 It's my great pleasure now to introduce our two speakers. And perhaps I ought to mention something about today's format. Each of our speakers will give brief 15-minute introductory talks. We talked about this beforehand, and they understand that I'm going to rule the time frame with an iron hand. When they get to 12 minutes, if they get that far, I will remind them, and at 15 I will shut off their microphones if they don't stop. The forum is about conversation and dialogue, and it's important that even very learned speakers embrace the dialogic mission of the communications forum. After our speakers deliver their opening statements, the speakers and I as moderator will engage in a brief conversation at the speakers table, and then in the final 60 or 70 minutes of our event, of our time together, we will open the floor to responses and exchanges with the audience. My expectation is, as usual with such things, it's the question and answer sessions that turn out to be especially memorable, and I have no doubt this will be one of those as well. So hone your knives, get ready for attack agreement, and alternative perspectives. We welcome, in fact, look forward to your contribution to this conversation. Well, our speakers today are especially qualified to address the problem of the continuing online migration to online format of American journalism, and it perhaps might have been a more sensible title to say the migration of journalism online, because we will be talking about things that sites that do not originate in traditional newsprint formats, and one of the most interesting features of today's media landscape is the appearance on the web of journalistic forms that don't have a print origin. I'm sure that's going to be one of our subjects of discussion. David Carr, to the far right, has returned kindly to the forum for the second time. He was here last year and made a memorable impression on all of us, and I'm very grateful that he's been able to make the time to return. As you know, as I'm sure most of you know, he writes a column for the Monday business section of the New York Times, and although it is often focused on economic and business questions, I've often felt that it was misplaced in the paper. It is to me one of the most revealing and continuously helpful columns about our media environment and about what's happening to journalism, and in a broader way to our larger culture because of the profound forms of media transition we're experiencing. He also works for the Times, of course, as a general assignment reporter in the culture section, and he covers all aspects of popular culture. Prior to working at the Times, he was a contributing writer for the Atlantic Monthly, and New York Magazine was the media writer for Inside.com, a website that focused on the business of entertainment and publishing. He also has served as the editor of the Washington City paper where he wrote a column called Paper Trail, which was also about media issues in Washington, D.C. David is also the author of quite a wonderful and courageous book entitled Night of the Gun. A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life, and colleagues of mine in several English departments have told me that they're adding it to their courses. David, I meant to mention this to you, they're adding it to their courses in autobiography, in American autobiography. It's a very powerful book. Dan Kennedy, to my immediate right, is assistant professor in Northeastern University School of Journalism, and he's the author of the Media Nation blog, which covers trends in media, technology, and culture. He's also a contributing writer for the Boston Phoenix, where he was the media columnist from 1994 through 2005. And he's a regular commentator on media issues on WGBH TV's weekly show, Beat the Press. Starting in July 2007, Dan Kennedy has been writing a weekly online column for the Comment is Free section of the Guardian's American edition. And that online column, too, is primarily about media and politics. He is also the author, Dan Kennedy is also the author of another kind of, both autobiographers in some way. David's book, also a powerful book, is entitled Little People, Learning to See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes, and it studies the culture of dwarfism in a profoundly moving and interesting way. That's a great pleasure to introduce our two speakers. David Carr will speak first for 15 minutes, followed by Dan, and then we'll have a conversation. Can you get my computer up? Got it. Are you guys? Is this on? Okay. It's a thrill to be back at the MIT Communications Forum. David said I made quite an impression. I was surprised I was invited back after that. I'm a graduate of an undistinguished land grant university you've never heard of, and so I was trying to explain to my dad where I was, who's both hard of hearing and quite provincial, and kept seeing MIT and he didn't understand me. And I said, Dad, it's one of those fancy Eastern schools I never could have got into. He said, good. Enjoy it. It's a special honor to sit next to Dan. Those of us who are in the media racket frequently find ourselves just grabbing the back of his shirt and hanging on. He's been ahead of the curve if there is such a thing anymore. I get it again and is not just a gracious colleague, but an incredibly surprising thinker when it comes to these issues. So I'm happy to be sitting next to the likes of him. The reason I put up this question is in 1988 I had been out of the journalism racket for a while and was talking to an editor for my first assignment. He said, just fax it to me. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, you put it in a machine and it goes through a wire and it comes out as a piece of paper on the other end. And I said, bullshit. It sounds flinstones to you, but at the time it just sounded so Jetsons, so improbable. And if you sort of back up from it, this is information being digitized and pushed down to a consumer level. So it was its own sort of paradigm shift. And I just say that as an example of how I was only out of journalism for about a year and that technology had changed in a very significant way. I think when we talk about how the web is destroyed journalism, we forget how much journalism it has enabled. I have more resources in my backpack than the newsroom I walked into. It's a fact of cloud computing that, you know, all known fact, one click away, right? It's right there. We have an ability to surround sources. It used to be, I was just on a big, long investigative story. You'd get a phone number somehow. You'd have to hammer the phone, hammer the phone. I found people on Facebook. I found people on Twitter. I found people on LinkedIn. I mean, guess is it what their work email would be? In part, all this technology has become so transparent that we don't even notice it anymore. I also think these distinctions when we're going to talk about all the new media, which I want to talk about more later, just really doesn't happen anymore. I mean, everything is hybrid media. We make video. We do blogs. I think that sort of what is a dot com and what is a dot org, especially considering how many news organizations are losing money is sort of, and I do think that over time, a point of view is just baked into reporting in a way that we don't really remember. One of the things that's going to happen is 20, 30 years from now, institutions like this are going to step back. At a time when people thought journalism was being destroyed, they're going to find out it's actually being built. That the information we have now is so much deeper, so much richer, and I'm not just talking in terms of different forms of media, but there is so much more fact-based reporting in my stuff than there used to be, because it's there, and it's there for the having, and I have resources that I otherwise wouldn't have. And I think that we're also looking at sort of disappearance of the platform. What is a newspaper? What is a blog? What is the BBC looks like? Reuters looks like The New York Times looks like. If you open up an iPad, you know, and open up a new source, you don't really know what you're looking at. Is this a TV station? No, it's not. It's on an iPad. But everything has text, everything has video, everything has audio, and the biggest change is sort of in the audience. They become like Tom Sawyer. They're helping us paint the fence at every turn, and smart media organizations are seeing this as partners, producers, and publishers. I think this is, people keep saying, where does the time come? The time comes. It still does. Share a pie might change, whether my newspaper is getting as much as it used to or not. People are consuming more and more media because they can do so in friction-free ways. I'm not going to go there. You cocked the gun about the schedule. I'm just racing through everything I got. And I'll see. So you did it in the course of a very windy introduction. One of the things I just want to focus on is, I think this sort of MSM and new media, I think a lot of what's happening is you see them marching toward each other. There's, you've got HuffPo and Daily Beast going on and Howard Feynman and Howard Kurtz, long time MSN reporters. More and more, I see blogs making phone calls where you say you're sitting in your basement, in your pajamas. A lot of reporting I used on this last story were from really good blogs. I also think that there's a hybrid forum show up in, like, it's okay, Texas Tribune launches. And it's this wonderful news site in Texas concentrate on the State House. The dailies that they're initially taking as an enemy, you're here to take them. Here we are a couple years down the road. They're doing joint projects. They're doing, and they've met in the middle. I was not like a big pro-public. A guy looked at the salaries of the guys that were running. I just thought, this doesn't look like dot org to me. This looks like home cook and a lot of money. And then when you see how their journalism gets spread and how many newspapers and blogs, all that great reporting is going in. It turns out to be a very good economic model. I do think there was a couple of days ago, you've seen this sort of, I lived through one sort of land rush in terms of journalists being valued and then our value dropped to zero pretty much. But when I went to work at inside.com in 2001, Tina Brown was at the height of her powers. Magazines were paying four and five dollars an hour. And then what happened is the web, one of the things that ESA production does is content doubles. Every year is that because twice as many people are making stuff. No, it's twice as easy as it used to be. And if you think that's a lot, just think about when I was thinking about this on the way up here, when voice to text becomes reliable, what's going to happen in terms of the explosion of, because right now there's all these podcasts out there that I wouldn't listen to with your ears because they're not searchable because they're time intensive. But if I'm able to interview you and immediately plop it up in text form and we're getting pretty darn close, there's going to be a lot. How am I doing on time here? You have seven minutes. You're all right. You have fortune and time. Try not to be too windy though. Okay. I've already pointed out the windy slot got taken. I'm going to be