 Hello, I'm Jonathan Zittrin. I teach at the Berkman Center here in the Society and at the Oxford Internet Institute. And I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer's about to do a comedy routine. And Smithers gets up and says, before Homer begins, let me just say that a small dog, not unlike Lassie, has been found dead in the parking lot. And now the comedy stylings of Homer Simpson didn't end well. So out of that thoroughly depressing last session, in a good way, in the sense of an important way, we now turn to the future of news. So it's actually a perfect kind of Janice view, looking back and looking today and looking forward. And we found eight who appear to have transformed into seven provocateurs to do an Agatha Christie mystery. So seven provocateurs. Where's Solana? Where is the Solanasaurus? All right, well, exactly. Yes, if somebody can fetch Solana Larson and tell her that her item was ready for pickup, that would be great. So to have a discussion in rapid-fire fashion about what's going to be at the end of our driveways, literally and metaphorically speaking, I think we pegged 2013 as sort of the let's not start thinking about genetic reconstruction limit on the future of news. But each of the people here has prepared two to three minutes of smoke bomb-like observations. And of course, there's a brain trust in the room. So I just want to get us started, get some ideas out there, and start talking about it. So just going in basically random order, let me call upon Paul Steiger to tell us who you are and what you have to say about the future of news. Paul Steiger, I'm the editor-chief of something called ProPublica, which is a non-profit, non-partisan investigative recording operation in the process of hiring a staff of 25 journalists to fill in the gap that's being left by the buyouts and shrinking of newsrooms all around the country. Is your media principally text, video, multi? It is going to be our principal connection with the world. It's going to be the web. We will blog every day, aggregating other people's investigative recording and commenting on some of the things we see. And we will pick half a dozen areas to focus on, try to move the ball once a week. And then we will do deep dive stuff, which we will offer free to existing platforms, meaning newspapers, magazines, television, even other websites. But we will give them temporary exclusives. They are free to collect any of the revenue that they would get from the stories. And our goal is to get maximum reach. And we're looking to shed light on abuse of power. Most power is in the hands of government and business. So we'll focus there, but we'll also look at unions, universities, and school systems, and lawyers and courts, and doctors and hospitals. No sacred cows. No sacred cows, not even non-profits. You thought we were lefty, but we don't like unions when they're not good. That's correct. Right, got it. And you said 2013, when I would be 70. So what is the future of New Jersey? And between the second and just one last thing on the bio, prior you were in the belly of the beast, correct? If the Wall Street Journal is the beast, I was in the belly. Again, answer kind of as easy as that. Managing editor of the journal. So the one thing that's clear to me is that news will be delivered principally electronically. I don't mean that print will disappear. Print will continue to have important functions. But just looking at my own economics, when I was at the journal, 15% of the total budget of the newspaper was allocated to news. The rest was paper, ad sales people, distribution people, finance people, the checkup on all the other people. At ProPublica, close to 2 thirds, at least 60% of our budget will be focused on news. And why? Because electrons are much more efficient than wood pulp with ink sprayed on it to deliver all kinds of information. So I think that the delivery of what we do will still be partially in print. But more and more of it will be on the web. And we've got to figure out not just throwing stuff out there and hope people will pick it up. The old format of an investigative story, 10 inches on the front page of a newspaper, jumping into a double truck inside, nobody younger than me is going to read that stuff. It still has to be done. It still has to be part of the background. But we need to be able to communicate in the kind of visceral imagery, including video, including sound and pictures. Last question before our next provocation. It's the question that probably Tony Curzon Price in our audience has in mind. In 2013, for your organization, how are you making money? And that's not the answer arriving on the screen for $200 bill. We are not making money. Beauty of our organization is that we are funded with the notion that we will not sell advertising and we will not seek circulation revenue. I'm sure you will achieve both of those aims. And yes, I was very good at promoting nonprofit journalism at the Wall Street Journal. I don't see why I can't continue doing that in this realm as well. That's slightly more convincing than the answer I thought you were going to give, which was volume. So all right, let's space out the Jonathan's, because we have so many of them. Jonathan Taplan, well, that's who you are, and give us your predictions. I'm a professor at the USC Annenberg School. I was, in my earlier life, a producer of films and music with Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese, Gus Van Sand, a bunch of other people. I want to just jump off of looking at 2013 from three comments that were made earlier. One, Richard Sandbrook's comment last night that we're suffering from information overload. I would add on to that that we may be suffering in 2013 from commercial overload. The second is Dr. Weinberger's notion that the struggle will be over metadata, and that relates back to the commercial idea, because the struggle will be over your metadata, your behavioral targeting information, and the ability to then deliver you specifically relevant advertising for your things. And third, Castell's notion of commoditizing freedom, which is essentially what his contention is, that MySpace seems free, but really, I'm mining your information on MySpace deeply to be able to then sell you a lot of stuff. So my notion of the world in 2013 will be a world that's really two worlds. There will be a world for the rich, which will be a world of content on demand paid for by the piece, in the same way that I still pay for the Wall Street Journal online. Essentially, personal wall gardens, where the equivalent of I would only use Facebook mail. In other words, only people who are in my world are allowed to communicate with me, and this would be an ad-free world. But I'd have to pay through the notes for that. The other world for everyone else would be a world in which advertising would be so much a part of your life that you could not make a phone call without having a 15-second ad before you made the phone call. You may laugh at this, but the notion of if you try free 411 service, you listen to a 15-second ad before you're able to be getting any information for free as to a phone number that you want. So clearly, many big companies are gonna be in this business of mining your information, and just whether you want to opt in or out of that system may not be as easy a choice as you think it is. Now, on the flip side of this, clearly newspapers' big, important journalistic operations will help you through the information overload, and your willingness to surrender to them your data in order to get a kind of personalized media experience and a personalized advertising experience may be a good thing, and it certainly may be the savior of the online newspaper, but I'm not positive about that. And is this two-tiered world a dystopia? You have this kind of overtellin' of scariness about you, but... Well, that's