 We're back on again Thursday, I'm Jay Fidel, this is Think Tech Community Matters, and Peter Adler joins us today. He was the convener at the Morning Media Symposium last Thursday. Welcome, Peter. You did a great job last week. Always good fun. We really appreciate that. Always good fun. Always fun to be with you. Let's review and have a retrospective. You know, who was there, for example? Well, I think we want to highlight some of the media people. There was Hawaii Public Radio was there, Civil Beat was there, KHON was there. We had independent bloggers like Ian Lind. It was a real interesting dialogue. Steve Petranic, obviously, from Hawaii Business, who was one of our panel leaders. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was really replete with media from around the town. It's interesting to juxtaposition because this is local media, but we live in a world of firestorm of media, of national media with your friend Donald Trump. I say he's your friend because I know he's not my friend. So the question, really, is how do you relate those two things? How can, as convener, how can you have a conversation about local media and not really deal with the national, the troubles, the challenges, oh gosh, the malevolent things that happen vis-à-vis the national media? Well, you know, the point is that the world is on fire right now. And I would like to argue that Hawaii is smoldering. We are on fire, too. It's a slower burn. We're not quite as outrageous and crazy as what we see every day on the national news. I mean, our president is just kind of loose. He's running loose, and he's running scared, and he's just, you know, maybe unstable. Yes. So, and then we have, you know, lots of foreign actions, and we have domestic actions and the impeachment. So there's that whole world of stuff, and you could, some would say it's always on fire. It's always on fire. But today it's acute. We have an acute burn going on, but we also have our local smoldering problems here that I think are coming up. The flames are rising. So you mentioned you had some insights as a result of part of this conversation last Thursday. Can you give us some of those insights? Insights, you're doing me honor with that word, insights. I took a lot of notes, even though I opened and closed the session, it was really led by yourself and Steve Petraniak, who led very good panels. But there were things I heard that rang my bell, and I'll just run through a couple of them, and we end there more later on. We talked a lot about kind of the essence of good journalism, which is voice, solutions, truth, and above all, stories, good stories that compel people. Either longer, if you prefer longer, shorter, whatever form you prefer it in. And Brett Oprigard said, for example, the value of great stories in the public space is that they get people talking. They get people buzzing around a bit, and they identify problems, they work with solutions, they work different voices. So it was a good reminder just to start out with the say, stories, we're all about stories. And then you get into the question of truth stories, and false stories, and fake news, and real news. But it's a good reminder that that's what journalists do, is they dig for stories, or they tell a story, and they hope to create a buzz. That's why it's called stories. That's what it is. And we know actually that humans, we communicate best through stories. So, it's okay in some. We know that's where we started around campfires, with stories. Yeah. What did you do today, Jay? What did you do, you know, pull off? And what did you do today, Og? And we, oh, I saw this really interesting thing across the river. I found a big bear or whatever it was. That's our roots. We're still part of it. I was reading my theory before the show began about the species. The species is a social animal, we're a social animal. And that means we talk to each other, we collaborate in order to bring the big bear down, or we don't in order to have a big fight or war, or what have you. But we deal together. At the end of the day, you can't be alone in the Northwoods. That doesn't work. That's clear, that's no more a viable option for anybody. So the question is, you know, what, so the quality of this conversation, the quality of this communication of social animals socializing with each other, around the campfire or otherwise. What effect does that have on our, what do you call it, political structure, on our structure as a large conglomeration of people in this country, 350 million, whatever it is, and in other places, and on the world stage as well? If it's good, what happens? If it's bad, what happens? What does it mean to our form of government, our democracy? What does it mean to our quality of life? Got an answer on that? Well, I don't think I have an answer, but I think I would share a few thoughts, certainly. I've never been shy about doing that with you, Jay. So I think just as the world is going through massive disruptions and changes in the order of things, so is journalism. Journalism is fragmented. I was saying before we started, they used to call it the fourth estate. Now it's a bunch of little bungalows and condos and hovels over here and gated communities over there. It's not an estate. It's no longer an estate in the traditional way that it might have been in the 1950s. So we got a very disrupted world of journalism. And the question, one of the questions that came out was, what's the key to sustainability? How, who's gonna survive? We'll think tech survive. We'll, KHONTV do it. And there were a few clues in there. There were a few clues that I heard. And again, I'm a writer, but I'm not necessarily a journalist. And one of the clues was from Bill Dorman. He said, really zeroing in on your audience and doing the analytics and figuring out who you're telling those stories to. Who do you want to have