuitive feel and you'll know what you see of it, which is a little dangerous admittedly and certainly I didn't actually stop to think about a lot of previous issues until they contacted this panel and I quickly looked at the email and found everything I could. But often it is this issue of, there's no, it's a case like this issue on every single story, and ultimately if we stay towards the aggregating theory of facts and ideas of Johnson-Camping Cooperation versus aggregating more of a conceptual scoop in a way where they can no longer, it removes, sorry, I ran it for a little bit. If you aggregate a conceptual scoop more of someone's like connecting dots and reporting on a trend, that's a little bit more dangerous because they've done this legwork and it's this intense effort which there's a danger of stealing and not giving, even if you credit them with denying them links. If you're aggregating very facts, Obama said something, this bill passed and he gets a little bit different and a little bit more leeway and I'm sure because you can always want to give a theory of what we're thinking about more but there's less of a danger of stealing something. So let me ask you, Josh, and I'll please Ryan in a second. How big is your stand? It varies on a day-to-day basis from, for those of you that aren't part of it, this latest is kind of the aggregation variable within Sling Magazine. It started as today's papers and it moved into something that looked a whole lot like what the Daily Beast has, the 12 quick hits and then the latest in creation is now it's a news blog where we cover breaking news and try to iterate the stories that are kind of driving the conversation. Our staff, when we first did the overhaul it was just me, so that was a frantic panic every day then it felt a bit modern and they realized maybe that was, we needed some more people for big events like that and so now on any given day we might have anywhere from two or three people ready for us to do anything. And do you have a policy on venues in the government? We do not. So Ryan, just spend a little time with the public offices because you get a lot of arrows and how big is your stand? Is there any guideline that you can train or discuss as part of orientation as part of being a member of a post staff? In Washington, there's about 40 to 45 editorial staffers and about eight or nine are called the vertical team which runs the politics page and they get intense training on what's better to do. I think one thing that gets missed when we talk about how to aggregate a specific story or how fair use applies to a specific story is kind of the broader benefit that a website can bring through aggregation, kind of the aggregate value of aggregation, I guess. The perspective of the Huffian Post as I said, the perspective of daily callers, the perspective of drugs, the perspective of New York Times they're all different. And so what the Huffian Post is doing overall is saying, here are the 20 or 25 stories that we think you're going to think are the ones that you want to read right now. And so you miss that by focusing on each individual story. You go to the New York Times website you're going to get a completely different experience than if you go to the Huffian Post website. So I think Keller has missed that. A lot of others have missed that when they're docking pure aggregation because if there wasn't any value to pulling out say the 13th paragraph of the story that is buried on a deep page within the New York Times website then people would stop coming to us because what the New York Times is doing is very good. It's an excellent product but by aggregating from a different perspective then we'll give readers something genuinely different I should have let off that question first I'm now just going to be my next question what is the generalistic and informational benefits of news aggregation because it is an important societal benefit and so that is that you are able to provide a diversity perspective to the news stories and add to the public discourse of news stories that are out there and take backs and reinterpret. So until the internet came along it was kind of up to television and radio to take, you know, the Baltimore report has always been done by print reporters and so up until the internet you might have conservative radio that would take a New York Times story and give it a different spin and talk about it for a couple hours or you might have different television shows treated in a different way. When the internet came around it would take a new play to get a different take on the same facts So, um, but, you know, to play devil's advocate I'm sure I hope you can post in how much of the content you actually put you use and where you placed the link and how folks are able to easily assess the original material or the accredited, I mean most websites, the goal is not to have it's to keep them on the website and not, um, you wanted to visit other parts of the website not directly to other traffic so there's a conflict of interest between the goals of making sure people stay on your page as long as possible with the other content with making sure you can get back to the original source how do you deal with those two? I think what has made us successful is our kind of willingness to send people off the page we try to think of the site as as a meritocracy and that our own original reporting doesn't have any kind of advantage over other reporting if somebody else, the Washington Post has done a better job on a story than one of our reporters has done then our top piece will link directly to the Washington Post and we're okay with that and I think it's good to be okay with that because readers know that when they come there what's out on the internet rather than the best of what we've created and so a lot of the mainstream media papers have approached their website in a vacuum kind of pretending as if readers don't have the ability to go to other websites and find out what else is going on so let's say you go to the Washington Post and you're looking for a particular story but the Post doesn't have