a term of heart. I think it's potentially dystopian. I mean, my students, my undergrad, think there's absolutely no problem with surrendering a huge amount of demographic information in return for cheaper content, and that may be totally right, but I also think that we're so marketed to right now that if every move that you make has a personalized message on it, every phone call you make, every web search you make, I'm not sure that's a world that I want to live in, and maybe I have enough money to opt out of that world into a world where I'm protected, I'm in my own personal kind of HBO world that has no advertisements, and I'm in my wall garden, and I have no spam, I have nothing, I can't be reached unless I want to be. Uh-huh. Jennifer Farrow. Yeah, I have a much-tearier outlook. The future of news, line cars. No. The future of news, line cars, is with ads. Okay, so no line cars. So what I see really is a convergence of devices and platforms, and I'm in public radio, I'm at KCRW, it's public radio in Southern California, and we're already seeing that, I really see that devices will become less relevant, so radio, I just don't see people carting around radios, I think that all devices will come together, so all these laptops that you're using, and your phones, and I mean it's already happening, that's not a big prediction, but what I think that means for a place like KCRW is that we just have to look at our content in slightly different, or many different ways at the same time, so that's what we're doing. So you think in this future you were licensed to broadcast, maybe irrelevant? Not irrelevant, just less important. So right now the way, this isn't a virgin, I hope I get more than two minutes, but right now it's public radio. This will not be docked against your tone. I thought that would be a lot of ads I have to sit through, right? So what public radio is like across the country in a lot of places is that there's lots of sticks around and then they all take national programming and spit it back out there, and in what we're seeing today where people, where national producers can bypass sticks, radio stations like myself, you can just go get NPR from NPR. You don't have to go through KCRW and stuff and throw a pledge or something weird announced or anything like that. So what KCRW is trying to do, what we're focused on is taking what content we have, figuring out what we can provide, repackaging it and spitting it out in many different ways so that we can be relevant to people who only wanna use their phone or just their laptop or they only wanna read or they just wanna watch or they wanna listen. So that's where I see it going. I see radios being less and less relevant. And then once internet comes in cars, then we're, you know, forget radio. You are representing the LA automobile culture very well here. I know, but you know there's gonna be internet in cars and there's gonna be people driving. Like they are now. I drive down this freeway and I see people, I saw it like raiding papers on the 10. And we weren't going slow. I couldn't believe it. I was like, and then he was texting. You know, I don't know when he was driving, but I stayed away from him. It was very scary. Okay, so here's my other thing. So I also believe that this notion of us going on the internet is gonna disappear. I think that the internet is always gonna be on and we're just gonna be on the internet. It won't be that thing over there. And I don't know what that means, but I'll move to the next thing. One thing that I heard Mark Cooper talking about, I'm really glad he said it because in media, like we're in public radio, a lot of you guys are talking about citizen journalism and being egalitarian and everybody should blog and all this stuff. You find that when you're trying to run a radio station, for instance, that it does matter if people listen or read or care about what's being said. And so I do believe that in the future, the cream will always rise to the top and that will always happen, no matter how wide open the distribution network is. I think that good is always gonna be good and people who consume that are gonna want to experience good stuff. And I also think that people will continue to search for relevance and for trusted sources and that's something that KCRW has always prided herself on is that kind of approach that someone was talking about in the monetized section, which is that you wanna turn to someone to find out what should I really be paying attention to. We look at KCRW as an influencer and we're gonna try to keep doing that. And I think that no matter how many millions are giving you content, there's gonna be one place that a lot of people will go to find out what's important. And I also think that advertising will be more ubiquitous, but I also think that nobody's really gonna care and I don't think they care right now. Okay, so in a word, convergence with quality layers on top. Yeah, quality maps. Which are represented by KCRW. Yes. So just keep doing what you're doing. Excellent. Okay, Jonathan Crem. I'm Jonathan Crem. I'm in charge of all the local news operations for washingtonpost.com. So I'm the evil mainstream media guy up here. My view is that mainstream media is going to abandon what has been the traditional form and structure of storytelling for the last 50 to 60 years, which is based on a posture of objectivity in which we largely sort of derive our credibility from keeping score within stories between points of view. And we seek to essentially attribute all point of view to others. Our favorite, of course, is blah, blah, blah, comma, critics say. And I feel pretty strongly that both the blog sphere, cable television, and actually some visionaries in print, like Paul Steiger, who began to pioneer the notion of much more analytical, much more conclusionary journalism, what I call declarative journalism. I'm hoping it's going to be the era of declarative journalism in which reporters are free to write what they know. And in which still very important is the quality of their reportage, that is essential. And it's still going to be important that they reflect in their stories, that they have considered the other side if there's just one, or whatever is the countervailing set of opinions or facts. But at the end of the day, the he said, she said form is no longer useful for readers. And in fact, as with probably many people in this room, you don't really believe, we don't have notions of what's right and wrong already, and that we tend to sort of find clever ways to sort of show what that is. Now the sort of interesting fallout of this is that we're going to approach something much more like what you see in newspapers around many parts of the world. Party press is not a term I love, but it's closer to that. And you see it in certain magazines in this country, certainly magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker and so on and so forth. But I actually believe that the credibility of the journalists will be enhanced in this case, but it may also be that publications are in general much more identified with a particular point of view than they are today. And that's going to be particularly interesting at a more local level. I think for the national press, this is beginning to happen already, you see it in the New York Times, we're not there yet and I should say that I am speaking for myself and not my company. But if you think about a mid-market newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer or the Detroit Free Press or any of those, it's interesting to sort of contemplate what that means when a reporter can go to a school board meeting and begin to write what is a very different kind of story than what they have traditionally written and how the community will respond to that. But I do think that what it will mean is a greater opening for wider sourcing and