 I'm David Thorburn, Director of the MIT Communications Forum and Professor of Literature at MIT. This is the third and final forum in our series, Will Newspapers Survive? And in a moment, I will introduce our three panelists and talk briefly about our scheme for today. My hope is that our conversation will genuinely be accretive, that those I see already many familiar faces and that as more people straggle in, we will actually have a core audience who's been here for all of the events, unlike our speakers who have not had the advantage of being here in person, although I know that they've been able to consult the website and read the text summaries and so forth. I wanted to begin by making a couple of very brief comments of my own about our series and about the way I feel it's gone so far, partly as an incitement to our audience to ask pointed and even perhaps aggressive questions. My colleague Brad Sewell, who is my indispensable right arm and keeps the forum afloat, suggested to me when we were planning this event that the final title for the third of our forums, Why Newspapers Matter, was somewhat inappropriate, and he said you should say instead, Do Newspapers Matter. And I thought for a long time about this, he's probably right. If you paid attention to our first two forums, you might actually feel especially that that was a much more appropriate question, why take for granted that there are values in newspapers that must be defended or articulated. And I thought for a long time about yielding to Brad's common sense suggestion but decided against it. Perhaps out of nostalgia, I nearly became a newspaper man myself and when I was in college I served as the stringer for a whole series of newspapers. I went to a university midway between New York and Philadelphia and in the time I was an undergraduate there were a very large number of daily newspapers in both cities and the folks who worked in the press club to which I belong were able to serve all of these newspapers. At various times in my own life I have served as a writer for the now defunct New York Herald Tribune, the United Press International, the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the experience working with grown up journalists, I was just a college man at the time was very instructive to me. It seemed to me that the journalist I dealt with when I was a young man had a particular passion for their work and a particular sense of mission that reminded me not of people who were out to sort of make a, they reminded me of teachers who do what they do mostly out of love of the work not because they are very well paid. And I think that there is still some tradition of that in American journalism. So in any case it may be a kind of nostalgia in me that led to insisting against my friend Sewell's advice that we keep the title Why Newspapers Matter. My hope is that in fact we will try to answer that question and if you doubt that newspapers have any value at all I encourage you to try to say that. Thank you. I'll just step back a bit. I'm not sure how helpful that was Sewell but we'll live with it. What I want to suggest though about the discourse we've had so far to try to contextualize where we stand from my own perhaps nostalgic and not disinterested perspective might run something like this. It seems to me that the discourse we've had so far has been too utopian. It's been too much in favor of the new. It has not been sufficiently attentive to what newspapers have been in American life to what they and maybe more broadly and culturally in other societies generally. My hope is that we will interrogate more systematically at least in our discussion and I know that our speakers are going to address this question today that we will interrogate really systematically what it is about newspapers at least in the past what about the role of newspapers in society that signifies that matters that is that is that is distinctive and the particular way in which I would raise not not total hostile opposition but questions, dubieties about the kind of argument that I'll call the utopians have been making falls into two separate categories. One is in a certain sense ideological or political and the other is cultural. The ideological or political problems it seems to me is that it seems to me that the people who talk about the excitement of the new interactive technologies and the magnificent possibilities that are available to us and it will become available in future because of because of the Internet and other amazing likely outcomes that will follow from our exploring the possibilities of digital technology. The problem not that the vision of astonishing possibilities is mistaken. It's obviously correct. And there's no question at all that these these new these new modes of communication have a transformative and potentially morally and politically revolutionary effect on society of course that's that's obvious although the revolution may be a very long one may not be the right word to use since cultural change takes time and we might think of it as an evolutionary process. No one I think who's paid attention would dispute that but it does seem to me that the rhetoric of the folks who talk about the transition we're in and the falls makes at least some easy assumptions that I want to mention to you quickly and one of them one of these easy assumptions has to do with the with the value that is assumed to in here in words like participatory interactive and even the word democratic this of course these are very important categories but when you set those categories up as if they are unproblematic and is if every activity which lacks a participatory dimension in the way you define participation is somehow inadequate then the game is over before it begins of course newspapers are less interactive than certain forms of digital technology but that doesn't mean that they're not interactive in some sense and it nor does it mean that every human activity needs to have interactivity in it. It is certainly the case that Shakespeare's plays do not permit the same degree of interactivity as certain forms of video games but it doesn't follow from that that Shakespeare is inferior to the experience of video games so that the issue is not that participatory or interactive dimensions of communication technologies are not valuable but that they are not the only value nor is the absence of these qualities or the relative absence of these qualities necessarily a source for skepticism about the technologies forms of communication that seem less interactive more needs to be said about these questions then simply to say well this is interactive and this is not there are there are forms of interactivity that can actually be very annoying and troublesome and unhelpful to certain kinds of enterprises not all enterprises have to be democratic right so I think that there's an ideological or political dimension to the to the arguments that are that or to the discussions that surround questions of the sort that we're facing in this series that need to be interrogated more closely that we need to be more skeptical and more rigorous about what we mean by the interactive what we mean by the participatory and we need to ask questions about what what activities most fundamentally require and are benefited by participatory activities and interactivity and what activities may be need less interactivity or need an interactivity of a different sort because it isn't true of course that the audience for Shakespeare's plays or the reader of Tolstoy's novels are not interacting in the profoundest ways with these old technologies with with but but they are interacting in ways that are different from the capacity to decide what plot twist is coming next they are not collaborators with the author in quite the same way that certain kinds of collaborative websites create genuine forms of participation and collaboration I hope it's clear that I'm not suggesting that these forms of collaboration or interaction are negative or bad in any way I'm just suggesting that to constantly to rate to say this form of communication this form of news gathering is much more interactive than that is for me not to make a powerful point about whether or not the older form is is less valuable or more valuable the cultural aspect of this argument also seems to be important and by that I mean I think that there's been an insufficient attention so far to what might be called the ritual or embedded cultural dimensions of newspapers newspapers in the at least in the United States and in many other countries offer certain forms of experience that are very difficult to find elsewhere and one thing that quite apart from the question of whether newspapers provide information to people which of course they do at some level they do other things as well they organize the world and they organize the world on a daily basis and and and they they create a universe that is in some sense more fundamentally unified and coherent than the atomistic universe we might find in in other communication systems and other communication forms and and the way in which newspapers organize the world and the way in which they organize the world every day a new is an experience that's much more complex than we've yet given attention to when you sit down on Sunday morning with your partner to take the New York Times or the Washington Post apart and share out parts of it you're you're engaged in a social behavior and an interactive behavior with your partners or your friends that's also part of the ritual of using and reading newspapers so it's important for us to think about and and and consider other aspects of the experience of newspapers of the way in which newspapers have been institutionalized and instantiated in American life in order for us to get a real a full sense of what would be lost if newspapers genuinely disappeared or if the aging of the newspaper readership reached the point that there were virtually no more no more readers for newspapers and they essentially except for certain great national brands that were able to keep themselves going essentially disappeared as cultural forces finally I want to suggest that there is a another overtly political dimension to the role of newspapers especially in American life that we need to pay a little more attention to than we have so far I'm talking about the fact that newspapers occupy operate under the protection of the First Amendment unlike other forms of communication and that there is a long tradition of the newspapers as a kind of independent political observer who can stand up against and and and sometimes even defy the demands of government the loss of a the loss of an institution of that kind in any society would obviously be a serious one we need to ask questions about whether in the transition where the long transition we're making from paper to digital from a paper world to a digital world from a from a from from a from a dead tree technology to a digital technology we need to ask questions of that sort about whether or not the new systems of communication and the new systems of news gathering that are going to emerge in our society in a digital environment are going to offer the kind of the kind of political and and and moral independence that at least the ideal of certain news of newspapers in the United States and the practice of some newspapers certainly justifies well that's my response to what we've done so far I hope it's an incitement to the audience to ask questions and to fight argue not just with me but with other speakers and even speakers who may not even be here it's now my it's now my great pleasure to introduce our speakers and to explain our format they all of our speakers have have kindly agreed to keep their arguments tight they're going to make brief introductory statements I'm going to time them closely they'll stop after a relatively short time we're going to try to maximize our opportunity for participation and interaction a value I really do embrace of course our our speakers starting starting here Pablo Bochofsky is a is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern he many MIT folks know him because he was here at at MIT before moving to Northwestern he's the author of a very interesting book called Digitizing the News Innovation in Online Newspapers and his recent research which he's going to talk to us about deals with other aspects of this topic in ways that I'm excited about hearing Jerome Armstrong seated in the middle although he'll be we're going to talk in alphabetical order so it'll be Jerome Pablo and Dante in that in that order what we go it's Jerome's last name it's the A that makes him go first Armstrong Armstrong is the founder of netroots.com he's the creator of the political blog mydd.com and he's the author of co-author of crashing the gate netroots grassroots and the rise of people-powered politics finally Dante Cine is the senior research associate for in for the project for excellence in journalism a media columnist for the Christian Science Monitor he's also served as a reporter for the net on the national affairs desk at Newsweek magazine we're going to begin with Jerome Armstrong proceed to Pablo then to Dante Thank You David hello everybody I'm going to do these introductory remarks and from a perspective of talking a little bit about my interaction of I think how I come into this discussion and then segue from that and that would be mostly about blogs and what I do a lot on the web and then segue from that into the interaction with blogs and other forms of