the bloviating spot. It's weird to watch Yahoo and AOL, which were portals, and we're just going to aggregate. And now what are they doing? They're out there hiring as many voices and as many journalists as possible. I think what we're heading toward is news sites being, and Ken Doctor I think wrote very well about this, a sort of series of federated verticals where the writer is known, they've developed a brand either through their work or through social media, and they begin to come up with any number of names all federated under a sort of a single flag. And you're seeing some of that take place. Peter Goodman, who was at our paper, went to work at, Havpo? Yes. Howard Kurtz went to work at Daily Beast. Howard Feynman, Havpo, there are other examples as well. And I think you might see a little bit of bifurcation between commodity news, that which is good enough, and then an overlay of analysis and commentary from people like Dan, known for having a certain level and area of expertise. The, I thought that Michael Shedson, the guy that did, he was like this, the, I think the more industrious, no I don't want to say that, half of the Downey report like probably had to actually write the sucker. And which was, I thought a great place to sort of start. He recently set up what I thought was a smart sort of triptych around what could happen with the media business. One would be a restoration, ad cycle comes back. As many people as remain, there's a new kind of stability there. And then the second tier he came up with is a diet with supplements, meaning that there's new collaborations, new efforts on the cause side, gradually moving from, you know, we're kind of in the newspaper business, we're in a trucks and manufacturing business, getting out of that business. As we make adjustments on the cause side, maybe we can start to live on the revenues that we're making, plus new collaborations like the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post now share sports. So there's sort of a middle ground. And then he also talked about a mixed economy, which would be your BBCs and your NPRs collaborating with a variety of sort of local sites. Craig Newmark, who knows something about nonprofits, suggested in 2020 that NPR would be the dominant news brand, and they certainly have been aggressive in expanding. I think that when we look at these new forms, like myself, I did kind of this reverse migration, where I was working for a dot com that blew up and went back to mainstream media. I doubt I would leave my current job to go to a new media job, just because if I'm going to work in journalism, I'm sort of hooked on this microphone that I have. I mean, right now I have over a quarter million followers on Twitter. If my last name wasn't New York Times, I think that'd be about 250. And I think you could wipe out, you know, quite a few of those zeros. And you do get hooked on that. The other thing is, and I thought about this because I did a very big heave for the New York Times the other day that was on the front page above the fold, and all the nonsense that goes into that, which is layers and layers of copy editing, of fact checking, of watching a big newspaper, come together as like watching a very big train move down a very small track. And it's incredibly ungainly enterprise. And I ended up almost catatonic from it, and I thought this totally isn't worth it. And then the next day, boom, a story that just took the corner of the debate and just shook it up and down in a way that no matter how articulate my post would have been, would have done. And I watched it bounce on Twitter. I watched it 400 reader comments. I watched NPR pick it up. I was happy to appear in all these different forums, and I think going forward to suggest, well, I'm from New Media, or I'm a crusty old media guy, is not going to get it. I think very soon, whether it's looking at it on this, or on this, or as television becomes more enabled, there won't be New Media, there won't be old media. There's just going to be media. Thanks. Can we switch computers? Can everybody hear me okay? Not just yet. I'll get to that. Well, anyway, I am really happy and honored to be at this MIT forum. I was delighted to be invited, and I was especially pleased to be invited to sit next to David Carr, who is really a giant in the media watching business and somebody I have followed for years. I think the last time that David and I met was in June 2009, and we were trading rumors about whether or not his employer was going to shut down the Boston Globe or not. Fortunately, the globe is doing a little bit better since then and has come up with some interesting funding models, and maybe we'll end up talking about some of those when we get into the discussion. The story that David has referred to a couple of times that he said was such a problem to get through because of the large train moving down the small tracks, if you haven't had a chance to read it, I strongly recommend it. It's a story about how Chicago real estate mogul Sam Zell, who acquired Tribune Company a few years ago, he and his merry band of radio executives have just completely trashed the place. And it's one of those stories that when you started reading it, you said, well, I already knew that Sam Zell trashed the place, and then you read it and you say, oh, my God, it's so much worse than I realized. So it's an absolutely terrific story, and I really recommend it to all of you. It even has dirty parts. Oh, yeah, there's sex in it too, so you definitely want to read it. 15 years ago, we started down this road of newspapers migrating to the web, and when we first started down this road, it didn't seem illogical to suppose that once we had gotten rid of the massive printing and distribution costs associated with publishing a traditional newspaper, that the advertising that would flow in would result in a bright and happy new era for everybody. And of course, as we know, a few years after the migration to the web began, the advertising business, as we knew it, fell apart. Craig's List has pretty much wiped out the classified market, which supported 40-45% of most newspaper revenues, and some non-technological developments, mainly the decline of vibrant downtowns and the rise of big box stores, have taken their toll on display advertising. So although newspapers are indeed migrating to the web, the money somehow stayed behind. And that brings me to a few points that I wanted to make about... Here it is. I'm just trying to get up a PowerPoint that's on the desktop. It's right there. This is more for my benefit than anything. When I see the pictures, I remember what I wanted to say. I am working on... I have a book in progress about the New Haven Independent and the rise of nonprofit community websites. Now, the New Haven Independent is one of about maybe a half-dozen really prominent nonprofit news sites that are covering either a community or a state. Probably the best-known are Voice of San Diego, Minn Post, David mentioned the Texas Tribune. And the New Haven Independent would probably come in right behind them as a really prominent nonprofit site doing good journalism. Now, I took this picture a few weeks ago with their fifth anniversary party. You see Paul Bass, the founder and editor of The Independent on the right. And I'm sorry, I will call her Ms. Ibrahim because I don't know how to pronounce her first name on the left. And it was really a very remarkable event at which people from all walks of life in New Haven came in to kind of celebrate five years of this project. And as part of this, Paul is pushing a new funding model for his site, which we'll get to as we move along. I actually may not even use my full 15 minutes. I'm very interested in hearing what's on your mind, but I do think it's interesting to kind of bring through a few ideas about what's going on in New Haven. New Haven, of course, is a medium-size, fairly poor, largely African-American and Latino city that had fallen on very hard times in the 80s, has been making something of a recovery in recent years and now because of the recession is really struggling to hold on. It is served by a large regional newspaper, the New Haven Register. I will tell you that the register has a terrible reputation and it's not that bad. It's not as bad as its reputation. However, it's owned by the journal Register Company, which only came out of bankruptcy a year ago. And as a commercial enterprise, it is essentially forced to put more of its resources in covering the more affluent suburbs around New Haven than it is on the city itself. So you have this vacuum in the city that the New Haven Independent tries to fill. Paul Bass has a background that to the extent that David Carr, Paul Bass, and I have some commonalities. He came out of the alternative newspaper scene, as did David and I, and he came back from a book leave and found he just couldn't go back into doing what he was doing, so he decided to start this project. Essentially, what you have with the New Haven Independent is four full-time reporters and a few part-timers just essentially covering anything that moves in the neighborhoods of New Haven. Here you have this big coverage of a food co-op that is starting up. The design, as you can see, the best way I can describe the design is weirdly compelling. I mean, there's nothing beautiful about it. It's done in blog format, but it's really not a blog. You have people going out and really killing themselves doing reporting. The flag is very beautiful, though. It is, and the little logo here is as good as it gets. No question about that. The guy with the thunderbolts. They work out of the second floor of the local Spanish-language newspaper in the heart of New Haven. The contrast with the register, I almost feel bad for them, but the contrast with the register couldn't be more striking. They're in this huge industrial building surrounded by barbed wire next to the interstate. The independent is downtown and easily accessible. There's a lot of temptation to get hung up on talking about technology when we talk about projects like this. I'm going to show you what I think is probably the most important piece of technology that the New Haven Independent uses. The reporters ride around the city on their bikes. As a result of a recent bicycle accident I had, I can no longer aspire to work for the New Haven Independent. It's very simple. They ride around the city with notebooks and smartphones and point and shoot cameras and cover the city. There's nothing very complicated about it. The technology that they're using 15 years ago we would have been pretty wild by, but today it's really no big deal. They're simply using a blogging platform and uploading all their stuff and making use of Twitter and Facebook to get the word out and doing pictures, stories, and videos. Now, they have managed to expand since they began in 2005. In June of 2009, they began a satellite site called the Valley Independent Sentinel. The Nogatuk Valley, which are some of the grittier suburbs in and around New Haven. If we were analogizing this to Boston, we're talking more Maldon, Medford, Everett, Chelsea, not Wellesley, Weston, Newton, and those kinds of suburbs. They had been without their own daily paper for about 20 years. A corporate owner had come in and just one day shut it down. Here in Greater Boston, we're