listened or hear? That was a very important moment for me because Dorman was reminding us that in this sprawl of new journalism, you gotta figure out who you wanna talk to or who you want to have read or who you wanna have write. And you gotta get some analytics around that. Aggression for a moment? Absolutely. Brad Parsqual, remember the name, we'll hear more about him. He was the tech political guy for Trump in the 2016 election. He is now the overall campaign manager. He's probably 30, maybe less. He's brilliant, American, from an American school, I wanna say in the South or the Midwest. This is not Harvard and Yale, and he is a genius. This guy understands about connecting with your audience. He understands about dealing with Cambridge Analytica, which is what he did back in 2016. He understands about examining the audience and messaging to the audience. And a micro level too. Micro level, and it's more of an art form now than it was in 2016. There was an article in The Times a couple of days ago about how Trump was way ahead of the Democrats in terms of understanding how you reach subsets. What are they into subsets? Trump has issued 45 million tweets or something like that since he took office, and he's hitting huge numbers of people. I mean, huge numbers of people. He's spending enormous amounts of money. And he's got lots of money, and he's raising more money. That's what he does. And he figures that the way it works now is social media. The way you win votes in elections, social media. And the article stood for the proposition that he will win because he understands social media. So in a sense, our conventional media program last Thursday was conventional. We don't understand Brad Pusquale or the leverage that he has, and will continue to have and improve on. But Opragar, Brett from the university said something key at the beginning. And you were moderating that panel. He said technology is the driver. And that's a great example. Pusquale's a great example of it. So he's figured out a technology and an analytic process of using that technology. And that is building the strategy that they have for moving their stories around. True or false stories. Doesn't matter. They, the technology is the driver. That was Brett's point. Yeah, it's almost as if the true of, you heard it here, it's almost as if the true and false and he doesn't really matter. It's how people react to that. Whether you're reaching Bill Dorman's audience subset and having effect on their opinion and therefore on public opinion in general. One of the things I liked about our session was Steve Petranic brought from Hawaii Business. He brought in some data. He brought some data to the tables. We were all conjecturing on opinions and ideas and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he said, his numbers, and I don't remember, I don't have the numbers. He said they know that video reaches the most people now. But it's also more expensive and it produces fewer stories compared to written products that produce, they're cheaper in some ways and produce more stories. I mean, younger people are reading. That's the sort of demographic. Older people are watching tube. They're sitting in a couch somewhere. The younger people are reading. And why, I mean, it's not yet completely known but why one reason is that you can read faster. You don't have to wait for the agenda of the television show. You can read right now. You can see the point. You can get it from the headline first paragraph or the next one. And if you have a lot of stuff being thrown at you, you can absorb more or absorb may not be the right word. You can have some contact with more news, be aware of more stories and therefore enjoy your conversation with your peers who love to hear that you are well informed or not because you know the in-depth story but because you know the headlines. One of the interesting side impacts of that, I hang out with people who are writers. They write books and like me it's a writing as a hobby. It's not like I'm making my living doing it although I did a little freelance work earlier. But one of the things is that there's less and less of a tendency to read longer form writing, right? So you can write a brilliant essay and it's 30 pages. Who's gonna read it? Nobody. They'll read the executive summary. They'll read the first couple of paragraphs. You better summarize things and those few who wanna dig deeper can read the written. But there's a shrinking of attention that's going on. And the other thing that's happening is we now live in an attention society where big money is betting that they can capture your attention for eight to 10 seconds on something. They are. Yeah. Yeah, it works. I think you make a real study of that. Young people, old people, all kinds of different subsets and they have different attention spans. I know watching the show, you know that our average is like nine minutes. After that they're off. And I think actually, Peter, we're beyond the nine minutes. Where? So they probably left already. The posse. Let's take a break. Peter Adler, a chord 3.0. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys Varsity Tennis team for 22 years and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my book, which is also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you, tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go Beyond the Lines on Think Kauai. