 Today's forum will be officially described and introduced by our moderator, Jason Spingarnkopf, and my job is to introduce him. Jason is a, I'd also like to thank all three of the speakers, but especially Jason and Josh for helping us out at a time when we were desperate to try to make last minute arrangements. Our original plans for Pablo's event didn't sort of work out and we didn't find out about certain things until the last minute and both our moderator and our respondent have agreed on relatively short notice to do this work and I'm doubly grateful to them. Jason is a documentary filmmaker specializing in the intersection of science, technology, and society. His featured documentary, Life 2.0, about a group of people whose lives are transformed by the virtual world second life, premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and will be featured on the Oprah Winfrey network. He served as producer of Nova's The Great Robot Race and development producer of PBS's Emmy-winning Rx for Survival. He's also created documentaries for Frontline and Time Magazine. He is currently a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, a graduate of Brown University and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Jason. Thank you. It's fun to be here and kind of exciting to have a chance to discuss this issue with you two who have studied this for some time. The title is Online News Public Sphere or Echo Chamber. It's a pretty broad topic slash broad question but there's a lot to chew on and I think there'll be a lively discussion. The format is that, well first we have Pablo Bajkovski. Is that close enough? Okay. He's a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University where he leads a research program that studies the transition from print to digital media and he's the author of several great books including Digitizing the News, Innovation and Online Newspapers and News at Work, Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance, which is this book and there it is. And it gets into this fascinating paradox about having more information but less news. So I'm sure he'll talk a bit about that. And he, welcome back to MIT. Thank you very much. From 2001 to 2005 he was the Ceciline Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor of Organization Studies at MIT Sloan School of Management. So Pablo is going to introduce some new research which most basically is looking at a gap or mismatch between the supply of information and the demand or basically what journalists or editors consider newsworthy versus what the public actually wants. So I think we're all trying to sort that out. And then after his presentation, which is going to be about 20 to 25 minutes, then we have Joshua Benton who will do a response. And Josh is Director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, which is a fantastic resource. And he was also a Nieman Fellow in 2008. And beforehand he spent 10 years in newspapers, was recently at the Dallas Morning News, and he's reported from 10 foreign countries, been a Pew Fellow in international journalism, and was three times a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. So Josh will do his response, and then we're going to have a little discussion and plenty of time to take questions and have a broader discussion amongst all of us. OK. Pablo, is that all right? Thank you for the kind introduction. Thank you. I'm going to stand there standing before. I don't know how to talk and stay still, so I'm going to move around a little bit. And I need to hide this, I've been told. Thank you very much to David and to Susan for the invitation to be here. It's always great to be back at MIT. I had a fabulous five years here. And I'm always pleased to return, and in particular to share work with you and get your input on it. And I'm very much looking forward to the response. I'm a big fan of the Nieman Lab and Josh's commentary as well, so hopefully he will not rip me apart. So without further ado, let's move to the talk because David, I was planning to talk for 40 minutes, and David said 20 to 25. So let's go into it. So this book, News at Work, as Jason just said, is a story about the increasing role of imitation or copying or replication in news production. They did it more and more and more. We have the same news across different outlets. A problem that I faced in that research project was whether perhaps I did most of the explanation has to do with changes in the production of news and the behavior of news workers and news organizations. But perhaps it occurred to me through the research. News organizations, which are actually market-driven organizations, were responding to changes in the nature of demand. Perhaps all of us want the same news, and therefore news organizations are giving us just what we want. They are optimizing their product to match the nature of demand. Was that the case or wasn't that the case? So to sort of discard or not that alternative explanation, I did a series of studies that were reported in this book that came out with Chicago in October. And I found out that that is not the case, that actually there is a huge mismatch, as I say here, between the supply of information and the demand of information. Basically, that means that the stories that news organizations consider to be the most newsworthy one, the most important ones at any given point in time, for any day or hour, that are the stories that are above the fold in print newspapers or at the top of the hour in the television newscast, or that they are in the top screen of a website. Those stories that they are the most important ones for them are not necessarily the stories that consumers consider to be the most important ones. And this ties back to a longstanding debate between journalists and scholars about the stories that journalists say we need in order to function properly in the sort of liberal democratic tradition as citizens of the polity, information about national news, international news, business economics, et cetera, versus the stories that oftentimes we want to read, that are stories usually about sports, crime, or entertainment, that are not necessarily an interesting or unimportant stories, as for example, was the case a week ago when my former advisor, my buddy, and a great guy, Trevor Pinch, author, professor at Cornell University, author of what was the most popular story on cnn.com at that point in time, which was a story, very interesting one, about the role of embodied cognition in, or issues having to do with environment, and cognition in artificial intelligence in the relationship between us and machines. So this was a very important story that sort of piggybacked on the geoparty, I think it was a television show where the computer, right? So you can sort of sneak in some great science study stuff through television and entertainment, but as Robert Park described 70 years ago, famous sociologists, former newspaper person, founder of Chicago School of Sociology, this is something that journalists and scholars have known for a while, that the things that most of us would like to publish are not necessarily the things that most of us want to read. We might be eager to get into print, what is or seems to be edifying, but what we actually want to read or watch or listen to are stories that are interesting. So this debate has been going on for more than 70 years, and it's a crucial one, not only for the industry, but also for the role of media and democracy. Interestingly enough, given how important and how long standing this debate has been, there has been a relative dearth of empirical studies about this subject, and the few real research studies that have systematically passed through evidence that have existed have suffered from at least three major limitations. The first one is that so far before the web, most of the studies focus on aggregate measures, right? Ratings or circulation measures or responses that people will give you in surveys, but not necessarily the behavior that tracks how people read or consume or watch, which are story driven, right? Rather than, you know, circulation in a day, weekday versus weekend, et cetera. The second limitation is that most of the few empirical studies that are there have either examined the supply of information, what are the stories that are important in the day, and contrasted that to secondary evidence about the stories that people are interested in, or examine through surveys, through focus groups, through examination of ratings, information, et cetera, the stories that people consider the most popular, right? And use secondary evidence to look at what we think are the most important stories of the day for journalists, the editorial criteria. And finally, the third limitation is that by and large, almost all the studies have conceived these preferences or these choices as static, as not changing depending changes in circumstances. I have taken that for granted. So what I did after I got my curiosity sort of picked doing these few studies for news at work is I got some grant money and designed a series of studies that have tried to first determine whether there is actually or there isn't a gap between the supply of information consisting of the stories that are the most important ones for journalists versus the demand of information consisting of the stories that are the most popular for consumers where consumers vote with their clicks, right? In seven different countries, 20 different online news organizations, and that have tried by research design to get rid of all these problems. So focus at the story as the unit of analysis, focus on the story as the units of analysis, looking at the choices of both or the preferences of both journalists and consumers, journalists and the public concurrently, and also looking at the role of contextual variation, contextual circumstances, where they affect or not this preference, whether that, to get a sense of whether these choices are then static or these preferences are static or not. So, and since Anthropology is sponsoring this, I ask Susan for permission. I am trained as an ethnographer. Most of what I do is ethnographic, but I'm just gonna give you numbers. This is the first for me. And it's an interesting challenge to write a book based just on numbers. But I'm gonna present you four of the papers that come out from these studies. I have few more. And you'll have to tell me where you think this overall story makes sense or not. The papers are almost all published or in the pipeline. So I have little sort of doubt about sort of that aspect of the research, but I'm trying to get a sense of the overarching narrative. That is basically a tale of four studies. So, study number one. It's a study where we laid the methodology for this. We did the following. One day, right? For a number of days, we repeated the same thing. We went, together with a group of collaborators, to four online news sites in the U.S., CNN, the online news site of a Chicago Tribune, the online news site of a paper that now doesn't exist anymore, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the news operation at Yahoo. And at three times of the day, at the same time, we grabbed the top 10 most prominently displayed stories, which are basically the stories that appear on the first screen as an indication of the stories that journalists consider to be the most important ones of the day. And at that very same time, we took the top 10 most clicked or most viewed or most popular stories on each of these sites. Whenever possible, I also collected information about the most clicked and the most commented stories. And I have analyzed that as well, I'm not gonna report it today, but in the Q&A, I'm happy to tell you there are a couple of papers out there, happy to sort of give you a gist of what that says. But so the methodology is very simple. We take the two rankings. The ranking of what the journal is considered to be the most important news, and the ranking of what the consumers consider to be the most important, the most popular interesting news. And then we contrast, and we say, of these top 10 stories in one ranking, how many are about, what I call public affairs news, news about politics or national news in this country, international foreign news, business and economics, one side, the other side, the rest, which is usually weather, crime, sports, entertainment, okay? And I measure whether the level of preference is similar or is different. It's a very, very simple, very, very simple process, right? A very crude measure, right? But that yields remarkably consistent results across sites. On the left side here, in this sort of turquoise color, for each of these sites, is the prevalence of public affairs news, the news that we need to know in order to function properly in the citizens in a liberal democracy, presented by journalists among the top 10 in the four sites. And on the Northwestern purple side, the color here on the right hand side, you have the prevalence of public affairs news among the top 10 most click stories in each of these sites. In all cases, despite the fact that, you know, you have two metro papers here, versus two sort of global slash national organizations at the two ends, that one is a pure player, the other confrontational media, it doesn't matter. You can change as much as you want. In all cases, there is a double digit gap between supply and demand. The basis is the percentage of public affairs news among the top 10. Okay, so in all cases, and all of these figures that I'm going to present today is everything is statistically significant. So we have about 1200 stories for each of these sites, hand coded, not machine coded, hand coded by people trained beforehand, blah, blah, blah, blah. In all cases, you have a gap. Now it is possible, right? We know that our choices when we read the site, we are influenced, we read a newspaper, we are influenced by editorial decision