still used to every little town having its own weekly, oftentimes a daily. Connecticut has lost a lot of this, so they started this satellite project that covers five towns near New Haven. They got some night funding for that, and so they're doing that. Actually, you see their Twitter feed over here. Their Valley Satellite operation is actually a little bit more advanced technologically than New Haven, just because it better reflects the people who are doing the Valley. They did this wonderful thing a few months ago where they used a droid to do live video of some sort of an eating contest in a local diner. I mean, you have to love local news to get into that, but it was great. It was really a great thing. They have a Statehouse Bureau. A young woman several years ago, acquired a one-person Statehouse website called the Connecticut News Junkie, and her name is Christine Stewart, and she provides Statehouse coverage not only for her own site, but to the New Haven Independent. Now, in addition to nonprofit models, there are also for-profit models of doing small-time community journalism. There were two kinds. There's the locally-owned. This is the Batavian, which was started by Howard Owens a few years ago. Former Big Wheel at Gatehouse Media, and they eliminated his job, and he said, can I take the Batavian with me? And they said, be my guest. And so he's making a go of it there. There's BaristaNet in Northern New Jersey. Your hometown, Montclair, New Jersey. Very nice downtown, by the way. Closer to home, there's a network of sites called centralmassnews.com, started by a local advertising executive and a former editor for the Metro West Daily News named Jennifer Lord Paluzzi, who got laid off, and now she finds herself editing a thriving web of for-profit community websites. That's sort of the locally-owned model. There's also the corporate-owned model. There's the wicked local sites that are owned by Gatehouse Media. There's the Yourtown sites that have been launched by the Boston Globe, which are expanding by leaps and bounds. And there's patch.com, which is owned by AOL, which also seems to be expanding into every town. I don't really understand the patch business plan, by the way, because it seems that in Massachusetts, every town they're moving into is already served by Wicked Local and Yourtown. I would think that they would be looking for towns that are underserved. But there you go. There were plenty of towns close to Boston now being served by three or four local news sites. What's odd about this is that at the moment, at least, non-profit is more lucrative than for-profit. To go back to the New Haven Independent, Paul Bass' budget is about $500,000, which isn't bad at all. Now, currently, he gets about 75% of his funding from foundation grants, and about 25% of it is from contributions, donations, sponsorships, that sort of thing. They are embarking on this quest to try to flip that around so that in a few years it would be 75% contributions and 25% foundations. What you see is that it's similar to the public radio model, is what they're aiming at. The difference, of course, is that public radio is hitting up a much larger area, tends to be very affluent, well-educated, people with money. What Paul is trying to do is quite a bit more challenging in that he's trying to get contributions out of a community that is smaller and largely poor and minority. On the other hand, his costs are much lower, running a website like, running the network of websites that he runs is a lot cheaper than running a radio station. And that's really it. I just sort of wanted to throw this non-profit model on the table as something that we may or may not want to speak about as the evening goes on. So that's all I've got to say for now. Thank you, Dan. What I'd like to do quickly is pick up on a couple of the themes that came out in both of your talks and talk for a few moments, have you expand on some of these ideas and then we'll turn it over to the audience. My first reaction, I suppose, is that I'm a little surprised that both of you seem unbalanced to be so optimistic. One might have expected even just a year or two ago that if you had a discussion about what was happening to newspapers and the migration to newspapers online, there would be a lot of doom and gloom. And what I'm really hearing from both of you in different ways is all kinds of new possibilities are opening themselves. Journalism is reinventing itself. David Carr talks about how the Times has, in some sense, the best of both worlds, he's discussed really various forms of hybridization and convergence simultaneously, and his suggestion that we won't even make distinctions between print versions and online papers or that we won't distinguish between newspapers and other forms of journalistic blogs suggests some kind of a very benign form of convergence. I want to ask both of you, no darker side, nothing you're nervous about. You don't have anxieties about the way, apart from the pressure of change, which is itself kind of frightening, about the consequences for what we might think of as news reporting as against opinion? Part of what you're getting is two media writers, and our jobs have gotten a lot more interesting. We used to write about how much the Globe sucked or whether the Washington Post was better or worse than it used to be. Now we're writing about whether they're going to exist or not, and that's a more interesting question. You have to understand, I think also, that in terms of sort of the great fire most of it, the burn down has occurred. We have one-third less reporters than we used to. Statehouse reporters, probably half of what we used to. We've been slowly boiled so new normal feels somewhat okay. I do think that there's sort of problems. I mean, Paul Bass is like an exemplar of all that is good and true in our business, and I don't mean that in a crunchy granola way. The guy is a great journalist and is an exemplar of all the grand traditions of nonfiction literary journalism, and this is where he's chosen to make a stand. Men post, same way. You know, you named barista net where I live. When something happens in my town, that's where people go immediately. What I wonder about is when all these legacy assets, many of these places are staffed by people who used to work at newspapers and can't stand the thought of getting a real job, and so there's these leftover people from buyouts who are getting by, and that's a whole generation of workers. I'm not saying there's not new talent that aren't doing extraordinary things, but a lot of these sites are built on the backs of people who just can't stand to let go of the newspaper business. And this other issue of foundation funding, foundations are like businesses. They move according to trends and self-interest. Joel Kramer in Minnesota at Men Post in particular has been most aggressive in pursuing this formula of let's flip the pie chart and have, yes, a little foundation money. But believe me, at a certain point, foundation interests will move on, and we're going to have to see what size news capacity can be paid for behind it, and there'll be a shakeout. Right now, there's a rush of sort of dollars toward innovation, toward new experiments, but at a certain point, it's going to dry up. If you look at the Texas Tribune, what they've done is tried to take something that has a broader sort of statewide interest and really go for the public radio model, go for verticals of interest, people with money, and that's all well and good, but the big hole in the picture is not scraping national sites or verticals that cover certain interests, but a regional news capacity, and that's sort of, it's the Boston's of the world that are threatened, it's the Cleveland's of the world that are primarily threatened. So I worry about, because community papers are doing pretty damn good, and some of the bigger national papers, Wall Street Journal's growing, Leaps and Bounds, New York Times just announced they're going to pay back that 250 million we borrowed from Carlos Slim, so some of those things, but it's the middle part I worry about. The middle part, the smaller? Not the smaller, the middle. You know what I mean, don't you? Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean major metropolitan newspapers like the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the papers in that weight class are indeed the most threatened by what has happened here. You know, one of the things that I worry about is, you know, 20 years ago, the globe would show up on our doorstep at six in the morning, and I would go get it. I'd say, gee, well you know, I'm sure that the New York Times would have better international coverage, and I'm sure the Washington Post probably has better coverage, but this is pretty damn good, and even more important, it's the only thing I can get. There was a monopoly that papers like the Globe really benefited from, which allowed them to send their own reporters around the world and across the country to do the full package of local, regional, national, and international news. Their mission has pretty much been hollowed out, except for that regional space, and it's a really tiny hole in the needle that they have to try to figure out how to thread, because not only am I relying on the New York Times and NPR for my national and international news, but I'm getting more strictly local news out of the Salem news and the Danvers Herald. So there's only this very... I mean, there's a certain type of regional story that the Globe does very well, but I'm not... I think that they're struggling to make themselves essential doing just that kind of story. They can do sports better than anybody else. They can do the state house better than anybody else. Obviously they'll do city stories very well, but you get beyond that, you know, what is their essential mission these days? Now, they've got a very energetic new publisher, Chris Mayer. They have one of the best editors in the business, Marty Barron, and I think that they're doing as good a job as anybody could do of figuring this out, but I do worry a few years from now we may conclude that the problem essentially can't be figured out. Just one little bit about that. You got to worry about the death by a thousand cuts because you correctly point to sports as a maypole that you can still hang a media franchise, and yet ESPN on the march out into the communities, SB Nation with the different model on the march into... and so the whole... that's how many young males learned, saw their father reading the sports section, and sometimes when you look at what happened with classifies and now sports, it's like the back end of newspapers are getting bit off, and I think sports is a great example because there is money there. It's a vertical that you can do stuff with, and some of those national players are going to do a real good job when they come in. ESPN Boston doing a very good job in some ways. I saw the globe had to credit them on some big local story just the other day. I'd like to... This is my last question, even though I have a million, but I'd rather hear from you two, but there's one matter that... and in fact I may intervene again as we go on because there are certain parts of this story that I hope will... this problem or this discourse that I hope will confront before our time