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Keisha King, host of At the Crossroads, where we have conversations that are real and relevant. We have spoken with community leaders from right here locally in Hawaii and all around the world. Won't you join us on thinktecawai.com or on YouTube on the Think Tech Hawaii channel. Our conversations are real, relevant and lots of fun. I'll see you at the Crossroads. Aloha. Yeah, good. Okay, we're back, Peter and me. So we're gonna talk about sacred cows because Ian Lynn was really spellbinding. He talked about sacred cows. What does that mean? In the local press, and I suppose in all of the press nationally, there are some topics people don't wanna write about or talk about or cover. And we go like that. Yeah, you go like that. Yeah, go like that. So anyway, can you remember some of the sacred cows? Yes, I do. And Ian's point was in the context of investigative journalism because that's what he's done for much of his career, his multiple careers. He's been an investigative journalist. And he still does that. He likes to dig on a story, go down to the Bureau of Conviances, gather everything up and figure out what's going on with this action. So one of the things he said was, and I think it was in response to the demise of investigative journalism in the mainstream media, that there's very little of it. And the reason for it is people can't afford it. You know, the KHON can probably afford a little bit and they'll send off one of their reporters, Mahayelani or somebody else to go dig a story. But for the most part, you know, the Star Advertiser and other papers like that. They read it off a prompter. Yeah, or they're taking people's press releases and they never know if somebody will follow a trail. Yeah. But he talked about, he said, if you really want to do investigative work, whether it's in the new media or in the old media, what you really need to do is figure out the sacred cows. What is it that nobody is talking about or people are a little afraid to talk about it? And he cited some very specific examples. He said, for example, in Hawaii, how come nobody's really dug down into the finances of the Hawaiian organizations? Now, sensitive, difficult. Nobody wants to attack Hawaiians and be thought of as anti-Hawaiian. But he said, lots of money in the Ali'i Trusts, lots of money at OHA, civic clubs, and you know, there's just the organizations that have wealth. They're sitting on resources. And that becomes especially important if we want to talk about the dominion and domain of a future sovereign region. Where's the dole gonna come from? So he said, that's an example of a sacred cow, that people go a little sensitive. We don't want to offend anybody. We live in an island where- Don't make a. Yeah, exactly. Go along, get along, all that stuff. He said a second one was the real estate world, which hasn't really been explored and possibly exposed. And there's interesting changes going on in the real estate world, but it's a big operation here in Hawaii. So you know, it's a big sector. He said, that's worth exploring and digging around on if somebody was enterprising. He talked about organized labor. Now there's an interesting one, right? Because we know Hawaii's very labor, pro-labor or very labor oriented. Our legislators tend to be approved of by labor or disapproved of by labor either in their elections or during their sessions. He said, how come we've not read any good stories? How come we haven't, nobody's followed the trail of the influence of organized labor? And that's just, that doesn't say it's all bad. There's a story, how come we're not looking at it? And then the last one he mentioned was airports. He said, our airport is kind of Junkalanka, right? And you know, it's kind of- We're all the time in my opinion. Yeah, it looks pretty bad. So he says, how come nobody's really dug on that story? So he was saying these are sacred cows that, and there are others that you could probably get. That's the key to investigation. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And that was so provocative when he was talking. He was really one of the best speakers in the crowd. So what I get is that somebody else talked about this. Well, you know, local, it's not that much local news and therefore, you know, the star of the ties is kind of thin. And you know, you only hear about accidents and weather and sports and- Obituaries. And then again, on TV. But you know, to say that there's no news here is ridiculous. This is a place loaded with stories. I remember when the descendants came out, the movie and George Clooney, you know, played the movie. Everybody said, gee, that's our story. We know that story. How come Hollywood is coming and taking our story? Fact is, there's a thousand, thousand stories like the descendants, which we have not exploited. We have not revealed. And there's a thousand, thousand stories we could include in our media, which we don't. Sacred cows are otherwise. And that may be one of the future strands, you know, in this diminished fourth estate, but the rise of all the bungalows and condos and little hovels and hostels and whatever. One of those niches, I think, if I'm gleaning this right from all the conversation, may be very localized news. Very localized news. People want to know what's going on in their neighborhood. They want to know about that burglary that took place or that Pete Binkham was crawling around the neighborhood. They want to know about the speed bumps and the potholes. And then, you know, it may be that people, there's a real market. That's, again, where Dorman's comment about the analytics of who's your audience, I think, becomes important to the future of viability of different kinds of tourism. You know, something called Nextdoor. I think it's called Nextdoor. And about a month ago, they wanted me to sign up, so I signed up on the net. And now I get mail. I don't know how many times a day about every little thing, about lost dogs in your own hood. In my own hood, my next block. And it's very local. It's very newsy. It's very helpful. And who's producing that? Who produces them? Where does that come? It's a national. It's a national that comes local. And it's very interesting how this works, because it's what you're talking about. It's news, but it's local news, and it's