making. That is, if a story makes it about the fold, we are more likely to pay attention to that story than if it is buried in page 15. If it is placed at the top of the screen of a website, it's more likely that it will attract hits or at least some visibility than if it's buried several screens deep, right? Conversely, I am not the only one who's looking at this. Journalists in news organizations are constantly tracking this information. They use now tool called chart bit for a couple of 100 bucks a month. You get very detailed information about the heartbeat of a site, right? I published the Trevor Pinch story is generating lots of clicks so we move it up in the site, right? Possibly or possibly not. So it is possible not only that our behavior as consumers is influenced by the journalist, but also that journalist behavior is influenced by consumers. So we did a second analysis of this information. Of the top 10 stories, there were some in the two columns, right? There were some that showed up in both that could be, right? Evidence that journalists have placed them at the top because consumers had actually clicked a lot, right? Or that consumers have clicked a lot because journalists placed them at the top. So we extracted, removed all those stories to get a more pure sense of the preferences of each site and guess what? The gap increases hugely, right? So when you have actually left to their own devices, right? The preferences of the choices of people diverge even more. This is, in the case of CNN, a gap of 50 percentage points. It's like basically running, having a bakery, putting all your products, right? You decide that 70% of what you're going to produce and put on the market are croissants, and only 20% of those are sold. You wonder how much longer can an organization survive with this huge gap between supply and demand? So, OK. We basically proved that there is a huge sizeable, right? Quite robust gap between the needs and the wants, if you wish, between supply and demand of information in the case of the states. But the states, to return to one of my favorite analogies, is the home of McDonald's. So perhaps people do not eat McDonald's in other countries. We run a second study that basically is exactly the same methodology to look at only new sites of national newspapers, right? To unlike the previous study, we just worked with national newspaper data for comparability reasons in six different countries, three in Latin America and three in Western Europe. And for each country, except for the case of Brazil, because we were also interested in issues not just of regional differences, but also ideological differences, we looked at two sites per country. One, conservative leaning, the other, liberal-centrist leaning. So perhaps this is a thing of the right, but not of the left, or vice versa. The six countries are Germany, UK, and Spain in Argentina. I'm sorry, in Western Europe and then Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico in Latin America. The first paper is coming out in Journal of Communication. This one just came out in Communication Research. Same idea, same measures, similar results. This is each site, right? So we have Tagesh Pigland Veil from Germany, El País and El Mundo from Spain, Guardian and Times from the UK, Glanina Nanación from Argentina, Folia de Sao Paulo from Brazil and El Universal and La Reforma from Mexico. In all cases, there is a sizable and significant gap in some cases up to 30 percentage points between what is provided to the public and what the public actually wants to read based on where they click. Perhaps, however, this is more a thing of Europe, not Latin America. Latin America and not Europe. No. Not only the editorial criteria are remarkably similar across very different regions but also consumer behavior. Here you have journalist choices, the prevalence of public affairs news in Western Europe on the left and Latin America or the three countries in Western Europe, three countries in Latin America on the right. In both cases, there are almost 60 percent. There is one percentage point difference. Here, preference of consumers which are exactly at 39 percent on average, combining all the sides together. And by the way, this is not machine coded, this is real people, people who lived in those countries for at least a year and two people per country. And we are talking total 18,000 stories in this study hand coded this way. Perhaps, however, there is an ideological difference. This only applies to sites on the right because those of us on the left are a little bit more enlightened. Well, not actually. You have, again, the journalist here, the consumers here. This is conservative. It doesn't really matter, right? Conservative, liberal, conservative, liberal. One percentage point difference if you group together all the conservative sites versus you group together all the liberal sites. So now that we know that there is a gap, the gap is sizable, the gap applies to at least three different regions of the world. The gap doesn't seem to vary depending on ideological preferences. We can start testing whether it is static or not, right? So whether, perhaps, things change when people should pay more attention than other normal circumstances. And what better time to study that than during the 2008 election, which was not only just a presidential election. It was a major political moment. It was possibly the election of the first African American president in the history of the country coupled with a momentous financial transformation that erased, I don't know, how many trillions of dollars in people's assets. So if there is any point in time in which people should pay attention to politics, to economics, international affairs, it's this time, right? So we did the same methodology. We looked at six U.S.-based news sites. Two from Cable, CNN and Fox. So two very different ones in terms of ideological orientation. Two from broadcast television, ABC and CBS. And two from print, Washington Post, the serious side, right? And USA Today, the antithesis. We started collecting information three weeks before the first convention and we ended three weeks after the election. On average, we collected, for the normal weeks, we collected between four or five times a week and around the election period, we collected for 14 consecutive days. And then we went back exactly a year later around those 14 days and we gathered information during a more routine period. Those same sites, same 14 days. I'm gonna report on that as well. We also gather information during the Congressional until the same 14 days in 2010 and we're gonna do a panel. We're gonna continue collecting information at least until 2012, if not longer than that. So I'm gonna give you two cuts of the data. The first one compares what happens in the 14 days around the election time in 2008 with the same 14 days in 2009. Not the full load for 2008, just these 14 days, those 14 days. And here we start seeing that these choices are actually not static. So the gap exceeds, it's huge actually, in Fox, right? So people, consumers of fox.com were not really very interested in politics around the election time. It's still fairly large, CNN, and it's also a bit large in USA today and statistically significant in all cases. It doesn't exist in ABC and CBS, so this from statistical vantage point. And the interesting thing is that in Washington Point, there is a gap that reverses, okay? So eight out of the 10 top stories that journalists published in Washington Post around the election time were on politics, but that wasn't enough for the public of Washington Post.com. They wanted more than nine out of 10, right? So the answer is, are these preferences static? No, they actually change quite a bit depending. I'm gonna show you another measure by which that is the case, depending on the context. When there is a major election and people are primed to pay attention, people actually do pay attention. What happens when life goes back to normal? Everything goes back to normal. Gap, large, everything in the same direction, no changes from two years ago, no changes I can predict you if you measure now in all six sites, right? So this is what the inter-annual comparison, they're from one year to the next, tells us. Then we did an analysis looking at the behavior both of journalists and consumers during the election cycle. So this chart gives information about the journalist's choices, right? Starting from week one, which is three weeks prior, the first convention going through week 18, three weeks after the election with week 15 being the week of the election. Each site has a color coding, a color coding. Basically, if you do as we did, throw a regression, you can predict them from one week to the next. There's basically, on average, a 3% chance that as the election nears, journalists are gonna give us more public affairs news. Fairly predictable, I can see that. The more predictable thing is that the journalists' choices basically move in a pack. They all go, it doesn't matter where you see, it doesn't matter where you are in Fox or the Washington Post. They're more or less gonna give us the same diet. So have this picture in mind. Look at us. This is us. This is the public from one week to the next, right? Huge disparity. So in some sites, you can actually plot a regression. Most of the sites you can predict from one week to the next, right? This is incredible, right? This is Fox. This is absolutely incredible, okay? So no, election is week 15. This is how much the election drew the attention. Less than three out of 10 stories during that week. Among the top and most click ones. The interesting thing or the most noticeable thing is that compare this with this. This with this. This is an industry that is fairly static that doesn't move depending on the context. That doesn't change. They have a formula, they push it. One, two, three, four, five. This is us. We change our moods. So today I won croissants, tomorrow I won bagels, but I'm actually going to the same bakery. If the same bakery only is giving me croissants, after a while, I'm gonna be my appetite. It's gonna be not satiated or not satisfied, right? So eventually, which is one of the implications, I think of all this, eventually people are gonna start living these sites. There is no industry that can survive, especially in a competitive environment, with this huge gap I have too. Ha, okay. I come from Argentina. So with hyperinflation, we can say eight. How about that? Um, so, okay. The moral of the story is that, you know, we can tell, okay, these choices are actually not static. They are dynamic. They change depending on the environment. And of course, this is a major environmental transformation, a major contextual variation in the case of a state, something that people had been trying for a clue in for months. Would the same changes happen during a major crisis that erupts like this, that is totally unforeseen and vanishes quickly after that? So we run a fourth study that came out in press politics last year too, where we basically were fortunate enough that during the data collection period for the international study in Argentina, there was one such crisis, a major political crisis, where the economic minister had to resign, the government almost, you know, was collapsed, et cetera. And so what we did is we looked at the evolution because we had 24 weeks of data. We looked at the evolution of coverage during those 24 weeks. And we also, the summer after we collected data, we also went to these organizations and a few others and interviewed a bunch of editors and also interviewed a number of consumers. Long story short, since I don't have a lot of time, the choices are static only when there are no major contextual transformations. Even in case of crisis that erupt like this and like this one only lasts for five weeks, consumers really pay attention to topics that journalists consider are politically important during those weeks. And then when the crisis is over, people go back to life as usual. So this is the evolution of coverage during the 24 weeks, weeks 18 to 23, are the weeks in which the crisis was taking place. If you look at the lines, so the blue lines are the solid one is the journalist choices for Clarín, which is the largest newspaper in the country. The broken ones are the consumer choices for the site and the same for Lanacio, which is the second largest news site in the country. They basically don't move a lot together during normal periods. When there is a major crisis, they converge. And as soon as the crisis is over, they diverge. That's another way of showing the data. So why? Why given that we all know, I know it and people in the industry know it and people in this side know it, given that they are publishing stuff, that a lot of it goes unnoticed, that doesn't, it's not paid enough attention. Why do journalists continue publishing this information? Why is there behavior like that? One of our editors told us, we cannot ignore what people are interested in, but we cannot make the news as a function of those interests either. I believe that journalism has a role that is different from following those consumer demand trends. Another one, different organization, Clarín, said we are guided by parameters that have to do with taking care of the brand. We cannot publish anything that is out there. So basically this is saying that there is an occupational logic that so far trumps the market logic. We know what the demand is, but our occupational logic is such that will trump the nature of demand. What happened on the consumers side? Why do consumers first click on public affairs or pay attention to public affairs news during crisis periods, but not during ordinary periods? One of them said, we have the agricultural producer strike, which is this political crisis. So now I follow the headlines from this story and if there is something I can read about it, I read