together is up, but I want to ask you one question about something. You hinted at this in your talk, but in your email to me you talked about it in greater detail, and it had to do with the idea that we have these sort of larger branding agencies that house individual reporters, but what's begun to happen is that inside that house the individual reporter begins to generate an enormous number of followers, partly because sometimes they're on Twitter as you are, partly sometimes because particular bloggers begin to generate followers and so forth, and I wonder if you'd expand on that. If you think that that's a distinctive new feature of our journalistic environment. Those of you who are interested in this issue, I wouldn't keep an eye on people like me or Howard Kurtz or Howard Fine. I'd look at Brian Stelter, a young colleague of mine, and he is... he's the kind of guy that moves his elbow and content just comes flying out, and it's just like... I was just talking to you. You were Twittering while I was talking to you. People got back to you. You turned that into a blog post. Holy shit, you're on page one. And it's like, whoa! The act of consuming media and producing media is not to discreet acts in the native digital generation. So you have this guy that is just monster-productive. Super smart. A great colleague, well-voiced, great connected, and he's at, I think, 22. We hired him, and he immediately became a star. If you're looking for a canary and a coal mine, I'd watch that guy and see if he becomes similarly sort of... gets the velvet handcuffs that a place like The New York Times can put on you, which is your calls get taken, your stories have bounced, or if, at a certain point, he's gonna feel entrepreneurially motivated and he's not gonna want to deal with the larger apparatus there. It isn't enticing new people in. It's keeping them excited and producing sort of going forward. And they will build out brands. I mean, when my Twitter started to get kind of big, they said, you've got a picture of like three old ladies as your avatar. And your name is Cartoon, and by the way, your bio-language is pretty spicy. And could we get a little New York Times in there? I said, I got a great idea. How about I not do it? That sound good? Yup for that? This is mine. I won't swear on it. I won't embarrass you. I have whatever chip you guys have issued and put into my rear end deeply embedded in me. And I won't embarrass you, but please don't tell me what to do with this Twitter because I know what I'm doing. That negotiation is an interesting one. And The Times, oddly enough, which is not exactly a sort of give-it-a-world place, has their pattern. You don't see us with a bunch of rules around Twitter. Brian Stelter, my colleague, got in a jam for tweeting a meeting that we were having. Was there some big wrist slap or New Edic or da-da-da? No, they just said, jeez, wish you wouldn't do that. And that was it. We just kept going. I always, right before I hit the button on those 140 characters, think, what would my editor think of this? That's okay. And push it. I pushed the button on a few I regret, but I do think that there's now a negotiated space between the larger brand and the smaller brands that make it up. One implication of what you're saying is that journalists and reporters today have to, in a certain sense, be masters of the immediate communication technologies in order to proceed. That they can't just be writers any longer. They have to be ready to do video, to do tweeting, to do blogs, that sort of thing. I had a weird experience where I covered the Oscars for four years, doing a blogging every day and making video, and I went out to the west coast to the globes or something like that, and I walked up to Brad Gray, who runs Paramount. I said, hi, Mr. Gray. My name's David Carr. I work at The New York Times. I cover the awards for it. And I know you. I have you on my iTunes. He was getting a steady feed of my videos every single week, and I hadn't even thought of the implications of, this guy hasn't met me, and yet he has. And he was more than willing to talk with me and stuff, and that was the light bulb moment for me. I would add to that that The New York Times really seems to get a lot of this, and you contrast that with The Washington Post, which frankly I think in a lot of ways is just utterly lost these days. Interestingly enough, a year or so ago, The Post handed down this series of edicts for how people need to behave on Twitter. That was just hilarious. It was just widely mocked by everybody who read them. And Howard Kurtz, then still safely ensconced at The Washington Post, put out a tweet that said something to the effect of, from this point forward, I will only be tweeting recipes. And you see what happened. I mean, this week he announced that he's leaving for the Daily Beast, and I know one of the first things he was asked was, you know, does The Post rather troglodytic policies involving social media and other new forms of media, did that have anything to do with your decision to leave? He's saying, oh, no, no, no, it had nothing to do with it. But, you know, The Post just lost one of their biggest assets, and a year ago he was making fun of them for not getting where our business is going. So it's hard not to draw the conclusion. You have to, as a writer, just say, let me get this straight. You put me on the front page of your paper. You'll trumpet me everywhere. You'll put me on issues of public moment in which they have tremendous implications in the lives of everyone. But you don't want me to tweet. There's just, you know, you have to buy into the entire asset and trust that she or he is going to do a good job for you on all platforms, regardless of what it is. You know, it's not like I'm going to get up here and say a bunch of swear words, shit, just so I try it, and make the New York Times look horrible. But at the same time, I'm going to be me, you know, while I do it. Now it's time for the audience to intervene, ask questions, respond, start here. There are microphones, it'd be good to speak into the microphone. This is recorded for some audio posterity, so identify yourself as well as you can. Mark Tomizawa, six degrees of innovation. We're creating a commons where unspeakable good ideas about the civic infrastructure of our country, our neighborhoods, can get an honest hearing so that people from a lot of different sectors and silos can stop being professionals, talk about really good ideas that they could never mention at work. I'm fascinated by all this. I just want to share something and see if you have a response to it. There's always been a fight between institutions and the people who control top-down and creative talent. And if you look at all the industries this happens in, Hollywood tries to control the artists, the recording industry tries to control the artists and their output. This is very old. In 1913, there was a report called The Iron Fist of the Alligarchy, and it was a leftist guy who said, why is it that all my favorite organizations end up crushing the people they're supposed to help? There is this tendency of institutions to crush individuality. Some of that is practical. They create order, but in creating the order, they eliminate the in-between that is innovation. It's the in-between stuff that moves everything forward. And the classic business example is Polaroid, where they had instant photography of the chemistry variety, and it was fine until people started walking saying, oh, digital, get out of my office. We're chemists. If you look at all this that we're talking about, we see the same wars going on. The TV people saying we can't do that, that's not TV. The platform wars. So I'm curious about whether anyone has taken the black box approach that was used to create the stealth bomber, for example, where you protect a ring of innovators within the organization and you give them free reign. It's like a charter zone within an enterprise zone within the major organization. And you let them experiment like crazy. When the head of the Miami Herald, what's Tom's last name? He was editor. He's now at BU. Oh, Tom Fiedler, yes. He pushed everybody in. He says, we're now all digital. And they went, what? Aren't we going to deliberate? He says, no, you're in the deep end. And that actually was the key, when somebody who knew how to help them do the thing they didn't know how to do. So in that, the younger journalists learned the older best practices and the older journalists learned how to be like networked animals. And people came up and thanked them afterwards. If they had deliberated, they never would have gotten there. So the implicit, I guess the questions are, are we having too much deliberation and not enough free-form experimentation? Are we creating any zones of innovation within traditional media? And if not, are outside people needed to be kind of networked inside outsiders so you have co-conspirators in the process? So thanks for being here. I hope there's a question and there's something that you like. I have a very short reaction to that. And that is, I think on the journalistic side of things, news organizations do not get nearly enough credit for being innovative. I think there's been a tremendous amount of innovation and journalism in the last 10 or 15 years. The real problem is that the advertising business fell apart. And if there's any innovation to be done in figuring out how to bring news organizations and advertising back together, I think maybe that's where some of the focus ought to be. Three things. One is, we do have a skunkworks upstairs at our shop where all these propeller heads and mad scientists do God knows what. And every once in a while they come down. And we have a real exchange with them. Like one of their real hot dogs is now a blogger for us. And there's been back and forth. So that's one thing. Another thing I think the difference between us and The Washington Post is they kept their two enterprises discreet for a while. We had the good fortune of moving into a building together. And when you begin to see other people, like when I first started doing my blog about the Oscars, I said, I have all this traffic. Millions and millions of hits on Oscar Day. My comments are terrible. And the guys next to me just said, oh, you want comments? And they just like hit a few dials and told me, look, end in a question mark, solicit participation, be provocative at the back end of your post. And also it all comes in. The other thing that I think has happened is, and I couldn't agree with Dan more, and that it's a necessity as a mother. And so really calcified institutions are much more willing to throw sticks up near. Last spring, I said, you know what? I'm going to do People Are Consuming video. I want a fully enabled studio in my basement. And I'm going to make one minute videos every morning. And I'm going to edit them and upload them myself and I'll have no intermediation. So they said, OK, we'll come out. We'll hook it up. I was like, really? So they do it. And I make them, and they look like hostage videos. They're terrible. And so it's like, OK, next idea, next thing. And now I do have to sit down with Brian Stelter every single week and we do this media, Dakota and da, da, da. But over and over it's like, yeah, we'll try that. We'll give that a whirl. One thing about