communications and how that interacts with newspapers and then looking at some questions and things for thoughts for the ensuing discussion so backing into the subject from the perspective of blogs I don't spend a lot of time watching television or you know reading newspapers I might do when I go through an airport pick one up that somebody's left behind but the actual activity of reading a newspaper for me has dropped off tremendously in over the last decade I can remember a time this being you know a month before the election when I would go down and buy the New York Times at Boston Globe and scour over them for the political news of the day leading up to the elections well now with the elections about a month away what I would wind up doing is going out in the blogosphere and reading about 30 different blogs and finding out all the different polling information there and everything as far as opinion wise would come from the blogs so taking a step back from over how did how did this happen well looking at from my perspective and I'm a partisan Democrat I work for Democratic candidates and a progressive the for me and a lot of people like me what what we saw in the early part of this decade was a lack of a progressive voice in the mainstream media outlets there was I mean by all accounts you know you can the right wing will say that the the mainstream media is liberal in orientation and they might be in philosophy but I certainly don't wouldn't adhere to the the belief that the the mainstream media is Democratic in any way and so the rise of the blogs was in large part a reaction to not only a right-wing propaganda machine but also the lack of progressive voices in the establishment media the probably you can point to a couple different events along this path with the rise of the progressive blogosphere and we'll get to some numbers here in a second but I first point out the the the debacle that we had in Florida in 2000 next along the line would be the the vote by the Democrats leading up into the 2002 midterms to give Bush the permission to invade occupy Iraq and then the the phenomenon of Howard Dean and the rises and that roots and what's happening this last cycle which much more of a decentralized effort of the local blogosphere it's gotten to the point now where that how many blogs are there well there's there's millions of blogs according to Techno Roddy but if you look at the the top tier blogs in terms of the numbers it's increased in size since 2003 by a hundred times the liberal blog ad work and the liberal blog ad network is it comprises about a hundred of the leading blogs and it received over 120 million page views in this last month and that represents probably around 15 million people that are actively engaged in it these people are very politically active among self-identified Democrats 23% in a recent hotline poll visit the blogs on a regular basis and they tend to vote to the Pew Pew study post-election 2004 found that 99% of those interviewed that were deans and porters voted so though this is a minority even by accounts of participation within the Democratic universe they are very strong in terms of their their opinions and their participation participation in the in the political process stepping away from the political blogs and the overall blog readership right now according to a recent survey by the blog ads is that about 50 million and those blogs transpire every sort of you know topic you can imagine anybody's interests that they basically have they will go to a blog and a lot of people will and and find those interests and being able to congregate talk about it with other people the relationship between blogs and and other sorts of mediums is symbiotic from my experience and a lot of what I see on the on the internet it's not that a lot of content is generated by blogs bloggers themselves but they will go to more traditional media sites such as newspaper online newspapers and and portal sites MSNBC CNN those type of things and they will they will feed off those write their opinions off it but it's also it goes both ways you have a lot more journalists now who write for print and online that go to the blogs to find out what's the recent stories that are breaking blogs are sort of you know they've they've busted open the gateway that used to be there for media but now they're in many ways a place for people to try out opinions are our leads and see if they can gain traction in the wider sphere let me present a couple different statements here on the relationship of blogs and newspapers the first is by Corby Parnell and talking about the difference between news and opinions he says newspapers are dying medium however blogging will not be the cause of its death normal blogs replace newspapers as a primary source of news for a majority of the world's population fair and balanced journalism is good journalism when I seek out news I don't read Robert Novak instead I read the Associated Press on the whole individual bloggers will never consistently produce the kind of original highly refined unbiased content that even small town newspaper readers have come to expect and value however the thought energy that bloggers put into their reporting and news aggregation efforts can and will be leveraged by other participatory mediums such as wiki news and will therefore contribute to and hasten the demise of the newspaper medium of course it's also possible that the newspaper medium will survive by aggregating good content from the blogs and that particular that last point that he makes it is it's something that I've seen happen more and more blogs like any other medium once they once they reach a certain threshold of communication possibility the commercialization enters into it because it costs more to run those things the the convergence in of new newspapers adapting to blogs involves the commercialization of those blogs the here's another quote here the the Arizona Republic the Des Moines registry and the San Jose Mercury News were among a group of publishers that signed up for blog burst a blog syndication service under the terms of the agreement newspapers can publish any of more than 1500 blogs featured by the service and how this works is that you know if somebody writes a review of something locally or say covers a sports story those can syndicate right into the into the newspapers if they have that agreement set up and one of the quote here is from the American state statesman in Austin they offer tools on his website that enable readers to create their own blogs which can then be posted on the papers website since starting the later service since late September the newspaper has seen readers create over 100 875 blogs there's about 2,500 pages a day he the the Austin statement and knowledge is that blogs have yet to attract huge audiences but the point is to offer readers a chance to connect with like-minded folks the idea behind this to create more of a community you can create community and you'll increase traffic and loyalty to me that's a really interesting statement because it points to why I believe why blogs have have arisen in you know across the whole stratification of different interests and stuff I mentioned why you know one reason why I thought the political blogs have arisen but it really doesn't explain the whole wider phenomenon of blogging in general but I think what this what this person's pointing to is in the in the sense of community that offers we need to ask the question does is with that sense of community the blogs are creating is that replacing something that newspapers offered or is it offering something that newspapers haven't offered if we segue from that into looking at this period as a transition period and in particularly recognizing what the the niche medias that have been created by the internet in in reaction to what I would call the broadcast medium yeah okay the broadcast effort of the last century if you look at the over the last in last century there's been basically the print medium then radio then television which has been the broadcast the means of getting out your message to a large number of people and you have basically a one to many message delivery somebody will formulate the message they'll get delivered out through the broadcast mediums the whole fragmentation that's happened of that structure of the last couple of decades is is points towards what's going to happen in the future the the means of delivering your message now has become much more niche much more one to one marketers figure out how to how to identify you through data mining and such forth and deliver your message to you in much more compelling manner how the only way it's really effective to reach you now in terms of mass delivery is to get a wide adoption of your message by many people who will then forward on to their networks because people have basically lost touch a lot of them with those broadcast mediums so this is some basic some some overriding questions that I have here in terms of the newspapers and their relevancy are they going to be able to customize their content in a way that can be compelling as online news services are you have much more easier ability now to go out and get your niche media in the online capacity than you do on a broadcast it's you know you have your a ones page on the newspaper is that more compelling that's a authoritarian figure then if you go online and you capture basically an interest that responds to your likes and dislikes immediately that's my two minutes ten minutes and thank you a couple of months ago I was there and I had to give sort of a similar talk the first talk on this project so it was July 27th actually and I wanted to check what the papers that I had been studying while reporting that day and in particular how the front pages look like would you see here are the front pages of the top two national free newspapers in Argentina combined market share 50% of the national newspaper market the top newspaper is 34% share of the national newspaper market the second one the nation is 50% share what you see is that the top national story about the national government is the same top national story plays exactly in the same position in its competitors the top foreign story about Hezbollah and Israel which is also the top story for the top one newspaper the top story for the second newspaper also plays in somewhat similar position then top sort of local news about a massive rain that happened the day before is also shared by the two newspapers and is the story that has the most prominent visual picture more or less of the same car destroyed and then finally the top health science medicine story is shared by both so basically what you have here is the top two newspapers in the entire country 50% of the market share for the entire print industry on a particular day sharing basically most of their front pages now is this a fluke or not this is an outlier just a coincidence is part of a larger trend this paper this research argues that it is part of a larger trend a larger trend that has a lot to do with certain technical practices certain ways in which the web has been used in the past four or five years to provide breaking news throughout the day has actually led in an unintended manner to a growing convergence of content sharing of content thematic overlap not just among online newspapers but in the entire media space in particular in print and so what this paper tries to do is to try to show this empirically and to understand what role certain technical practices play in this phenomenon it does this through a content analysis of both print and online newspapers in Argentina the results very quickly are that over a 10-year period there has been a systematic growth in the sharing or the overlap of content among print newspapers coinciding a lot with intensification of publishing constant breaking news or online during the day right that this cycle over a 10-year period for print repeats itself over a 24-hour period for online right you take online newspapers at your midnight and online newspapers 23 and a half hours later you see a convergence of their news agenda and what we have today is in general a very dense web of content homogeneity content overlap in the entire media aspect spectrum so what I would like to do at the end of it after presenting basically a little bit more of this is to draw some conceptual and fantasy methodological implications and since they asked me to make sure that I will have something very direct to say about the content of the seminal implication for this I'm saying now and I'm saying at the end of it are as I see very simple so the question is why might newspapers matter less than before because they have themselves commodified their hard news content they have commodified one of their main contributions right as commercial product and also in society right contributions to the polity to the public sphere and they have they may matter less and they may matter even less in the future because this decreases their power in terms of setting the agenda and also there this decreases their contribution to diverse public sphere in society I won't worry about theoretical implications of the grounding in general one quick thing to say and that motivates the overall project of this paper is that among my colleagues sociologists of media there has been a lot of talk about this trend that more and more media resembles each other but this term has not been accompanied with a lot of systematic research and in particular research that looks at things