any original reporting on it yet they might not have something up on it yet so a reader is not going to read a worst story they're going to leave and go somewhere else I know Politico I think it's changing its attitude a little bit towards aggregation but when I was there the New York Times had reported something and we wouldn't put it up on our site so we had confirmed it which I think is a misunderstanding of the way that readers consider news I don't know a reader who said well the New York Times is Politico to have unnamed correct ways saying that it's true then I'll believe it that readers want the news fast and they want it to be credible so Angie so we have two organizations here that use aggregation as their business so one do you think Fed used to use the name is there does the center have examples or discussions at all? Yes, it's definitely under report and I think the belief of the center and what came out of the meetings that we've had and we're currently working with a society of professional journalists to develop a code of principles much like in the STJ code of ethics and one of the things that needs to be worked out is that collectively journalists from the traditional legacy media world and the aggregation world and the new media world need to get together and find how they can rather than being at odds or feeling like one person is taking away from the other they need to find a way to move the industry forward and accept that aggregation is going to be part of the new media landscape it's not going to go away and so how can we collectively as journalists with all the same aims our aims are to inform the public are to practice journalists' democratic role can we develop a model in which people are comfortable with the use of is it like your example of summarizing the point where you're not taking away from the conceptual nature of somebody's scoop or somebody's work but I think just either being at odds again with each other or putting your head in a stand and pretending like it isn't changing is not the way to do it so we're not at a recommendation stage yet because we really want the industry people in the industry to talk to each other and decide how best to address this Jordan I'll ask you too what is the phase unfair and what is what Ryan answered discussed what is criticism what are you getting involved in there criticism well first of all my first debate on the I see I did the separate journals on the business which is in here there's always that firewall of the smaller staff I'm the editor of the studies but I'm looking at traffic all the time and I'm on certain pages but also in my journals as long as we cite everything we never take a factor of explaining where it came from and providing the link and ultimately from the straight sharing information I can understand kind of the professional critique there of the original source beyond so they denied their role but ultimately I mean if you look at so political wrote the Herman Paine story great, great excuse for that down to the conversation your favorite police ultimately the initial reporting on that for most everyone is some form of you could do it like the slates or the Atlantic wire or the dating piece does it and it's very clear it's aggregation or you could do with how ACUs or CES where they're just citing political in the lead or in their second graph but ultimately it's still aggregation they get to the point where they are providing their own confirmation of the original recording and somehow that is viewed a different thing which I think is a long bear and a professional critique side but often with that story it's footprinted the amount of people that were aware of the Herman Paine story almost instantaneously was so much larger than people that had visited the political site to review the story and while that was in theory every person denied political one click everyone who knew that Herman Paine story they heard it from the news or the slates that they heard it from they technically denied political that click but I don't think I think it's a wrong heavy way to look at it if you do it just on H2NX as a result political it was cited so often that it helps to grant that while there's still a generalization and lots of people know who they are after the Herman Paine story there are a whole lot more people recruiting more and maybe didn't click through to the Herman Paine story the next day they went to the homepage to check out what this political site is and then if they're a political fan I'm sure that they came back ten times that day or they signed up for the newsletter so while you might deny their specific page click and as a result a lot of the numbers we can see we don't track specific click-throughs on everything we have but we have an idea on how many people click through it's not 100% but if you look at the broader picture of as long as you're citing I think that there's this idea that in the long term that we're not doing as much damage as I think a lot of the professional critiques have implied that aggregation does right I just want to say one second Andy please if anyone has questions please raise your hand if the question is out there I just want to add really quickly that what Joshua reminded me that what we heard from working journalists was that there was this real double-edged sword and there's discomfort with having your work aggregated definitely on the business side there's discomfort with that but in the journalist side in a way it was like I love it when my piece sent the top post everybody looks at it it's almost like a credit and I think credit and citation is the important part and I think that's going to be really key to making this work okay so we have a question right now yeah I just wanted to say Mike here Hi my name is Paige Gold I'm part of the future of media task force of the FCC with the information needs committee I'm just looking at the bigger picture the argument is that you want these clicks because ultimately you'll figure out a way to monetize it all and the New York Times is arguing that we're losing money because