the, it's such a vast topic and I'm a little frustrated because we can jump across so many different interesting issues. But I am especially interested in what we might call the three versions of the New York Times that you can find online. There's not just one version. There's Times Reader, which tries to, with certain exceptions, replicates the experience of the, tries to replicate the experience of the paper, of the print paper. Then there's the actual online Times, which is an infinitely richer source of information, but from a makeup standpoint, from a visual, from an aesthetic standpoint, can't even begin to be compared to the beauty and genius of the printed paper, which has had a century to learn how to do its thing. And one issue, I think, in some ways is how conscious the Times itself is of the problems involved in actually having three different platforms that they're managing simultaneously. You forgot our iPad application, too. That's right. Which is terrible. Surprising, such a digital age. Well, that's because it's so new, probably, presumably. No, Wall Street Journal came out of the gate. Gorgeous, smart, wonderful. What it is is we're coming up on putting in a metered model that makes it complicated and we already had a deal with Amazon. So somewhere between the web, which I don't agree with your aesthetic analysis. I think it may not be the gorgeous artifact, but it's a remarkable thing, beginning with our 2.0. It's navigability. We took everything that was good on the web, stole it, and made it our own, which is what web innovation is. The problem is, as you correctly, I think, point out, you can't get to the end of it. There's not a feeling of, I've accomplished something. You feel like you're down a hobbit hole. It's just like, where does this thing end? You get done with this, and oh, we've got a photo tell from the Fashion Week, and oh, look, here's a four-minute combat video from Iraq. It's just like, where to look after a while? You first. I've been a longtime subscriber to The New York Times in his guise as a forest products company. Here come the delivery problems. And then I took part in a group that was concerned with carbon footprint, and I dropped my paper subscription and moved to the newsreader, and I tried to pay for the newsreader, but I couldn't succeed in making the transition. The Times couldn't handle that transaction. Now I read it for free. I shouldn't, I keep occasionally trying to pay for it. And I also read The Times on my droid phone. My son has never subscribed to a paper. He lives on the other coast, but he could subscribe to The Times there. And I think the younger generation is pretty much in his space. And I'm kind of concerned about the existence of institutions like The Times, which do bring value as institutions. But at the same time, I recognize the point you're making about, you know, social media and whatnot, and this makes me think that I just read a few days ago that Don Graham is a board member of Facebook. And I wonder what is the disconnect between his engagement and the fact that it's not valued at the post? Well, a couple of things. One is Facebook is probably the most significant referral engine of newspapers today. So that's, and Don Graham's one of the smartest guys around. Oh, I think it's a natural fit. This deal about, you know, I've tried to give you money and you wouldn't take it. Really an important sort of point. And you wonder, why, if you guys are going to go to a metered model, are you waiting until 2011? Because it hasn't gone very well in the past. We're looking at getting in an e-commerce business. We don't want a third party. We don't want Steve Jobs between you and us. We want to own all the customer data. Once we got our dirty little hands on your credit card, we can do all sorts of things with you. And we can move you along a vertical access value. We've had a good luck with maximizing consumer revenues with people that we have. We're working hard to get it right. One other thing you should think about, and I think the FT has demonstrated this, okay, your kids probably not going to be visiting the New York Times 20 times in a month, so they're not going to bump up against our wall. But you, however, are, and we're going to say, hey, we want you to pay a convenience starch, like I do for the Wall Street Journal. I could get the Wall Street Journal any part of it that I wanted because I know how to work the web. I just want to be able to go across it freely. FT's the same way I pay them. And behind that wall, there's another new ad business of wantedness of people who opted in. And so the FT, when they have this customer, they know, hey, this guy goes to Singapore all the time. And we know that about him, and he's into this news. You end up, so we don't have to just sell against Huffington Post or sell against Garker and that we can behind this wall develop a new ad business to go with these new consumer revenues. I'm not saying it's going to work out or it's going to be great, just that that's one of the possibilities. Can I just interrupt and say I'm really bummed out all you younger people in the back won't come and talk to us, so I'll give somebody a dollar U.S. if the back ventures. He thinks you're young because he can't really see that. You're out. Does he qualify? Yes, sir. Go ahead, sir. Hi. I'm one of these old fashioned people who still gets the Boston Globe and the Sarinville Journal delivered to me. I'm not quite sure why I'm still getting these print editions because it seems like by the time I look at them, I've read a lot of what's in them already. So my question is, you know, at what point do you think those are going to go away and there's not going to be a print edition of, you know, either our little local weekly or, you know, big national New York Times? You know, Ron, a few years ago I thought that print editions were doomed in fairly short order. And I'm not sure I think that anymore. One of the ways that the Boston Globe has kind of achieved some stability in the last year was that they took the print edition and said instead of looking at this as our mass distribution model, let's make this kind of a specialty product for people who are willing to pay for the convenience of getting it. And as you know, they took the print edition of the Globe and jacked the price up through the roof. And in so doing, even longtime customers like me ended up taking the Sunday paper and then subscribing to GlobeReader the rest of the week. But the thing is, it worked. It worked. Their circulation plummeted again, which made perfect sense given what they were charging for it, but their revenue from print went up substantially. And as I said, it allowed them to achieve some measure of stability. Now, the other aspect of that that's kind of neat if you're the publisher of the Boston Globe, and this gets to the point that David was talking about with people reading the FT and, oh, you go to Singapore all the time. If you're shrinking the print edition, shrinking the circulation of the print edition and charging a ton for it, all of a sudden the readership of the print edition is smaller but maybe more desirable to advertisers than it was before. So that becomes another reason for keeping the print edition. Of course, the problem is if the print edition is becoming a profitable center because it's appealing to ever more affluent readers, is that going to affect the news judgment? And ever older readers. Yeah, exactly. That can end up affecting the news judgment, which would be a shame. If your readers are suddenly really rich and not connected to Boston particularly, there isn't necessarily an awful lot of incentive to do ongoing in-depth coverage of the Boston school system, for instance. But I do think that there's a lot of life left in the print edition because that is still, to a large extent, where the money is. The discussion is growing lively or the more we hear from the audience, let me encourage both audience and panelists to be concise. We have about 45 minutes. Let's try to get as much in as we can. I'm totally with Dan, and I think we're going to end up with Dave Eggers. The novelists made a gorgeous one-time paper out in San Francisco. And it was like this luscious print artifact and you just went... And when I looked at it, I thought, that's where we're headed is we're going to have... The print thing is going to be a curio, a treasure, a luxury artifact. We might even start to see better paper and it'll become a tchotchke and accessory to be seen with and a totem of status. Not just among... There is a back-to-paper movement among some young people and it could become somewhat fashionable. Part of the problem with the Kindle, part of the problem with the iPad is you can't really see what I'm reading. So you can't... There was a woman across the train from me that was reading Winter's Bone. I just said, I totally just read that book. Isn't that great? And we had a wonderful time and I assigned meaning to her having that and there's not a signaling that goes on. She couldn't see that I'm reading the corrections on my iPad. But the fact that you both have iPad signals something. She didn't have one though. She was reading a normal book. But iPad just says either rich, trendy, or nerdy. It doesn't say Winter's Bone reader. You know what I mean? And that's something that... I get four papers a day at home and love it. And I'm one of the most webby people I know but I enjoy the music of print. There's been a little bit of discussion here about money and advertising and it seems to me that both of you or all three of you have figured out that the collapse of the market is the collapse of the advertising market and that spreads across a whole variety of media. So I would like you to talk a little bit about the state of the advertising market if you know it today and about what you think are the future income sources for newspapers, magazines, television, radio and those kinds of things. If advertising changes, which it seems like it's going to have to do. I think that it adds... It's great that you landed us there because we've had a discussion about sort of secular aspects and it's like where are we in the cycle? I think it adds over. I'll be back anywhere from four to six percent this year. What is slice of pie going to be? Who is going to get what? That discussion I think is... I think the smartest thing that got said here which is what Dan said, the publishing model came onto the web, Real Liquity, Tickety Boo, was great. When I worked at inside.com in 2000 I thought this is an amazing technology. I published an item about the president's airplane, the campaign plane, within 40 minutes, lit up, followed and I just went, wow, this is amazing. The problem they had model that came with it, at first we thought it was dollars for dimes. Now it turns out dollars for pennies because there's no scarcity of content on the web and all content is commoditized and sites like the Huffington Post and Gawker have been able to replicate not just our content but our audience away from us and so we end up competing with them. Part of what you're seeing with these fenced off sites I think a little bit is an effort to replicate that scarcity. Tiffany's has been upright in our newspaper, page three, for over 100 years. Every single day they're there. Until we beef up the