unfolding over time and across media so in the house of comparative media studies with all the work that Henry and William have been doing over time I thought it was particularly important to emphasize that one needs to look at this phenomenon relationally and over time which is what this paper tries to do couple of things about the art and context so that you understand so the overall basics of the story because this is not the US like first the penetration of the internet in the year in which data for this paper was collected last year was about 25 percent of the population so it's not a massive medium it's still a medium for the big secondly the newspaper industry unlike the industry in the state it's not local it's national one second is highly concentrated top two players on 50 percent of the market top five on two third percent two thirds of the market 65 roughly second unlike the US the share of the advertising high of the newspaper industry has remained more or less constant over the past ten years and even though Argentina suffered as some of you may know a massive economic crisis in 01 or 01 the industry has to cover quite handsomely for instance in the past year when newspapers in the states were fighting people left and right the top newspaper in Argentina made salary increases across the board for all its personnel amounted to 35 percent salary raises partly to catch up on inflation but partly because business is good so this is not happening in the context in which business is bad and resources have been shared shared it's actually quite a comfort so the cast of characters three newspapers the top player top player for print top player for online relative to the size of the country 14 million people the top player is a fairly large newspaper it will basically mean if we adjust it to the size of the states having a daily circulation of three million and a Sunday circulation of six million and is the second largest newspaper previous paper in the Spanish speaking world second and it's also the top online newspaper as well second character the second largest newspaper and also the second largest online newspaper third character a newspaper which in the print world is a very small financial daily one percent of the market so we are not going to look at it for print but I looked at it for online because it has become over the past three four years a very very strong competitor like partly because of its aggressive practices of publishing online news constantly throughout the day the final thing to keep in mind is that in all these cases organizationally we have two newsrooms we don't have one newsroom sharing so it's not the issue of one organization sharing but it's two organizations sharing and for the top player they are apart you know basically three minds apart from each other or about two minds apart from each other so really they are two different organizations okay quick thing about the research design I looked at the front pages of the top two previous papers and the equivalent online the first screen so the top nine stories basically for the top three online newspapers for print over a 10-year period for online over a 24-hour cycle for print I look at four periods right over these 10 years first in 1985 immediately before the online counterparts started to publish as my baseline then in 2000 right immediately before the online counterparts started to publish breaking updates during the day for the first five years like many newspapers in the states these online newspapers basically took the print content and put it on the computer so I wanted to see whether they are very existence but not the practice of publishing online had made any difference and then starting in 01 they started to publish more and more breaking news during the day and in particular in 2004 they moved very aggressively into that arena so my third and fourth data points come from basically half a year after they move aggressively to publishing online and a year and a half and this is what I found that between 1995 and 2000 right there is no difference in between the front pages of the newspapers so five years of existence of the online edition has made no difference however when online started right to publish aggressively that actually made a difference for print basically in 1995 and 2002 in these two samples one in three hot news stories were shared however when we go to the 04 and 05-1-2 are about the same with a small growth between 04 and 05 raising the possibility right that this trend is going up but secondly of the stories that we share this growth impacts more heavily public affairs stories 18 percent more sharing of politics basically national economic and foreign secondly I looked at the evolution during the day at three points in time of the day mid-morning once the folks in the online newsroom had time to provide to the basically more more stories for their online edition in the middle of afternoon and at the end of the day right and then just this was for a like I looked at the following day's print sedition of the talk to newspapers to see whether they were in a relationship basic findings first of the baseline of the baseline level of shared stories is already very high right unlike print so we start with basically one in two being shared however between the morning and the afternoon there is no major significance that this is a significant change however in the evening that raises four percent which is from a basic of you know almost forty basically 49 percent four percent is quite a lot it's never going to go much higher than that so basically we see a thematic convergence in the news agenda right unfolding in real time during a 24-hour cycle unlike print thematically this affects far more who will call non-public affairs stories which is basically in the following orders sports entertainment and crime finally one thing we looked at is if we take the evening edition of online 10 p.m. and the following day edition right of print basically it reaches consumers eight hours later how many of the stories that I have in print in day two have been anticipated by eight hours or more online between 50 and 60 percent within each newspaper and a lot of cross anticipation which tells me that they said as I said in a very dense web of shared content among the top two players in the country which have far more than 50 percent of political power to set the news agenda so what does this mean one that technology and certain technical practices are essential to understand what's going on but it's not technology per se the changes how technologies use five years of having online didn't make any difference for print it was only after online began to be used for certain purposes that that ended up affecting the gender thing secondly and again the house of comparative media studies a relational lens is critical to understand what's going on in today's media environment it's impossible to just focus on print or online or television we need to understand the relationship of this and finally why why do I make so much of technology before doing this study I spent together with a team of researchers in Argentina nine months inside the online newsroom of the top player here and one of the things that we found is that there is a great intensification of the monitoring practices of people in the newsroom of what their competitors are doing and what the entire media environment looks like at any given point in time that is reporters and to have always looked at the competition now they look at the competition with five minutes every 10 minutes obsessively all the time they look all the time and they have the mandate of having a very complete picture of today's news so if they see in their competitors something that they don't have right their bosses are not going to be happy so basically they take that story and publish it elsewhere but still on the homepage so what that means is that over the course of the day everybody is starting to have the same news right so breaking news all the time online basically has eased the barrier of access to the information about the competitors and what that has meant right is that that has increased the process of imitation right and the level of shared content of homogeneity in the problem just to give you a little bit of the time reporters monitor to make sure that they have a complete picture of the editor of two minutes and as the editor of the economic section of this online newspaper said I look to the other online news sites all the time I don't want to miss anything that they have if something has been missed they put it so the editor of the urban did say if a piece of news that has to be published by the competition then we also have to publish perhaps it is not very important so we lower it we're putting another part of the homepage but we'll publish it anyway if they have it we have to have it too and they monitor before and after they publish before they publish to calibrate the framing of the story right so talking about a high profile story one reported from politics section nationalized in this country will be called told us looking at the competition is unavoidable when we define the head and the lead of the story before we publish the first thing we did was to check at our competitors to see their framing we do this almost automatically and after they publish to assess their performance vis-à-vis those of their competitors so for instance this is from one of the people at 6 13 p.m a local cable news channel announces the verdict of the michael jackson fryer which triggers an intense rush in the newsroom to publish the story seven minutes later because this is very very very fast the updated story is published the editor looks immediately at the site of their competitors and says we publish it first the homepageator congratulates him shapes his camera says something along the lines of great work with you all right methodology i won't bother you with this again why my newspapers mattered less than before because they have themselves commodified one of their distinctive contributions to society this runs the risk of decreasing their power to set the agenda and their ability to contribute to a diverse public sphere you might think this is only a few days in many cases a weird country that we are in the real south but as the folks on the project for the excellence in journalism said in the state of news media for 2006 the new paradox of american journalism is more out of this coming to your stories right i guess the the first thing i'd point out uh just on what pablo just said is that uh we're we're uh some colleagues of mine are coming out with a book on local television news that shows that actually at local television news in the united states the homogeneity is breathtaking it's it's frightening uh but hey if you watch local tv news you know that already right uh first first let me thank uh thank uh david for having me here in mit the website for this forum so that it was going to have media critics working journalists and online visionaries for the record i'm i'm a member of the first two camps i'm not a member of the third camp but uh seeing as i'm from washington and visionaries are in short supply down there i'm happy to be here uh but when we start before we start i just want to do a couple things just to get an idea of your your media consumption habits uh and this is probably not an average audience even by the highly erudite standards of greater boston but uh how many of you in the last two days read a newspaper for news okay how many of you got some news from local or national television news or cable news okay uh how many of you went to a big website new york times cnn.com boston.com and how many of you went to a blog for news all right the point of this is that look our media consumption habits are increasingly very complicated okay we're all omnivores now okay we're media omnivores we go all over the place for our news and the way to look at this kind of this moment in history right now and and i think i hope moments to come is this is a very good time be a news consumer it's the best you can go umpteen places for news national and international and you really control your news diet if you want to spend the day on espn you know just reading and knowing every little bit of minutia about sports you can if you want to go to bbc.com you can do that if you want to go and scatter around you can do that too but this is also a difficult time to be a news consumer because all that all those possibilities mean that you really have to monitor your diet closely it's really easy to kind of you know wander down the the news junk food aisle and just stuff your mouth with ho-hos if that's what you want to do it's possible uh and whether or not newspaper survive or not i actually think this is going to continue to be the case i think we're going to be continue we're going to be a mixed we're going to be omnivores we're going to be getting a little bit from different places a little bit from here a little bit from there i don't i i completely agree with Jerome about blogs i i don't think i i think it's wrong to think that blogs are going to replace newspapers but i think that you know they make the news environment richer i think there's no question about that but the idea that top-down media is just going to suddenly disappear with you know assignment desks or their equivalent and reporters and editors and people touching your people a lot of hands on the copy before you see it i think that's going to continue it's just