it. But during normal periods, and I said, I don't like politics very much, but I have to pay a bit of attention to it, whereas normally I read bizarre news to take a break from current events. So basically, I've just summarized a lot of interviews, people consider political news or public affairs news anxiety-provoking, demanding a lot of cognitive effort, and they feel somewhat unprepared to interpret it. All of that moves them away from this information, right? So we have two very different cultures and two very different logics here. I think we should, if it's all right with you, save the rest for the discussion. Give me two minutes. Two minutes, okay. Two slides, I only have two more slides. We're definitely getting into hyperinflation mode here. I know. So what does this mean for the industry? One, the media industry is an industry that grew and developed within the natural monopoly or oligopoly position. You had to come to them, you are an advertiser, you had to come to them. They gave us what they considered was important. And basically, when you are one or two of the most three players in the market, you can actually ignore the nature of the man. Now the industry has moved to a much more competitive environment. So this gap that has existed according to Robert Park for at least 70 years now becomes terribly pressing in terms of the economic viability of the industry. Second, this highlights the growing tension that you see in each and every newsroom that I've been to between the logics of the occupation and the logics of the markets that I said before. And third, I think the Washington Post finding is in part an interesting one for me, the reverse nature of the gap because it tells us that the sort of niche side, the sites that have a specialty are siphoning interest from the generalist sites. People who are in St. Louis or people who are in Seattle who are interested in politics go to Politico or the Washington Post. They don't go to their local news organization. So the bundle product strategy, the generalist strategy that dominated the industry for a long while actually might not longer be so feasible. And since Jason is looking at me, come on, come on, you have to finish. I leave you with the last slide so that you can read and I can talk about it. Thank you. It's fascinating. So that's brand new research. It's brand new. Are we the first to see? No. No, but great, it's exciting. That's gonna be part of a new book? Yes, hopefully. Okay, Josh. Terrific, well, thanks very much. Thank you Pablo for that presentation. It's a great honor to share the table with you. It's a great pleasure to be here at MIT. While I've been at Harvard for almost four years now, I really do comment a lot of these questions fundamentally from a journalistic perspective as opposed to an academic one. So while I can't match Pablo in academic credentials, I do think journalists traditionally, their task is to ask questions. So I'm just gonna raise a few questions about some of the research that we just heard presented that I hope can spark a fruitful discussion. I appreciate all the work that Pablo has done to illustrate the gap that exists between the production of journalism and the consumption of journalism. And that said, I don't think, I'd be surprised if anyone here was really shocked by the idea that in fact the things that we consume are not the same things that we would like to see produced or that professional journalists would like to see produced. I suspect we'd find a similar gap if we looked at the amount of broccoli you're supposed to eat versus the amount that people actually do eat or the number of hours that Americans spend listening to Justin Bieber versus the number of hours they admit to listening to Justin Bieber. And I think we can, even from our own experience, acknowledge that our own consumption of media is not always optimized for seriousness or for civic worthiness. I'd actually be interested, if you're looking for something else for the last chapter of your book, to do similar research looking specifically at the consumption habits of the same journalists who are producing the stories. I'm sure at the end of a long day of muckraking, a lot of them will go back to go read a trashy novel about vampires or zombies. Now, I last night used another tool to try and gauge the interest of the internet using public. This is Google Trends, which is matching what people are searching for at any given moment. The top five there include a woman named Melissa Malanero, who, from what I could tell, is only interest because she's in an old Navy commercial and looks something like Kim Kardashian. The word forehead, I was completely unable to figure out why people were searching for forehead last night, but perhaps someone in the crowd can crowdsource that for me. Two searches related to the death of the star of a reality television show, The Deadliest Catch, and Scott Walker Prank Call, which that last one, that fifth one, could be described as public affairs journalism if you're willing to have a broad definition, but I'm willing to invoke the prank call exception to anything actually being public affairs journalism. I think that sort of moves it into the entertainment category for most people who are consuming it. The internet certainly makes it very easy for us to quantify the public's wandering attentions, but I would note that it's not exactly a new phenomenon for there to be concern about the civic information levels of the American public. I remember as a kid in the 80s, hearing about all the Americans who couldn't find the Soviet Union on a map, which was really hard, because the Soviet Union is pretty big, pretty hard to miss. There have always been people who, while they may have bought a very serious newspaper, skipped straight to the comics or the sports section or the crossword puzzle, or who quite frankly, just one of the ads. Anyone who's worked at a newspaper will be able to tell you that Sunday paper sales are largely driven by people who take the newspaper, set it aside, and then just go through the circulars. Joel Kramer, who was the publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and now runs a nonprofit news site called Menpost, he told me that their readership research at the Star Tribune consistently found over the years that about 10 to 15% of their audience were people he would consider serious news consumers, people who sought out news as part of their civic identity, people who viewed it as sort of a life priority to get different perspectives and to stay in form with the latest happenings with government. It's easy in hindsight to imagine some idealized past where everyone was a dedicated public affairs reader, and maybe that was true in Cambridge, I confess. But I just want to raise a few questions. One, before I go into the, one that just came to mind listening to Paolo's presentation. It is certainly true that some of the listing of the most popular stories and the most promoted stories on news sites may have some taint between them as people, as news organizations realize, hey, this story is popular, we should move it up. But I think it's difficult to argue that the presentation of the stories on a front page or the first few stories in a newscast have ever been a pure reflection of the journalist's judgments on one of the most important stories. Page one meeting of the newspapers, the environment I'm most familiar with, usually had a mix. We have to get the right mix. A few hard stories and a nice feature story about some teen who's done something spectacular. The presence on the front page was never a full statement of this is the most important story of the day. But that aside, I want to just raise three questions that hopefully can be of use in our conversation. The first one is, are we evaluating the right news universe? To the extent that I have a quibble with some of Paolo's work and with news at work, his last book, it's that to my mind, it doesn't quite reflect the reality that the news universe is no longer limited either from a consumer's point of view or a producer's point of view to the large news institutions, either CNN or the New York Times or even the newcomers like Yahoo. And that's the one question that I would push back a bit on from Paolo's presentation is, I'm not 100% sure that supply and demand is exactly the right metaphor here because it's really hard for me to look at the internet and say there is a shortage of supply of anything. It's hard for even in whether you're just limiting it to one news organization or going beyond, if you want to find out about what's going on in Libya, you can easily spend the next 24 hours poring through lots of information. It seems it's less a matter of supply and demand and more one of distribution and promotion. And also along those lines, looking simply at the top 10 stories at any given moment is not really strong for my mind, statement of supply. It's only even a rough statement of consumption. If you're looking at a site the size of say, the New York Times or the Washington Post, even the top 10 stories that are consumed at any given moment are still only a tiny fraction or at least a small fraction, nowhere near a majority of the amount of news reading that is going on at any given time. If you just looked at just purely the public affairs production of something like the New York Times or even CNN, it's certainly a list of stories much longer than 10 every single day. When we're comparing print to online, I think it's very important for us to not just carve off the serious part of the print world and make that the point of comparison to the enormous, glorious confusion of the online world or vice versa. You know, even in print, before the days of the internet, more people read people than read time, more people read Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping than either of those and more people today read Game and Former Magazine and Better Homes and Gardens than any of the other ones that I've just mentioned. The web, particularly thanks to social media but not exclusively, does a really terrific job of connecting quality news and information and the people who might want to consume it. If you ever just look at the things that your friends are sharing on Twitter or on Facebook, they tend to be a pretty good reflection of your interests, assuming that you pick your friends correctly, which is always a different question. And as a result, there are lots of outlets that existed before the internet and in some cases, thrived before the internet who are now reaching all new audiences that they would not have been able to achieve without the connecting power of online media. You know, there are many, many more people reading the journalism produced by the New York Times Newsroom today than has ever been the case. The Atlantic is doing great gangbusters on the web, generating lots of revenue and lots of readers by having a very smart digital strategy that is aiming at high quality content. The New York Review of Books of all people is doing quite a good job online and reaching all sorts of new audiences who would never have gone to the one newsstand in their Midwestern hometown that would have carried a copy of the New York Review of Books. There's lots of terrific, serious criticism of the arts and books, on book blogs, on little nerdy startup sites. Because the web is such a good distribution and connection platform, that sort of quality content is able to reach new audiences. And I would love to be able to see a way that that sort of broadened effect of both on the high end and on the low end in terms of high and low brow to see that reflected. If we're gonna take the next step and evaluate the impact of these changes in the news universe and how we consume and produce news, it's important to acknowledge these sorts of changes. As Ethan Zuckerman at Harvard has said often, for subjects like foreign affairs, it really is not so much a supply problem of question as it is a demand question. It's not how can we get more information about Libya, it's how can we get more people to be interested in information about Libya. The second question I wanted to raise is are news organizations public institutions or businesses? Now of course I can easily answer that for you, the answer is both. But through which lens we view them through, well it should inform I think the way that we view this gap between the public's interest and journalistic production. I think if viewing news organizations as being primarily civic-minded institutions is really only tenable if you ignore the vast majority of news that has been produced in the history of the world. Even before the internet, an average American newspaper would only spend about 20% of its budget on the newsroom. And in that newsroom were lots of people, sports reporters, movie critics, other people who were writing perfectly valuable stuff, but stuff that it's hard to say was critical to democracy in a lot of ways or critical to being an informed voter. Even the New York Times spends an awful lot of resources covering the Yankees in fashion and pop music and whatever hipsters are up to in Brooklyn. So what percentage of an average newsroom would pass the is it critical to democracy test? It's a lot less than a hundred percent, that's for sure. And even given that newspapers do an awful lot of important public affairs journalism which they certainly do, why do they do it? Did they do it purely out of a civic responsibility? Or did they do it because they felt it was good business? Again, the answer is both, but historically speaking, the story of newspapers in the 20th century was one of consolidation, going from cities with dozens of newspapers to cities that would have, in most cases, only one, occasionally two. And if you live in New Yorker, you get a few more. That consolidation in a variety of ways led to a spread of distribution and coverage area. You went from, if