more public participation. Lisa Williams. You've asked to go to this particular place, which looks like a wonderfully subversive way to sneak in a PowerPoint slideshow. It's a really terrible jet lag and this sort of helped me remember what it was that I was going to say. But what I wanted to say is like Jennifer and Paul, I don't work for a newspaper and I never have and so I'm actually much more optimistic and less depressed. So I'm a little less worried about that sort of thing. But I actually think that journalism will survive the death of its major institutions. As a person coming out of high tech, all of the things that's happening to journalism look really familiar to me. High tech went through a massive simultaneous crackup of a lot of its institutions in the late 80s and there was a lot of talk about well, geez, America won't be on top anymore and Japan will come in and take over. And that was pretty silly when you say that and 10 years later you had Google's IPO. I think in essence what's going to happen is that what's happening is that we're becoming the same industry and thus the career norms that I experienced as a person who's always worked in high tech will become the career norms of journalists so there'll be much shorter job tenders. There'll be fewer titanics and more kayaks like Paul's. The good thing about this, everybody sort of focuses on bad things. Geez, how are we gonna have people for you? One of the great things is that we'll give you totally new ways to address stories that are really important. I think one of the best pieces of journalism that came out last year was the Walter Reed story but because of the limitations of even the best newsrooms they always give somebody some weasel the opportunity to stand up and quote him and say this is really an isolated incident, right? Whereas there's one story that's really hard to cover in the newsroom context that I think could be covered once the New York Times and Google are sort of one and the same which is the Iraq war has returned 6,000 amputees. I have one question. How many of those amputees have been issued their prostheses and had them fit in? That's an important question. It's very difficult to cover out of a single newsroom. You know, and a lot of our problems are like that. Public health issues, global warming, okay? So technology outside of the newsroom gives you really new ways to cover issues that are really important that I think are sort of under covered or hard to cover in a really compelling way that I like, okay? So how to make money, okay? I'll just give you sort of one insight about how high tech firms make money now that you're going to be one. News organizations take things that are free like public meetings, a lot of it's public information, right? I'm not talking here about access journalism, mostly talking about local journalism. And then they add value to them by adding editorial value, they edit them down, they make them into this nice package and they deliver it to my doorstep. Web organizations that make a lot of money and typically took things that used to cost a lot of money or that individuals couldn't buy and make them free. So if you have an idea that's like that, that's probably a good sign, okay? Peter Slaughter was here before and I don't see him in the audience but he actually stood up at the last session to defend the primary unit of citizen journalism, I refer of course to the cat picture. Community is about shared lived experience and most Americans are extraordinarily fortunate. Their experience of being in a particular place and being alive there when they walk out the door isn't news because they don't live in a war zone and they're not celebrities. Neither of these tragedies have fallen on them, right? So, but news is always a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that lived experience. So what you get when you sort of wrap community around a news source is a much more comprehensive poll. So learn to love and embrace your cat pictures. So you don't have to put them on the homepage, honestly. And that's all I had to say, thanks very much. David Kohn, would you like me to pull up your Twitter feed? No, that's all right. Okay. I thought you might tweet your way through your Facebook. That's actually, Lisa's is actually, I guess, good for me to bounce off of. My name is David Kohn. I work with news.net and also newstrust.net. So it's very, I'll try and sort of blast through this but I have two mantras. One is that the future is gonna be open and distributed. And the second one is that journalism is a process, not a product. News institutions, as we know them right now, their product, newspapers, are failing. But journalism is a process, I think, is alive and well right now and will continue to be, you know, is going to survive, as Lisa said, you know, what's going on right now. So the question is, is how does open, how can, how does that process become more open and more distributed? And some of the ideas of how I see the future are actually almost counterintuitive, non-tact. Right now, news institutions have physical space that are closed off. They're sort of, I tried to go to the San Francisco Chronicle the other day and I wasn't allowed in, essentially. But, you know. This was like ironic to you? Well, but why shouldn't the San Francisco Chronicle be like a library, open to the public? You know, in the future, I see newsrooms, the physical space as a library. Even a cafe, almost. You can go there, maybe there's some kiosk. If you want to find out. What? Well, no, no, to the extent that there's a source of information about your community. You can even talk to someone, a reporter there, who is well versed in all the other bloggers in the area. And so you can come in and say, well, I'm really curious about the history of, you know, my actual library and then they can tell you about what, you know, the most recent things. Now that's just the physical space. And again, it's counterintuitive. You know, maybe you'll take your hoverboard there, but, you know, I don't see why newsrooms, you know, can't sort of open up to the public. Or even if it's just every three months, have town hall meetings, so to speak. But that's one way that the physical space of newsrooms can become open and distributed. I also think that the business model, in a sense, can become open and distributed. It's a, I have a sort of cheerier version of what you were talking about, where it's not walled gardens, but maybe cooperative owning. You know, you can, if you take small donations, right, like, you know, $2 from 2,000 people, then you're able to sort of get something that's ad-free that has, you know, real editorial value to it. And I don't think $2 is, you know, too much to ask of people. So it's, I mean- I'm sorry, don't get me into my spuffles. Right, well, you know, if you add, you know, it's, there's always this talk of collective wisdom, but there's the power of collective pocketbooks too, which I think journalism hasn't tapped into 100%. And there's also, you know, on terms of content, right? So that's the business model. I've talked about the physical locations making that open and distributed. What about the content, right? Which is really what journalism in the end is about. The final part of that process is the final content. How do you make that open and distributed? And Richard talked about networked journalism. And again, it's local, but it's also national. Things like the environment. You can get people to report on their local environment, right, and local environmental degradations, but to the sense that you aggregate that, you have something that is of tremendous value more than the little stories. And I don't see why in my extreme sci-fi world, although it won't happen anytime soon, news organizations are sharing these stories, this content, right? That's the extent that, you