 Let me start with a story that I think will encapsulate a bunch of these issues as I go on, which was back from January of 2002 when the Boston Globe published a two-part series on the upcoming trial of Father John Gagan, who was a priest in pedophile who had been employed by the Catholic Church since the 1960s. And three Globe reporters had been working on this story, and they had gotten a hold of the documents the Church had been forced to submit in the upcoming trial. It turned out that Gagan had raped or funneled over a hundred boys in his care, and was able to do this in diocese after diocese, because every time the accusations would start, the Catholic Church would take him off to rehabilitation, which was ineffective, and then assign him to a new diocese. And he went and moved through several parishes in the air. The reaction to this story, as you can imagine, was instant and horrified, shock on the part of the Catholic Lady. The story went worldwide. So many people read it that the New York Times Company, the parent company of the Boston Globe, mentioned that story in their investor relations document at the end of that quarter because the size and global scope of the audience was literally unprecedented in the Times-Cos history. Any organization set up to deal with issues of previously abused got an enormous, got wind in their sails from this article, snapped the survivor's network of those abused by priests, and grew by a factor of three in a single year after its 10-year history. Voice of the Faithful, an organization that was centered originally in the Boston area, went from 30 people in a church basement that January, concerned about what to do to 25,000 members in 21 countries in six months. The Bishop Accountability Project, which is set up as a database to prevent the, this is a rare occasion, it doesn't happen elsewhere, kinds of excuses from taking hold, added that article and then used those documents to expand their observations to elsewhere. There is an unbroken line from that article. Should I wait? I'm sorry, I'll just send an elevator full of people to show it on me. There's an unbroken line from the Globe's publication of that article to the worldwide pressure the Catholic Church is now under to both count for its past and to alter its future, which by way of introduction makes it clear what's at stake with what Professor Jones calls accountability journalism. This is a classic example of, again quoted from losing the news, a classic example of the iron core of journalism, and in particular the investigative journalism category where three reporters are dispatched for a long period on a story that may or may not pan out. The other input to that, or the other input, besides accountability journalism mattering in this way, is that the newspaper's ability to produce accountability journalism is shrinking, and those two facts together put us at, I think, a really an epical moment of figuring out what to do. So I want to offer some observations in two parts. One, why it is, I think, that newspaper's ability to produce accountability journalism is shrinking, and why I am convinced that those changes are secular, monotonic, and irreversible rather than being merely cyclic and waiting for the next go round. And then two, I want to talk about the features of a journalistic ecosystem that I think will have to obtain to get anything like the accountability journalism we've been used to out of the current media landscape. So the first observation made widely, and probably in most depth by Paul Star and creation of the media, is that dated from some time between the rise of the penny press and the end of the Second World War, we had a very unusual circumstance, and I think especially in the days where we had commercial entities producing critical public goods. We had ad supported newspapers producing accountability journalism. Now it's unusual to have that degree of focus on essentially both missions, both making a profit and producing this kind of public value, but that was the historical circumstance and it lasted for decades. But it was an accident. There was a set of forces that made that possible, and they weren't deep truths. The commercial success of the newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn't a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad Bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad and just didn't have any other good choices. So I think the first thing to recognize about the commercial structure of the newspaper industry is that it is not enough for newspapers to run at a profit to reverse the current threat and change. If next year they all started throwing off 30% free cash flow again, that would not yet reverse the change because there were other characteristics of the commercial environment as well. The first of them was that advertisers were forced to overpay for the services they received because there weren't many alternatives for reaching people with display ads or especially things like coupons. And because they overpaid, the newspapers essentially had the kind of speculative investment capital to do long range high risk work. It was enough to be commercial, you have to be commercial at a level above what the market, some theoretical market was there. My friend Bob Spinrad who recently passed away but who ran Xerox Park, the Palo Alto Research Center for a while, said, the only institutions that do R&D are either institutions that are monopolies or that wrongly believe they are. Xerox is an example of an institution that wrongly believed it was a monopoly and willing to fund the invention of ethernet and laptops and the graphic user interface and all the rest of it that we take for granted now. IBM, AT&T, the list of commercial entities that believed they were monopolies and during the time that they were monopolies could take this velocity of overinvesting in speculative work as large. When the commercial inputs to that kind