you're at My Old Newspaper of the Dallas Morning News, you were no longer covering the area immediately around Dallas, you're suddenly covering this sprawling metropolis of six million people. And within those six million people, there are enormous disparities in wealth and race and ethnicity and interest in socioeconomic status. So the economic incentive, if you want to be a monopoly player under this model and to reach as many people as you possible can, is to focus your coverage on the broadest possible common interests. And that's why the Dallas Morning News wrote an awful lot of stories about the Dallas Cowboys, the Dallas, and why the Globe writes a lot about the Celtics and the Red Sox. And it's also why the Globe writes a lot of, one reason why the Globe writes a lot about Deval Patrick and the State House, because when you have a large metropolitan newspaper that is trying to appeal to a large, very diverse audience, it's efficient from an economic point of view to focus on the things that appeal most broadly. That's also the reason, on the other hand, why newspapers have traditionally been pretty darn bad, I would argue, at covering niches and subcultures and the small, you know, the little things going on that a broad metro newspaper, you can almost always count to not do a particularly good job on. I, from my own experience, I remember the day when I was looking through the newspapers archives in Dallas for information about the bar where the Velvet Underground recorded a live album in 1969. And I realized that after going, spending lots of time looking for references that the Dallas Morning News essentially chose not to cover the 1960s. Chose to ignore the counterculture. A treat is not something they were particularly interested in. We had the example a few years ago where the Lexington Herald Leader published a front page apology saying, as a correction, we're sorry that we forgot to cover the civil rights movement. There are lots of ways in which newspapers, by trying to appeal in the broadest possible ways, focus their coverage in ways that leave open lots of niches to be exploited by new, more agile players. Also remember that newspapers are not just selling news. They're also selling an image of their readers. They're selling that image to advertisers, of course. You know, you should want to put your goods in front of these wonderful people. But they're also selling it to readers themselves. You know, people's identities are influenced by the kinds of media they consume. I remember the great saying, I've been trying to figure out who said this. If anyone knows, please talk to me afterwards, that there are three kinds of people in the world, those who don't read the New York Review of Books, those who do read the New York Review of Books, and those who no longer have to read the New York Review of Books. These sorts of identity issues are important to the ways that people consume their media. And while there are lots of journalists who of course feel a civic duty to do serious reporting, they're also, and they're publishers who feel similarly, they're also economic motives, trying to get a more upmarket audience. It's something that a lot of Metro newspapers are very much focused on, and other news outlets as well. Also, that sense of responsibility, that civic gravitas that a classic publisher had, well, not to demean that in any way, but it's also a pretty easy sense of responsibility to feel when you have a local monopoly that will produce 30% profit margins without trying all that hard. When the question is, do you have a 30% profit margin or a 20% profit margin, and how much journalism you're willing to invest in to make that difference, the questions are a little bit different. So these business factors and economic motivations are also important, I think. And my third and final question is a little bit more, I hope there are good political scientists in the rooms, is it okay for people to not be informed about the news? How much does it really matter? I'm not surprised at all that the closest connection that Pablo found between news produced and news consumed was around the 2008 election when, logically speaking, interest in public affairs should have been at their highest point and by most theories of what informed public is supposed to be. When I saw the numbers for Fox, I was reminded actually of Nick Lemon's great profile a couple years ago in The New Yorker of Bill O'Reilly, where he noted that while for people who don't actually watch Bill O'Reilly, they may think of it as being primarily a political show, but if you sit down and watch it, there's a lot of crime stories, a lot of child abducted kinds of stories that the political focus almost seemed secondary in a lot of days. Jay Hamilton, who is an economist at Duke, his book All the News That's Fit to Sell, terrific book I would recommend, he outlines what he calls the four kinds of information demands, the four reasons that people would seek out and consume information. The first is producer information. That means information that would improve or increase your production. So if you're a stock trader and you find out that a company you're interested in just got a big new contract or is facing a lawsuit, that's information that you can use to make you do your job better. So the Wall Street Journal would be producer information for you. Same's true if you're an agent in Hollywood and you're reading Variety. And also to get to Pablo's data, I think it's also completely true if you are a reader of the Washington Post and therefore probably affiliated with the federal government in some way. And it's the few days before your mega boss is about to change. It's very much tied to your production and your job. The second type consumer information is information that lets you make better consumer decisions. So should I buy the new MacBook Pro that was unveiled this morning? If I want to risk injury to go see Spider-Man on Broadway, will it be worth it? Reviewers of all kinds are the obvious suppliers of this kind of consumer information. Entertainment information is what Lindsay Lohan's up to today, plus also a Philip Roth novel. It is information that is primarily aimed at entertaining the consumer in some way or another. And an awful lot of what news organizations produce, I would argue, falls directly to this category. Journalists may not like to admit it, but I think it's true. And then finally, the fourth category is voter information. That's information that lets the reader make better decisions about his or her government. Should I vote for Obama? Is he handling Libya correctly? Was the stimulus worth it? And what Hamilton argues is that for the first three kinds of information, there is an immediate return to the consumer. You make more money, you avoid Super Spider-Man, you have a good laugh or a good cry. When with voter information though, knowing doesn't give you an immediate return. Knowing about the stimulus doesn't mean that the stimulus will have a different impact on you. Simply means that you'll know more about it. Because the chance of your individual vote being the difference maker in a given election is so small, you don't derive the same direct benefit from that knowledge that you do from the other classes. Hamilton argues that for this reason, it can be a perfectly rational economic decision for someone to choose not to follow the more broccoli side of the news. And frankly, these choices are something that we all, even if you're the biggest news omnivore in the room, there's still lots and lots of things that you choose not to read about every day. You may be completely up on the latest impact of the stimulus, but perhaps the Botswana economy is not your major focus. We all make these choices. Hamilton says that he views the elements that lead people to pursue a lot of voter information as what he calls the 3Ds, duty, diversion or drama. I think a lot of cable news would fall under diversion or drama and many other people would fall into having the sense of duty of following it. So the question I really raise is particularly in the kind of political system that we have, where the political science literature tells us that if you're the best predictor of whether or not someone's gonna be reelected as president is this level of unemployment right before the election. Is it not potentially a rational choice for people to be choosing to focus less on public affairs news? Is it okay for us to instead have a class of people whether that's politicians, but also journalists, lobby groups, academics, as well as those people driven by duty to have this class of people who do the heavy lifting and pay attention to these things? Speaking from my own experience when I was writing about educational policy in Texas, some of my stories I knew would reach a very broad audience and would be of interest to a broad audience, but a lot of them I knew were kind of targeted at a few dozen bureaucrats and administrators and legislators who for the hardcore policy questions that weren't going to reach far beyond that. How important is that element of mass in the mass media? Josh, I just want to give you a warning. Yes, all right, I am duly warned. And this is where when we talk about agenda setting, which I think is a slide that you may not have gotten to in one of your last slides, we live in a world where a gawker can take down a congressman and talking points memo can get an attorney general to resign and WikiLeaks can set the whole world talking. The ability to set the agenda is much more broadly spread than ever before. And I think what the impact we've seen this in the economic structure of news organizations is moving away from the world of duplication to a world that is much more about niche. When you look at Washington coverage, there are fewer people than there were 20 years ago doing broad Washington coverage of the sort that the Washington Bureau of the Des Moines Register would have done at some point in the past. But there are many more people doing niche coverage about the elements of federal policy that are important to them. And for the people who are really interested, the people who are reading Politico and The Washington Post, there is no shortage of blanket coverage. It's just that they're reaching different audiences instead of trying to appeal to the broad element. It's really hard for me to look at the 700 feeds in my RSS reader and see more conformity or a new bottleneck for diverse subjects or diverse points of view. But finally, to conclude, I think that the example of WikiLeaks is instructive because Julian Assange realized after going working for several years to do what he wanted to do, at a certain point he needed to work with news organizations like The Times and The Guardian to have his work make the maximum impact. Those news organizations still have the enormous reach of their audience, an enormous weapon in the battle of what kind of media is going to be produced and consumed. So I think in the end, there's gonna be lots of room for lots of different kinds of players and the ability to judge the actions of the audience as one unit will get a lot harder. We're gonna have to start looking at more narrow slices of the news production and consumption question. And I think in the end, there'll be room for all kinds. Thanks. Well, I think you've covered a lot of ground for sure. I think there's a risk of this devolving into something very abstract. I think it'll be good to try to keep things grounded as much as we can. One of the things I was hearing that was very interesting looking at the data was how the public interests are very hard to predict from week to week. I thought that was kind of surprising how scattershot people's interests are. And I think an important question was raised whether journalism's role should be different than basically serving the public's interests which are shifting from week to week. I think most people would say yes, but then this gets into a business discussion. Maybe you were at Sloan before. I mean, is our goal to be maximizing business or is it for some greater good with the kind of big J journalism public service? Like let's uphold democracy through journalism. So I think that's gonna be hard to come to consensus on. But one of the things that I find very interesting now is if we're trying to meet the public's desires and their desires are shifting so broadly, there is a trend now of kind of engineering stories that meet the public's needs and you could call it computer assisted reporting or computer assisted pandering. This kind of algorithm generated news. Looking at your top 10 list, number two was Chin. Forehead, I believe. Forehead, right. So there are sites like on-demand media that uses algorithms to assign 6,000 stories a day based on popular search queries. So there probably now are a few hundred stories on foreheads, I don't really know. Foreheads, what's the deal? Yeah, yeah, and AOL has something called Demand ROI where they're also using algorithms to figure out what's most popular on the web, what are people clicking on, what are they emailing to other people and then they assign those stories. So is that a bad thing? I mean, we're talking about this gap between public interests and what editors kind of high-brow journalists would like, but can we have this middle ground by saying, well, let's find out what people actually want to read and then write something interesting based on that. Throw you first. Okay. So first things for the comments. They were great. At some point I'd like to sort of go back to them, but whenever you think it's appropriate. To your question, is there something wrong? Yes. Sorry, it's not a very close answer, but yes, I think there is something wrong with it. Is, so, normatively, not only normatively, but also socially, if society is devolved into collections of people that talk about certain topics, but shy away from others, other