people are taking on the job but actually there's no way to prove that that's what's causing them to lose money and ideally I would suppose if the New York Times could generate income based on Slate and Politico and how you can post they might not inject I just want to know the thing about the business aspect because it seems at this point almost like everybody's fighting over these speculative profits and nobody really knows how they're actually putting money on the business yeah I mean I think they're probably objectionable on principle that a practical loss we do a ton of original reporting now and it often gets linked on other sites and we're always happy when that happens but it's never occurred to me that we would be suffering when other sites were taking our stuff and going back to us is there an instance where you guys you feel like you guys have some original stories that you didn't get created by mainstream news organizations who aggregate your content without probably exciting you guys well it happens all the time well let's see maybe a month or so ago we posted a story that Warren Buffett's private jet combination had spent millions of dollars lobbying to get a tax break in Congress and that succeeded that story was basically rewritten by the Wall Street Journal a month later I'm not sure they did all the original reporting but there's no way that they would see our story and they I would call that aggravation a bad kind of energy so you seem to look both ways right but you know it's but people have been doing that in journalism for hundreds of years so it's kind of almost nice to see it being dug up for the rest of the journalism right I was going to add that I mean especially and I did write a question on it really too about how the traditional outlets are they still treated as though they're siloed off that you're on the New York Times website it's as though you have the paper in your hand and you can't pick up without the paper I mean ultimately obviously it wouldn't necessarily hurt the New York Times there's some giant movement like that the biggest insult you can do is to exclude them from the conversation to not to let go of that story and ignore it because they just treated it completely separate that sort of happened because it was a giant story and political at this point is the giant organization but when they were first going to start to deny entry into the larger online news and culture conversations going on by excluding certain sources I think there's a harm there that I think a lot of these they don't consider absolute New York Times it isn't worried that the slayers doesn't agree with their stories that people won't go to New York Times to exist I'm not saying that but I do think it speaks to the larger that there's no one's figured out how to monetize the serial pages yet but I think that there's a large doubt for these outlets having their information aggregated as long as they study the problem so people know where the outlets exist and what they're covering and what they're doing to work I just want to add really quickly the belief of the interviewees in the center of social media process was that it's short-sighted to look at aggregation as the reason why journalists in financial trouble there's much much deeper issues about business model audience and that we need to look beyond just blaming aggregation sites or blaming the repurposing material as the reason why this piece of trouble I would just say that collection a couple years ago these people holding this made a 21% profit margin but yet the collection is on the verge of collapse because of the debt it took on in the quiet night river and this is a case of a good net furloughs its employees during the first quarter when they were making a 19% profit margin if you make a 21% profit margin you should be a successful business model but when you're making 40% profit margin and your local ad rates get in competition now with online advertising and you go from a 40% profit margin to 20 Wall Street for the likey so that's the view of in my opinion that is one of the major reasons why this piece I am sir Michael Nelson for attending university I spent a lot of time thinking about where we're going the next technology is the KS and I was interested to mostly talk about text there's a lot of people who are going to make a lot more money selling data and tools and play with data there's also infographics which are a nice powerful way to convey information I'd like to know how are you very used to working in this new world what happens when you take somebody else's infographic and you simplify it and make your own very powerful infographics using all of their numbers what do you do if you sweep up somebody else's database with a new product and you fly your own software through it but the raw data is there in Europe 10 years ago they passed a law to create a new type of intellectual project to protect databases that hasn't happened here but the database providers would love to see that so how do you think various images infographics and data databases tools that you play with will play out next few years I was thinking that you could construct the same images that you could put around photos but that's if people want their images to be kept on their site whenever we make an image we need to be encouraged to be embedded in other sites so that it can be spread around so that's how I think the images I think academic research is also going to overlap with that because there's a lot of questions about people wanting to mine huge data sets that come out of twitter for example or links patterns of linking on facebook these are great avenues for studying sociological behavior and the question of how much of that should be accessible to researchers and journalists is and this is all new territory as jeff said the reasons why we have controversies are very often because things are new and I think the position of the center for social media is it's better to get out ahead with the practitioners and start to develop these and let the core system decide for us have you seen the cases