 Good morning. Two quick administrative questions. One, can you hear me okay in the back? You can hear me fine. I know you probably can't see me, but that's my parents fault. And is my presentation up on the screen? No. So if we can grab the presentation up on the two screens, great. All right, we're ready to go. So firstly, I really want to say that it's a privilege for me to get a chance to speak to you all. It's a rare and often sobering experience for me to speak to journalists and people in the media profession because what I do three years ago was seen by many of them as the rise of the enemy. And in fact, what we found is it's been quite different. And what I want to do is not necessarily talk to you just about citizen journalism. What I want to talk to you is about the next 730 days that in fact we are standing at a very critical fork in the road as human beings. And it's actually a very quite a scary place. On the one hand you have more demographic change than you have ever had at any other point in human history. We are seeing incredible swelling of different age groups that are fundamentally different people in their behaviors than they were a decade ago. We are not the same people we were a decade ago. You have Gen Y and the Millennials, people born 1981 and after which I'll talk a little bit more about in a minute. And these individuals do not think, act, socialize or have expectations around news in the way that we do. For the most part they're primarily aliens compared to us. You then have a middle fork in the road which is technology and on the technology front we have seen more change in a decade than we've seen at any other point in human history. So you now have the web which answers a very important question for us sociologically. Which is if every human being on the planet was connected within the click of a button how would that change us as people? And in fact we are seeing the reaction and result of that today that we are now connected within the click of a button whether it's through a mobile device or the web the shrink in the actual space between us as people is fundamentally different. And the third of course is the environment. So now we stand in a place where we are reaping what we have sowed. That the Earth's core is at its hottest temperature since it's been from the melting of the polar ice caps and we are facing all kinds of challenges with Tom referred to earlier. But how we get ourselves out of the mess that we put ourselves in. So the reality is there is no such thing as a futurist when it comes to journalism or technology. All we know is that 10 years ago had people told us what was going to be happening today we probably would never have guessed it. If you fast forward to 730 days you will see incredible change compared to where we were before and what I want to do is give you a bit of an insight into where we are going to be over that period and how journalism is going to change. And this was the turning point I think. It was this moment in time the tsunami in Southeast Asia where we changed fundamentally as human beings. We went from being a culture of people that had a line of communication where we were spoken to where we were observers to being participants in our own world. This was for all intents and purposes the first account of a global event where people like you and I covered became the eyes of years for the world where you had people standing in the line of the human crisis and instead of protecting themselves or instead of running or instead of looking to traditional journalism to cover what was going on around them they covered it themselves. That moment changed from where we became watchers to where we became people that lived and observed and shared. It was a fundamental turning point for which we have not yet turned back. And this is another one of those moments in that evolution. This is a hand, a photo that was uploaded to now public. It's a photo of an intake officer at the Houston Astrodome during Hurricane Katrina. And why this is important is because this photograph shows the difference between user-generated media and traditional media. This was an example of an intake officer who had run out of paper and had run out of pens and had basically run out of time, took a photo of her hand with all the phone numbers of the people that were trying to connect with their families, uploaded it to the internet through us and multiple other sites, and within 45 minutes three families were united in New Orleans because of this one photograph. It is the power of the change of what it goes to when you move from a passive role in media to an active role. And what I'm going to do over the next 30 minutes is walk you through the questions of how did we get here? Because if you look at those examples and you think about this fork and road that we're at the bitter reality is many historians have taken great pride in thinking that we can predict our future from our past. But I would argue that actually fundamentally today we are at a point in history where we cannot, that there are only small elements that we will be able to understand based on our past because there are three fundamentally different elements that have changed at our foundations. And I'll talk about each of them. What is time, the other is access, and the other is economics. I will then talk to you a little bit about citizen journalism and crowd sourcing. So first of all, all I really want to say about citizen journalism is that it is a fallacy. It does not exist. Citizen journalism was a term invented by journalists to define an activity that they could not understand. What citizen journalism is, is not journalism at all. Journalism is a skill, it is an art form. Simply because you have a camera doesn't make you a movie producer. Journalism requires analysis and skill set and talent. The difference of what we do and what all of us do is we are an army of eyes and ears that can see and witness and experience and be there where traditional journalism and coverage cannot. So there is a fundamental difference between journalism and