refined down to my neighborhood. It's not the next neighborhood. It's only my neighborhood. So you say, well, maybe this is the future. Maybe it's the future of those bungalows and cottages. And maybe those bungalows and cottages are not old-time newsmen who have been around since Jimmy Cagney. You're dating yourself and me, but. Can't and whatnot. The new people who are going to do next door and do that refined thing that Bill Dorman talked about, they're younger. And they are interested in the stories. The problem that I have, though, and I'd like you to have thought about this, is the problem is that at the end of the day, we have to educate people who stopped their education at college or high school, most people. And they said, I don't like school anymore. And I'm going to sort of learn as I go. And I'll talk to my friends if they do. And I'll learn that way. And then they wind up learning at 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock. That's when they learn for eight minutes or something on television. Not enough. You can't be a worthy, responsible, accountable citizen doing that. You have got to be educated to cast a ballot. So my training is in sociology. So my instinct is to say to that person who's only watching at 6 or 9 or 10 or whatever it is, is not to say you've got to learn about everything else. It's to say, what do you want to learn about? What's the curiosity? What is it that interests you? Is it our local politics at the state level? Is it your island? Is it your neighborhood? Is it the national scene? I want to know what they want. That's what they're thinking about. I had a conversation with the advisory council of KGMP, Hawaii News Now in time. They said, and I said, why don't you show people what they need to know that's different? They need to know about what's happening in legislature, city council, government in general, the fiscal policy, all that. And Rick Blangiardy said, no, no, no. We know what they want. Accidents, crime, weather, and sports. And that's what we give them. And a lot of fluff stories about the kids on the weekends having an event or something. And my problem with that is that that does not make responsible citizens and serious players in a democratic society. And so I take your point and I change it to say, we have to tell them what they need to know. They may not be able to determine what they need to know. They have responsibilities. And the responsibilities don't stop at fluff stories, no? I agree. I mean, I agree there's a certain amount. But I think this is such a time of ferment. It would be interesting to understand what people want. What do they want? What do they want from ThinkTech, from our shows? What do they want from Star Advertiser? What do they want from Civil Beat? And the feedback channels need to be open within the range of what people can do. I mean, the media can't do everything. It can do some things. But I think we need a little more feedback, genuine, good feedback about it. Yes, I agree with that. Yeah, but I'm not disagreeing. We need to find ways. I mean, I've always thought we should give the DOE we should require citizenship tests for high school graduation. What's the same citizenship test that we asked? What a great idea. And they got to take it. How come this kid doesn't have to take it? How come my kids didn't have to take it? You want to vote, at least know something. Damn right, there's three branches of government. Here's the president. He's got two terms. I mean, there's some fundamentals. And of course, we know people have lost that. They don't know that. There's not much civics going on. Let's go to the last and most important point of our discussion. How is the press, which is under such stress, economic stress, political stress from guys like Trump, the stress of people not wanting that caring, not reading, not consuming news. Those are all big stresses on a media that has developed under the First Amendment since the Constitution. And now it's under attack in so many ways. How can it be sustainable? And the primary issue there is economic. How does it stay in business? How do they keep doing what it thinks it should do? And one of the things we didn't get to, because we only had a couple hours to do this with what it was, at 40 people in the room or so, one of the things we didn't talk about was the antidote to the fake news battles. And we didn't get a chance to talk about it. And I think it's actually worthy of another conversation, just on that. And there may be some antidotes to that, some things that can be done either regulatorally or voluntarily by through the pledges of companies and media outlets. So it's a big one. Because right now, one of the tendencies is to say, I don't know, I can't listen to any of this bullshit. None of it. I don't trust. Can I say bullshit? Can I say that? I talk to here in this neighborhood. I don't trust the press at all. I don't trust any media. I don't know what to trust and who to trust. So there's people who are looking for some kind of a compass or a navigational tool that can help them with that. And I don't think it's fully evolved at all. But that's worthy of another big conversation. Well, they say a couple of people with smart ideas can change the world. And maybe that'll happen. Maybe somebody will have a smart idea. It will be high tech, like Glenn Schiarty was also talking about technology as the future of news. And I certainly agree. And it can be the kind of technology that Zuckerberg does, which is often destructive. And it can be the kind of technology you're talking about, which is productive and constructive. So the question I put to you, though, is economically, how can they make a living? You can't sell newspapers on the street corner anymore. It's hard to get people to subscribe for $10 a month. It's hard to do that. It's being done by the