where journalists have been taken to task for using some of the database not with data not with data that I know but or infographics somebody else's graph that is not aware of I know data is still pretty good I think right now it's stopping you can aggregate text quickly but an infographic it's almost not with your time because an infographic is going to have their source at the bottom if you want you can go get that number you can make your own chart but ultimately that took a lot of work I think as a the speed that the web specifically the aggregation moves at least with the tools we have right now infographics would be very difficult but that also would change that's a great way to graduate you class come through I was wondering about something that you pointed out when you were comparing aggregation by websites like Daily Beast and Sligist and Huffbo too aggregation by more traditional media like when ABC would take that political story and you kept mentioning that with traditional media they would make sure you their own confirmation of things so it seems like there's at least a couple of different a couple of different factors that work one of them is how much credit goes to the racial sources that's something that you're interested in and making sure that you provide and the other is providing confirmation of the fact which is something that it seems like the original traditional media is more concerned with they see about breaking the story so they see their value in confirming the story and then sort of downplay the accreditation as Josh said they don't always confirm it themselves if it's a powerful and fast moving story that their desire to develop on their site will overwhelm that desire to have an independent source I think part of the tension comes in what for like a better term I'd call the ego of the outlet if we see a story that's on the Washington Post we credit the Washington Post with a great deal of credibility and integrity and so we don't feel like we need to need to go out and find independent source to confirm that and that goes to our judgment as an aggregator if readers ultimately don't trust us to be linking to incredible content they're not going to come back to us so if we see a less credible source then we will go out and confirm it for ourselves before we put them on our site whereas for a mainstream outlet they don't usually make that judgment they don't care if it's on the New York Times or if it's on AT or the Washington Post if they haven't themselves personally confirmed it then they'll often hold off on it except within some of their blogs that are deeper into the site who kind of have more of a post attitude towards things than say the front page might and anything that gets back to this business journalism that I mean ultimately if you're speaking solely journalistically in the idea that we're all one giant journalistic ecosystem and we want to provide as much as best information as possible you have to wonder if it's worth the time of 50 recorders in DC wanting for me to do their own chasing down a story that everyone knows to be true but the political broken or the Washington Post broken and you want to confirm it soon because that's understandable that the New York Times does it's tradition but ultimately if those reporters let their time chasing the next story pushing the story forward and didn't worry about going back to the press secretary to confirm every quote or or to dig up and follow the trail of the reporter labs and piece together their story I don't want to discount the need for independent confirmation and it's always great to double check facts I'm certainly going to do that but the issue is there are only so many reporters and there's always more stories than there are reporters and I think it's better served to see people spread far and wide than that old team on a lot of these okay I've got a couple more questions anyone has questions please get to the mic we have about 15 minutes left Ryan can you speak to the recent conversations with the Post coming with a last year with the both at-age situation with the report that they had suspended too much of the story and can you talk about that controversy in any lessons learned when something like that happens what happens within an individual organization a couple of lessons learned do you recalibrate the policy if you retrain it what happens what happens getting after that there was a there was a re-office can you explain what would happen if I remember correctly we were talking about adding a much-evented value to it and had it basically included all of the relevant details from the story which left little reasons to click back to the original so there was just a reaction to saying that that's not what we're doing that we're trying to add value specifically to that individual story but we're also trying to create a place that has a kind of a voice and if we're not going to add any value to that specific story then just link the record to it it's fine. So in the Angie New report you talk about that journalists are maybe trained early on on fair use the policy within the organization are so hard to understand at times that the journalists are afraid to use it or go to the lawyer so conservative actually shut them down to be more creative to Ryan so Ryan you see there's a sense of training and this is a question above you Angie and Ryan, we're starting with Angie first then how in the report you go on a new journey and everything is changing in this world digital media and you get trained first come on the organization is that enough what should happen should it be constant training updated how should journalists continue to be trained on this issue when it's evolving? In my experience I didn't get a lot of training on fair use I don't think it was ever like I said I don't think it was ever mentioned in the newsroom that may have changed nowadays but it wasn't standard practice and God rarely trained on things like libel and obscenity maybe I think it's often copyright is the term that's often used and copyright is bad because copyright is you can't