reporting or eyewitness reporting in particular. So when you hear people talking about citizen journalism remember that the journalism part is actually for the most part a fallacy. Crowdsourcing. You'll hear a lot about crowd sourcing over the next year if you haven't heard a lot about it already. Crowdsourcing is one of those terms that people use that sounds complicated but it's pretty easy to understand. All crowd sourcing means is you take a task that was normally very expensive that was done by one person or a team of small people and you use economies of scale through the web and mobile to actually take that task over thousands if not millions of people. There are lots of great examples of it and in fact time I'll tell you more outside of the journalism space because I think one of the great leveling effects of the web and mobile is that it has allowed us to actually use those economies of scale to get a lot smarter and a lot more efficient at some of the things we've traditionally done. I'll tell you a little bit about my company, about now public what we do, what we've done on a daily basis over the last three years I will then also talk about the changing face of breaking news in journalism and not just how technology has changed it but also from those three forks in the road particularly demographics and technology why the market that we are walking into in the next three years is fundamentally different than it was even six months ago. And I'll tell you what we've learned now public was really the pioneer in citizen journalism with the exception of online news in Korea which is a very different model than what we do we were really the first people doing this in the market and over the three years that we have been engaged in user generated news we've learned a lot. I'll also tell you a little bit about what's next and again I am not a futurist I barely know what I'm going to eat for lunch so what I can tell you is what we think where the market is headed and where we're going over the next 730 days and then I want to leave you with what I think you can do what people in the media can do what journalists can do what citizens and just human beings can do to be active participants in this process and not let it slip you by so I said at the beginning that it was very difficult for the old theory of history that our past will predict our future to be true and correct because there are some foundational things that have changed in humanity and in society that I'm not sure we all yet understand 100% but it will make our future very difficult to predict based on our past and the first of those foundational elements is time now it is clear that we know historically that everything has a cycle stock markets and stock market bubbles will have cycles real estate markets will have cycles the education of a 13 year old child will have a cycle and although I don't know the answer physicists struggle to figure it out theoretically every day what is undeniable is that over the last thousand years time has shrugged us time is the only commodity that we do not own and it is actually physically shrinking our cycles are shrinking so take a look at the stock market and what Tom mentioned earlier the first stock market bubble effectively one of the first was the Tula bubble in Holland the next major stock market crash came 65 to 70 years later if you look at the dot com disaster in 1999 basically 2000 the next market crash came effectively 8 years later we shrug from 65 to 8 years and as Tom showed you in his graph it is expected and I also believe that the next market crash will come in and around in 2013 5 years later so the markets are shrinking time is shrinking the next bubble, the next crash, the next cycles will become shorter and shorter and more intense and more intense if you take a look at simple things like the education of a 13 year old there is no question that 13 year olds across the world, developing world and otherwise are much smarter than when we were 13 years old I mean my 13 year old nephew came to visit me in Vancouver a few months ago and he had in his app sack a copy of Thomas Friedman's flat pot crowd the new book about Thomas's view on the world and the environment and when he stepped off the plane I said, he was 13 I said, what are you doing with that dog? is it for school? and he said, no it's not for school I'm just really concerned about the globalization of our planet and how it's affecting the economy and I was like, what? when I was 13 I could barely achieve government so there is no question that time is shrinking on us and although I don't offer an explanation neither do theoretical physicists the truth is that our cycles are shrinking the second foundation that is fundamentally changed is access I said to you before, imagine what would happen if every human being on the planet was connected at the click of a button and as Tom rightly pointed out as mobile proliferation occurs and just to give you a sense of that expansion it is expected today and numbers differ a little bit depending who you talk to roughly on Earth today there are 400 to 500 million personal computers, Macs and PCs there are today north of 2 billion mobile phones is that about right? 