going to live alongside other things uh the question of whether in my opinion a question of whether newspapers are going to survive is obviously a provocation i mean it's it's you know it's it's it's such a broad question that you know the answer is yes in some sense i think newspapers will survive i don't know what they're going to look like i don't know if they're going to be on paper i don't know what they're going to cover topically or geographically and i think the biggest question is i don't know how they're going to fund the coverage that they do uh there are real challenges in all those fronts newsprint as you probably know is expensive and delivery of the newspaper is not the most efficient you know system in the world a kid come by and throw in a paper at your door is it's nice i i get my newspaper that way but it's not the most efficient way of getting the newspaper metro areas and this is important i think for local news are harder to cover than ever because they sprawl you know you know greater boston extends to new hampshire so how does the boston globe cover all that it gets it gets very complicated i mean those people up there may want the boston because they want the national news but can they really feel they're getting the local news they need in there it's a very it's it's complicated it's very difficult for the globe or for any big metro daily to do that and on top of all this revenues are down in newspapers and they continue to go i mean they're they're they're inching slightly upward but they're if you look at it over you know long term they were going like this they're creeping up now and that's for a lot of reasons one of them is falling readership which i'm sure we all know about uh the best case scenario for newspaper readership over the coming years is a one is a slow and steady one percent decline for newspapers that's the best case that's what we're hoping for um how does the web fit in all this uh it hurts and it helps obviously you know more eyes see the content from newspapers and this is a good thing uh the bad parts there are a lot of them uh online is killing newspapers where classified ads are concerned that was a steady stream of income that's gone all those people who read the newspaper for free it's it's not clear that it's a large number yet it's somewhere about i think six or seven percent that don't that read it but uh read it online but don't get it delivered or read the hard copy that's money that's lost in terms of subscription revenue uh one thing we cite in the report is if online and print ad rates stay where they are you know if the idea that the well online revenues will increase at some point it'll be a nice stream of money and it'll be able to fund all that wonderful reporting you get it's it's it's hard our estimates are somebody else's estimates that we count on are if they stay where they are if rates stay where they are they would have to grow at a rate of 33 percent till the year 2017 just to make up for where things are right now that means that uh you know it's going to be hard times for all in the newspaper industry and that brings us to the the big question so what what if there were no more newspapers and uh we'll get into this tonight and i think actually that just hearing people talk there's more agreement on this than than you might think but i'll throw out a few things why i think newspapers are critical newspapers are at the at the local and the national level the place with the most bodies it's got the most it's the newspaper that has the most reporters on the street more there may be more people that watch local tv news but in terms of having people out there getting the news it's the newspaper that has the most people what does that mean that means that they have beat reporters who have a certain amount of expertise and who know what the heck they're talking about uh i there there's some feeling among bloggers and i know because i write things and i write things in my column and i have an email where people can get in touch with me and you you know you you get flames from people through the email uh i think blogs actually do a pretty good job of covering big stories and it's uh for the for the reason Jerome was saying i think that they that basically blogs largely feed off what's out there they take the news that's out there they they tell you what they think of it maybe they poke holes in it maybe it's another set of eyes that has problems with something that's out there but the store is already out there they're not very good at breaking something they're not going to break news and that's because you know they're not bloggers aren't going to be walking around the justice department you know for free okay they're not just going to give up whatever they do and like well i'm just going to go you know stand over at the department of interior for a while and see what i pick up and then put it in my blog because nobody's going to want to read that it's only interesting when something happens at the department of the interior but to know what's really going on you have to have somebody there figure it out unfortunately and increasingly newspapers don't have those people there because of staff cuts and that's an issue uh number two i think despite all the grumblings about bias from the left and right newspaper and i think some of it you know that's that's par for the course uh you know the the those lovable mainstream journalists do at least try to get the story straight i do think they're trying to get the story straight i don't think they willingly spin readers i think they get spun i think it happens and i think it's going to happen all the time they're human beings it's going to continue but if you think that well okay so we'll go with bloggers we'll go with citizen journalists as a replacement of newspaper people or replacement of newspapers you know they cover what they cover a lot of times because uh a they're they care very deeply about the issue and they would like to see it turn out one way or the other which means they're going to have a certain thing they'd like to say or a certain spin they'd like to put on it or sometimes they actually have a dog in the fight and there's nothing wrong with that as long as you know it but what you end up with if that's what everybody starts doing is you have a world full of electronic equivalents of the nation or or the or the national review and i think that's interesting i just think it can't be the slow way we get news you know it that you know if that was the world whether you sit on the left or the right at some point you'd have to wonder you know where the truth lies or especially if you sit in the middle uh in other words there's something to be said for the pursuit of objectivity three and uh this is a big one and this goes to what david was saying early on because in this comes back to the beginning because the news environment is so complicated now and because we're all omnivores you need somebody to make sense of it you need a guide now that doesn't mean that you have to take their you don't you don't have to take their vision of everything at face value you don't have to say well the most important story of the day is mark foley because the new york times that it was the most important story of the day but at some point you're probably interested to find out what a bunch of people who just look at the news all the time and go through the stories and try to figure out what the biggest news of the day is you're probably curious to see what they think it is maybe after you go and look at the things in particular that you're interested in uh the strength of a newspaper is really it's collective knowledge it's all these people who may not be experts in areas but who have who have knowledge in them and i you know i may know more or you may know more than your favorite or least favorite reporter about the thing that you care about but collectively the newspaper actually has a lot of knowledge that they can put together in mind to try to figure out what's really important every day i'll stop because i want to stay short uh but i want to put one important caveat on all this while we're talking about newspapers i think it's important not to get caught up in the paper aspect of it the important thing is that somebody is doing these things that i just talked about and it may be that it's going to end up being electronic it may be some other some other form that it comes to you by but the delivery system to me isn't important what's really important is providing the things that we talked about and i think i think most important finding an economic model that really makes that possible because right now the economic model for online there's just there's a lot of stuff out there but there isn't funding really to have the reporters to have the the base of reporters you'd need to go out and kind of gather the news you want in their newspaper and let's just leave it at that and hear what you have to say this is the audience's turn i count on your being articulate and concise uh come down to these two microphones if you have questions or comments not just questions we we we welcome your your argumentative sides as well as as well as questions uh i i thought i while while you're sort of gathering your thoughts i i thought i might give uh each of the panelists a chance to respond quickly to what they heard their colleagues say so it's public let's start with you do you have any responses that you'd like to offer well we don't have to forget is that now most sites that are well run but i'm actually making money and they have profit margins that are much higher than those of their print counterparts the problem is that the volume right it is very low so we are talking about a business that as a business will be satisfactory for most entrepreneurs but it's not satisfactory for a very large company and company that has been used to enjoy an incredibly sort of a handsome profit margin right with a very very large volume for a long time right so and uh that's sort of because several years ago people used to say now it's making money on the work with news but now they are making money they're making good money proportionately speaking the problem is the the size right right well and they are in a lot of times they're getting their content from there you know they're drawing the content from the from the print side and right yeah Dante let's be sure when you speak that it picks up the mic return the mic toward you when you speak so make sure we get it on recording yeah let me cut content on the commodified nature of the news I think is really interesting because it's sort of correlated to what I was bringing up of what you know a progressive might feel earlier this decade is the non not not enough representation of their their viewpoints and I think it's something that that we can probably criticize newspapers in general as lacking in in that commercialization of that commodification of it points to the lack which I pointed out at the end of the talk I gave with which is community and that's another reason why people are turning to other sources other than newspapers the the authority aspect is a really interesting model because you know what there I think there's actually a little more breakdown we need to do with that is that you have authorities of people who are like-minded with you people you turn to as sort of an ally and then you have authority figures that that society puts up as relating to the general information flow that that we go into and I think newspapers are more of the latter and typically those are those are things that are being deconstructed more and more as people turn to more of the former getting it online and blogs are a great representation of that of people being able to form their own authority leaders and their own networks there they're shared with other community members just a touch on that I mean I agree I think that when you're talking about particularly about politics where I think blogs are very strong there's knowledge out there in the in those in those blogs that that that maybe the reporter doesn't have what I'm trying to say about what the newspaper does have is for you to get everything you'd get in the newspaper or from a from a major media organization as a big reporting staff is you'd need to go to a blog about politics then you need to go to a blog about what Asian affairs and you need to go to a blog about what's going on Europe then you need to go to a blog about what's going on health care then you it gets very complicated the the thing the newspaper does is it takes all these people aggregates them in one place and I think if you have specific areas of interest yeah you're going to go to blogs and you're going to get you know if you want in-depth political coverage I think a lot of times you can get some of it on the newspaper but I think yeah you're going to go to blogs to supplement that I just think you know the idea that we'd all go through you know a blog for every kind of topic in the newspaper it'd just be just too damn time consuming question here I want to pick up on that point and the point Mr. Cheny that you made towards the end which is that even if you get rid of the form of the newspaper you didn't have a newspaper and you didn't have delivery trucks and you didn't have ink and everything else you would still have enormous value in the resources of the newspaper that no blog can replicate and it seems to me what's happening at least in some cases is that newspapers are migrating into