know, local paper gets their scoop about environmental degradation, but they sort of aggregate it together so that they sort of create this wealth of information that is greater than any of the sums. Now, right now, we're still in this mentality of scoops and it's my information, I hoard it. But, you know, on the internet, if you're a silo, you're screwed. And so news organizations can almost, in a sense, create an associated newsrooms, kind of, instead of the Associated Press, you have this collective sort of idea on what stories need to be covered at a national level. Can't tell if it connects with Paul's idea of the temporary exclusive, or the 10th exclusive. It sounds like that's sort of the same thing, so maybe not. Well, I don't know. Is it okay if we go into a more engaged, I don't know if I get my temporary exclusive. I don't know, let's strap in. I'd like to hear what that means exactly, temporary exclusive. Temporary exclusive, if you remember the charts from this morning where you saw that on mainstream media, the sites, the biggest hits were all in the first couple of days. Well, basically what we would offer someone who has got great reach, and this is before your world arrives, and in return, they get to collect the inventory, including putting it on their website. All we'll do on our website is put the headline on the first paragraph and link to them. And then after two days, let's say, we'll post it on our site, we'll archive it, we will put additional background, and we will follow up. And we'll get the long tail. And since we're not collecting revenue, we don't care, but we'll get the additional reach. And the virtue of that process as a supplement to the process you're talking about is that it's very difficult on an aggregated basis to go beyond collecting facts or interviews on the same topic. If you wanna go deep into a subject, I think most of the time requires a fairly powerful central intelligence to have interviews that are creative rather than are horizontal. So there's two supplementary and important parts of the journalistic package. My answer would be quick. Yeah, it's very much related. Again, the mantra is how do you take the process of journalism, the process for me is collecting information, filtering information, and distributing information, and to the extent that technology makes those all, it changes them, we'll say. How do you make them more open and distributed and which goes against the tradition that we normally have right now. Got it, thanks. John Funabiki. Okay, so I'm John Funabiki, and I'm a professor of journalism at San Francisco State University where we have 650 journalism majors and I can't figure out where they're gonna go work. But they love doing what they're doing and we're trying to figure that out with them. I wanna take the opportunity to try to maybe inject a couple different ideas into here and so I'm gonna change the question. It's not what the news look like but what will be happening to our community and I think that a lot of our news and information and civic dialogue will center around passion, will be passion driven because I think that we're all really interested in what is not only relevant to our lives but is intimate to our lives. We're seeking connection and what we see in the new media world is that we're looking for the things that appeal to our passions and that the media producers are covering the things and producing the things that appeal to their passions and where they connect, we get sparks. So let me take off three trends that I think are really interesting that are particularly interesting to me because I kinda look at things from the ground up rather than from the sky down which has been a fantastic experience so far today. First of all is growing, increasing demographic diversity in the United States powered by globalism creating as you know as soon as you step outside the building incredibly large and energetic ethnic communities, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, et cetera, et cetera. You can see that everywhere. Second, an incredible explosion of ethnic news media. I'm happy to see that there are ethnic news media representatives here. A little louder please. I'm incredibly excited to see that we have ethnic media representatives here. Those of you who are from the Bay Area where I know that Dean Singleton owns nearly every single daily newspaper in the Bay Area say the San Francisco Chronicle which David could not break into. And so it's quite, it's quite, when you look at the map of the Bay Area and look at Singleton's holdings, it's kind of scary. But if you do something that I just did was to count off the number of ethnic news media outlets, homegrown, community-grown in print, radio, television, web, operations. I counted in the Bay Area more than 200 working in more than 25 languages. These are media outlets that are contributing to their and catering to the passions of their communities. And I really do speak, I really underscore the word passion. The second, third trend, demographic diversity, ethnic news media outlets growing. The third trend is the increasing practice of community-based and nonprofit organizations to be using tools of media. So of course, websites and publications, et cetera, et cetera. But increasingly using journalistic storytelling, narrative storytelling forms, short storytelling forms, films to talk about their work, to try to move their communities in certain directions to try to deal with the needs and services that are needed in those communities. And those are contributing to the civic change that's going on. So you have to couple the ethnic news media with this more community-driven, community-produced media, which may or may not be news, which may or may not be journalism, but is contributing to this civic dialogue that's going on. So I see those three things coming together to really shape at least one aspect of this media sphere that we have gone on. And I think if we were to expand the way we're talking about not be so media-centric, but be more community-focused, we might find some new things to talk about. Got it. And by the way, these communities you think of as ethnic, but also regional then, or it might not be regional. Yeah, ethnic, identity-based, cultural, and you can expand this notion of community to communities of interest as well. So whether you're a vegan, right, or religious or spiritual focused, you can see that as well. And that's why I say that I think that a lot of the media that will be coming out will be more passion-driven. Got it. Solano Larson. Hi. My provocation is shaped... Tell us just a little about your background first, sorry. It's shaped by my experience as managing editor of Global Voices, where I've been for about nine months, and previously before then as a commissioning editor with Open Democracy for almost five years. I'd like to preface it with a story. I was in the car here a couple of days ago, and actually it was yesterday, listening to BBC World Radio, and there was a report from China, correspondent in Beijing, who wanted to tell the story of a press tour that the Chinese government organized into Tibet. The problem was that the journalist from the BBC was not actually allowed to go on this tour. So the story got complicated by that, and what he wanted to say was that Western journalists went on a tour, and the tour was interrupted in Tibet by a group of protesting Tibetan monks. That was the story. But since he wasn't there, he had to borrow some audio that was recorded by another journalist, and then he interviewed the other journalist about the experience of being on this propaganda tour in Tibet. And both of them seemed to be trying to give the appearance that they knew what was going on. And all I could wonder was, first of all, why is this news? Why are these two, one Brit, one Australian, why are they