3 see a group 3 billion mobile phones it is anticipated by 2012, 2013 and that number will double what's interesting about that is it is expected by 2012 and 2013 that 80% of those devices will be fast broadband mail and not fast broadband in a 3G context but moving to 4 and 5G where you will have faster web connectivity on your device than you will in your home or your office so fundamentally this concept of access and immediacy has taken us to a level that we have never seen historically before the third foundational change that has occurred and I think this is actually the most important and it's the one that's not talked about a lot and that is the sliding scale in economics Chris Anderson from Wire Magazine wrote a book called Free and in that book he argued that we were moving due to costs and other economies of scale to a market where things that people used to pay for were now going to be free I think Chris is right theoretically but there's something that he's missing which is that what we are experiencing now is not just a credit and a debt crisis it is a crisis based on everything I've just talked about which is access to incredibly fast immediacy of people shrinking of time changing of demographics and what that has led to is a clear exposure in the fact that many businesses got wrong what people were willing to pay for they misunderstood the value chain and the greatest example of that was music business and body of journalism is on its heels with the same problem the music business when Napster and peer to peer file sharing started I used to work in a prior life at Universal Music in the States and Canada they all thought it was about fevering but it was never about fevering it was never about theft it was about people that were telling a company in an industry that they were offering a product at a price and a medium in format that they didn't want and in fact as we're finding the value for most people is not in buying music it's in experiencing music and the music business is just starting to understand where the real value chain sits in the economics of what they do journalism is facing the exact same crisis the question is what do people really care about what are they willing to pay for why has the CEO of Ryanair in Ireland committed that by 2012 he believes that not a single seat on his airline will cost a penny that people don't value the point A to point B it's an expectation what they value is everything else around them entertainment, baggage, quality of food all of the other things they don't pay for except for the seat so these three foundational changes have made it very difficult for us to know where we're going based on our past let me tell you a little bit about my company and what we do at NowPublic so when we started NowPublic it was started by three fairly senior entrepreneurs in the space who knew nothing really about news but set out with a very very lofty goal to do to the news business what Skype did to the telecom business to create overnight 15 years over I should say the largest news network in the world and to do that using crowdsourced which is what I mentioned earlier taking a task where if a bomb went off or a plane went down or the 500th home run was hit whatever it was where normally it would be difficult to have a human being there we would have multiple human beings there covering the story because the theory was when news happens and when news breaks someone was going to be there and that someone was going to be able to record it so effectively what we were doing was building an organization and if Baron von Reuters hadn't started Reuters and he had to do it all over again today what would it look like now what we did do which I think is interesting is we thought we were in the news business but in fact we're not in the news business what we actually are is in the intelligence business in effect what we have created is an environment where everyone can watch and monitor and listen and plug into conversations as they happen a lot of time around the world so we basically built a news intelligence network which didn't exist before and the company today is the fastest growing news agency in the world we have more coverage and more reporters and more places than any other news agency on the planet by far and I'll explain that in a minute we raised about $12.5 million led up to venture capital in New York we are large partners with the Associated Press we currently have at our own web property over 3 million readers a month and we have today which is I think amazing we produce about 7 to 800 stories per day and from 160,000 contributing reporters in over 160 countries in over 6,000 cities which includes six paid bureaus that we have our editor and chief is Rachel Nixon who was the deputy world editor at the BBC in London now, what's important to note about that 160,000 number is that 160,000 made up in there is also 7,000 professional journalists so on an apples to apples basis in terms of our numbers we are 20 to 25% larger than the Associated Press on a very comparative basis so how is news changing and how is the changing face of breaking news and journalism the first thing I think that's important to remember is that the very cycle of news has changed news was typically something that was historic once it was posted it had already happened so the cycle went a little something like this when an event occurred somebody witnessed it and it was reported and typically that's where the traditional news organization stopped their coverage now some would argue through letters to the editor and comments and feedback moves that in fact there was a bit of a change maybe that's so but what has happened in the last even seven months is that cycle has changed dramatically now after it's reported however and whomever reported it the crowd wherever they may be interacts with the event and with people lifetime as it's happening actually thereby changing the event as it occurs so if you look at the way news is actually evolving today news is no longer about something that is reported it is no longer about something that is historical it is about somebody notifying the world that something is going on and allowing the world to interact with that event lifetime and actually change that event as it's happening it gives you and I the ability through blogging and micro blogging, photo, video, phone to actually change the very course of history I'll give you a small example of how that happened in our world and now public at the Republican Party convention in Minnesota we got notified through some of our own systems that there was a riot and a protest breaking out outside of the theater once it became clear that several people were reporting that this was happening all of a sudden people from all over the world interacted with the people through Twitter, through us through other platforms with the very rioters on the ground someone sent a notice saying the police are about to