topics that are important for us only to be informed, but also there is a research show that there is an important relationship between being informed about the topic and participating in deliberation and decision-making. So if we are not informed and that we are not gonna participate, and we are not gonna deliberate, we are not gonna participate, but decisions will be made anyway. The decisions will be made anyway. The most likely will be made in ways and directions that will not represent a whole lot of what we might have wanted had we been involved. So in that sense, I do think there is a cost that we pay in the same way going back to your broccoli example. You know, as a society, if we constantly routinely eat certain kinds of foods and not others. News organizations have tried for a long time, for several decades now, to try to meet that middle ground, right? And they have done that as Josh illustrated very well. Quite nicely, when they operated in a different market environment. In a market environment in which they were more or less like public utilities, right? And in which, going back to your second question, they were actually both public institutions and business organizations. The combination of a far more competitive environment and the massive technological changes, not only in distribution and promotion, but also in production and in consumption that have taken place over the past 15 or 20 years, have actually decoupled the marriage between being a public institution and being a business organization. So a more competitive environment and the decoupling of that have actually are forcing more and more these organizations either to go niche, right? Or to go downstream, right? Which is a whole lot of what you find in many of these sites and let alone television newscasts. So I think it is still too soon to tell as society or as a number of societies, what are the long-term impacts? But in the same way that epidemiologists look at the diet of a population over 20 years and sees the rise of certain illnesses or physical conditions, et cetera, in relation to over intake of salt or processed food, et cetera, et cetera, I do think, I'm a little bit of a classic in that sense, but I do think that these changes over time are detrimental to the body politic and society in general. You know, I think that the big shift that Pablo is describing is the shift from a few news organizations that are able to have a certain position within society and within business. And now the very wide range of entities like demand media that can exist. You know, I've spoken with the head of demand media and I can assure you he has no interest in fulfilling the investigative journalism needs of society. He feels no shame about that fact. He is completely at peace with the idea that he is getting people to write stories about foreheads and how to buy a kayak and a variety of other things that in fact people find very useful. A lot of what demand media does is falls under the consumer information rubric that we were discussing earlier. I am more hesitant to go to the conclusions that Pablo does for a few reasons. One, I don't think that in any way the case is cinched for the idea that there actually is a less informed public. If in fact there's a less informed public that would lead to less engagement, we just went through a presidential election that had the highest turnout for quite a few cycles. So social media and a variety of other platforms allow lots of people to get lots of information through sources that are not the traditional news outlets. And while I'm willing to believe the idea that there are instances in which people as a mass in the United States or elsewhere are less informed on a number of subjects, I'm willing to hear that data, I don't think that you get that from looking at comparing the patterns of production and consumption within a few individual news organizations, precisely because there is so much consumption that goes on outside of those entities. And also, you're not comparing it against a static norm, you're simply comparing it to the amount that is produced by journalists. There's no saying that that is a correct amount or that that is an incorrect amount. I am, maybe I'm just a congenital optimist, but I believe that we're undergoing this tremendous period of shift. And in that, I have seen less, I haven't seen a lot of evidence in the people that I know from my small town in South Louisiana or places around here of people having access to less information about public affairs and actually seeing a significant drop-off in demand of information about public affairs. I think if, whatever we think about the political events of the last two years in the Obama administration, certainly lots of people are fired up about something. Lots of people have felt an interest in public affairs, whether that is properly informed interest or not, it's a whole different question. But I guess I'm just more optimistic that we're not headed down the road of democratic ruin. But I could be wrong. Can I quickly? Please. So, I think there are a few things. To go back to your first question, where we are evaluating the right in the New University, and you alluded to this just now. I actually think we are. There is a very interesting, so there's a rhetoric associated with the web that says that there is a whole of diversity out there and there are many more options, which it is true, there are many more options. Now, if you actually look at where the traffic goes, the web or the digital environment is far more, is the most concentrated media environment in terms of the economy of attention. It's more concentrated than print, that television, than radio. That is, there are a few numbers, a handful of sites that command the largest share of attention on the web than in any other of the media markets. And these sites are actually affiliated with a couple of noticeable exceptions. They're affiliated with the large leading news or information-driven organizations that have that brand recognition. So, it is true that there is a lot outside of the New York Times, of the Washington Post, or LeMond, or an event, et cetera, that it's interesting that it targets a niche audience, et cetera. But for the most part, the eyeballs go to these leading news organizations. That's Matt Hinman's book on the myth of digital democracy. It came out a couple of years ago. And the evidence there is very powerful. So, that's number one. And the same happens within any of the lists of the most clicked, or most viewed, or most popular on any of these sites. So, I just present this data, which is the first, second, third. But if you actually look at the number of hits or clicks, they have a power load distribution where the first one, two, and three are basically, you know, get far more traffic than the next 97 probably combined, right? So, one thing is, I think we have to be, when we look at the web, when we look at any kind of media environment, we have to, social structure, we have to be careful in terms of distinguishing what exists out there, right? What is sort of, if you wish, possible, right? Versus what is likely. So, where the social patterns coalesce around. And for the most part, so far, it might change in the future, but so far, what the research shows is that social, you know, social physics have not changed with the web. So, most of us go and do more or less the same things. And interestingly enough, on the web, the concentration of attention is actually even more concentrated and more convergent than, you know, in other media environments. The other thing that I think it's important to distinguish in these kinds of analysis is to separate what are sort of ordinary times versus extraordinary circumstances, right? The social patterns of behavior around extraordinary circumstances or extraordinary times differ quite markedly from behavior during ordinary times. So, at the time of election, a major crisis at tsunami, an earthquake, the death of a public figure, the behavior is very different from the behavior during normal times. So, in those situations, WikiLeaks is critical. Now, day in, day out, for a small 20-person town, 20,000-person town in the middle of nowhere, day in, day out, they are not really very present. So, the behavior of people during extraordinary times like election times, et cetera, yes, people go there and get the information that they need in order to participate in public conversation. But during ordinary periods, they really don't pay much attention. And these, you know, Gokar, et cetera, et cetera, they don't really affect the day in, day out, except when there is a crisis. Hmm, that's, okay, go ahead. Well, that's an interesting provocative. One, exactly, that's what we're here for. I would argue, though, that while smaller websites may not have anywhere near the scale of the Huffington Post of the New York Times in terms of their audience, they are disproportionately influential among the people who say right for the Washington Post and right for the New York Times. If you look at all the, I think you can really interpret a lot of bloggers and a lot of smaller websites as essentially the farm team research squad of the people who end up writing the trend stories in the New York Times. You know, there are lots of economists who will write things about their blog first. It will suddenly be able, two days later, be turned into something that becomes an angle in the third paragraph of a newspaper story. I think that within that universe, if you're looking at it from a site traffic point of view, I think you're right. I think that there are a few sites that most people will go towards. But I think that disproportionately, people who are influential in public opinion, whether those people are academics or other journalists or other people, have much more diverse media diets and that those media diets end up influencing the kinds of things they produce and then share with that broader audience. But what happens if people are not actually reading what they share with us? That's a thesis here. Yes, of course, that happens. So the front page, the top of the hour decision-making, the top of the homepage, they have two publics in mind. The elite public and the mass public. And the two are interdependent. So the ability to influence elite decision-makers is premiss on the ability of having a large public or at least the right kind of public. So people are not gonna read you. People read The New York Times. Decision-makers in Washington don't read The New York Times because it has 20 million uniques on the web. I don't know if I agree with that. I think there are lots of people who are influential who will read small sites, not because they have. No, no, no. If that were the case, the most influential would just read the Huffington Post and be done with it. No, if they pay attention to that coverage in order to make decisions, it's in part because there is a large base of public which is actually following those sites. And the research on agenda setting what is interesting is that longitudinally it shows a decrease in the ability of the leading news organizations to set the agenda for the mass public, but a steady level of influence among decision-makers. So in part what you are sort of illustrating is a decoupling, not just between the business side and institutions, but a decoupling between the elite public and the mass public, which is, in part, all of this research, the bottom line, is that it signals an interesting transformational transition in the role of media in politics and public affairs. And the sense that the media is talking among themselves and we are talking about something else. I want to open it up to questions in a minute. I just have one question when we're talking a bit about decision-makers and what influence what other journalists write and in your book you talked a lot about copycat journalism, but most of the writing out there is basically a reaction to what other people are writing on the constant 24-hour news cycle. But do we, I just keep thinking about the consumer. This isn't necessarily what I would advocate, but for the sake of the, quote, consumer, wherever he or she is, would it make sense to tailor sites more towards their own interests in terms of, like the new CEO of AOL has said that he thinks the site's homepage should look more like Amazon than the front page of the New York Times. They're trying to rebrand themselves as a kind of a news organization or have a big journalistic component to the new AOL. Is that okay if people no longer all see the same thing? My gut feeling is that's bad. I like in the New York Times every day how we can judge the importance of something based by the size of the type and how wide it goes across the page. And that was good for the million people who read the New York Times before the internet and the other 300 million in the United States and the other, you know, billions around the world. I mean, you've studied this a lot more than I have. I'm interested in your take it, but I've always thought that a lot of the shared conversation I want was kind of bunk, I don't know. I've always thought that it's a statement that is generally made from a point of view where it's the kind of people who would like to be running that shared conversation. There are lots of people throughout this country who have the same vote as anyone else for whom that shared conversation has never really happened. And I think actually that, you know, the viral nature of news online means that it's actually a lot easier for something really big to spread very rapidly to, you know, if you had something like the Kennedy assassination that was always able to spread on its own without any other technology beyond television and radio. But, you know, I think that shared conversation, I think it's more that there are gonna be lots of different shared conversations. The internet does extremely