 Welcome to ThinkTech on OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Kauai Lucas. Our show this time will take us to part two of the recent roundtable discussion at the East-West Center, examining and addressing the changes in Honolulu's news media and their impacts and effects on our community. In part one, we heard from Jose Fajardo of Hawaii Public Radio and Patty Epler of Civil Beat. In our show this time, we'll hear further comments from Ann Aument and Brett Obigard, who are on the faculty of the journalism school at UH Manoa. We're treating this as part two in our series on the subject. Yes, we still need to wrestle with all the changes surrounding us. New technology, new social media platforms, new tastes, standards and expectations for content, new methods of delivery, citizen journalists and lots of new readers too. It's all about change and how the media and the reading, listening and viewing public can integrate those changes into the way they live and look at the world. The Trump-Clinton race has made these changes all the more pronounced and we can hardly overlook them. Fact-checking when that was a given only a few years ago, tweets delivered by some candidates at two in the morning, live TV debates delivered on your smartphone and audiences of hundreds of millions in the U.S. and millions more around the world. It's all connected now. And there are new and higher production values in video and podcast audio. New questions of truth are consequences by the candidates and their spokesmen. A new vernacular in election rhetoric and new and profound questions of credibility and trust. New journalists, new business models, new audiences and new tastes and sensibilities we do not yet fully understand. We are only beginning to integrate the changes and their effects. What's even more interesting is that these changes are taking place real time in a real election and having a daily effect on the way people see not only the candidates, but the way they relate to their government and the Constitution itself. Just as no one can predict where the country and the world are going politically, no one can predict where the media is going and how the consumers of news will engage with the platform or the content. So the plot thickens as we move on from the remarks of Jose Fajardo and Patty Ebbler in part one of this series last week to the remarks of Ann Alman and Brett Opegard of the School of Journalism in part two this week, again as moderated by Karen Knudson of the East West Center. Ann Alman. She's a professor at UH Manoa School of Communications, the journalism program. She's also an alumna of the East West Center and is on the chapter, local chapter board. So what I'm focusing on right now is news literacy giving students the analytical tools, especially in the selection year and they are very engaged despite what you might hear about young people. They are reading, it's just not what we're reading, in fact they are reading more than adults are and this is in the latest Pew report on the state of the media that was released in June 2015. I mean 2016 about last year, has anybody seen that report? I encourage you to go look at it. So with this group of students too I found a big change over last year when Facebook, Reddit and so on were their primary sources of news and information. This year I did the word cloud again. It was the New York Times and this is through Facebook and I'm like, wow, you know when the star advertiser was in there too. So this is good news and they are very engaged. So the problem is sorting out what is the truth and why we shouldn't be reading true pundit. There's no names on there. We don't know who owns it. It could be the Russian, it could be Julian Assange. So this type of thing is what we look at. So that's one thing and the second is a set of ethics which Kevin Komodo who's sitting here, raise your hand Kevin. He and I teach those classes and we're constantly sharing stuff. I believe Kevin more than I am. He sends me stuff every hour sometimes of what's going on. So giving them a set of ethics that they also create and internalize as both consumers and producers of news and information and I think that's critical that they take that away with them because they want this and they're looking for it. So I think what all of this comes back to are our readers and we are readers. They are readers. We are producers and consumers and where are these readers going? Where are they getting their information? So I pulled up the Pew report to look at that and then the second part of this is how do you folks respond fast enough to create media structures and systems and to hire employees with the skills you need to produce and deliver news to those readers and what can we do to help you? Where do we need to go with this and we're constantly focused on that. Also how do you track the advertising dollars? You know in the end it's financial and there's all kinds of models going on right here in the room which is why I'm bringing my students down on Friday and I bring them almost every semester to public radio to experience that model of getting on the phone and talking to the community and raising money that way. So the Pew Center report reports that younger Americans are more likely than older to prefer reading news and most of that is digital text. Interesting isn't it? So under 50 of those who are reading so you've got 42% who are getting their news from reading and those over 50 it's only 29%. So the rest of the information they're getting from watching and listening so those are the three categories reading, watching and listening and it's the people who are reading and it's from digital text primarily 81%. So when you think of where are you putting your resources that's primarily also from social media. So think about where you are putting your resources and Brett's going to talk more about the mobile which is his specialty as well. So even beyond the young fully 62% of U.S. adults overall now get news on social media sites. They spoke Twitter and so on. I have that public radio. I have the HPR I get the push notifications BBC Twitter. That's where I'm gleaning information every day as well. Of course then we have the financial realities of news content online. That's a challenge. So native advertising is come into its own now. It's gotten very sophisticated and we've been exploring that a lot in news literacy can students recognize what native advertising is? And some of it is really good and very informative. And I think it's here to stay. I even went on the onion and onion unabashedly says on its website basically the proud of native advertising. We are monetizing your trust in us. Those are the words they're using. And Brett Opregard who is a system