an electronic format I read the Wall Street Journal every day but I haven't picked up the newspaper itself in weeks I read it online because it's organized that way no blog can replace the Wall Street Journal but but the electronic format is quickly replacing the newspaper format it seems to me and I wonder if you or the other panelists would sort of talk about this middle area that's not the traditional newspaper but certainly not a blog it's the newspaper that is delivered in the in an electronic format. Well really quickly I mean the journal is an interesting example because it has one huge advantage that most of the other online newspapers don't it charges for content and it's in it's in it's such a specialized I mean people the journal means something special people get it and they feel they get they're willing to pay that you know the other the only you know the times is kind of crept into it by asking you to pay for columnists which surprisingly has worked I'd be honest I never thought that would work but they're actually they've done pretty well with it and they offer some archival stuff and things like that you know the question is I do think I do think the newspaper is going to migrate that way and then I also think at some point I'd be curious to hear what the other panelists saw but you know video these things are going to it's all going to merge there will be there will be a you know some kind of great convergence down the road it's already if you talk to photographers at newspapers they're being given video cameras they don't shoot as much anymore they take video and the the quality they're they're able to do frame grabs from the video they shoot that's so good they don't need the camera anymore so what does this do well they still can run the photos in the online edition but they also have this video of the event that they can put out that actually can make some compete a little bit with television anyway I do think it's moving that way I just think it's a question of a discussion of a funding way to pay for it for the outlets well what it brings out to me is like what it what are we going to drop off if we if we know what's going to let left in the the waste back of basket of history if newspaper stopped in the paper format specifically because we're replacing it online in the digital format is increasingly what's going to happen what's going to drop off is this structured format of how the news is presented to everybody and it has been this one-size-fits-all model with the paper newspaper that is ending and I don't think there's any way that that's going to get turned back even the newspapers that people are going to be getting at a certain point here it's going to be like that Harry Potter movie where you know you unroll something and it's all digital and it it's just like a digital paper that changes and the delivery of these things day-to-day is going to become a relic I don't think that's a that that seems to me irrevocable change it's going to happen the online news vehicle that people are going to use is also become more and more customized according to your delivery that even the Wall Street Journal they can find out more and more about you and deliver the ads that they want you to see based upon your consumer profile that's not a trend that's going to stop either so the thing that you know I believe is that is really what what newspapers symbolize here that is going to change is this one-size-fits-all broadcast medium consumption that's represented most dramatically with the online culture as far as how it's changing. One comment to the observation in the transition from print to online you don't take the same content and put in a different delivery vehicle because the times and places and modes of consumption and the ways in which users or readers engage with the different media are different what has been happening over the past four or five years is that most of the news online gets consumed in regular work hours if you look at the evolution of the of the traffic over the 24-hour cycle it is flat more or less from the wee hours in the morning until eight or nine in the morning that starts to go up right and it stays very high up until five or six when it goes down. So Pablo the implication is instead of working people are going online to read the newspaper are they working online? So people are working with computers they're working online they're checking the news but they're doing something else they have very little time right so right they on the consumer side they're doing many things their attention is divided they won't quit some bites or so the common wisdom says on the journalistic side it means that you're constantly urged to feed right the consumers with information so you don't have two hours to go to a particular neighborhood to source your story to come back think about it write give it to your copy editor etc that you have 20 minutes from start to finish in the research that I was referring to when we spent nine months inside this online newspaper one thing we look at was time of production right from start to finish 95 percent of the stories were producing less than half hour now what this means is that and there are many other things having to do with the different media that people use video audio etc but what this means is that in the transition from this to this the way of the ways of crafting a story change what kinds of stories we can tell change right how we tell those stories how the stories are consume appropriate it circulate in the blocks here all that changes right so newspapers are in part print but they also stand for certain ways of journalism certain ways of in which the media contribute to society and that's in part what is in question in this transition right not just it's not just oh instead of getting it here I get it here question here is that on can we hear her in the back can you hear the speaker ask again it always seems like well I have a new technology version of that that means all these criteria I use google desktop and google homepage and there's news feed there when I go to my email there's a new sticker on top my google desktop which is always up on the sidebar my computer has this constant cycle of news stories I can choose to play to me that's very much like community and so the only thing that might be different is my google desktop looks a little different than someone else's and their news stories might be different but I mean I lived with my boyfriend his parents for a while and we had three newspapers arrived every morning all four of us spent a couple hours with them and yet if we were going to talk about what we read in the paper none of the four of us that actually read the same thing men of the four of us identified as being the same paper unless we actually sat down and read the story aloud or not some form of a newspaper or some baby form of what might replace a newspaper what is the newspaper very difficult question well I think I think a newspaper that's what I mean we can't get we can't get caught up in the idea that a newspaper a newspaper is an organization full of people that put out a product that you read every day that's really what a newspaper is a newspaper really isn't the newsprint that gets on your fingers and all that stuff google news is interesting because I like google news a lot but but google news couldn't exist without the mainstream media it just goes in and grabs stories and I think it's very interesting I like it you know and and I have a couple of rss feeds you know but it but it's cannibalizing I mean it's cannibalizing you know it's taking stories from the old media okay and it's and it's giving them to you in a new format but it's still the new to me that's still you know the newspaper or or if you're getting it from a broadcast company it's bright it's the it's you know it's abc or it's cnn yeah it's got a really good point because um don't tell me it's it's because the newspapers I mean google couldn't exist with that I love that thing too it could not exist if people like Dante weren't out on the street you know doing the reporting none on the street now he's a columnist he's a pining now but literally I mean you know so I I think you have to probably step back and unfold that well if google is not really supporting that model financially and they're not they're just feeding off it that's the point truth and so a lot of aggregators online what's going to keep that model profitable and up and standing for them to feed off it there's there's no commercialization happening between google and everything that it links to just one comment on the news that is important and relevant to the question of what is the newspaper newspaper in addition to the things I've done to mention the newspaper is an organization that it specializes in editorial judgment right and selecting from all the potential events happening in say 24 hours or a week period of time which ones are newsworthy and of those that are newsworthy which kind of angle etc etc google has an algorithm so difference between google and newspaper is that there is nobody actually looking at this story versus that so it's an algorithm that selects on the basis of certain criteria right what kind of news get delivered in what kind of position on the homepage what is interesting is that that kind of reasoning the mixing of the human and the software is also happening at traditional newspapers so for example lemon as an in-house built software that assists its editors online to select and rotate the stories on its side during the day depending on the number of patterns so issues having to do with traffic what stories get you know more traffic than they are moved up automatically or they're suggested to the editors that they should go up etc etc so a newspaper among other things is an organization that specializes in editorial decision making part of the transformation that is happening from print online is that that editorial decision making in part is being that in conjunction with software right written in part with the editorial premises but where the total premises are very much set from the beginning and with the human element of reacting in an improvised way and having that sort of feeling for the news right disappears so that's another important thing to keep in mind the current context I have a question about the economic model it sounds like everyone's trying to we know that there are big changes happening but we don't know what the economic model is going to look like and I'm curious about your thoughts on if one thing that's hurting newspapers is the move to online another it seems to me is the sort of expectations about revenue newspapers are wonderful investments for a while when they were generating 20% Wall Street love them and so a lot of them are now public companies that clearly is difficult to maintain and you see some conversations happening now about taking them private or taking them in the hands of local investors who wouldn't have that same expectations and I'm just curious your thoughts how that would affect this the pressures therein would that allow which just sort of stave off some of these changes or would that give them some breathing room to live a little longer so one and it's particularly relevant for the american context is the critical role of the capital markets unlike the newspaper companies in other countries where they still remain privately owned mostly family owned enterprises right so they are shared much more fluctuations in the marketplace newspapers in the states decided few decades ago to fund expansion through the capital markets and that was wonderful for a certain period of time but the capital markets have certain sort of dynamics and that they is a very short term view of performance and that is hurting the newspapers now because they are not performing as well as other competitors they are performing remarkably well when one compares that with other so mature industries but they are not performing as well as some competitors so it is important in terms of the economic model yes to think about what are the consequences of the important presence of the capital markets in the industry and what could be done or could not be done in going forward the other thing that i think it's important to keep in mind or at least the way i think about this issue and i know an explanation i spent some time thinking about newspapers in general is that a century ago that is 1960s say the traditional media owned a lot right a very significant portion of the information environment right there were few companies which owned a lot now traditional media are no no longer no longer have this dominant position in information environment the market value of google or some of the new competitors far surpasses that of many traditional companies even jointly put together so in a sense what has happened is that newspapers as one expression of traditional media have in general receded in their position in the marketplace right in the information marketplace because the things that we used to do separately in the past now we do all together we get our news we search online we watch video we get movie tickets we all do that in the conversion so information environment so what in part is hurting newspapers is the fact that overall they have a much less controlling position of the entire information environment and they have much less room to maneuver yeah i have a comment um as somebody who reads who reads the globe in paper and the times online and pays for both