use this and I think one of the things that journalists don't really realize is that the realm of things that can be copyrighted is best and it makes journals very uncomfortable when you start to list these things so technically under copyright law doing an interview with somebody that person can claim that the quotes that they give you are copyrighted even though they can send it to the interview and if you use a document we think okay all government documents are public domain right? if that document was produced by a contractor or a government organization that could be copyrighted and so you just said and I think journalists need more knowledge I think there needs to be much more training and I do think there should be more just training with discussions open discussions where you bring the lawyer in not to check on whether or not you can run something but to have a conversation about and the truth is that there aren't class laws that are rules it's not like if I use 30 seconds of a film or broadcast it's okay but if I use 35 seconds it's not okay and there's this sort of misunderstanding that if I just use a little bit of it I'm saying so I think in general what we're trying to promote is not just individual newsrooms but the whole industry and you've just said before that when newsrooms actually do have a policy that is discussed the likelihood of unfair use actually minimizes it yes and I think it's just in the nature of journals they don't like rules they don't like restrictions and I think what we're trying to do is say fair use is actually a tool that will help you be able to use more things without putting yourself at risk and it's empowering you to have access to more material to argue that you're re-purposing the material for another that's the idea of fair use I'm using Michael Jackson's music and he's obituary not because I'm selling the music or I'm viewing the user the music I'm trying to tell a story about how his music reflected his life and that's the people that he said so Brian you said you was extensive training in the beginning did you continue training once you had that first initial training or is it discussed again or how does it work well it's constantly reinforced because we're practicing it every day and so people who are more versed and others will be constantly providing guidance to people who are less so it's an ongoing thing you checked the lawyers and the lawyers involved and some of the stuff and Josh you said you don't have any policy is it we're doing a spot formal policy but after hearing the conversation what's your thoughts on the issue of policy and again journalists do not like rules at times but what's your thoughts on everything you're hearing on this issue it's certainly and with an aggregation those people who are doing the basic aggregation the most aggregation of aggregation the summaries and the quick hits they're most likely to be your interns or entry level reporters and people with the least amount of experience and I think that that is what leads to a lot of the talk it is the fair use issues are much more prevalent now so it's not necessarily that institutional knowledge and they might not have learned it if they got a date with the region or in a microsoft world old south carolina copyright really wasn't on parade and I do think that there needs to be a little bit more training a little bit more there's an obligation to the younger reporters that are coming in that we need to teach them better on this but speaking to the issue about the rules we also don't necessarily we had a professional course on live to talk to the lawyers because it was late, it was all back and forth questioning reporters but then at the same time I left terrified for the next day I was convinced that I was going to get a livell soon my way and ultimately I hadn't done anything wrong and ultimately we didn't change how we're doing we were completely within the rules but there is this concept that it is going to hand out to you and slow you down so I guess it is difficult to go to people on board but also if people are doing a good job and you want them to know why they're doing a good job then maybe you don't want them to know too much without I guess just getting people so analogous as far as issue of innovation you have a question innovation you know the fact that there is criticism of the mainstream media criticism of news aggregators is unjust in the sense that the news aggregators actually you talked about earlier take this information and present it in a much more digestible way for folks and because there is only a bigger issue over the past a decade or so because when you have limited news outlets it's hard to have a diversity of viewpoint and to create a public discourse but the internet has allowed great public discourse to be able to weigh on issues and the fact that it's protected news in a more digestible way in the sense that the news papers and news organizations had the ability to view news aggregations themselves and have the entity but was still stuck on an old model that didn't innovate like the newer companies are when you talk about that you talk about the reports anything to add to that as far as some of the criticism that is always when you criticize and beg at you that this is something more than what these organizations are doing now but it's something that we couldn't wait for in front of most of the world as ladies yeah and it's the mainstream media traditional news organizations especially the large newspapers are the battleships of the industry and you know how long it takes to turn a battleship the idea was I think that it's always taken pride in their work in their original reporting their way of framing or couching a story in their writing and there was this resistance that we're going to somehow summarize it and diminish it and not present it in its absolute purest form on the front page of the newspaper then we're taking something away from it and that it's actually diminishing the value of my work which was really you know pre-internet thinking it's we're past that now and I think both