well is gather communities together. Whether that's the community of people who are interested in the kinds of things that Gawker is talking about today or whether it's the gathering of people who are interested in Washington politics, those conversations, I think, are aided perhaps at the expense of a shared conversation led by what Dan Rather says is important at 530. No, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. There is a political scientist at Princeton called Marcus Pryor who has this notion of a high choice media environment that basically if you look at sort of the media structure and longitudinal pattern, we move from a situation of sort of relatively low choices. You have a couple of newspapers, you had television and they gave us bundle products and all of us had more or less, even if we were not interested in a particular topic, had at least some casual reading or glancing through some pages or waiting for the story that we were interested in about sports and then watching the other content online. They're watching that content on television. Now, on the web, first with cable and most importantly with the web, we have moved to a high choice media environment in which it is easier for us to avoid what we are not interested in. So those communities of interest are emerging in part as a result because we were never really so much together. The media in part brought us together. So the interesting experiment for us as a society is how will it be to live in a society in which the media will not bring us together except within the niches that we already occupy and we connect us with people who are like us but will separate us from the people who are unlike us. So I'd rather live in a society where I'm not so ghettoized but we will see how that plays out. But I do think that in and of itself not only we be central in terms of the sort of the culture of everyday life but also in terms of the political system. So does it make sense to have two large political parties where society and its conversations will be far more fragmented than that? Although does that run counter though to what you're saying earlier about the concentration of readership online? In that, I mean, because it's very easy to just bifurcate into we're all gonna be little isolated pods just talking, mumbling to ourselves versus we're all gonna hug each other and saying kumbaya. But there is the middle point that people are gonna have a news diet that involves maybe checking it on cnl.com once a day but also getting really deep into their little element of DSLR photography that is the thing that there's their focus. No, because they go to those sites, right? But then they migrate to the content that they want far more easily than what they could imprint on television and the radio. So it's the brand names because of what Jay says. I mean, in his book what Hamilton says that brands are incredibly powerful in the media industry because media products are experiential products, right? That is unlike if you go buy a pair of jeans you can try them on and you decide whether, right? You're gonna buy them or not, right? If you are going to buy a story by the time you try it on, you exhausted the story. So brands are critical in terms of telling you whether you should go with this site or that site. No, so I don't think that's the case. I think the sites as a matter of fact are splitting into smaller niches and they are attracting different people for different parts of their offer. Let's open it up to questions. Okay, the mic is there. Susan Silby, anthropology. So I want to speak or address this issue of the decoupling of the elite and the public and what that means. And so there are several embedded questions here. First, what relevance is it as to how much do we know about who the public is with regard to clicks? There was this story that ran a few weeks ago that said, and I think it's been validated in several ways, that Wikipedia, only about 15% of the contributors are female. Who's clicking on these stories? Who's spending their time on the internet, okay? That's one. The other issue about the differentiation of the elite and the public and this notion of what the public wants to know. Sometimes some of you talked about it as volatile or you used a few other words. The public isn't necessarily interested in what is called news and you had several quotes and other things. The profession, I've always thought it interesting as a consumer, is constantly looking for what's new. What's news? It's a controversy, it's a problem. It's always something wrong and one of the people interviewed by Pablo indicated this. I don't want to read that, it's too depressing. It doesn't mean that they don't want to know about the world. It's that the news has a particular valence. It's not what's ordinary, it's news. Lots of people want to know what's ordinary and this is a repeated bias in lots of professions to focus on the problem instead of what's not the problem and therefore what gets to be ordinary and the constitution of life is ignored by focusing on the tip of the iceberg and so I think those are two ways to get into this discussion and one last thing about proliferation of niches. There is a structural cumulative consequence by simply proliferation, whether it be to niches or to separate little communities and I could say it, this is what happened to the curriculum in American higher education. When we got rid of the concentration imposed, yes, by elite professional scholars and students could study whatever they want, choose with their feet, what you end up with is not niches and differentiation, you end up with almost a homogenized curriculum but it's not clear what the content of it is unless you look very deep inside of it. Thank you, thank you. Well, Josh or Pablo? I could tackle one piece of that and I think you'd probably be better for some of the others. On the question of the focus on what is new, I think you're speaking to something that a lot of people feel and it's a question that a lot of people in this space are trying to wrestle with. What is the right way to bring context? What is the right way to provide background? In some way, while it's the fact that Wikipedia is one of the 10 most popular websites in the world, you can view that through a negative lens, you could also view it as that there is a thirst for background information, there's a thirst for context and presented in a very straightforward manner and that there is a desire for that. I think actually the fork information demands that Hamilton talks about is actually instructive there because I think a lot of that is because most of the news that we consume falls under entertainment, falls under something that you read because you think it'll be interesting to read about and not because you're gonna take action based on that specific news and when you think about what entertainment is, it's often the quest for novelty. It's what's happened new, what happened in the last 24 hours and I think you're right that there is a craving on some quarters for that extra depth. The question is from a very practical level, can you build a business model around it? Can you create this sort of financial incentives that will encourage that kind of behavior or are you stuck with here's what just happened? You wanna tackle the other question? Sure. So how much do we know about the people who are at the sites? Who clicking? A lot more than what you think. So you might not know who they are, maybe their names, et cetera, but you can know for each story now, again paying a couple of hundred bucks a month to a company that looks at your server data in real time. For every click, you can know where that person was coming from, what story, how much commenting there is and you can use actually, you can put that together into very detailed profiles of the consumer, each consumer by the consumer base of a site. You can if you believe in your registrations, if you require registration and believe in your registration data. But the behavior actually, you probably don't need the demography, we like it because we are social scientists, but they don't need it in order to sell their products because they profile and they target products at those profiles if they want to. So in terms of sort of to complete, so that's the elite public, what the mass public wants, and I did for this book, I did a lot of ethnographic research on consumers. The bottom line for me is that what the mass public wants is something to talk about. The news is something to talk about, that's the bottom line. So what are you gonna talk about? The budget crisis, the situation in Libya or Melos' debut with the NICS, 27 points, not even a training session. And also your research is saying increasingly to talk about at work. That's right. Rather than at home or at the breakfast table. That's right. So if most of the online news is consumed so far at the place and at the time of work and people in the workplace tend to avoid politically sensitive or culturally sensitive conversations, they're gonna talk about the NICS. Right, and then they said Denver Nuggets fun in the audience, something like that. Well, let's take another question. And if you could also say your name at the start of the question, since we're taping it. Sure, hi, William Iroquio, Comparative Media Studies. Want to start with a quibble and then a question. And the quibble relates to both of you and I'll just pick up, because you uttered it last, the Hamilton distinction, let's say between entertainment, which is what people wanna talk about versus the knowledge people need to vote. I think voters was the fourth category. And I would argue that there's, at least in my world, there's a fair amount of evidence to say that what passes as entertainment, in fact has, O'Reilly, the entertainment bits there have everything to do with mobilizing people to participate in the public sphere in a way that I would say is uninformed but nevertheless quite active, tally up the kind of misperceptions that a very active group of our electorate has right now. I won't mention their name, because I'll be spammed to death. But that's very interesting to me and that's coming not from news, that's not coming from the side of the line that's politics and economics, it's coming from the side that's entertainment. So I would argue that that is actually quite a mobilizer in terms of people's perceptions of the world, their perceptions of what hot button issues are. So that's kind of the quibble. The question, and it's a methodological question Pablo, if I were to account for the kind of disjunctions that you're seeing, one of the things I would look at myself first and I'd say, when do I read the Washington Post? I always read it as a click-through, I don't go to the Post, I read six other papers a day, but that is generally not one of them. Is there a way for you to filter out people that are making a referenced visit from the outside versus someone who's reading the paper selectively or the site selectively? That seems to me, when I just look at one of the characteristics of the web that's so useful or so interesting is the resonator effect. The fact that a lot of references can be given that will spike stories, the bizarre stories, the serious stories, that drive traffic to a story rather than readers, selective readers of a particular enterprise. Well, on the first point I would say I completely agree that there can be huge impact for that. The twist I would put on is the question is when you're looking at it from a business model perspective when you're thinking about how you're gonna decide what as a company you're gonna do, you're thinking less about the impact after the fact and more about the intentions driving the what is causing people to take those action in the first place. So if you're trying to incentivize voter information-friendly behavior, public affairs journalism, then it's a question of how can you get people to make that choice, not necessarily whether the impact is gonna be on the flip side, but you're completely right in the same sense that a variety of cultural factors influence voting behaviors in a variety of ways, say the same thing, so yeah, I think you're right. And you wanna talk about that? Yeah, so on the quibble first, and then the, it's your methodology question. So, yes and no. So sports is the most popular topic. You know, it's the universal, it's the lingua franca of popular taste, right? And there is an interesting sort of rationale for that. There was a study done in the 90s by a Toronto sociologist, Bonnie Erickson, that she looked at the topic of conversations in factories, right, and the number one topic of conversation in factories is sports, and she concluded that that's the case because that's a topic that allows people to cross class divisions. So you can have a foreman talking to a line worker. So when I was, again, for News at Work, doing interviews with journalists in Argentina, one of the people I interviewed is a very well known political activist. They are also sports editor at his newspaper who could basically choose any, no, not choose any bit, but fairly important person who could work in other bits. So I asked, so why do you work in the sports bit? And he said, because this is actually the only place where I can talk about politics, right? Okay, now, having said that as a preamble, if you look at which are the sports stories that actually get the clicks and not the stories that have content, are the stories about Real Madrid defeated or, you know, Thai with Olympic, the Marseille one-to-one, you know, Benzema minute, you know, 67 and, you know, blah, blah, blah. So I would be willing to say, okay, we talk politics through, you know, sports, or we talk, you know, international news through travel. But when people hit on or click on travel or sports is usually more the statistical aspects, right? So yes, you could be right. Actually, if