bring in riot gear hundreds of people who did not live in Minneapolis phoned the Minneapolis police department the phone was ringing off the hooks and finally police stood down all caused by an interaction for people who didn't even live there again, an example of the news changing and history changing for people who were passive participants elsewhere from where the event was occurring but what Tom said is correct that what it does not replace is analysis so analysis comes after so the New York Times long ago almost a year and a half ago gave up on the fact that they were a news organization when you read the New York Times when you read their headlines over a year and a half ago they changed their philosophy that they assume you know the news they assume already that you know what's happened what they're trying to do is go a layer deeper and provide the analysis to help you make sense of the world so the analysis comes later but it's still fundamental and very important I'm sure you all saw this in the news yesterday this was a great example of how user generated news happened just 24 hours or 48 hours on lost by track of time already ago a plane crashes into the Hudson River in New York and for those of you who've been to New York that is a you can imagine a mesmerizing event first footage caught of that event was of a person looking out their office window taking a photograph and a video of the plane coming down the world was notified by an office worker when the plane had crashed and slowly everyone started poking out their windows and taking different photos and going to the scene interacting with survivors and because of the crowd's interaction with that event the real hero came out which was the pilot the person who would have typically been thought of as the villain on that occasion truthfully came out because of coverage of the micro blogosphere and the blogosphere as being the hero so just a very small example of something now there has also been a shift in fundamentals in the news business which is very important number one there is a lot of discussion about hyper local news hyper local news as it ties to geography is becoming more and more of a fallacy lots of newspaper organizations around the western world have experimented with micro blogging networks in neighborhoods and in cities and the truth is most people don't care most people when they want to get hyper hyper local news expect it to be pushed to them they will not come for it so if I want to know about a garbage strike in my neighborhood or school closing or a theft or an arrest I expect that I will be notified of that I am not going to look for it what has happened is we have moved to this era of the hyper personal where it is no longer about where I live where I live is a part of my person but because we are all connected on this global basis now the solar system around myself that I care about is much broader and my locality though I live in Vancouver Canada may very well be tied to an event going on in a some India that I am very personally connected to but my local media would never cover but it is more important to me than the garbage strike in my neighborhood so we have moved to a very big change in this and one of the most important changes was Facebook the biggest change in my opinion in the last 10 years of news was Facebook for one very simple reason that it proved the theory that people were more interested in the hyper personal than they were in the hyper local in North America people under the age of 15 checked their Facebook news feed 10 times to 1 to a traditional news feed and when asked why the reasons come in two one is because this is the kind of news that traditional news organizations sloughed off that's not news if your kids have a birthday party and the photos of your nephew's birthday party nobody cares about that well they're true they don't but they care to you and a very small isolated group of people who care it was very hard and difficult to cover but the second thing is what most people talk about especially people under 40 is that they are tired of turning on the news every day and getting depressed and seeing that the world around them is a constant reminder of failure and disaster and starvation and problems and that their source on Facebook is actually the source of uplifting that it's about family it's about friends, it's about social and personal and it is clear and undeniable as I showed you in a few interviews that the crowd are better reporters than any journalist will ever be on reporting not on analysis when you have 400 people at a scene 3 people at a scene they will always do a better job as a crowd in just witnessing and experiencing and sharing that experience than anyone else will ever do thirdly we need to accept in the news business that you have lost a generation I don't know if it was the same in the Middle East but certainly in North America if you were an intern at the Washington Post and you walked into the room 10 years ago and said you really need to focus on 18 to 25 year olds we never do any marketing for 18 to 25 year olds you would be laughed out of the room because the dirty secret of the news business was that they didn't care about people under the age of 25 because the assumption was when you buy your house when you have your kids when you have a mortgage that's when you get it that's when people start to read and focus on news big problem most North Americans and now most people in the world develop their news consumption habits when they were 12 years old on Google so there is an entire demographic that has been lost that no longer goes and looks for news they either search for it they ask for it or they get recommended if you looked at people under the age of 30 the amount of people who type in an actual news site versus going to an AmeriGator or search for it has dropped by about a thousand percent fourth it is going to be really important in the next decade as more and more as journalism comes more expensive and more and more journalists which I think is a terrible travesty get laid off when two