can exist I think that we need to change our thinking and see aggregation as a way to get more readers, get more exposure to encourage people to click on that link and look at the full version of the story rather than to say okay I read the paragraph I'm okay now some people might do that and that's great but we need to have both Joe Torres this is Robert Pinsky I was very interested in kind of convinced by your partly economic analysis of the I really like thinking about the decades of consolidation increasingly monolithic news sources in the way newspaper, newspaper chains TV networks and the debt the investment that was made in that consolidation now being reversed as things are more pluralistic and less monolithic it's an appealing idea I wonder if you would talk about the counter arguments maybe I've been propagandized but the counter arguments that it's an overall social loss because the expenses the leading example usually is a foreign international news and the expense of having agents in lots of different in Africa in Asia and that expense is being show grouped by these same monoliths and so their argument is yeah if we don't do this society as a whole and the world as a whole is going to do lose so the consolidation started really happening in newspapers rapidly in 1960 when this whole public trade company Gannett was really the first one to popularize it and the Washington Post followed suit and all the other companies followed suit and during the 1990s I believe there were some half the newspapers in this country were sold and all this transaction was being flipped and all this consolidation happened and you remember in 2001 Jay Harris was the editor of the publisher of the Sandwich and Mercury news and he quit because he refused the mandate by Knight Ritter to continue to cut profits profits were anywhere between 22% and 29% and he wanted more and he said there's no way to continue to come more without being laid off waiting for this economic crisis because they had to meet expectations of Wall Street they were cutting state bureaus who covers government agencies and all the important work there's more people there's a lot of reporters coming to Congress and thickly in this city with newsletters and stuff like that but then no one's covering the agencies so all these newspapers who cover the state bureaus and have reporters in Iraq they're cutting them way before this crisis because they had to the economic the investors, look at what happened to you I'm buying a tiny mirror this is a disaster so newsmaking is one of the more profitable it was one of the most profitable years in history and yet 15 million in a verge of collapse yeah please answer that there's some structural things that aren't much as much that change as well because newspapers had three major sources of revenue they had classifieds they had car dealerships and they had Macy's for the local mall Macy's has been in dramatic decline as have these big department stores car dealerships have shrunk by something like that but the classifieds is where they really got killed because that was free content that people were creating for these newspapers and many people picked up the newspaper for that free content not for what was on the front page but because they wanted to look at what was in the classifieds and not only was it free content people were paying them to produce this content and so once that disappeared as a result of Brexit I watched it happen while I was at the city paper that was just a dramatic loss and to your point though I'd say that back in the 80s 90s people had to wait for say the Baltimore Suns Farm Bureau to decide to do some reporting from whatever particular Bureau they wanted to write about and great for them that they had all of the Bureau but today, readers have exponentially more access to farm reporting than they did even in the heyday of the mainstream it is the Bureau to cross the world but first of all, I mean, Opium Post has a UK Canada, France and a Spanish site so if you want to know what's going on in the Middle East you can go to Al Jazeera.net which you could not do 20 years ago so if you want to know what's going on in Russia you can get English language, Russian papers China the same, Africa, South America well what is being heard is still most local communities want to focus on local news and while we have maybe national respect for some stuff we don't have I was just in Arkansas people complaining about the local Arkansas paper covering the state capital and the classified thing is that it costs a lot of money at one time to place your car for sale or to sell your full time and advertisers have more people have more choice now to more inexpensively try to sell their product it's a good thing there's no reason why these news papers could innovate and create coupons and stuff like that I'll say that this because you can see I have issues with all this criticism of the internet but I'm just keeping folks you know family owned papers owners used to say if I made a 12% profit margin I was having a good year and for that change when it comes to consolidation Wall Street corporate Wall Street controllers one of the most interesting talks I've heard this month about Dr. Henning who is the CEO of Ndelay this is a new platform a little bit like Evernote that will take all the things you read online and all the articles you read and all the websites and synthesize them automatically give you a 20% to a 10% we have technologies like this that provide us better access to information highlight the good pieces Ndelay and EN at the same time we have these robo writers who are developing some source articles and how we read it by computer I'm kind of curious if I need to see various our computers when they demand copyright they're generating thousands of articles a day from the teams screen how is various in existence in the world if you are under time can be automatically generated either from raw data like source source or from the whole blog I'm going to I'm going to say please answer that question to all the panelists my last question would be