trying to give the impression that they understand what's happening, and why don't they talk to some local people? And I understand that it's hard when you're a foreigner, you come, you don't know whether you talk to a local person and they might want to dupe you. They might be trying to use you for their own purposes to push a story, and essentially one of the issues that comes up is one that you get asked a lot when you work with bloggers. How do you know who you're talking to? How do you know who to trust? How does a journalist know that they can trust an ordinary Chinese or Tibetan person? Well, the answer to that is by knowing the region that they're writing about, by knowing and understanding something about the culture and the local context, which is why my provocation is that in 2013, there will be no foreign correspondence. And by that, I do not mean that a Brit, or an American, or a Danish Puerto Rican can't write about what's going on in China, or in Africa, or in Asia. It simply means that we will no longer have this parachute style of journalism where someone flies in, pretends to understand what's going on, and goes back out. The merging of having different cultures meet is really great. I mean, I'm not saying that somebody, a foreigner can't write about a situation and draw out some analysis, which is really useful to a home audience. What I'm saying is that we will have hopefully a world where the journalists will understand the language in the country that they're reporting about, that they will be able to read the local newspaper, and that they'll be able to give you this kind of informed commentary and analysis about what's happening. And this is something that we at Global Voices do to the extent that we can with bloggers. We have regional editors who are trying to work with locals to understand a very local situation. And I think if the mainstream media applied some of this to their coverage, we might be able to understand more of what's going on. And just to conclude, I think that what's happening in Tibet right now is a particularly good example of why this is definitely going to happen. Because locals now, to a wider extent than I think was possible before, are able to follow the news coverage themselves. So the idea that a CNN correspondent can write or report whatever they want and never have to report back to what Chinese people are saying, or Tibetan people, or all of a sudden they are now accountable to a global audience, even when they are reporting for local media. And that largely has to do with the internet and the fact that people are expressing themselves in citizen media worldwide. So Solana, let's use your provocation as a jumping off point. I can't tell if you are agreeing or disagreeing, or perhaps in parts yes and no, with Jonathan Krim's views, because Jonathan was saying that the future might hold to his relief, I think, more declaratory journalism. Or you can just say what you know, rather than having to go find a peasant to say it, and then say, some people say. On the other hand, your whole point is, maybe we don't need people to come in and say, I do declare, but rather there's people already there who can get their voices outward globally, as it were. Yeah, it's a more subtle point. I mean, I think there will continue to be many different forms of journalism, but I just find the notion that, oh, sorry, we can't have any news from Madagascar because we don't have any journalists on the ground there. I find that notion to be absurd because there are journalists who live in Madagascar. But of course, that's a different point, though. There are already no foreign correspondents in Madagascar. It's similar because there are also, oh, well, we can't cover this region of Iraq. There are journalists in Iraq. So it's about using that information. I mean, I still think you can have, these notions of factual, you can still have, he said, she said so-and-so reported, but by using different kinds of sources and accepting that journalism can come from people who aren't white or aren't Western educated is part of it. So here's another question that is free for the whole panel, I think, also launching off of what you said and harkening back to the depressing montage in the movie we saw before our panel began, which is part of what I heard people fearing losing as journalists were getting laid off with people who subscribed to a certain set of professional standards and who knew them 24-7. Your identity is as a journalist and you can't be bought off even after the office closes and you go home. In your view, is there still room for people to separate themselves from the rest of the public and hold themselves to a profession that says that when I express my view, I have certain obligations or limitations or is that? Absolutely, I would not suggest that we turn reporters into opinion mongers. I think it's more about the voice and structure and the form of our storytelling, which right now, I believe, is contributing to a sense and that movie not withstanding voters or readers are voting with their feet about newspaper readership. And I think, unfortunately, our structure, which was born out of very high ideals about that separation, is less useful and less credible than someone who still needs to do all of the reporting, still may quote people in a story, but is much more free to declare what they've learned and what they know in definitive terms instead of this sort of, you know, we're just gonna sort of lay out bits for you and then we're gonna let you decide. And it's just less useful. The other Jonathan. I just think that during the last 24 hours, the three most interesting stories have all been from nonprofit organizations, so the BBC, ProPublica and Global Voices. And, you know, it seems to me that what's needed and what's so missing is some way to finance more nonprofit journalism because, I mean, as we all know, our public media systems are dying and they're dying because they're being starved. And what do you think of David's asking everybody for $2 model? Well, I mean, obviously that's what PBS tries to do, right? You have pledge dives every quarter. He might have had something more like a tip jar in mind, I don't know. It's a tip jar, but, well, here's my, here's like, well, you'll even take me and you guys can all shame me for this. Like, I haven't donated to NPR because to me, ah, there it is, I know, I suck. But here's why, let me explain my reasoning. I'm donating to this large organization that holds up journalistic principles, right? And I'm afraid of, well, what if I'm just donating to a $40,000 stapler, right? I wanna create, I envision, I envision a more direct access. Is there a name to stapler? Uh, exactly. But I mean, like, what Solana was talking about was like a distributed and open newsroom. And I think that, you know, your original question that started this discussion, which has now gone new way, was, you know, how do we keep them up to professional standards? And to some extent, someone earlier, I forgot, who said, you know, the cream rises to the crop. And I think it's a false assumption to say that if you do open it, and you do make it open and distributed, that you're gonna end up with all this crap. Granted, the technology has to come in to allow filtering, right? I mean, it's not like, you know, but that's, take newspapers as a product away. We no longer have newspapers as a product. So what journalism does is a service. Journalism in the end is a process, and that's a service. So one of the services can be, journalist as guide, another service can be, journalist as host of a conversation, a physical host or a long online community. So we need to rethink our services. David, I think you've just put it back into Jennifer's lap, because I think she was the one who had such serenity about the idea that the best stuff would rise to the