newspapers or two television stations compete in the same market it's going to be very difficult to distinguish brand when everyone is getting their content in the same place so the importance is to recognize that the advantage of this crowd the advantage of the thousands of people that cover events, millions of people is that it actually allows local markets to distinguish one end and one against the other so that you're not in a position where you're taking content from the same free wire services over and over a day so what have we learned in doing this for three years the first thing I would tell you is that in the world of user generated content almost no one is motivated by money every, I'm sure one of you is going to ask this question today I would almost guarantee it but someone in this room is going to say do you pay people who write for you no, and the reason we don't is because they don't care when you ask about your motivation for why they participate in this kind of stuff it's issues like I want to be part of a conversation I want to follow and contribute to matters that are important to me I got nothing better to do frankly which is one of the answers and the other is money and money is the last on the list every single time and typically the people who are motivated by money don't elsewhere so money will not motivate people which is actually not a good thing because if they were motivated by money it's actually easier to monitor and negotiate and control the environment because you know what the lever is it's hard to do it when they're not motivated by money the second thing we've learned is that where we are today is at a very interesting point in history we are at the point now where Barry Vaughan Reuters and the creation of the Associated Press was 150 years ago this is the reinvention of who will own the channel of breaking news and if you think that that's some sort of exaggeration as many people who journalists do I will tell you that right now we are seeing the Associated Press crumble before our eyes as their members leave as they struggle to redefine their identity CNN has started its own wire service which many of you may be familiar with and CNN has started a competing wire service which they've started to train people to believe that professional journalism is the same quality content but what will happen, I guarantee you in 12 months, is the vast majority of the content and photo and video that will be sold through the years will come from people like us it will be citizen generated media so the cost of production of that wire service is going to plummet so we are at the point of the battle of who is going to own breaking news today thirdly, if you want to motivate people and you want to get people engaged reward them with editorial control and stats, those are the two levers that people seem to be the most interested in when they participate online and lastly when we started now public we thought that user generated news and mainstream media were two entirely separate worlds but what we have learned very clearly is that going forward one cannot exist without the other traditional media will die if it does not incorporate user generated content into what it does and user generated content without traditional media is pretty boring stuff both of them need each other to coexist and that coexistence will be defined over the next 12 to 24 months so I want to end off talking about what you can do what can you do in this room as journalists, as people who work in media as human beings what is the next 12 months going to hold and what are some actual takeaways the things you can think about the first is it is very important to not make one of the mistakes that traditional media has done which is to take their archives and log in so if you go to many newspapers in North America and Europe if you want to do a search for a piece of content they will only give you the last 7 days anything that is in the archives you have to pay for it it is closed behind a fire and what I would argue is that it is suicide for newspapers because if you go back to what I said before the vast majority of people under the age of 40 find their news through search now in a searched web and in a searched economy time stands still the vast majority of what breaking means if you click on a search and find a link it is breaking to you even though that story happened a year ago if you look at the heat maps on what people monitor news sites you will see that the last thing that they look at is the date almost no one when they search why because they assume this is my theory maybe wrong when people do a search in Google they assume that Google is giving them the most timely relevant results so when you heat map a story and you look where people are looking after a search the date is the last thing they look at so it is important to remember in a searched web breaking news has a very different meaning and stories that are a year old or two year old can become very dynamic and very current by adding user generated content cheaply and efficiently live time to keep the story current and to keep ad dollars flowing into those stories secondly whenever I speak to journalists somebody inevitably always says that I speak about the death of newspapers as if it is something that I am happy about let me say two things number one, newspapers are finished whether it is five years or six years or seven years the amount of newspapers that will be handed out to people are sold will diminish to nothing there will be some free sheets that will survive magazines will survive clearly but the local daily newspapers will not and that is just a fact the numbers are clear on that and I can tell you my family owns a very large newspaper company in Canada so I have just as much to lose as everyone else does but the fact is undeniable and so usually a journalist will say to you you say that like it is a good thing and the truth is I don't care and nor should you because it is not about the media it is about the brand being upset that people aren't reading newspapers and being upset