professor at UH Manoa Journalism program and he also writes reader rep media commentary column in Civil Beat. Well in the last three years over two billion smart devices have been sold each of those three years. In fact in 2015 it was 2.6 billion totaling in the last three years 7.3 billion smart devices. So just in the past three years there have been as many iPhones, Android phones, iPads sold as there are people on Earth. So that should give an indication of how dramatically this is changing the way we communicate. In addition there are more mobile subscriptions in the United States right now than people and that is really dramatically different in Europe where it's up to like 140%. So you start to see how this affects the way traditional media companies run with their newspapers and broadcast channels that they were used to using. So about two years ago I went over to the Pointer Institute in Florida and a bunch of media companies came there and we were talking about the mobile news phenomenon and how it was changing and everybody's very excited because their numbers were nearing 50% of their audience going to mobile. So you think about all their audience, where is it at, 50% was coming up to mobile. Well now about two years later these numbers are up at 60, 70%. Now the problem with that, like the New York Times for example I went to a workshop with them maybe a few months ago at Columbia and they said 60% of their audience is on mobile but 70% of their revenue is in print. So you can see how that just really messes up a business and how it's affecting the way people work. Now when you think about business interest you can also bring into your mind the social media outlets and how they're changing the way we distribute news. So I have one more example that really kind of stunned me. This was in April 2012 when a company you might have heard of called Instagram had 13 employees and had been in business two years and Facebook bought it for $1 billion. On that same day the New York Times was valued at $967 million. So this was a day where Facebook could have bought the New York Times instead decided to buy this little company called Instagram. All right now this seemed pretty shocking at the time but then more statistics started to come out like the Washington Post sold for $250 million in August 2013 so one fourth of the price of Instagram. WhatsApp sold for $19 billion in 2014 so that was something where you could have bought 19 New York Times for buying the WhatsApp program. And I started thinking well geez you could probably have bought every media organization in the country instead of buying WhatsApp at that moment for $19 billion. You probably could have bought every single one of them. If you think about newspapers for example we used to give at least spend millions of dollars on a product that would give to 12 year olds that would throw in your in your bushes and that was kind of the model there and that whole idea of paying people to run the printing press paying people to stack up the papers insert the advertisements all this was very expensive and what we found out I think in this transition was that people bought the newspaper for a lot of reasons they didn't just buy it for what was on the front page they might have bought it for the TV guy they might have bought it for the comics they might have bought it for the classified ads there was all these things in there that that they found worth the cost but when other things like craigslist came along or all these different other type of entertainment sites may be distracted people from those products then suddenly we had to say well what's the real value here what am I really getting for this price and people decided that the content they were getting was not worth the 50 cents or a dollar a day so it goes back to content but it's also about delivering the content to people in the way they want it so the idea that if if we don't transition into the mobile device where people want their content because we want to have you know say like like Patty mentioned a big a big photo we think that's more important than having it appear well on the device then I think you know you're going to turn off the audience in ways that maybe they won't come back for so we have the structural issues in our country with the commercial models and so we'll have the click bait right we'll have the algorithm driven and that's for profit as well so you know we have organizations like TMZ who are doing that sort of thing we're putting out videos that are sensationalist and that will attract and then we have the New York Times so we have a huge spectrum of different kinds of media and so I think what you said Brett or Patty maybe you know what kind of organization are you what what are your ethical standards and it's going to be different it's going to be different but I think we also need to look at the models in Canada and Australia in Britain where we do have government funded media I used to be a journalist in Canada so I was familiar with that model where they are editorially independent I don't know if Americans whatever go along with that but I do have a friend who's another East West Center alumni who's working for the ABC in Melbourne and she's now in Sydney covering covering government and she's absolutely independent there is no government influence they would take the government to the courts you know if that ever happened I think the key answer in the commercial market is and this is my speculation that we have to be extremely brutal about the type of content that we offer and it has to be valuable content we can't get away anymore with you know sloppy incremental inverted pyramid type stories that just push the ball an inch forward and then we we call it good for the day I think people are are number one they're probably going to be reading more in modular fashion like I'm interested in this particular story not so much I'm going to come and maybe Patty has some insights on that but probably are going to be more attracted to stories through social media you know this is a topic I'm interested in they'll probably come through that direction and they're going to want value in it if they're going to pay for it you know an event story about the local festival and you know what kind of hot dogs are going to be serving there might have been fine 10 15 years ago but people aren't going to pay for that anymore because they can go straight to the website of the festival organizer and find all that out so I think the key challenge for journalistic organizations is how are you going to make your content worthy of that dollar dollar 50 or whatever you're going to charge and then see who will buy it and I think if if the content can support it people