you look at the numbers, not so sure that that's what gathers attention. Now, on your second question, there is no way in terms of our methodology to parse out whether people are going to a homepage versus, and then clicking on a story through that, versus people are doing a search in Google, right? Versus social media, which are the three main referrals. Still to this day, the homepage is the largest driver. Still, might not be, you know, so for a long period of time, but still to this day, when we were doing the data, a collection, it was about, you know, the homepage of any of these sites would get between 15, 55% of the traffic for the whole site. Right, then people who get through stories minimally, you know, seven, right, to social media and a little bit through Google. Now the situation has changed. However, I would say that that doesn't change the results at all, actually. That doesn't change the reputation of the findings. I would argue, actually, first, for people to go through Google or to get to stories through Facebook, they still have to be produced by journalists, right? And if you look at where the traffic comes from and negative evidence tells me that it would be even more on sort of the non-public affairs side. If we look at search results, like, you know, what Josh showed, or even on the Facebook social media referrals, referral structure. So we will actually see even a higher discrepancy between the editorial logic or the occupational logic and popular taste or the market logic. And you can see this at a certain level by looking on, just go to nytimes.com, look at the 10 most read stories and the 10 most emailed stories. The 10 most read are often a little bit closer to the ideal of what you would like people to be reading in your time. The 10 most emailed are, you know, health tips and, you know, a variety of other things that are perhaps a little bit farther away. Useful and bizarre. Those are the two things that make people send the stories. Exactly. Great, let's take another question. I'm Flourish Clink, I'm a lecturer in MIT and CMS. And I was wondering, you know, I have been thinking a lot about the similarities between sort of the Victorian era and the internet lately in my own research. And I was thinking about sort of the idea of the informed friend, you know, the person who reads the newspaper to you or the person who, you know, creates a summary. When you mentioned Gawker, I thought about, you know, I really don't read entertainment weekly all that much, you know, but I do read Gawker's summary and I know that Lindsay Lohan wore a really great dress to court. You know what I mean? So, yeah, on the one hand, I have never clicked through, I don't think, to any of those entertainment sites, but damned if I don't go to Gawker every day and, man, if that was voting public, you know, I think I would be maybe not perfectly informed but well enough to say, like, these are some of the big topics, et cetera. I do a similar thing, actually, when it does come to voting matters and I think that probably some other people do too. I'm not sure that this is a mass media question, but the other thing is it's much easier now to actually have the original source accessible to you. So for me, I almost, you know, sometimes don't see a point. If I can get some basic facts about an issue and it's, you know, just enough for me to be basically informed, then okay, I've read the headlines and if I do want to dig deeper, I can, for instance, go and look at that bill and I think it was the Georgia State Legislature that potentially makes miscarriages, you know, illegal and I can actually look at like what the text of that bill says and find out, yes, indeed, you know, the feminist side I was reading was not overreacting the pudding. You know, whether or not you are pro-choice or pro-life, you should probably be concerned by this, right? So I guess I'm wondering how does that kind of thing, which wouldn't, I don't think, show up in your research, Pablo, like, does that seem like it's even remotely related to this or is it something that only a small percentage of people are doing? That's a great question. So it doesn't, it doesn't actually, so it does when I analyze emailing behavior and commenting behavior, right? And just to complete on the thought that Josh expressed before, there is a difference between what people click, which is a larger body, right? And a subset of the people, which is a smaller subset of people who email, which is a little bit related to what you are saying about reading to somebody and the commenting, right? Which is the commenting out loud. So people email what is bizarre or useful, right? And people comment what is provocative, right? And there is far more attention to public affairs topics in the commenting, right? Because many of them are provocative and they're couched. Unless it's about Apple. That is true. This is about technology. So it doesn't figure, but by and large, it doesn't figure in this kind of project. I spent quite a bit of time in this book, in News at Work, sort of thinking and writing about those issues, about sort of the social web of media consumption, right? Social patterns related to news and media consumption, but not in this project, no. And I do think that if, you know, we had a story in the New York Times too long ago about the death of blogging and not necessarily the most accurate story I would argue, but one thing that I think that whatever happens to people using blogger.com and actual things that would be classically defined as blogging, the one innovation that I think is the most important to take from that is the fact that it enabled you to turn to someone other than the front page editor or the CBS Evening News producer to decide what are the most important things, to create an alternate filter of the sense of someone who's reading the paper or highlighting things, or a version of this always happened when you're just sitting around in that factory talking about things and say, hey, did you guys see that story? That was, you know, that sort of filtering what happened in a social way. When you look at the numbers for Facebook, you know, the average user of Facebook spends an hour a day on Facebook. That's the average across everyone, you know, for 500, 600 million, yeah, 600 million, excuse me, not billion, sorry, active users. When you look at that, it's, I think that we're only gonna go further in the direction of the presentation of a particular story will be less by the choice of a journalist to say, hey, this should be the top of NYTimes.com and more by who you're following in Twitter, who your friends are, what stories they're sharing, and that diffusion of promotion and the diffusion of marketing, I imagine is just gonna continue. David Thorburn, I have a quick remark about our procedure, because we're coming toward the final few moments, let's sort of turn this into a lightning round. Every speaker after me be as concise as possible and same to the panelists, let's be brief to get as much in as we can. Just a general observation, and I hope both of you, all three of you will respond to it if you feel it's worth responding to. The first observation is, the situation is still incredibly fluid. That is to say, we're really in the embryonic earliest stages of what is obviously a vast and ineluctable migration of everything analog into digital technology. That's going to take a tremendous long time. Most of us in this room will be dead before the migration has gotten fully underway. I will surely be long in the ground before anything. So I think it's important to recognize that everything is still tentative. But one of the things that I think is especially important and struck me as relevant to the presentation you've made, Pablo, is when I think about, I mean, I've been a lifetime reader of the major print newspapers and literally, because my parents read it, the New York Times has been in my life longer than I can remember. I think I might have been diapered in the New York Times and I've always read it myself, always subscribed it to it as an adult, as well as other newspapers. But with the advent of online things, one of the things I've begun to do, of course, is not only sample many other newspapers online, but also to read the Times online. And one of the most interesting experience, and I think it's actually an intellectually important experience, is to compare the treatment, even the layout of stories in the online paper with the way they're displayed on the web. And you can see the Times is worried about this because it has alternative sites that try to replicate the print edition. They don't do that out of nostalgia. The reason that they do that is that if you actually look at the front page of the New York Times, what you see is centuries, more than a century, of nuance about how to display information. The visual display of information in newspapers, especially in advanced newspapers, reached a kind of elegance that is very, that it still has no counterpart on the web. So that's one thing. In other words, it seems to me that we're still in a stage in which web versions of journalism are learning the properties of their medium and are learning how to take what is strongest and most remarkable in their print ancestors and find digital analogs, bad analogies, a digital equivalent of what happens in print. It's regularly the case, incidentally, that stories that are displayed in a particular way in the New York Times in print look, in fact, much more interesting and fascinating than they do when you see a little line about them in the online version. And all of you might wanna try this for a week or so and you'll be amazed at how often a story in the paper grabs your attention much more fully than it will on the web. So lightning rant. Right. That's the opening lightning strike of a lightning rant. This is something I'd like you to comment on. But I have one final point, which is that- One final lightning strike. It's also connected, it's relevant. When I go to the Times, I often won't read the lead story, but I'm comforted by its presence, Pablo. And the fact that people may go online and ignore the main news story on a particular day doesn't necessarily mean that they don't want it to be there. They may choose to sort of do the more bizarre readings, but they may still very well, as I do when I read the newspaper or go online, prefer or want to be sure that there is a location here where the Egypt story is being really covered, even though I may not wanna read it today. Yeah, but it's a lightning strike response. But these organizations are not public utilities anymore. So if you are happy for the organizations to produce that, you have to pay it with your attention. If your attention doesn't go there and the public's attention doesn't go there anymore, the organizations are gonna stop producing that. I can guarantee you that. I mean, you already see it a little bit and you're gonna see more and more and more because they can survive in a competitive environment doing that. When you asked at the beginning of your comments, yeah, we've known this for a while, what's new? What's new is that the industry structure has changed and the technological environment has changed. What that means is that the sustainability, so this gap puts in danger the economic sustainability of the industry. And technologically, all the shifts in part have meant that the provision of information for society as a whole, to your point, will change. And not only the industry is in danger in part of the current model is in danger given the current economic situation, but also society as a whole in part may move into a situation where we will be deprived because these organizations will not treat us sort of, they will not be philanthropic anymore, right? Two quick lightning strikes. The issue of headlines, I think that's actually very interesting and there was a study that one of our writers did on looking at users of Google News and found that 44% of the users of Google News which is a site designed around nothing but headlines and clicking, there are no stories there living there. 