that your children don't listen to music on vinyl records anymore it's the same analogy it doesn't make a difference it's about the quality of the content not about the medium through which they consume it and the longer we hang on to this romantic nature making no shit about the newspapers as being the beacon of news the more people will die and fail in the process thirdly I think the role of news has not changed it has enabled you to do much more interesting things instead of just doing analysis and reporting you should act as an organization that connects people you should think of a site for a news organization as a tour you are taking people on a virtual tour of a topic a topic that matters to them that they are engaged in that they found one and you want to connect those people to each other you want to be the hub, the water pool you want it to just be about your analysis you want it to be a place where people congregate and your job on that tour is to be a tour guide your analysis is to help people and show people the way so that they understand very complicated issues when there's lots of different opinions and voices the role of the news organization in the future is to be a tour guide and to connect people on their tours and lastly I think this is very important again I don't know if it's the same in the Middle East as it is in North American Europe but I would really caution traditional news organizations from taking the philosophy of corking the boat and what I mean by that is every news organization that went online all they did was they took their offline publications pushed it online and then tried to acquire companies which would stop the bleed in their revenue so they would acquire classified companies and auto companies and job listing sites well there's not any more of the left that they can acquire so the question is if you're not one of those people and by the way the ones that did acquire them still serve the revenue shape the people who have been successful in the media business in using the web and the people who were bold they made very very bold decisions and recognized that they had to get out of the mindset of what news really meant The New York Times The New York Times bought About.com $640 million depending on what kind of thing and they were laughed at for doing it well today it accounts for close to 75% of their internet traffic and close to 90% of their online revenue people laughed at Rupert Murdoch when he bought MySpace people in news business could not understand it he just paid $475 million for a little social network and we all know social networks are like high school dancers they'll come and they'll go and people will be popular and they'll be a new one well last year MySpace did over $800 million in revenue making up 90% of the revenue for Fox Interactive and it has proven to be an incredibly sophisticated vehicle for Sprayton News so this is not a market to buy another job site to buy another classified site this isn't time to be exceptionally bold and risk further failure so where are we going this is where I'll end off everyone always asks me where are we going and what's next and the answer is, I don't know if I knew that I'd be off on a beach somewhere but the truth is there is one thing that is certain in 1992 Neil Steenson wrote a book called Snow Crash and in that book he said that once we all start carrying promises on our person that we will effectively as individuals replace some of the most important fundamental institutions in society like the media like the police and security and lo and behold he was right so where we are moving is to this gargoyle culture where we need to pursue that everything we do can and will be recorded which means as human beings you have a very different obligation when you pass by an incident, a discrepancy an injustice what is your obligation to record that what is your obligation to communicate it because there will be laws as the United States is discovering around being this American and it will be almost certain that it will be illegal in North America to walk by an injustice especially a crime that did not it also has another meaning which is we need to assume that everything you do can and will be recorded and that you are always being watched and as creepy as that sounds let me give you a small example of just the beginning of how that started on Facebook today the coaches in American universities watch their players very very closely American football players in universities are under almost consistent house arrest before games and what happens on Facebook is you can be a quarterback of an American college football team and somebody takes your picture in a party now you don't know who they are but they know you and they take that photo and they upload it to the web and they tag it with your name Facebook by the way is openly searchable and the questions are able to see on Facebook where their players were at any given time without the players ever knowing the photo was taken knowing the person who took it or that it was uploaded to the web so we need to be very cautious that the environment we are moving into so I think this is going to be an incredibly challenging time for us around figuring out norms and who we are as people and I thought the greatest thing ever said about news was actually said by a comedian he said I think it's amazing that the amount of news that happens to the world always exactly happens to fit into a newspaper and that is exactly the problem so I thank you and I really believe this is going to be an incredibly challenging 730 days thank you very much we are now going to open this up again to questions if you have a question from the audience raise your hand and also if you would like to write it please it will be passed up to me with an intro question and here in Qatar we have a very vibrant media we have four air newspapers with three English newspapers but their web presence is not quite developed just yet what advice do you have for the newspaper sphere as they are developing their web presence and growing to kind of