will pay for it I think for all of us not just producers of news and information but us as consumers right we read we create media that we have to be open and flexible to the changes around us so we need to be constantly learning how to learn that's hard and so I think that's what the future is all about that if we can try to learn how to learn and do a better job of it maybe we'll be able to protect news and information and save journalism well generally technology has changed dramatically the the way the media environment has developed and this is causing a lot of disruption for traditional media sources but there's also a lot of opportunity out there more people are reading more people are reading news they're engaging in news they're mobilized by news and I think the key part is the businesses have to figure out how to make that work financially so that's I guess the the key question in the future if you want to go back and see part one you can see it on OC 16 or wait a few weeks and see it on thinktechkoa.com or YouTube it'll be worth your while to see both parts in the week following the program at the east west center Brett Opagard a regular contributor to both civil beat and thinktech came down to our downtown studio for a talk show on the subject the media environment is changing very fast so I think what's what struck me most about this panel is that all of these people on it we're dealing with this change in different ways and we're all thinking about how this affects our organizations or our activities and where we're going in the future so I think that's going to be like this never-ending puzzle that's going to last for a long long time and I think it just keeps changing faster and faster so the number one thing I would say is we need to be embracing this change and be ready for it and not feel like we're stuck in any particular model I think back to when websites emerged in the kind of legacy media and everybody's very excited about putting their website up and within you know five years or so of people establishing that mobile has taken their entire audience or 50 60 percent of their audience as an ideology we have to maintain journalism as a way we think about the world so in that respect we should hold on to the past we have to think about like what are our journalistic you know mantras but in terms of how we deliver that journalism that's the thing you know I recommend we just kind of let go of as much as we can without bankrupting our companies but you know let go of it and say where in the future will journalism be and a lot of people have experimented with just amazing new forms like virtual reality and drone journalism and augmented reality journalism so people are trying these these new ways of communicating out and they're doing journalism within those forms so that's a very exciting time I think for journalists yeah it's maybe not so exciting for ad sales and analog papers but it's very exciting if you think about it as an ideology at some point people get you know just exhausted with that that constant negativity that leads them to buy things and I think in the political process you get the same sort of deal where you feel like everybody's always trying to spin you and manipulate you then at some point you think well if this is really important to me and not every issue can be really important it has to be like this is the issue or these are the issues that I think are important and then the person should spend the time investigating them and finding out what what is the real truth most of our life is seen through media I mean our first-hand experience is very minimal when you really think about it I mean you sit on your couch like you said or you get in your car or you're sitting in your workplace or whatever it is and that's your first-hand experience but most of what you know about the world is is through mediated sources so to understand how those mediated sources work on you and also I think the main thing is they distort reality in very dramatic ways the real challenge is for every citizen to spend time and effort on that media and figuring out what what it means and what you can trust and you know where it's coming from it's not just a trifling thing that you you know you spend five minutes in the morning reading the newspaper anymore thanks again to the east west center the school of journalism for having organized and presented this important program it is truly a community service and we feel it should take place on a regular basis think tech itself has on various occasions organized talk shows and panel programs dealing with what we have called news morphesis videos of these events are on our website and youtube google news morphesis and you'll see all in all we believe these discussions are critically important to understanding the thinking and direction of our community and our country with that in mind we are delighted to have been able to cover both parts of the series and you can bet we will continue to cover the story in the future and now let's take a look at our think tech calendar of events going forward there's so much happening in hawaii sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them but think tech will take you there remember you can watch think tech on oc 16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government industry academia and communities around the islands remember also that think tech broadcasts its daily talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m to 5 p.m on weekdays then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends and some people listen to them all night long and on the weekends if you missed a show or if you want to replay or share any of our shows they're all archived on think tech hawaii.com and youtube for our audio stream go to think tech hawaii.com slash radio visit 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comment to enhance the discussion we'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of think tech but first we want to thank our underwriter okay kawaii that wraps up this week's edition of think tech remember you can watch think tech on oc16 several times every week can't get enough of it just like kawaii does for additional times check out oc16.tv for lots more think tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on think tech visit think tech hawaii.com be a guest or a host a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on hawaii thanks so much for being part of our think tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech energy diversification and global awareness you can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next sunday evening for our next important weekly episode i'm jay fidel and i'm kawaii lucas aloha everyone