because i think i ought to pay for it um my concern isn't the change in technology i don't care whether it's on paper or it's online but i care a lot about interface i mean coincidentally i'm an interface designer but um but the role of serendipity and i have just two examples on the rare case when i pick up the new york times on paper and i read it i'll leaf through and i will see an opera review and i'll read an opera review and i'll be enlightened by it i will never click on the music section of the online times and the other example it's coincident that alex beam just stepped forward because i was going to use him as as an example is in the paper i read his column i enjoy it i get pissed off by it about half the time but because i um because he has good lead ins and good headlines it usually draws me in but because he pisses me off about half the time i might not click to it and i might not therefore get exposed to something that would annoy me um and i really mean that as a comlin by the way i think i appreciate that you're provocative um and when you couple that with pablo's point about the the commodification and i just worry about our culture becoming the lens through which we view the world getting smaller and smaller and flatter and flatter and it doesn't just apply to news but it's but but it certainly applies to news it doesn't just apply to it but it certainly applies to news and none of the panaceas that have been proposed have addressed that concern for me sorry but that's just a comment well i think it most importantly actually applies to news because it's ultimately news is how you define your reality so if we're all going to go out and get our different pictures i mean we all have to some extent a different picture of reality but but if we all start going off and completely just crazy divergent directions democracy becomes much harder because uh we can we're debating things that should be facts we do a little of this now actually but you know uh it could get much worse and i agree the the serendipity factor i think is a big point i i do agree with that the one thing about moving to online um and and i agree with Jerome that uh you're gonna you're gonna seek out the stories you want they are still gonna have that front page when you go to the first page of that site where they're gonna try to tell you something there'll be some chance maybe that you'll get a little bit of serendipity there but um it's interesting the new york times new website has all these tabs at the top and they're not all functional yet but one of them is just called my times and i assume this is gonna be some kind of uh some ability to do do more customization uh it's not functioning yet i'm curious to see what it's gonna look like but but a little bit of it would be lost then i mean that that's what i mean a little bit about the news judgment of those people you don't have to the nice thing about online is you could you'd still be able to see some of it on that front page maybe not as much you can still ignore their news judgment i mean believe me people do all the time you know but but uh i think it's nice to have it out there just to see what somebody else thinks is is important alex you know participating in politics i think i see the you know the definitely the creating of realities out there the living by different realities you can see it online you can see right now with this the story that's breaking with mark foley you can go to right wing sites and you just see a completely different picture of reality than if you want to um progressive blogs where i tend to do when i go into the mainstream media is looking to see what you know what what world view are they buying into and it's on one level it's a rather cynical attitude but i think on another level the participatory nature of it means that a lot more people are participating in that political structure they might be doing it from very partisan perspectives are very oriented towards their own needs but democracy usually is pretty pretty messy when a lot of people get involved just keep it online we'll be all right can everyone one sort of data point to your comment i don't have figures for sort of leading papers in the states but for the two newspapers that i looked at and i had extensive research on in argentina if you look at the total number of clicks on any given day one page gets between 50 and 60 percent and that is the home page so you these newspapers have every day 100,000 pages available to the consumers the consumers click on one between 50 and 60 percent of the time which means that they what they have a there is no significant they have there is what they see 50 to 60 percent of the time so if your concern of sensitivity is an important one because what is not there likely will go unseen much more proportionally than in the world of print right alex beam perhaps i should mention that alex spoke at our first forum he's a columnist for the boston globe right i look for a newspaper i not maybe not much longer though alex i really my question is direct solely at at gerome which is the reason i came here and um i i i want to i totally empathize with your comments about the lack of progress progressivity in the mainstream media there's this it's it's almost complete but can you talk to us for a while about net roots and political power because i feel like i've been on the receiving end and i remember the excitement around dean and the online excitement around dean and um it sort of faded out and i i got really caught up in the lamont thing where net roots and it's sort of you know outriders seem to have played a fascinating role and now i'm there's this possibility that uh lamont might lose to the machine and i could you speak for a while about um progressive politics um and the internet sure the um you know when i worked on howard dean's campaign up in up in burlington and uh after after he crashed and burned in in iowa there was a lot of stories like you know is this a dot like a dot com boom or boom bus cycle of uh online net roots politics and of course it wasn't you know those people are still clicking away and in in fact much greater numbers right now i think what we're seeing here though is is something that's uh going through stages of growth and getting pushed back from you know an establishment um the for me that the what's happened over then i would largely say that this what i call the net roots movement has happened this decade and it is increased in numbers um even in this last six months the amount of people participating in the blogs i mentioned that the traffic earlier at 120 million page views for the month right now previous to lamont it was at about 60 or 70 million so it's nearly doubled in the last five or six months i think the lamont race and this was um net lamont and kinetic who won the primary against joe lemont joe Lieberman really showed that the the progressive movement that is gathering steam online has the power power now to affect politics and democratic party at the electoral level and up to that point it had not been possible the the reality comes crashing in when you when you when you when you consider that yes you can do it in the in the primary election but the net roots are probably not strong enough to do that at the general election when independents and and republicans are you know voting just just alongside the democrats it's a much more partisan atmosphere but i don't really view the the lamont election as a do or die movement for the net roots because i don't believe the net reach is going away this this process that has started online of people regaining control of the democratic party engaging in politics online is not going to go anywhere it's going to stay with us and whether or not lamont loses whether or not the democratic party regains control that's not going to change that's going to keep going with us the the one thing i'd like to point out though in terms of like you know what's changed over the last couple years is that in the 2003 cycle you had a lot of big blogs that were more nationally oriented towards the presidential race this cycle what we're seeing being developed a lot more is what i call a local blogosphere and these will be blogs that are within a state and you have that here in massachusetts there's a number of blogs that that joined together and had a conference called blog left late last year and they participated in a number of other activities and so you create this sort of local blogosphere that exists within the you know the wider progressive infrastructure but it's part of a more local effort and and what we're seeing now is that the candidates are able to reach out to these people and engage with them help them with their turn out the vote exercises and engage in politics on a real grassroots on the ground level all that is just you know from the perspective of someone who likes it when people get involved in politics just great it's something that's going to be with us so we say but you know the ups and downs of the victories and whatnot are going to stick around with this and any follow-up or is that sort of along the discussion okay i have a question that's sort of a follow-up the question what are newspapers what is a newspaper and get me thinking what what is the audience about i don't know it's been over 10 years ago i was in this building doing research on customized news as part of a research program called the news news in the future program and at the time talking about the deli me and customized news was very criticized and we were talking about the loss of serendipity and but now many years have passed and i'm still wondering what is audience when you say that newspapers have editors who have an expertise in identifying stories and but that's because they are to identify the stories based on an audience and to target a certain audience but then how do you define audience it seems like audience is something very diverse and hard to like i was born in colombia i grew up in france and i'm here now and i'm interested in all those countries but i and i'm not saying i'm representative but i'm just saying everybody has a different background and interest so i'll start off with this one you know this points out earlier is what is lost is you know with this customized news trend that we're having what is lost is a centralized sort of broadcast message that's going out there to people and and i don't really blame i mean it sort of sounds like we're kind of victimizing you know that the broadcast medium thing but i think um you know probably pointed out that the problem that was was created with this in in the beginning because they were not delivering what people wanted they were they were delivering more of something that's been commodified for consumption in an easy to recognize recognizable focus and from a political standpoint they were creating things that were advocating uh something that was what i've viewed a lot of times to be right ring propaganda because they were being so pressured by those forces that wanted to control the debate i guess the thing i'd say about uh about editors and and expertise and and whatnot is i don't i i usually i think when you it depends on the news organization but if you get to the right news organization i don't think that they put stories on the front page for their audience i think maybe they'll put one story on the front page it's a crowd pleaser or something like that but if you looked at the front page of like of of the globe or the times of the washington post those stories are up there because a bunch of people all sat around and it's not that they're not that they're experts on everything but they have all these people you know coming back to them and saying this is going on where i am this is going on where i am this is going on where i am and it's like well why is that important why is that important why is that important and they sit and they they take all that into account they're like based on everything i've heard these are the five biggest stories of today you know and maybe plus the story about a lost dog or something that'll that'll get that that truly is there just like you know it's a it's it's a good read it's a crowd pleaser but but i really don't think that they put the stories in the front page just because they're trying to attract audience i think that they're doing it because they think this isn't true of all places and actually i would say this it's less true in broadcast and that's probably my bias as a print guy but but i really do think when they put those front pages together they're they're they're putting the stories up there they think are the most important construction of the story of the absolute the audience right because they have an image of the audience that is for the most part putting themselves in the position of the audience what i would like to read about etc etc and they are a very special kind of audience in that way and to a certain extent the news that they produce that they communicate reflects their own self perception of an intended audience so one two um it is an unimportant thing i have to say that those papers are not here do not exist in society to tell us what we want necessarily but what we should know right now we may not care about but it's important that a citizens of a particular country or people who live in a particular locality we should know and that's a very very important function that they play now in the world in which 90 for instance in the states 97 percent of newspapers operate in natural monopoly