catch up with the west well I mean just this is a great question I guess the advantage that you have in any economy where the newspaper websites are just starting to actually become serious now what I'm taking it is you have a lot of lessons that you can learn from from what has already failed in the rest of the world and saved yourselves a lot of time the things not to do is do not spend a lot of money on CMS platforms that are going to waste a lot of money and time most of the production capability you need online is free and is a fraction of the cost that you would ever need in buying an industrial grade system secondly don't lock up your content don't lock up your archives don't be fearful of other people's news content appearing on your site and remember the best advice I can give you is be a source news is about people's lives it's about things that they care about it is the ultimate water cooler news is the ultimate conversation point so if people care about it create an environment where people connect with you and through you to other people around the things they care about and let your journalists be the tour guide to help people navigate those waters those will be the most successful I think web properties and news over the next little while and be very very good at search engine optimization you should have three people in your company that's all they do full time is optimize your pages for search any questions from the audience someone Mike while you were talking I visited your website and to check something the first question which came to my mind the first to say remark is something sort of about localization and this something was missing again in Tom's previous presentation here which made a chance to ask him about it now for me thinking that this is as you said one of the most known site news websites in the world so I thought to look at what are the main news here for somebody who lives in the Middle East I think that gas killings will be some sort of major thing here while I didn't see anything in the world section there was something more important maybe about tap dancing now this is very interesting what is missing here the question is what people in any certain area around the world should do to be part of this and people can be able to know what is happening around the world what I saw here mostly something which is related to certain markets in North America few around the western world only what about the other world parts of the world so it's a great question if I can just repeat this back to you you went to the public you looked in the home page of the public and you saw a bunch of stories that weren't really that relevant to you based on where you live so that is a question that my board asks me all the time and it's actually a very important lesson I think for people in the news business less than 1% of our traffic comes to our home page the home page is not the home page people come to our site and find the stories that they want when they look for them see in the 1990s and early 2000 news business was fascinating with this concept of personalization you're going to come to CNN and we're going to show you everything you want to see about everything you want to know but it's failed and it failed because it wasn't the way so we took a very different philosophy which was our home page was there as a branding tool to explain to people what we did so that people when you go to the site what we want you to get out of it is not here's a bunch of news that matters to me because we'll never get that right what we wanted to get right is that you understood what we did and we engaged you and you wanted to participate the the thing that the sort of dirty secret of the internet which I think is very important is if you ran a London telegraph or you ran the City Morning Herald in Australia four years ago 80 to 90% of your traffic was local it was coming from Australia or from people in Britain today because of search those numbers of local viewers are shrinking so today the telegraph in London where they had 80% of their audience coming from the UK is now sharp to 60% and over time that will go down to 50% and there will be challenges for ad sales and all kinds of other issues so my point is the home page of any news organization should be used as a branding tool because more and more search will drive the real home pages the age they find that they're looking for so that's why you may not see stuff because we actually truthfully don't care about what you're looking for because we expect you'll find it either through our search tool what you're seeing on the home page in that public is what our editors feel user generated and crowdsourced stories in terms of how you get involved I think that was maybe one of your other questions how you do this I think it depends on who you are whether you're a journalist or on a media organization or whether you're just somebody who wants to get involved as an individual and the short answer is get involved to sign up in our public you can do it right now on your phone it's simple it's easy to do and start participating you'll find that you'll start to build a community of interest in people for example to answer your question we have as many people on the ground in Gaza as Al Jazeera does the challenge was we weren't going to consistently put it on our home page for four and a half weeks it was featured coverage for two weeks it was enough already the people who were looking for stories in Gaza found them and then we moved on to other things like the inauguration and things that were important for the rest of the world so we have a very big interest in Gaza we have six actually sorry we got eight in Gaza that are covering it almost full-time I think a question from our audience we had a lot of nervous journalism students in the room they want to know what advice you have for current journalism students as they think about their future well Karen asked me the same question about the drawing I think actually Tom's advice is something I never thought of before and I would agree with it 100% I