ad site and figure out how do we replicate the idea of scarcity in a placement on the web such that we can leverage price up from pennies to dimes, maybe one day dollars. That's the big fight. Print has tried to do a video like I was making these videos and I just did about the askers and they said we want you to do more and more and more. I'm like it's like some homeless guy in a red car but what do you even, it's weird. I mean it turned out they didn't have enough inventory and advertisers want motion on motion, right? And so it's like, I think we've done a really good job sometimes when you open up your paper at times on the web there's this some goofy whatever the heck it is but we're trying all manner of different things to get, it isn't, we already have audience, we have more audience and I think we've got 25 million uniques this month, more audience we ever had, it's a global one. It's how do we perform a cash act to me on them? Sure. You know, a few years ago I think a lot of this is broad changes in the culture as much as it is technology. I mean I don't even need to say Craigslist except to say Craigslist, you all get it. But you look beyond that, a few years ago I was interviewing a guy who had sold a community radio station in Salem to a Spanish language religious broadcasting network and I said come on, why did you do this? I mean this was kind of an asset to the community and now it's just been taken out of play completely and he said you know when I started in this business I could walk down the street and there were 12 or 15 banks and I could walk into any one of them and try to pitch them on an ad and now there are two banks, three banks there was retail all along Main Street it's all gone into the mall and they don't advertise much so advertising may come back a bit but I don't think it's coming back that much recently I saw a statistic that in Japan the reader pays for something like 87% of the cost of a newspaper whereas in this country traditionally the news has been free it's the paper and the delivery that you're paying for so I think that if we're going to preserve journalism preserve professional journalism and by the way it's not 100% clear to me that there's a huge desire to do that but if we're going to preserve that we are going to have to move toward a model in which the user pays for a much larger share of the content now I mentioned the New Haven independent and non-profits that's kind of an indirect way of the user paying for the content through foundation grants and contributions and things like that the direct way and we're starting to see this more and more is through news organizations like the Boston Globe like the New York Times beginning to charge for certain types of electronic delivery both the globe and the Times are going to continue to have substantial content on the web that will continue to be free they're pursuing two very different models by the way but basically that's the idea but what you're seeing is in addition to charging a lot for the print edition which I mentioned you're starting to see charges for different types of electronic delivery that people will pay for for convenience they will pay for a Kindle edition they will pay for an iPad edition they will pay for one of these reader editions it's great you can download the whole thing you don't have to have an internet connection after you've downloaded it and then you can read it on the train and these are all different ways of getting revenue from the reader moving away from this idea that advertising will pay for it all because we now know that advertising is not going to pay for it all I do wonder about charging for basic web access I have a problem with that as I said the globe and the Times plan are both very nuanced although in very different ways maybe they're stumbling towards some sort of a solution to this I don't know but clearly the reader is going to have to pay more if they want professional journalism one thing I wanted to say about this ad thing just to slide it over to the digital side some of you were business oriented folks as Dan pointed out great big national organizations local organizations say local that's where all the money is and you look at this vast beach of revenues and we're going to have location based and there's falafel around the next corner and it's the best in town and great great great you're up against the tyranny of small numbers it costs a lot of money to go and get that money and unless you're highly automated unless the advertiser themselves is doing the work sending you the money to go out and get all those little granular ads that would make a great site is a huge pain in the ass and is really non-economic as it's currently set up I'm twenty small I miss your Oscar blog a lot by the way I love that I enjoyed the carpet bagger and the video with the light I'm twenty six but I go through this phase every couple of months where I cancel my papers and then I miss them and then I subscribe to them and have them delivered it's like a lot of hate relationship you break up all the time you're just trying to get the discount that's true but one thing that when I have some friends in the press and I talk to them occasionally but I keep a number of email lists with various groups of friends and when the globe came out and said they were going to do the paywall I just asked them how many of you guys they readboss.com I said how many of them are going to move you would pay for this none and they're all about my age group none of them and that just sort of they all said they would go to somewhere else and get it for free and then that occurred to me is what happens when everybody goes to a paywall where are you going to go and it just how do you change that mentality that news isn't free how do you make somebody realize that this reporter has to eat he has to pay his electric bill and they have to pay for a photographer and you have to pay for you know recorder and things like that how do you convince somebody how do you make people realize that this is something that's worth paying for here's a problem that the globe is facing this is the website of WBUR radio which is the leading news public radio station in Boston I want to make sure I say that word news because one of my part-time employers is WGBH radio and we're more commentary and talk shows and analysis this is you know you take a look at this site and I think that people at the globe have to be staying up late worrying every night as to whether their paywall can compete with a free service such as this and as the website of a public radio station WBUR.org is always going to be free now is it as thorough and in-depth is the globe on a lot of these local and regional stories no but I think the fear that the globe ought to have is that for a lot of people they will find that something like this is good enough because it is pretty good it really is now what the globe is doing is they're taking their website and essentially dividing it in half they have this incredibly successful free website Boston.com that gets about five million unique visitors a month and they're going to take out a lot of the globe content and put that behind a paywall so they're trying to figure out how much globe content will we continue to give away how much of it will be exclusive to Boston.com it's going to be very difficult and I see another really good example coming up here to my right okay it's and it's not just .org's that are this is TBD a Washington news site and they're part of all Britain all Britain communications Federation of television stations there are the people that brought you political let me tell you I agree with you pretty good is you know Clay Scherke I think coined this pretty good is often good enough TBD is better than pretty good and when the shooter and this is what a three month old site four month old site when the Washington the guy took over discovery hostage situation TBD went crazy and what did Washington post end up with a feed a video feed from TBD humiliating moment you know a news brand that was decades old leaning on TBD which had the existing relationships with television station and I do think it's going to create a situation where you guys are hunters and gatherers you're going to find what you need what we have to do is like in my newspaper out of people who have to have exactly what we have whenever they want it and we don't need we don't need 25 million people to give us money we need 2 million people to give us money the most regular the people that want access to the archives and then we're going to induce them with special delivery products do you want deal book on your desktop every single second there's something going on if you're an Oscar freak do you want me to like come and tell you who's going to win blah blah blah blah blah a series of special products that will be an inducement one thing that I think I've tried to talk our guys into is invite them in the people who are most trusted subscribers let them start overseeing content let them you know kind of Tom Sawyer approach where you say you know you're kind of part of the family here and one of the inducements is you do a bunch of free work for us seems good you know so much is happening there's so many changes taking place that sometimes we get to we find ourselves in a circumstance in which certain kinds of changes seem so modest and minor that they don't even sort of get on the radar but if you think about the simple way in which in the online times there are David mentioned this a little while ago the readers themselves have a kind of participatory access to so many of them now that's an incredibly minor and technologically very simple feature of the newspaper but think of how it profoundly transforms the reader's relation to the material if he or she feels that when a significant article appears or a significant column appears he or she can jump in and give her opinion or argue with what has been said what happens today in the online newspaper world thousands and thousands of times every day I think the environment is so complex and so diverse that we have trouble sort of focusing on the elements in it that seem truly distinctive in terms of how our journalism is changing up here I'm sorry you're next then you this side first hi I'm Laura McGann I write for the Neiman journalism lab at Harvard my question is about Buzz in the New York Times newsroom what do writers think about the wall is there anxiety about your work being behind the wall or is that not an issue I'll just say this first about the Neiman lab if any of you are sort of press wonks and want to know what's going on I don't think anybody's doing sort of deeper quicker takes and what you guys are doing right now I do all my reading on Twitter people ask me what I read I read Twitter it's a human enabled RSS that sends me deep rich links I curate my followers closely and a lot of what I see is your work so good on you um the wall is um our wall is going to be set back a ways so you're you can come you can come you can come and then probably on the 15th or 20th time it's like oh by the way this is how we eat are you interested in participating where where we begin to ask people for a kind of convenience charge for coming in over and over the available metrics say what he said which is like everybody's just