top. Well, I just, what did you mean? You said rise and top. What did those mean? Well, first of all, I mean, quality will trump quantity always. By trump, you mean, will become more salient in the public eye, will be more paid for? People are gonna read good stuff, they're not gonna read or consume crap. And what I also mean, though, well, I'm not saying, I'm not saying anything that anybody in this room does is crap. One person's crap, it'll be someone else's. Until you said that, I don't think people thought that's what you were saying. Well, why did they know? They were doing, because they believed there's a bunch of people outside the room watching Fox News right now. Let me just get to the point, and if you feel like listening, stay with me, and not just keep twittering on your laptop. Now you're insulting the people in the room. But they're gonna hear me, because they were eyeing their friends. No, what I also wanna say about that is it doesn't rise automatically, or by itself. There are editors and producers and people who make those choices, and as egalitarian as we all wanna be, people must make those choices for other people. A good writer just doesn't happen to just expose him or herself. Someone grabs them out, and what I think will happen is there's many more options for people who would never be able to walk into the San Francisco Chronicle to now say hey. Fair enough, this is David's collection, filtration, distribution, and on the filtration part, you're right, that's a very powerful element of the story. I'm wondering what you have to say to the skepticism that the filtration is selecting to meet a market demand, which wants to hear about things that the particular people in this room think why is not cream at top? Now, it might be a disconnect, I don't know. I don't think you can argue against what people want to consume, and- Wow, it's just amazing for the NPR person to say. Well, I mean, I'm a new media director, in case you're wondering, I was just talking outside, and ideas are a marketplace. People, the free market will decide what people wanna talk about, and if it's, as my six-year-old said, Britney Spears who shaves her head, or if it's health problems. Does that mean the cream rises to the top or the top rises to the top? Do you have an independent view of the cream? What's the top? What do you mean? The top means the most popular, the most valued. Is there a definition of quality news, or quality information, independent of what the market votes has to say? Well, yes. I mean, I think it's a two-part thing. I think there's quality because there's a way to tell a story that's compelling. There's a way to see a story that's compelling. That's what's gonna rise to the top, but I also wanna just make sure that you do still need editors and producers that choose what is good. And a lot of its reason why I think certain blogs are so popular is because they have a personality. And you know, I connect with that person. Therefore, what you said, I like who you are, I like what you're about. Therefore, what you're about to tell me, or show me, is something I know I'm gonna like too. And so that's where me, at KCRW, that's what I worry about. But I wanna also talk about this tip-dart thing because everybody said this before, but collecting $2 from 2,000 people is only $4,000. And I'll tell you, there's not 10 people who can pay their mortgage based on that. And that's something we all have to acknowledge. And I'm not buying $40,000 staplers, but I do have 70 people that work at KCRW who wanna live and do what they do. And I think it's important and we have to quantify that and it has to be something that's valuable and that people pay for. So that's all. Yeah, quickly and then let's get other voices in who haven't spoken. One quick thing about filters is there's different types of filters, right? Dig is a filter. When I wanna read fake Steve Jobs, I go to dig and there's a fake Steve Jobs, so it's great. I wouldn't call it journalism, obviously. So really it is about providing different types of filters and meeting the demands of, you know. And do you see dig as pointing the way towards the future? Well, I wouldn't call, say dig is, you know, dig is a fascinating thing and it is a filter, right? It's a filter of a sort, but when you say I'm digging something, that's really vague. I don't know what that means to dig something other than to say that, right, subverting profit. Perfect example. I understand that there's gonna be a constant battle. I mean, police officers have to fight gangs and then there's that scaling up war. But here it's all private parts. It's a code, it's a coding war between, you know, subverting profit and dig. The same way that it's like, you know, a war of arms in the real world. I mean, I'm not saying that it's gonna be perfect, but dig is a filter of a nature, right? I think it can be gamed easier because digging is vague. But this is all a side argument. I'm just, I wanted to bring up the point that there's different types of filters that you can introduce to meet different demands. Got it. There are people in this vicinity who may not just be passing the time leading against the wall, but ready to go to the mic. Is that true? Yes. Please. The two BBC journalists who were talking about something they didn't know and I just thought, well, this is kind of like this panel here. So, I just wondered if anybody. We call that conclusory journalism. If anybody, if you'd all address the television journalism in 2013, we sort of somehow television hasn't appeared much around in this conference. Anybody wanna speak to television journalism? Is television converged? Is it still a separate creature? Is it? Television, well, I mean, my sense is that the 500 channel universe will have disappeared by 2013. In other words, there will not be 10 cable TV news channels that much more of this will be brought to you on demand, on a video on demand basis. So, I think the proliferation of voices in terms of the cacophony of cable lobbyating will have disappeared. Solana. I think in 2013, we won't be that obsessed with format. Whether it's television or radio or text or it will become less interesting and relevant. Those divisions will be fluid, I think. It will be about information content and I think journalists and others who provide information will choose the medium that lends itself best to telling stories. Do you think we'll be less or more obsessed with institutional brand? I don't know what the format is, but I get it all from Fox. Washington Post will be a TV. Right, but still a brand. I was just gonna, yeah, I was just gonna say, I almost, I always think about this almost from the reverse, which is, I wonder if in 2013, the dominant internet experience is going to be essentially like a television experience. It will be dominantly video. In one way, if by that you mean television. No, I mean the internet experience will be much less oriented around text as it is today. But still possibly two-way video then. Yes, absolutely. Got it. So over here. Hi, it's Richard Sanderson from the BBC. Two things. Firstly, I agree with Solana. I think that the model of foreign correspondent is way overdue for being completely reinvented and I think that's partly because of globalization and diversity and some of the things that happened before and the notion of, you know, white Western are flying in to report on something they don't know anything about, is just not acceptable about, you know. That's one reason. I think the other reason is one of authenticity and the idea of the blow dry, expensively suited dish monkey standing on the hotel roof. You know, that's not journalism and everybody knows it's not journalism. And therefore we all, and the BBC is guilty of it as like everybody else, but, you know. Thank you very much indeed. It's just not gonna be acceptable in, I hope, five years