newspapers, some of them anyway. It's hard to be in print. It's just hard to be in print. It's so expensive to print it and distribute it and all that. It's hard to have investigative reporters. How are we going to thread the needle on this? And there were a few comments towards that about sustainability of different media. And they talked about the civil beat model, which is a nonprofit, please give us donation. They also have a patron. They have a big daddy in Pierre Omidyar. But he doesn't pay for everything. And they are building. And so they have a nonprofit model, please give us $5 or $1 a day or whatever their pitch is. We talked about the midweeks and the star advertisers and how they have to really rely on ads and advertising. So I think there's a time for a reinvention. And it is a tough question, because unless you know who your audience is, as Dorman said, and unless you know you have some analytics on that stuff, how do you find the support channel? And we got to do it. We got to do it here at Think Tech. We got to do it everywhere. Anybody who wants to survive? Yeah, and we have a nation. We have to clean this up. This right now, it's not working. It's like in the movie The Terminator, when he comes up and he says, you want to live? Come with me. So how are they going to live? Pretty impressive. Yeah, yeah. And we don't know. No, we don't know. And concerns me of what you were talking about before. I'd like to latch on that for a minute. If you have a problem of this magnitude, a problem with the media of this magnitude, one possibility is to get the government to regulate how it's doing. And that is a very suggestive, if not seductive possibility in Congress. They're having hearings already. And they want to talk to, they want to reform Facebook, and this and that, and enlarge the unquestions of news. And monopoly questions. I think there's been monopoly questions. And monopoly around news, right? And consolidation of hundreds of radio stations. And they all happen to be just right of center, or very right of center. So it's a problem when you say, well, the only people who can solve this problem is the government. I don't think the founding fathers were thinking of that. They did not want the government involved in the press. One of the themes I heard from our friends and colleagues in that session was people are going to have to get used to the idea of paying for news and paying for stories. The notion that it's all freebies, that's coming to an end. One way or another, people have to pay. You have to subscribe. You have to donate. You have to do this. You have to do that. Otherwise, those channels go away. And I heard that pretty strongly from several people. I also heard Mahelani Richardson talk about the evolution of press that has multiple platforms. They are on the net. They are on TV. They are on the radio. They're on podcasts. There's multiple things. And I think the bigger ones are going to do that. Sure. And if you have multiple things going on, you can pick and choose which one is making more money for you, which has the greatest leverage, the greatest reach, and go that way, like a pseudopod and an amoeba. You find your path and you drop off the ones that don't work. And I think it's very important. And I point to two possibilities for your consideration, Peter, which we did not get to discuss on last Thursday. One is books. So I watch Rachel Maddow. I like Rachel Maddow. She's written two books in the last six months or less. Good books. And it's about things that are happening right now, things that are relevant to understanding the world around us. And then you start looking at all those guys from the New York Times and Washington Post. They're all writing books. Go to Kendall. You can download them in a one minute flat. And this is news. The question is who's reading them? How much reading goes on? Good question. That's my question. Because if you're writing longer form writing, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, the question is, are there readers? Are there readers? And I don't know. Maybe it's enough that Rachel Maddow has a good name or Susan Rice or others. And people will just buy it for the name. And I don't know. It's a really good question. And maybe they should be short books. Could be the answer. We'd like to get them right here on this show. Susan Rice, for example, Rachel Maddow. One other thing that pops up along the same lines is Frontline. I think Frontline is an example of what you can do in a fairly compressed period of time with a news story that requires some drill down. And they have done a number. And they've sustained. Sustainable. As has Meet the Press, the one of the oldest shows on the networks. Somehow they managed to figure out a survival strategy. And I don't know what the key is. Who knows what the secret sauce is? No, but we have to keep watching. We've got to find it. And we have to keep following it. And you have to keep on organizing these programs. You were the real organizer. I was popped up for ceremonial purposes. That was great. That was great. So Peter, what's your closing remark? I mean, there's camera one over there. They want to know what you want to leave with them. This is your big opportunity. And you may select a one-word description of what you have in mind. You like that. Stories. Go for stories. I think stories are the essence. Stories make the world, and the world is made of stories. It's not made of molecules. It's not made of laws and regulations. It's made of stories. And let's focus on the stories, pay attention to the stories, listen to the stories, read stories, and write stories. And there are so, so many stories. There are. Let's get the good ones. It's great to be alive these days, I think. I agree. Thank you, Peter Radler. Thank you, Dave. Great to talk to you. Always, always, always. Yeah, good fun.