44% go to the new Google News page and then leave, they never click on anything. And I think there's actually a number of news organizations have decided to start litigation about the value of headlines, the market value of headlines. I think there's actually a statement about there's something to be gained from doing that scan even if you don't click on anything. And to the other question, the one time when I living in Cambridge feel the most disoriented is when there is a story that has been on the bottom of the front page of the New York Times that all the print readers of the Times have read that I have no idea about because I'm just reading it in that online context that has been presented to me in the same way. I think the next step in getting the evolution of the web is to get beyond the web into apps on devices like this where a lot of news organizations are interested in reviving print aesthetics in a variety of ways that I question whether it's going to work in that new domain. Okay, we're gonna do, I would just say yeah iPad, you're the tablet and all that business. Your site has predictions for 2011 for like the hot trends in online journalism. I highly recommend that. One of them is about whether this is the year of the tablet. All right, lightning questions. I'm David Dahl, I'm with the Globe. I apologize if you guys address this when I stepped out but the degree to which local news and hyper local news is addressed by any of your research in Josh's, your observations. This is sort of a niche but I'm wondering if your research is overlooking the fact that you're talking about Uber national issues to a degree but what we've found is there is a demand for local news and we're trying to supply it and so are a lot of other players in that space and I'm wondering if you've found anything in your research that addresses that and Josh I'd be interested in what you think. You are. Okay so quickly we don't distinguish between whether it's local or national but between whether that local item pertains to issues of public affairs or not. So in that sense, I have no direct data. Most of these organizations are national except for the TRIB and the Seattle when we looked at that. My recollection is that local items were not that much more, local items I had to do with public affairs issues were not that much more appealing to the audience. The other myth is user-generated content. We also sort of look at data just sort of not in terms of the subject matter but in terms of the format and we saw where it was divided between hard news stories, features, opinion, blogs, user-generated content. Nobody clicks on user-generated content by the way. So it's a myth. The people who generated it, that's the only people who clicked on it. It's an absolute myth. So did you find blogs were overrated? They're really not that popular? Absolutely overrated. In terms of large numbers, absolutely overrated. When it comes to news, absolutely overrated. Know when it comes to blogs about my adventures in cooking 12 cupcakes about X, Y, and Z, right? Have you looked at the New York Times email list because that's all stories about my adventures in cooking in cupcakes. But anyway, I guess we can just go. Oh, I guess you just specifically asked for my thoughts on that. So I'll just very quickly say that the distribution mechanisms of the web, what I was saying before about how as Metro newspapers grew, they had an incentive to appeal to a broader issues where like the Dallas Cowboys or the Red Sox or whatever. I think that the same thing is true and we're seeing this bifurcation of national news outlets that are only interested in really national issues and that's led to a retrenchment to local for a lot of outlets like the Dallas Morning News and other places as well. And there is a real interest for that sort of thing. At the hyper-local level, I think the real question is the business model, whether there's the number of sites that are really focused on a neighborhood that try to build a business around it. There are a few exceptions, but I think the use case, the argument hasn't been quite proven yet. To the extent that it's gonna be proven, I have some faith in news organizations like the Globe that have the sort of business side infrastructure to back up a spread out your town kind of strategy. I think that has a better chance of succeeding than a lot of the others. Kelly Kreitz, I'm in comparative literature at Brown. I feel like we've been talking about how the news landscape is changing in various ways and I'm not sure that we've talked yet about how the idea of news itself may be changing and so I wanna ask a question about that. The reason I wanna ask is because I feel like your study paints a picture of a number of news organizations that themselves maybe have a very static view of news that's not changing. And I think I myself have been writing, I've recently finished a dissertation on the idea of news in the 19th century and over the last couple years as I was writing it, started paying attention to how the idea of news seemed to be shifting even in some of the most traditional or the papers that represent the tradition of journalism as it stood in the 20th century like the New York Times. And just to give you an example of what informs this question, during the time period that you were studying 2008 to 2010, I started noticing the New York Times having a lot of anxiety about bloggers and there would be stories that would talk about traditional journalists versus bloggers and this sort of language that in this still objective way seemed to sort of undermine new aspects of journalism and the thing that's been really interesting in the last year is that the New York Times now has this hyper local news experiment in New York City with journalism school at NYU and I see even in some of the most traditional news organizations this real shift. And so I guess the question is, I wonder if what you're capturing in your study is you are looking at some of the really big names you're representing and perhaps older 20th century form of journalism and is it possible that what you've captured is precisely these news agencies that do want to or did for a period of time want to promote a view of journalism that is now getting shifted and that it may be that if you expanded the study to look at even some of the experiments that some of these agencies themselves might be in, that we might even have to redefine what we think about public interest. That's a great question. So you want the light and new response? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a funder after all. Okay, so yes, the news as a cultural category is changing, right? The way it's changing however, I think it's the Google news way. So it's headline, a few characters, and I'm out of there. And it relates to public preferences also in terms of interface design. So for news at work, one of the, I interviewed about 60 plus regular news consumers extensively, so one of the questions that I almost invariably asked is, imagine that you had, we talked a lot about design. So imagine that you have the design director of the site, right, of your favorite site. What would you ask this person to change in design? What kind of site would they like? And the almost invariably the answer was, I want headlines and white space. I want a Yahoo search results page, right? So news organizations design in part that going to your comment and present information with to sort of give another life to the past, right? And to optimize for clicks, because if you put a lot of bells and whistles, people are gonna click more so you are gonna be able maybe to charge a little bit more for advertisements, et cetera. But in terms of what people want, people want things that are actually very different, right? From the things that have been provided to them, right? And I think that's why I'm not a big, I don't think the tablet will make a huge difference for the news, if all that it is is a repurposing of different centuries aesthetics into just a new medium. Just by way of non-systematic data, there's a negative evidence, I mean, and going back to your point that the transition will take a lot of time, might not take that much time. I have two kids, 10 and seven. About five years ago, I was traveling with my 10, who was like five at the time, coming back from Argentina to the States. And we haven't had a print newspaper in my household for more than 10 years, right? She's never seen that, even though two parents are highly educated, blah, blah, blah, right? And I study the news, but I have not read print for a long, long time now. So we were coming back on the plane and landing Miami airport, go through customs, blah, blah. I knew she was gonna fall asleep on the way to Chicago, so I grabbed a copy of The New York Times, an exception I read on the plane print, because I can't do it electronically. So, you know, plane from Miami to Chicago takes off, she falls asleep immediately, I open the paper. It's hard for us to look, she wakes up and then she wakes up, looks at me, look at that, looks at me, look at that, and says, daddy, what is that? So she had never, I mean, she had never seen in her first five years of life a print newspaper as an artifact. So for that generation, I don't think the transition will take that much more time. The aesthetic criteria and the cultural constructions around the news, whether it's newsworthy or not, are dramatically different, I think, for them. I think that we should be careful of, well, we talk about news, and that can mean a lot of things, and people who are supportive of long form work, and I work in long form documentaries that are 60 minutes or more, and then they're long form journalists. We don't want everything to just be a headline. So I think there's also a need for creative rethinking of long form formats, you know, what type of container and what type of, you know, e-commerce model can support that, and Stephen Brill has a new model of micropayments that, who knows if that will work, but I think we should resist the newspaper and magazine becomes just a list of headlines. If there's a way we can do that. Well, but also, I mean, you're completely, I notice the same thing as I think many careful reader of the media of the last decade would of seeing competition, degrading it, saying every blogger is in wearing their pajamas in their mother's basement, and then eventually there's a sort of, there's a very repetitive motion, I'm sure it's happened in many media moments in history and past where you derive the bloggers, then all of a sudden you have 200 blogs on your site as the New York Times does now, and then it becomes, well, let's move on to deriding Twitterers and how you can only do things in 140K, you can't say anything worthwhile, and then of course the investment moves there as well. The one element I wanted to point out from what you were saying is that I think, in the sense that this is a field of enormous flux and things are gonna continue to change, I think there's also room for them to change in directions that are not the one that they're going in right now. Right now the business incentives for a lot of sites are we need to get as many people clicking on as many articles as we possibly can, but I can tell you newspaper business side people and lots of other people who are, even the Gawkers of the world, are not at all interested in selling clicks anymore and selling advertising on that level because they realize they're not gonna make a lot of money at it. They're shifting into creating a brand that you wanna associate yourself with. Newspapers, at least a lot of the major newspapers that I know about, they sell the vast majority or all of their direct advertising on you buy some time, you don't buy clicks, and it's interesting that that kind of business incentive could change the way that journalism gets produced. If you're not just trying to create an SEO friendly headline that you're just gonna get someone to click on it, and instead your goal is to try and create someone who loves the site so much they're gonna come back at three times a day, that's an entirely different and I would argue healthier set of incentives. So things are gonna change and we don't know how they're gonna change, but they could change in ways that bring us back towards a more branded traditional kind of experience. You may have time for one more quick question. Yeah. I'm Virginia Brinkamo from Literature and CMS, and William, I thought you were gonna go this direction. I wanna go back to this first division between national and international news and sports, weather, crime, entertainment, because it seems to me that we have the story-based unit, it's being analyzed in relation to a binary, but it is a content-based distinction. And I just wanted to ask, what happens if we make it a form-based distinction? In other words, maybe the most popular mailed articles for sports are Who, One, and Who Lost, but I would bet you that around election, the most popular emailed political articles take a very similar narrative form, Who, One, and Who Lost the debate? Who's in and who's out with the bailout? In other words, short snappy narratives that are structured on binaries, winners and losers, we have these narrative forms, we know them. And I'm wondering if on the entertainment side we're getting articles about organic produce at Walmart that are synthetic, that are complex, that are rigorous, that have all of these formal traits that we might wanna associate with the edifying and not the interesting. So my question for you is what happens if we make form our binary and not content? It's a great question I have, actually. And both the journalists and the public converge around this hard news factual format. That's what drives the attention of both kinds. It's less the long form, it's less the featurey piece, it's less the opinion, it tends to be the facts. One, two, three, four, five, boom. So I did actually, I mean, what I presented is just on the content side, but I have. And the other interesting thing to me because I looked into user-generated content is it is supposed to be the wave of the future as a different format, if you wish. And it was very interesting to see how little attention that garners. But on the flip side, though, I think there's actually, if you look at the stories that people engage with beyond just simply reading and adding one to the page view count, when you look at those, those are much less likely to be the kind of commoditized, straightforward, barefax stories. If you look at the political stories in the New York Times that end up on the high on the most emailed list, they tend not to be Obama had a press conference and here's what he said. They tend to be the long form narratives that are in the magazine, that the long profiles of Rahm Emanuel, those things get shared around. And the same thing with sports. Who won the Knicks game last night is the definition of a commodity. Anyone can find that out. No one's going to share that with anyone else because they're not going to think, I need to draw attention to my friend, the Knicks fans. In fact, there was this guy in mellow, he had a game last night. Instead, the things that a lot of sports journalists are seeing, their role is shifting away from providing just that commodity to saying, how can I provide a perspective and a column and something that is going to create the connection with the reader so that maybe he might decide to follow me on Twitter, he might decide to read my blog as well as my stories to try and create this larger engagement package. Okay, well, I think we're out of time. Thank you Pablo, thank you Josh. Thank you. Okay, thank you all for coming. Thank you.