of R&D work and the R&D work ends as well. The second characteristic of the happy state of the 20th century newspapering was that the advertisers were not only overcharged, they were underserved. Not only do they have to deliver more money to the newspapers than they would have wanted, they didn't even get to say, and don't report on my industry please. There was a time where Ford went to the New York Times during the rollover stories and said, you know, if you keep going on this we may just pull all Ford ads from the New York Times. To which the Times said, okay. And the ability to do that, right, to say essentially to the advertisers, where else you're going to go was a big part of what kept newspapers from suffering from commercial capture. It worked better for bigger papers than smaller papers, but that bulwark against commercial capture was a feature of the 20th century commercial market. Neither of those things, neither the overpaying or the underserving is true in the current market any longer. Because media is now created by demand rather than supply, which is to say the next web page is printed when someone wants to be printed, not printed and stored in a warehouse in advance of someone who may want it, turns out that when you have an advertising market that balances supply and demand efficiently, the price plummets. And so for a long time people were saying analog dollars to digital times as if, well when do we get to digital dollars? The answer may be net. The answer may be that we are seeing advertising price at its real value for the first time in history, and that value is a tiny fraction of what we had gotten used to. And underserving is an even bigger problem. The institution's harrying newspaper and Monster and Match and Craigslist all have the logic that if you want to list a job or sell a bike, you don't go to the place that's printing news from Antenna Norevo and the crossword puzzle. You go to the places that are good for listing jobs and selling bikes. And so if you had a good idea for a business, you wouldn't launch it in order to give the profits to the newsroom, you'd launch it in order to give the profits to the shareholders. This is Bob Garfield's thesis from the chaos scenario, which is it's not just that advertising is moving from the analog world to the digital world, but that advertising in the digital world is not inherently connected to other kinds of media. Advertising can be media in ways that improve both the advertiser's outlook and the plummets. So the ability to tell the advertiser, you have to keep advertising with us even though we're covering your industry is gone, that protection is gone. And third, deepest down, the coherence of newspapers is not intellectual, it's industrial, which is to say if you're running a website and somebody's on your website and they've just done a crossword puzzle and they seem to really like it, what's the next thing you're going to show them? Is it newsroom to Guzigalpa? No, it's another crossword puzzle because that's the only thing you can battle. The idea that someone who is doing a crossword puzzle may also want news about the Kuhl and Honduras or how the Lakers are doing doesn't make any sense. It's never made any sense in terms of what the user wants. It's what print is capable of as a bundle. What goes into a print newspaper is the content that on the margins produces commercial interest in the least interested user. So in the language of my tribe, the aggregation of news sources has gone from being a server side to a client side operation, which is to say the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is made by the consumer and not by the producer. Now there has been considerable ringing of hands and running of garments around what Nic Negepantico of the Daily Me, right? The idea that we get the newspaper that's nothing but pure echo chamber. The good news seems to be that people are interested in bulk sources and they are interested in expert editorial judgment and they are interested in serendipity, but they're not interested in omnibus, single omnibus publication. The New York Times is being torn apart right now by its own readers. The number of people who go to the Times home page as a percentage of total readership falls every year because you don't go to the Times, you go to the story because someone tweeted it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper but by other members of the audience. None of those three things, overpaying, under serving and the incoherence of the print bundle in a web content, none of those things will be altered by reversing the revenue. So the New York Times is currently getting out of the business of some regional reporting and they've opened an online university in a wine club. The university and the wine club, even if they generate the resources to support the newsroom, don't change those other three characteristics. Now this doesn't mean that all newspapers go away. It does mean that a lot of them go away. Syndication makes no sense in a world with URLs as the AP is realizing, so they're saying, you know, send the traffic to us instead of us sending the stories to you. So the restructuring of that environment, even for those newspapers that survive, will mean that newspapers play a less significant role in accountability journalism in the future than they have in the past, which leaves us with a giant hole and a very threatening one. I mean, the nightmare scenario that I've kind of been spinning out for the last couple of years is that every 10 in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual endemic civic corruption. That without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing, not of epic catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes 5% off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bull work for that, and as they're shrinking, that I think is where the threat is. So what now? The other big question. And the one that's