time. So I agree with you. Let me just add that the World Service has 400 indigenous stringers that we mainly use and I don't know what yesterday's issue was. The second point, but it's related, is to pick up Jonathan Crimm's point about decorative journalism. And I said a little bit yesterday, I think we're getting a terrible model about opinion versus impartiality and so on. And the BBC, we have our organs of opinion surgically removed when we join the organization. We're not allowed to have any. However, having said that, there's a big difference in my view between impartiality and objectivity and objectivity for me is about evidence and evidence-led journalism. And I think, I say to reporters in the BBC, you can say anything you want as long as you provide the evidence to support it. And then the viewer or listener can decide what they agree with that interpretation based on the evidence you give them. So evidence-led journalism, which could be decorative or whatever you want it to be, I think it's absolutely essential and I really feel that the kind of technology that we're having and what the internet can provide and absolutely global voices or the 400 stringers in the World Service, if we can stop turning this stuff in on ourselves and point it outwards again, we can get to an evidence-led journalism which I think could be a real breakthrough and very healthy. And in 10, 15 years, do you see BBC still as a global brand for news or will it have disaggregated? The various stringers can just pipe directly out. Oh, I think there'll still be a brand, yes, called BBC, I hope so anyway. Yeah, no, I think there will be. Pay my pension. That was impartial, but not objective. A couple of reactions. Well, I totally agree, having once been a parachute journalist many, many years ago, I totally agree that- You have to either shout or just dial it for Michael Will. The model of the parachute journals is, should have been buried many years ago. The unfortunate reality is that it has not been buried and still serves a commercial purpose. The second point I'd like to make, and unfortunately will continue to serve a commercial purpose. I think the second point I wanna make is we shouldn't fool ourselves that there will be one model, right? I mean, branding will be one strategy, but there will be other, aggregation will be another strategy. The local journalist or the freelance journalist will become more of a social entrepreneur if that's what he or she really wants to do. That person is gonna find a way to survive, just as I was just, we had a program last night with a documentary filmmaker. Documentary filmmakers have struggled with this issue of survival for much longer than kind of your mainstream journalist has. So journalists have to kind of relearn a new way of working, unfortunately. Yeah, Paul. I wanna ask Jonathan in front of me, when you were talking about the model of the Washington Post and other platforms in the future as being devoted to declarative journalism, I mean, in my years at the Wall Street Journal, I was a fan of declarative journalism and often insisted that stories, particularly certain kinds of stories made a point, but we were not party-linked and in fact, prided ourselves on the fact that we weren't predictable in the news columns. And do you see us moving more toward a model of the federalist versus the Republican and we're gonna get nearly all of our news through people who are objective but not impartial or will there still be a place for organizations that produce journalism that is both objective and impartial, impartial in the sense that it can fall on either side of political divides? I hope the latter, but I think it's going to be incumbent upon, if you follow the model of being more, both conclusionary and personality-driven by allowing your writers to express themselves, then it's incumbent upon organizations to have a very diverse group of thinkers in the newsroom and I couldn't agree more with Richard, it has to be evidence-based, so the evidence should lead you wherever it leads you and it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to always be on one side or on another side, at least, I would hope not. Over here. Michael Smollens of Dotsub. Just a sort of an overriding comment listening to all of you and the discussions over the last 24 hours, I think we are all privileged to be part of an explosive delta of change that's increasing so fast that the technology and the ability to do things that we all know important are far outpacing our bodies and our minds and our cultures and our society's ability to absorb these changes and so I hear a frustration is that people don't know which is going to be the winner because they're so used to immediate gratification and I think that that sort of a problem is only going to be getting worse. I mean, in our case, language has always been a barrier and it's so obvious to us that everybody should embrace the fact that everybody should want to see stuff in other language but it takes a very, very long time and I think we all need to add a little bit of patience because the culture and everything will sort of evolve as the technology allows things to happen faster and the solutions and feeling good about them are going to happen much faster than our ability as human beings to absorb them. That's a kind of a problem. But Michael, here's the problem. There are certain people who are panicking. I mean, if you look at the LA Times newsroom, they're in full-out panic and they don't even think they can wait for the solutions and my feeling is that these large news brands will survive because you will need, as you say, an editor. You will need someone to help sort out all of this but right now they're firing people. I mean, just the little documentary clip we saw. They're in total panic. They're not waiting. They have no patience. I think if the only problem that we faced was the rapid pace of change, I for one would be a happy camper. The problem is that the rapid pace of change is threatening a lot of people's jobs, their pensions, their children's education. I mean, it's very personal as well and so that's the frustration you hear. The music industry, the four giants of the music industry thought that they could litigate their way against file sharing and their music industry is down 15% a year for the less and Hulu, if you take a look at Hulu, the networks and other people said, we can't have it the way, we've gotta have a site that's really accepting what it is so I think here's an example in seven or eight years where the television and the movie industry realize if they try to do what the music industry did, they're gonna get their lunch handed to them as well so here, it took seven years but Hulu is a perfect example of large media companies doing something that I think is a very good solution as opposed to waiting for small entrepreneurs to do it. Lisa, you've been patiently waiting to get in. I'll get you a mic on. Actually, when you got, I was struck by your comment that you have 650 students and you don't know where they're going to go but for you guys who work at Annenberg, I have a challenge for you, I think this would be really great. You say you have 650 students, imagine how great it would be if they all applied to work at Google at the same day, right? I mean, why wait around for the internet to invade your newsrooms and crush them? Counter-invade, you know? I mean, everybody talks about Google News but honestly, if that weren't associated with Google, I don't think anybody would really consider it a very good product. Lots of journalism can be practiced in places that don't look like newsrooms today and the secret about those places, which if you don't know already because I work in those places, they're stuffed with liberal arts graduates. You don't have to be a computer scientist to work there and the