going to go no right I don't think so I do think that there's um and the question is and this goes to what we're talking about with Stelter is like the coal mine I mean are your good writers going to jump and want their stuff on the daily beast because they want a writer do you want 250 million eyeballs or do you want 2 million paying eyeballs and as a writer what do you want good question well true true that but but I do not think that our visibility we're still going to be optimized for web crawlers and you can still I mean there's nothing more visible than being sort of in the New York Times it's only in the doing that we're going to find where it begins to become apparent that visibility is dropping I will tell you that when we did times select yes times that that they were putting all the calmness behind it and I just I just started doing a column for the New York Times and I was like I am not marined out I am not Joe no Sarah I am like David Schmeckler nobody knows who I am or what I do please don't put me behind that wall please don't now how am I going to feel you know 8 years later with a partial wall we'll see people are not worried about it yet tell us tonight because it's not until January here's the thing as long as it had dollars keep on the grow you can see might take a little longer to get that wall going and it might get set back a little further one of the beauties of our model is you can turn the wall up or down and then it's got some dials on it so I believe that visibility for writers is going to be really important but people aren't they're not worried about it yet they'll be much keen in once it once it happens hi my name is Adam Hassler I I think one thing that hasn't really been discussed yet and this may or may not be within the purview of what we're talking about but I know about a very significant amount of the journalism that I read is cultural criticism like arts journalism performance arts things like that I know Seattle has one full-time arts critic left like among all of their newspapers and so one thing I wonder about is I publications have had a very long past as being taste makers having a huge impact on what we consider to be part of our aesthetic canon or you know what if a show made it or didn't or restaurant critics who like one bad review like they're restaurants done and you know there are still some really big names out there in arts criticism like British Smith in New York Blake Gopnik in DC but like 90% 95% of what I read are like blogs and stuff I mean like that's all where all the good stuff is and so you know I can only read about Richard Sarah so many times every once in a while I have to read about like new stuff that's coming on and none of the people at New York Times are talking about that stuff you know meanwhile the 26 27 year old blogger went to art school they have their finger on their pulse and they're talking about the best stuff and they're on blogs and so I was just wondering what impact you think this online migration is having on newspaper as taste maker I think that you know I like to sometimes I like to say that blogs have not made professional journalism irrelevant except in two areas I think that blogs have pretty much replaced the op-ed page and I think that blogs have moved in on a lot of the turf that you're talking about for arts criticism and and you know restaurant reviews and all that stuff you know you talk about the aesthetic of good enough I mean I think that a lively food blog just ends up being more interesting to people than waiting for the newspaper to come out now Boston like most major cities has a very vibrant alternative weekly and the executive editor of that will be speaking in a few minutes I believe and their heart and soul is is arts journalism and they still do a really really good job of it but now instead of just competing with a few other publications they're competing with everybody and I think that is very hard and you see book reviews being shut down and less arts coverage and less food coverage it's it's not something that people necessarily look to newspapers for anymore there is on the there is on our website if you go into the archives a forum on this topic arts criticism what's happening to arts criticism and one of the points that was made at that forum was that the local arts community especially the arts institutions in the community the theaters and the art galleries are the ones who are suffering the most because of the general disappearance of this kind of discourse because it's affecting their attendance it's affecting their sort of publicity first of all it's just a lovely question and really well put it's something I think a lot about a couple of things one is let's take food for an example New York food blogs frantic, crazy really good all sorts of players New York magazine has moved in just ferociously and then there's all these independent blogs and there's something called midtown lunch and those two things from New York you'd say well they don't go together but when what are they all preoccupied by when we named Sam Sift and my old boss the chief food critic of the New York Times that was Defcom for like a month and a half and so it's not just I think the question of authority is very important but at times the blogosphere reinforces an authority and at times they disperse it in film I think it's much more acute city after city indeed many alternative weeklies letting go of their sui generous local critics and opting for commodity criticism or letting film blogs take the weight the other threat is about just the very nature of authority which is who is a trusted source for us I was I'm a frantic we grower I would always check metacritic which would synthesize and come up with an aggregate number of the reviews and look at critics I knew now a lot of times I'll just pop onto the twitter and say have you seen X and X what did you think those are my people and I think that there's there's that sort of disperse dispersal of authority is a threat over the long term for newspapers which let's remember our paper and others make most of their money off that back end the movie ads all that stuff so well Dan blew my cover my name is Peter Casas and I will now say I work at the Boston Phoenix actually first I wanted to do two things first to report on an experience I had as being I'm sure I was one of many but I was surveyed by the New York Times online right before they made their announcement that they were going and I have to say that I like participating in surveys if it's something I want and you know one day I'm on the New York Times site looking for something and then at a very convenient point time in my experience online up came could you answer some questions you know I did it was an incredibly thorough very very smart survey that first was doing all the usual stuff and they kept asking you if you wanted to go on and it had to have been programmed in some way that there was some computer intelligence back there feeding questions to me based on what my previous answers were I was actually back at headquarters putting my hand slowly up your skirt but go ahead just to say that the experience and then you know that led to an email thanking me for doing it would I do another thing online I did several of these until I finally spoke with a real-life person I'm going to be fascinated to see what they come out with because the research was impressive I'm in a way a bad person because even though I answered the way I hoped the pay model would go I'm going to buy it anyway I mean I buy the New York Times seven days a week in print I use it online just an experience because so much is talked about here this what's going to happen when the Times pay wall goes up the second was I just wanted to make an observation you know I agree 100% with you guys you know about the squeeze being in the middle the regional papers my view not firmly held because no one in the right mind has a firm view about these things is that mass and class are what's going to be around in five or ten years you know TMZ the gossip sites will be you know the mass the class will be the New York Times the Guardian the Wall Street Journal in a handful of other places but audience I think in the way that none of us have figured out yet is the key and let me give you one example from the Phoenix from many years ago we do a lot of live concerts and sometimes the bands we present go on to be big deals we did a concert with Green Day some people who were from Boston may remember this this was what Dan you were there I think 15 years ago yeah 94 I think and make a long story shot Green Day played one and a half songs and there was in effect a riot the cops didn't know what masshing and stuff was I heard he started it what happened the next day was the one thing we had won the police what was going to happen and they didn't listen they didn't rat us out we didn't rat them out anyway flash forward the next Monday there's a call from Budweiser I happen to be in the ad director's office so this will be interesting Budweiser was and still is one of our biggest advertisers said how did you guys do this we want to buy more ads the lesson to this was you know they want trust me the Green Day audience is a beer drinking audience that's a very simple simple thing but here's an example of how papers like the globe were in trouble Levine the great conductor returns front page news in the New York Times people page news in the Boston Globe now by the way the globe did a fine job with the way they handled it but in the long run that class what I'm calling the class audience is slowly deserting the globe and they'll be consolidating around the New York Times this is going to happen all over the place but as someone who sits in a position where I'm these days right then the uncomfortable nexus of where the other tour of the department meets the business department I can tell you this news still make more money newsprint brings in more cash than online does the trouble is that amount of cash is going down I really see the future as one where it is going to be much slimmer for everyone but the difference being is that younger journalists can do three or four things they can take videos they can blog they can report a story and I think we're going to see a future where the large organizations have maybe a third less people but it's not so much doing a third more work they'll be working in two, three or four different mediums thank you very much very helpful we're running out of time we have ten minutes my friend Henry Jenkins used to call these the lightning rounds let's make them as quick as we can on both sides this is a nightmare scenario something like the Boston Globe splits off into Boston.com and you have a more affluent, better educated minority reading the actual globe content and then you have the 90% reading regurgitated wire stories and the top 25 things to do Wednesday afternoons and unpaid bloggers and the nightmare part on Boston.com they'll get their breaking news headlines from the AP they'll get their SOC scores and they'll go about their business am I missing something? is that an ideal solution where they make money off the affluent people who care about the news or is it an absolute catastrophe for the community in general is it an absolute catastrophe for the community in