markets that is they have no other local competitor right and in which newspaper people get aggregate circulation figures about how much they are selling and they may get some information in terms of focus groups about what people want to know more and so they have a very big and aggregate right a real conception of the audience of the audience response it is easier to sustain this mission of saying i'm gonna tell you what you should know not necessarily what you might want online they have clicks right right i think everybody clicks and everybody votes with their clicks and people online and all the time not only monitoring their competition but how well or badly their stories are doing and they are developing a much more refined taste right much more refined sense i'm sorry of the taste of the audience right so for instance newspaper newspapers in general for their top stories they tend to be a heavy proportion of public affairs like national foreign etc most of what consumers want to read about as mentioned in terms of their clicks is sports entertainment right natural disasters etc one thing one thing is when you have that very idea from focus groups but you don't see every day with the clicking on your stories but when you see that information every day right it creates a very important conflict that is pervasive in all the news that i visited and the people that i talked to which is between the daily knee or the aggregation of the daily knee as manifested in their clicks and the professional values right and the sense of purpose and the public service of the journalistic profession which is a wonderful thing right so part of what's going on is that right i mean it is true that the audience right i mean it's a very complicated construct etc etc but these technological changes in part and intentionally have revealed a certain dynamic right that is much more difficult to avoid now than what it was before and again for organizations you want to go google news yahoo etc etc which do not have these wonderful journalistic values therefore they are going to deliver a whole lot of what the audience was and unnecessary what they should know about right it's much easier to move in that direction but for for traditional media it's much more difficult because it's a value system right it's a country thing so it is a very complicated issue let me mention people that i know some people have already left and we're going to have a very elegant reception after this event starting at seven o'clock all of you who are here are certainly invited and i hope you'll attend question yeah i have i guess two questions i is the traditional media ceding their expertise to make editorial judgment when they start feeding off each other you know who decides what a story is if everyone's just pointing at each other saying we don't have it we need to have that do they suddenly stop exercising judgment and on the flip side of that you know Jerome you talk about the ex the two tiers of expertise the the familiar and then the authoritarian expertise in the blog sphere how do we vet experts how do we say this guy really knows what he's talking about southeast asia versus this person start with that last part i i think it comes through um the experts are basically known to their credibility and it's you know the the unique thing about the internet is history sort of begins in the mid mid 1990s and uh you can you can go um you know if you have an online record that's associated with you people can find out about it in the past but so many people is the online record associated with them i mean so many people post anonymously oh yeah well then you're yeah well so then you either are pretty skeptical of that um thing that's posted and that's sort of evolved over time it used to be that you know when things would break people would report them no matter who did the story and it would be part of the cycle but people got burned a couple times especially um you know people that were out there under their name who were taking anonymous uh statements at their at their face value that's i think that's evolved over time and especially from the perspective don't take and speak to this of a journalist that reads sing out there there's a there's a much more skepticism that exists online now but there is uh you know the the the editorial judgment that you mentioned um you know i see this playing out right now with the with the mark foley scandal and that um there's a lot of online uh blogs and and websites that are reporting on who the pages actually were and these are minors that were involved with mark foley these and it's very explicit you you have pictures of the people you have descriptions of where their jobs are now and everything every thing down to the detail it isn't making it into the wider mainstream media and i think that is and it's not even making it into the larger blogosphere but it's definitely out there so you have something of a you know i i think it tends to see the blogs as sort of like a gatekeeper are having busted down the gatekeeper presence of the mainstream media but it's still very much in effect and for sometimes like this case good reason i think there'll always be gatekeepers i mean it's just going to be who's who's that you know it's just who's at the gate you know somebody's going to be there and maybe the gate's bigger or smaller or whatever whatnot uh the the Pablo study is really interesting about about about argentina just because it's it's the i think the thing at most again the thing it most ties to the united states is local television because you have a market where you'll generally have at least three maybe four stations doing the news at the same time and you talk to somebody who's done local tv news and they're watching the other newscast the entire time and writing down what's on there in the morning they get the ratings they get the overnight the next morning like oh my god this story didn't do well why'd this do this we got to move something else it it is a different i mean it works different than a newspaper it it it is much more of a commodity local television news than newspapers are just because it's the environment in existence and it's troubling if that's if that becomes the the the way online starts to operate because it's a very bad i mean in terms of news judgment it's just awful it's gonna it's gonna it will things will get commodified and it'll lead to a dumbing down isn't part of the problem though there that i mean in terms of what we're talking about tonight the the 30 percent of people are online in argentina and if that were a number where a lot higher i wonder if we'd have these problems that you're you're describing why i want to make one yes sure why because people wouldn't i mean i think if those papers had a lot more competition with online sources where their eyeballs were after them that they wouldn't necessarily be replicating their stories because if they're going to start putting the same thing it leaves a huge vacuum out there for other people to go into okay so so editorial judgment is always a collective enterprise make all kinds of judgments so it's a social device it's not that the newspaper is not composted when the newsroom has more than one person and that and that judgment actually is a result of years so on the job socialization in some cases professional training etc etc what has been happening though is that the collective character of the judgment right is there's always attention between the collective and the individual or the organizational right what's going on is that there is more of an inter-organizational convergence right that is leading to this judgment being more shared right so they there has always been a collective component now it's more collected than before but it's not that it wasn't collected before one two two that is very important in this context the role of the wire services becomes even more important than because a greater proportion of what we see in the online press right in the online environment comes actually from the wires and actually what happens that the people in the newsroom not only the the online newsroom are watching each other people in the print newsroom are watching about their online doing right sometimes I've been told that I haven't observed this directly so I don't have systematic data but sometimes even instead of preparing their news budget by themselves they actually grab print out a couple of online pages from reputable sources sometimes their online newspaper sometimes their online newspaper and they take that to the noon meeting in the newsroom right so because again it's easier to access that information and time constraints are very serious so two things that thing that happened is that then the collective dimension of the editorial judgment is still editorial judgment because of a thousand possible stories there are things there's in five six seven ten stories that have been closed so that is the expression of judgment but the collective part right is more important than before and in the context in which there is as Tom Rosenstein for instance and the people at the project for instance in John Lison as we have written a lot maybe in which the acceleration of the news cycle has deepened there is less time etc etc and then reliance on wire services right it's even greater than before we also rely on wire services but now it's even greater so again that is adding to the collective right nature of the the enterprise going to your comment it is so what one way of thinking about it is it is not only that is 25 percent but it also that 25 percent represents disproportionately a particular segment in the social economy so I mean we have the upper tier because in a country with you know levels of poverty that are incredibly high that people go and access the web etc etc etc so one thing is not only that the pie if the pie gets bigger than more resources the public gets more diverse they should be more I don't know that what I do know what I do know is so remember I said I have data from 2004 and 2005 and I have so basically the two are much more alive than before them and I said there is a growth between 04 and 05 in the convergence right so what we see is that the convergence has grown right and right at the same time the amount of people who access the internet has grown and the spreading in the social pyramid pyramid has gone down too so it's actually at least from this very little data have is exactly the opposite of what you are saying right I don't know I mean it's just two years it's a very little variation but I'm not sure if you go up you may be right but I'm not sure if you go that way I would just I would just say I hope you're right I hope Jerome's right but my concern is that ultimately it's the it's the ad dollars they're gonna determine it and that's a problem because the advertisers they're just gonna care about a certain population it becomes a problem but I hope I'd I hope you're right and I think you may be right question I have a comment about the somebody say about the democracy of facts and and realities considering the political implement implications of mainstream media how do you comment on how how much freedom has it offered to a certain geographical area especially in the area where a lot of news or a sensor or a lot of facts or realities or a sensor interpreted in a certain ways especially in China or here in the United States how it's gonna affect the third parties who don't really have any voices in in the mainstream media that's really interesting you say that the last column I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor was after I just had met he was over here in a State Department Fellowship he was a blogger from China who worked for China Daily which I thought was insane because obviously all the media in China is controlled by the Chinese government I'm like what can you possibly be putting up and he says well we allow we photos everybody you know it's you know it's no different than us everybody's got camera phones so they're going out and they're snapping pictures of their camera phones they write a couple lines of text they send it to us and we post it on our website I was like this is this is fascinating you know how do you choose you know what happens then well we choose what goes on the front page and and I said what do you do of controversial topics and he said they've told me the government has told me they're very excited by what I'm doing but be careful that was what they said and he said that everybody has an individual page they kind of have their own photo blog and if they have not issued him they had not issued him rules for what he would do with taking pictures of things that are technically illegal like strikes he could take a picture of a strike he could put he now they would not let him post it on the front page but the idea is this person could post it on their personal blog and I thought this is remarkable and in two weeks it had only been up for two weeks you know the you the number of people sending in photos this was was you know it was it was shooting up and he and I went and I looked at the site and I thought it was really fascinating I wrote about it in a column I wrote about it on a Saturday after looking at the website when the column came out on Tuesday the website had been taken down and it's not it's I was worried that I'd done something it wasn't that there there are things going on in China right now there's another shake-up going on and and and there is there's going to be