other great thing about them is there's no adult supervision so you can just sort of get hired for anything and then just go kind of do what you want. They also have free snacks 24 hours a day. Free snacks 24 hours a day and often there's a lot of funding for projects that you want to do. If you can make a good enough argument and your argument doesn't often have to be all that great. Right over here. Hi, I'm Sahab from Real Girls Media and I wanted to comment on what you said about content, good content rising to the top. I actually completely agree with that and I think the best example is the music industry where we've had great music come straight out of the industry, come from independent, my space and things like American Idol. I think if the music's great, people will- American Idol seems grass roots to you. I'm sorry? I wasn't asking this in a valence. No, I didn't hear the- I was just wanting to expand on it. I didn't hear the question. American Idol seems grass roots to you. No, no. But what it is, is it's, which leads to my next point of filtering and what types of filtering we have. There's so much content out there that I don't doubt that there's great content that doesn't have a platform or a voice. And I think that there's two ways that it rises to the top. For our particular magazine, we feature, sorry, just to explain, we get content from user generated, we get editorial content and then partner content as well and so our editors decide which content is featured but our users decide what they like. So there's two ways of this streaming. That doesn't mean there isn't great content buried deep down in the internet but I think something like American Idol is a way for the people's choice versus the curation. And I think at the end of the day, the good content wins. Whoever puts it out there. Would anyone think that the current TV ratings say that the best stuff is always rising to the top? How about arrested development? Well, I think we have to get into a conversation about what is quality. I mean, to some, we're so used to sensationalized media in this country. So deal or no deal is quality? The dabble's in order. I had that debate with my father for hours. He thinks so, I don't. But to him it is and that's the point if there's enough people like him that believe that, then yes, it is. So there's quality but it has to be socialized. If you either have great content and you have an army behind you that thinks so, so those are the options as I see it. Jennifer, this is your zone. Are you going to say something? I was just going to say that in response to your very smart comment there, which it was, that television has a very limited distribution network. They only have 24 hours in which to broadcast. So deal or no deal, man. That's going to make more money for them. But if there's a wider distribution network, then there's going to be more better things. How about that? I just don't think there's a long tail in television. Sorry. I don't know anything about it. I think we're talking apples in orange just to some extent, because deal or no deal is entertainment, is made for entertainment. The majority of TV is- This panel's sponsored by NBC. Right. No, I mean, you know what I mean. I mean, the extent that the television is where you come after a hard day of work and zone out, it's not, it's entertainment, not news and information. It's a drool or no drool. Right. Thank you. Sorry, Paul. The single most profitable magazine in the time ink stable is what? Yes. It accounts for a majority of the revenues and the profits. Now, is that journalism? Or is that entertainment? Entertainment. Well, whatever, who says it's both? So I know it's the first time that you've seen before. My name is Disa Philadelphia. I'm a master's student here in public diplomacy. But before that, for eight years, I was a correspondent and reporter for Time Magazine. And I left, and then all my friends got downsized. And they closed all the bureaus. And I'm one of those people who doesn't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Because I do believe that there's a difference in my mind between news gathering and what becomes fully realized journalism. And I think that news gathering does need a revolution where we have ordinary people telling us what the kind of reporting that Solana talks about, because they can. And as a reporter, I'm happy that I can get firsthand information about what's going on in Burma from Burmese. And I think now we've got the tools for that. But in terms of the question of whether or not there is of what quality is, when Time Magazine said it was no longer a reporting magazine, it was more news analysis magazine, that was fine with me. Except I didn't think that the analysis they were providing was very good. So to me, it's a matter of really to a niche where it's important to your audience defining what you are and then really delivering on that. And I think that some of these changes that are happening are forcing old media to do that. And I think that's a good thing. We are running out of time. I want to have the three people still left at the mics have a chance to get in. So let's just hit it one after the other. OK, quick question. First point of information for Jonathan Kaplan. Virgin Mobile already offers a phone in the UK, which you can make calls for free as long as you listen to ads before the call. It's actually 30 seconds, not 15 seconds. The future is now. Exactly. My question is, Jonathan Grimm talked about giving reporters a voice. Do you think that that will lead people to become more attached to people rather than to news brands? 10 seconds or fewer? Both. About that. Over here. Yeah, I'm just going to say the question is kind of what news do you envisage? It seems that people are asking what kind of news do they want? It seems to me there's a very elitist agenda here, which is we're all kind of saying what kind of lovely thing would we like. And we're all talking about quality, which means what we think is very good. And I think that that's fine. You know, that's great. I agree with what most people describe. We don't seem to be asking what the world needs or what people want. And I think one of the reasons why, and the main is that there's an English person coming over to the home of capitalism, it's because we seem to have forgotten the value of competition and market forces in journalism. It helps you become relevant. It helps you to excel. And I think the danger is that we're abandoning that. Got it. Steve Schultz. Oh, not Steve Schultz. You sure look like Steve Schultz. Hi. But the record show, somebody not Steve Schultz is about to ask a question. Not really. Chris Anderson, but not. Look, that's Steve Schultz over there. Just can I just say, separated at birth. I feel like my question is anticlimactic now. I just wanted to know if people in the panel and the audience are comfortable with the world in 2013, whether it would be better journalism and news available for anyone who wants it. But there's no way to make anyone want anything. And the era of the omnibus informed citizen is probably gone if it ever existed. So we have to answer this with a community poll. OK, here's the questions with moderator privilege. Put simplistically, 2013 is a world of place where if you want to know what's going on, you will find it easier to do so than today. If your answer is yes, raise your hand. If your answer is no, raise your hand. Wow. That's a scary result actually. If you were intuitive, it would say we're all wrong, right? Well, with that, we have the wisdom and the optimism of the crowds. There's no real way to tie this up except to say certain key words kept coming up again and again, such as quality, evidence, news. And I think lurking out there was truthiness, even though we didn't actually say it. So please join me in thanking our panelists for a terrific...