would add one other thing that the one thing that journalism journalism students surprise me because we get asked to speak at journalism schools all the time and when I actually ask a journalism class how many of you have a blog how many of you use Twitter the numbers are very very small so two pieces of advice that I would recommend is one start using the tools start engaging in the community to understand the platforms that are going to be used for journalism in the future and secondly and most importantly you need to become exceptionally good marketers I think the one key thing that they don't teach in journalism school which is going to make a huge difference in the future when you work for the New York Times whether you work on your own as a blogger whatever you do you need to understand how to market your content online that is going to be a fundamental difference between success and failure and less and less will the organizations that you work for do that for you they will expect you to do it on your own so learn how to do it and do it well so just move it in the back right next to the camera yes could someone show me the user microphone right to the left yes great thank you for your presentation did you experience any incidents where you received false reports from some people anywhere in the world and how do you check the accuracy of the information received or uploaded on the internet and if they are out of force information do you take them down so that by the way is the second most common question I get from journalism so it is a fair question so do you want the diplomatic answer or the snarky entrepreneurial answer the snarky one the snarky one so the diplomatic answer is that in an online environment you get transparency much better than you would in one way communication so if there are fallacious stories or illegal stories that are posted in our environment they don't last long because the community smokes them out very quickly so rather than the typical linear chain of an editor and a writer and then a complaints department our complaints department is very public meaning we have a system of 12 professional editors and 500 volunteer editors that are constantly monitoring that stuff and if it's false or fake it gets smoked out very quickly much faster than in traditional media and as we know the ratio of error in user generated media and traditional media is about the same our philosophy is we don't edit anything if it's illegal in the country in which it was uploaded we will take it down so if it's defamatory hate literature we'll remove it but otherwise we don't get involved now the snarky answer so I always have a struggle with journalists because journalists I'm not a journalist I can barely write my own name but the truth is that journalists need to figure out what they are because they will often use the double edge sword of being a craft and a profession and it is not a profession I'm a lawyer if I breach my ethical conduct I will be disbarred I answer to an authority and I will never be able to practice law in any jurisdiction again I will be completely removed from my craft and if I do it I will be jailed the question that I always try to ask journalists to think about is you cannot use the shield and the sword at the same breath and a craft because the truth is if a journalist breaches their ethical code who do they report to and the answer is in truth, no one you may report to your editor you may lose your job but there is nothing from barring you from putting up your own blog or looking somewhere else and all we need to do is look at Henry Blodgett in the United States who was the most villainized who was barred from practicing the securities business that is now one of the most well read bloggers about technology in the world so this concept or this high brand and pedestal that journalists sit on about ethics and fact checking and all this stuff to me honestly is nonsense because I think the truth is journalism is not a profession it is a craft and that's where it's high value because not everyone can be a journalist not everyone can package and analyze a story not everyone is smart enough to be able to analyze that stuff the same way that I'm not interested in watching my family's home movies in the same way I'm interested in watching a spill so I think journalists need to stop the traditional arguments against user-generated news about fact checking and ethics and all this stuff because it's not relevant and it will actually expose traditional media for many of the fallacies that bring themselves up for failure I think the truth is do what you're good at be great packageers, be great analysts be great storytellers and that's what the world needs and there's going to be much more value in that than 50,000 reporters running around taking photos of everything they see the irony is in this market the journalists become more valuable than they ever were that's the snarky answer Any more questions from the audience? Hi, I was just wondering is it possible in a country like Qatar where we censor the internet to house the journalists? The short answer I think is yes China, as you know, censors the web pretty severely and during the Olympics they did it aggressively yet incredible flow of information came through there are so many very simple little things that you can do if you know what you're doing to work around it where there's a will there's a way there's a tiny little program that you can download on your laptop and completely circumvent the network so in Canada I can't watch Hulu.com because it's barred in Canada because of the Canadian rights holders well I can tell you I watch it every day and they don't know that I'm coming from Canada they don't know where my IP address is coming from so it's very easy to do and that's why I agree with some of the things Tom said earlier about censorship and government involvement the reality is you can try to do it all you want but inevitably this is the ultimate form of people doing what they really want to do I think on that we have to wrap up our session Thank you