some there there there are definite media the person who's getting more control wants more control of the media so he's obviously shut this thing down at least I think it's shut down it says it's been it's been down for server maintenance now for like 10 days okay but but the thing I thought when I wrote the column was this once they let in the camera phones to me the fight's over at some point whether you post those on a blog or whatever some of those pictures are going to get out I mean I I think you know that they're going to they're going to try to maintain the tightest control they can over the media you know but but I think that you know this is the good this is the this is the best part of blogging this is the best part of citizen journalism citizen journalism at its best they won't be able to control it and things are going to come out and eventually it's it's it's it's going to be hard and it's going to be hard for battle and they'll maintain control as tight as they can but eventually they'll lose control there's one there's one topic that really hasn't been much discussed in our in our three forums so far and it's been implicit or embedded in some of the comments that have been made to today and I'm wondering if if we can get some comments from the panel and maybe from the audience about it and that to put it in its simplest form is the tradition of political independence that is true of western newspapers and especially of american newspapers there is no in in all of the complaints that one hears about the top-down media and the mainstream media it's very and of course there is it's true that the mainstream media the washington post the new york times promulgates certain in in their editorials and in their news stories promulgates certain perspectives on the world there's no question about that but they also themselves believe themselves to be committed to a different kind of aesthetic or moral mission and that mission is to sort of tell the truth as they understand it to a citizenry that needs to hear these truths and what those journalists do is protected constitutionally in the united states a lot of other societies don't have that and that constitutional protection as everyone knows does not extend to other media television news isn't completely protected in the same way there's no evidence that that online news will be protected in the same way so my the question i want you to address in one sense is leave aside the feelings of any particular newspaper is there some ideal of what journalism is embedded in democratic societies and especially in the constitutionally protected rights of newspapers in the united states that should be protected should be celebrated should that we should try to find a way of extending these principles into the into emerging media isn't this a loss if it's not the case if we if we don't recognize that the idea i think one of them that's been brought up here which is very relevant to this discussion is the the being openness to information that you would have otherwise not might have clicked on on the internet somebody brought this up recent earlier with the with the opera review and i think that's something to to think about and but also the the the notion though on the on the web that you're totally closed off is is probably not the case because if you consider what we're talking about with china there's a reason why they don't want to let the people to get out on the web is because you learn about much more different viewpoints than you would have otherwise certainly there's places in in the united states even where you know we have pockets of culture that are newspapers which would which would have probably established fact is creationism with their readers i mean it's just a fact of where you know what where we live in today the united states and those same people they go online they might only go to creationist type of websites but they're going to be exposed if they click around a lot to different viewpoints it's a very important point but i think it's important at least coming from overseas and doing more and more research that is comparative to keep in mind that there are different traditions of the press when it comes to the relationship between the press in general not just free newspapers or online instead of the press in general journalism and the state and politics right and um there are to the same extent different manifestations of democracy there are different ways there is not just one kind of democracy there's different kinds of democracy and one of the main contributions that the president different in its different traditions have to democracy is that in general the state and large corporations etc try to control the new agenda for obvious reasons right so a well-funded resourceful autonomous press has always tries always at least to control to monitor right in part it does that right by providing a product that is different by doing more and more investigation more and more that's all the way of bringing this up is because this trend towards the commodification is actually decreasing the contribution that the president has right as a collective actor in different democratic societies and that's why it's it's a very it's not just evident as you can tell I'm obsessed with decisions kind of a lot of time thinking about this and trying to collect data makes sense so if I think it's important it's socially relevant because it is an important issue for all of us as citizens yes I mean Pablo's findings have a paradoxical quality obviously I mean because if the net is supposed to be so uh uh liberating and pluralism and pluralistic yet if it's effect on news is to make news uh less pluralistic that's very disturbing and very strange it's obviously a very very interesting uh project and the paper is certainly going to be something I want to read closely uh Henry yeah I I guess you've succeeded in provoking me David to respond and I was resisting doing so but your statement my intention the statement that the first amendment belongs to professional journalist is a pretty outrageous statement well I didn't say I mean you you you I just said I said I said I said the press I said the press in the United States is protected by the first amendment and you said other people are not protected but in fact the the whole point of that is a right of political participation our founding fathers would certainly have been shocked to discover that it was professional journalists who had some sort of monopoly but it's congress that did that Henry not me it's congress that did that I mean there have been decisions that have not allowed the freedom that it goes to to uh press to to print papers to be applied in other media it should be of course well I said there's all I I think I think that's a legal record is the legal record is really it would be disputed on that and I think it's much more important for us to insist that the rights of citizen journalists and bloggers are protected from the first amendment and they accept a premise that there's some sort of exclusive right of professionals to control free that was not my that was not my assumption my assumption was what the law is actually no I I don't think I agree with you about where the law is on that table and that's the part of the problem well the the one thing is the one thing is journalists do have a special responsibility in democracy because you can write anything you want and you can write what you want on the web but the fact of the matter there when you're a journalist you you actually you know and you are a you're paid to do your job which is the big thing about paying to be your job is you are accredited yes that means that some government person is saying that you are allowed to do things but unfortunately not everybody can go through congress and just like go up to the press gallery because it wouldn't be big enough you know not everybody can you know sit in the White House press room most people probably wouldn't want to but but but you know it's it's there there are special responsibilities involved in being a journalist and and you know democracy can't function properly without without journalists doing their jobs because look they're the ones who have access to these people and you might have had questions you wanted to ask George Bush before the war and a lot of people might have questions but they weren't going to get to do it it was the people who had the credentials who were going to get to do it and you know they didn't do it properly a lot of people would say and they'd probably be right so there there's there is something special about the the rights about the the rights that are granted to accredited journalists to do things not to say what they're going to say but to have access to things that you don't have access to you know Henry I would maybe I just wasn't clear I mean you've misunderstood me I did not at all want to imply that I didn't think these rights should extend ever I of course I do but I my understanding is that legally in the United States television news does not have told the same complete freedom that the print papers do that that that there have that there have been I don't know if there have been supreme court decisions but there have been decisions about how how to apply questions of freedom of the press and and first amendment freedoms that have not been extended to other media I think they should be extended to other media I think that the idea of the first amendment should apply to all forms of to all forms of communication of course I would not want it restricted in any way but in practice it's not been the case in in and and it's also obvious that in practice television news has not behaved in the same in the same way taking the same kind of attitude toward its relation to to toward government for example or toward its role as reporting as print papers have of course I hope that in in the online world that is emerging there will be citizen journalists who will assert the same powers and and rights of inquiry no question I certainly think that that should happen it ought to happen the the FEC this year had a had a ruling come down with the with the political blogosphere it it was advocated by a bunch of regulatory pro-regulatory organizations in DC that the the participation in the political process by blogs which are openly partisan be viewed as in-kind contributions and especially for the links that they put out onto the you know contribute to these candidates now type of things and ultimately the FEC found that there was no way that they could write such sort of legislation for bloggers alone and they sort of threw that out rightly so because you know the what we're doing what political bloggers are doing in on the online world is no different than what you're doing when you go and talk to other people that they have a a wider audience that listens to them is not their choice when they participate in the dialogue I want to can I ask a question here sure I want to ask question just following up with Dante is is the access that the the the press has uh is it granted though because of the respect for those for their you know the rights and their um position and their their ability to hopefully look at things objectively or is it granted because of the audiences they reach in the persuasion power that they have ultimately it's granted because the because the first amendment is in the constitution because they felt that for the government to work well somebody had to tell everybody what was going on the government and it's just you know people have people get paid to do this specific thing to go and report on things and and not everybody can have access to just to to walk into to to buildings and press conferences I mean it literally is a question of it literally is a matter of you know just logistics to be honest I really think it's you know it's and bloggers I mean bloggers were invited and and they will increasingly be invited they'll be invited to do more and more stuff but but when they do that they will be accepting the fact that they are in some ways becoming more like mainstream journalists that's that's that's part of the that's part of the deal and I and I don't think it's I don't think it's about the fact that they're not that they're not biased I mean the national review you know the nation these people get press credentials as well I don't think you can separate it though from the fact that they they have audiences that they're they're open to persuasion with if the nation didn't have any readers at all I doubt that they would get as much access yeah I think I think I think it's fair that's that's also that's the question of when you have that's the same question is if you've got you know 20 candidates who are running for the democratic nomination but but really there's only four that have a legitimate shot at winning and maybe they invite eight and the 12 or you know the LaRouche people stand in the balcony and yell down at people about how unfair everything is you know it's just the lines are drawn at some point and it's it is to some extent you're right yeah there's a constituency for the for the for those candidates there's a constituency for those media yeah it's true well the communications forum has entered a conversation about newspapers that's been going on in the society for a long time and we'll go on after our forums are over I hope at least some of the things that have been said have been productive of further thought I want to thank the audience and I want to thank our panel