exactly what do you see the future of aggregation the future of values where is the heading and so you riff off this question and one taking someone else's pieces and this will be close mistakes I'm not quite sure on that I guess ultimately if it's real or generated it's deploying in facts so I don't think it's a really copyright issue the facts of your game as far as the synthesizing the whole Internet I don't know do we need to keep going on it seems as though it's going to be the next step in aggregation as far as where our aggregation is going and aggregation of the whole is going I think it's going to I don't really know I don't know the goal is really just to get better and to link to more people and have them link back to you and I think where your initial stages of aggregation felt a little bit like as I understand earlier this concept that they are not trying to send people away because they know they'll come back and I think that that is a newer attitude that is becoming more prevalent online when people realize that they don't stay on your site all day they come they go and if everyone is doing the same thing where we're making HOPPO HOPPO is looking back at us ultimately that's going to drive up our total page views and people will be less afraid of losing your reader because they know that they will come back this concept that we're not a standalone entity and I think that the sooner all aggregators and aggregations realize that and I think you can separate aggregations from the whole whole game as soon as people realize that you can send people away and they will come back I think that we'll get over a lot of these hurdles and a lot of these hard feelings about feelings though original recording is being stolen or the aggregations or parasites because often people are just feeding into the conversation people online they're clicking on more things they're moving more so ultimately it's not a zero sum game people aren't only going to read 10 stories that day and so ultimately I don't think that any of them there's definitely not just how aggregation will serve readers but also how organizations will get over a lot of the hard feelings and just be uncomfortable and at ease that it's going to be sure a lot of what's happening with how it's moving or how it's handling things I think the key as we report there's no way to know what's coming and there's no way to prepare for what journals will look like 10 years from now and decide ahead of time how we're going to figure out these issues for what exists now and so I think the key is to develop principles not rules and I know any of you who work in journalism have worked with the Society of Professional Journalists it's a very workable set of principles that have stayed true to all of the changes that we've had and I think we're trying to develop something very similar and so I'm going to put in a plug the American University Center for Social Media is having small group sessions on May 10 and 11 lunch will be provided for working journalists to help this SPJ develop this code for fair use and we would love to have any working journalists come and join the discussion so just let me know or contact the email address on the website if you'd like to take part in those discussions and I think it has to come from the industry the industry has to decide what its principles are and the principles have to be broad enough so that they do absorb what's coming even things that we can't see and I think the core of the principle needs to be that more information is better access more information the ability to use more information without dishonoring people's work their creativity their personal staff they're reporting their shoe leather but we need to create an environment for more information I think the challenge will be to variety of websites will be to figure out to continue to figure out consumer behavior as readers get more and more news over email through their social networks through Twitter through searching for it online you're going to have I think fewer people going to individual websites I think you're already seeing kind of the eclipse of the kind of blog form that came about 0204 fewer people are going to record these these blogs just trying to get them aggregated either in their inbox or on Twitter or on Facebook and so the challenge will be to figure out how to make sure that you're in that stream one to figure out how you can hopefully continue to be one of the sites that people still do actually go directly to the visit because I think despite the ability to synthesize your news based on exactly what your preference is or to find on Twitter to find it from your friends on Facebook there's still I think kind of an elemental desire among people to have some where they can go and see what other people are reading because that's the only way you can have a broad conversation so you know hopefully we'll be one of those places where people can go and see like oh this is what the whole thing is saying and I care because I know other people are reading it so I want to know is actually the last question for Ryan winning the Pulitzer what does it mean for you know of the post in online journalism and online original online websites you know I mean just got a graduation to help you post and what does it mean will that be the last one well it's a huge deal I work unbelievably proud and thrilled and I think it'll help us a lot with the mainstream crowd you know it's a post it's a big deal and I think it'll help us a lot with maybe some older sources who aren't as familiar with new media that you know oh okay he's got he's doing serious real journalism so I better return to the call I'm going to blow up the wall I think we've established that over the last couple of years so we're okay there but just out of the general outside the bell way outside of Wall Street I think it'll help there great well thank you everyone for listening to this conversation I hope you enjoyed it thanks a lot of it and thank you for being on it and thank you for being on it thank you so much for hosting this thank you so much