general I don't know for several years now I've been putting together websites that were essentially just repackaging their content and that in fact the smartest thing to do was to have a website that featured different content and appealed to a different audience and I give the globe a lot of credit for giving that a try we're going to have to see how it goes because in fact you may be right there may be more people than they're comfortable with thinking that the free Boston.com site even without much in the way of globe content is all they really need but we'll have to see David talks about the dial that they're going to have for the paywall the globe is going to have a dial for how much globe content to put into Boston.com and I suspect that that's going to go up and down quite a bit as they try to figure out how much do we need to put in here a website attractive without necessarily taking away from our pay model plan. Is there already a split between those two audiences who you're selling advertisements to and who you're actually writing the news stories to? Well, I mean there's a split except that all of the globe content is free online so the split may not be that important. I share your concern I feel like in terms of political information that we self-assemble into verticals of interest which only reinforce what we believe and that Village Common is disappearing that's A, and then B this deal about oh, I'm part of you know quality audiences and quality you know quality content for quality audiences and the other guy goes oh, I read Gruel for the low sloping foreheads it seems just fine and creating a kind of bifurcation or ghettoization of information I think that when people talk about an informed citizenry it's okay that people assemble their news diet I wouldn't want great journalism to become a high-class district where everybody wasn't invited. Which is why Boston in particular worries me and it's not like Boston hasn't had a little history of that either way. We're here. Johanna Knapp, Shaefer freelance writer in Manchester. I was just curious what your thoughts were on the impact of migration of newspapers to the web and overall decentralization of the news on municipal and state governments I've heard that state houses are largely empty of reporters these days but what do you think legislators are noticing? I would re-free this speech that Michael Shudson gave the other day who said that like half the state house reporters are gone. I live in New Jersey which is a game preserve of corruption our last big bust we need the three busts just to take the mayors away you think I'm joking but so when the star ledger has suffered from this consolidation that Dan talked about probably a $9 billion retail market is now a $4 billion between consolidation and auto classified especially department story consolidation and that's why it's so cool that Paul Bass is saying that they have a state house component because if you look at the budget overall we have a state house component we have a state fund going out who controls the most money if you take the fence out of it which is sort of non-discretionary in a way it's the states not the feds and I don't know about you but the idea of having less accountability reporting in those state houses just terrifies me and I think it's as big as they were and all the guys they went and said well we're going to make our own New Jersey whatever it's called it lasted like 8-9 months and then you didn't hear about it much anymore because the buyout money runs out they got to figure out how to pay their kids tuition get some hamburgers and then they move on and we end up net-net with fewer people keeping an eye on government I know we're in the lightning round first of all one of the very first media pieces I ever wrote was on the desertion of the state house and harking back to the golden era of a time when the state house was full of reporters I wrote that piece in the mid 90's so some things never change there's been a steady decline of state house coverage for many many years and we do see it accelerating now but it's nothing new the other thing is one of the reasons I love to keep going back to Connecticut is because the decline of the traditional media is so much more advanced there than it is in a lot of other places I mentioned that the New Haven register has been in bankruptcy the Harford Current is owned by Tribune Company which is in bankruptcy and because of this you have seen what happens when a vacuum is created I mentioned the Connecticut news junkie which is a one woman state house state house bureau there's also a much better funded project called the Connecticut Mirror which is several former Harford current people among others who are providing terrific state house coverage day in day out again a foundation supported non-profit the money isn't going to be there forever but they've got plenty of funding for the next few years and so you do see the kind of accountability journalism that we need being done by some of these non-profits Peter Walsh and over Newton Theological School I have a question about focus and that is in the 50s, 60s and 70s when there was a low point in diversity I'd say in the news media there were three major networks there were dominant papers there was a long period when journalism was able to take an issue on the fringe something not sexy not glamorous not a majority opinion things like the McCarthy hearings civil rights, the Vietnam war the Watergate break in and they were able to take that little thing out on the corner and bring it in to limelight into the center of the culture and then the culture and the country formed a consensus around that and since media has broken up we've got people, we've got media outlets of every stripe and opinion and the national consensus has disintegrated there is no national consensus the government is log jammed it kind of moves back and forth do you see a relationship between those two things yes double yes I just do and then the question is what do you do about it? it was a distinctly 20th century phenomenon it not only doesn't exist anymore but it didn't exist before the 20th century either it was just one of those odd historical moments and I think it brought with it good things and I also think it brought with it bad things frankly I love it one of the things you have to realize when people talk about monopoly institutions and their respective cities and their respective industries is one of the things they threw out so much cash they didn't know what to do with it so they ended up sticking it into journalism and that's where investigative journalism came from that's where when they had these monopolies they ended up sitting on so much money that they ended up funding all manner of adventurous and wonderful big long heaves taking apart issues and stuff they'll never be that excess revenue in the system to do that it's going to have to go on over to this sort of .org final question I was interested to see Huffington Post in this list the top 12 sites and if you didn't already talk about it of all of the sort of progressive left liberal websites one could think of truth dig truth out common dreams, alternate why Huffington Post what do you think explains the relative of Huffington Post and where can this data is this the kind of data available publicly somehow? these two charts I should have mentioned the two charts that were displayed are from the fall issue of the American journalism review I put them up partly to cause the kind of connection you've made it's very curious that there are not exactly radical but certainly left oriented sites that are so popular yes one but still and the other thing I had hoped people might notice is that one of the distinctive David mentioned this at the beginning of his talk one of the most interesting recent developments is the way neutral portals are now beginning to hire journalists and are themselves becoming journalism sites and they're hiring good journalists and spending money on it this is especially true of Yahoo and AOL and if we look at these charts the distinctive and disturbing elements of it is first of all that the first newspaper site that shows up on the most popular sites is the New York Times and it's number five and there are only four newspaper sites in the most popular, supposed most popular news sites on the web but more interesting to me is the other chart which indicates the amount of time that people stay on these portals now there may be more news on AOL or Yahoo than we saw before but if viewers are if visitors are only staying there for five minutes or for eight minutes how much news are they getting? That's an eternity in web time that's a very sticky a couple of things why them one Arianna I never saw a brand build out like it historically before she came along 50 million dollars four to five years to build out a national brand she did it for under 10 million bucks in a year remarkable thing to one two is how po as a technology company it's not really a news company they SEO the hell out of their stuff they test headlines in real time three is they're kind of a sex company too is if you if you get just past that big luscious front page you see what's driving a lot of hits might be the inadvertent shots of Brittany getting out of a car or that again and again there's a lot of sort of weird traffic stuff where you see it off to the side you don't want to look at it somehow your mouse just crawls over there and you click on it and you don't want to reinforce such skull-duggery but there's something irresistible either in the photo or the but the main thing the main reason is they have a business model based on theft which kind of helps keep your costs down they will often exert their impression of what fair use is often goes down six and eight paragraphs deep and that's a pretty animal I give Ariana and I adore her she just is a gas to be around but they are putting money in the journalism stuff but it's a business based on appropriation and replicating our audience and the audience of others away from ours I don't take it personal I just submit to you that it's when you take other people's stuff it tends to have a beneficial effect on the cause side of your business it also makes you sell ads at a really low rate that ends up commodifying sales and it's probably not great for the news business other than that I think they're great I agree with everything David said HuffPost is sort of a combination of Talking Points Memo and TMZ and there are a few aggregators out there that really pursue their business model in a way that they don't really incentivize you to click on the link they really want to keep you there and they do it by overly aggressive summarizing of other people's content I think the one that is the absolute worst, the bottom of the barrel is a site called Newser but it really doesn't get anywhere near the audience that the Huffington Post does mention My suspicion is that the confusion and churn and diversity and both the positive and negative elements that we've been discussing are likely to go on for a long time that we may be in the beginning of an immensely long time of uncertainty and change with regard to where we get our news and how our news is delivered I'd like to thank our panelists very much for their wonderful participation Thank you