vaguer in a way, it's easier to see what's broken than what's coming, as is always the case in revolution. First thing, back to the John Gagan story, Dr. Boston Globe report. A huge number of the positive effects from that report were not created by the Boston Globe. They were created by the Boston Globe's initial audience. The Globe does not have a worldwide audience of millions of Catholics. The Globe is a regional page. The worldwide audience of millions of Catholics got that story because it was forwarded and forwarded and forwarded. The audience created the public, in fact. The public created itself. The important audience for that article wasn't Bostonians, Catholic or not, it was Catholics, Bostonian. And the Boston Globe can't reach those people. So the ability to reuse and republish that material was a huge part of the value. The ability to take that material and put it in databases like the Bishop Accountability Project, the ability of SNAP to have itself found because anytime anybody read about it, Google put it one hop away from wherever anybody heard about it. All of those things, that, that, a number of reuse around the original article created an enormous amount of the value of that article. There is eerily something vanishingly close to a two-slide comparison here. In 1992, a priest named Paul Stanley was pulled in for having raped or molested almost 100 boys in the Archdiocese of Massachusetts. His bishop was also John Card de la and the group covering was also the Boston Globe. And they ran 50 stories that year on priestly abuse. And that story went nowhere. It shocked people. People were horrified, they were upset, and then it died out. And then in the intervening decade, Gagan kept acting. We can't say that if the web had been in wide circulation in 1992 that the Stanley case would have created the reaction to Gagan. But what we can say is that many of the good effects in limiting the Catholic Church's ability to continue doing this were a result of the public reuse of the documents in ways that were simply not possible in 1992 and had become not just available, but trivial by 2002. I could clip out an article in paper and mail it to one other person at great hassle of expense. And that's about it. By 2002, I put on a mail list. Suddenly 100 people read it. And they forwarded it. It's one of the cases where the difference in degree becomes essentially a difference in kind in terms of assembling. The prevailing story among some parts of the media enterprise now for recovering from the current difficulties in the commercial model of the 20th century is user fees. Either a paywall, micropayments per user charges, per article charges, what have you. The effect of that would be to make the kind of value that the public got from the Gagan article illegal. Not illegal, uncontractional. A violation of contract to make use of the news. Because the whole point of adding these restrictions is to take an infinite good and to be able to sell it as if it's a finite good. And you have to prevent the audience's ability to act as a publisher in order for that business model. Now, this would be, if it was just a commercial operation, it would be no big deal, right? The people trying to get more revenues and expenses are trying to do it in this particular way. Let the market sort it out. There's two reasons, I think, to be skeptical of that. One, we need the public good of accountability journalism, however produced. But two, they're going down and lobbying the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption in order to be able to engage in some form of coordination that borders on price fixing if it doesn't actually constitute price fixing. But the irony is the argument they're using of the Justice Department is the creation of public good. Even as what they're looking to do is to erode that public good in order to charge a scarcity premium. So the proposal by Steve Brill et al. effectively an RIA for newspapers is destroying the village in order to save it. That suggests to me that the ecosystem we're in now is already different enough than the 20th century ecosystem that we should be looking at ways of balancing the very expensive and time-consuming production of accountability journalism with the possibility of public reuse of same. Because that public reuse produces a kind of value that doesn't just come from publication. It comes from republication and reuse. So there's three methods for creating public good. You can go to the market. We're not public good, but rather things that are accessible to the public. You can go to the market and things in the market are created when revenues can reliably exceed expenses. And then you expect some company to set itself up and provision. You can have a public organization that has some source of income other than revenue, whether it is endowment, donations, taxes, whatever. It typically operates in a different legal regime, producing goods because they believe that that is the right use of that money and they are constituted to pursue those goals. And then you can have social production, where a group of people just to get together and do something for themselves. Markets are how most cars are produced. Public goods are how most roads are produced. Social stuff is how most birthday parties are produced. How most picnics are produced. It has just not been a big feature of the landscape. But now it is. The positive supply side shock to the cost of coordination represented by the Internet means that groups of people who are assembled in non-market and non-managerial modes of production. Yochai Benkler, who is here, is the great unpacker of this logic. But groups of people who come together outside the market and outside managerial culture can nevertheless provision for themselves enormously valuable goods. Famously open source software, famously Wikis' modes of production, but also things like Amanda Mickels off the bus experiment for Situated and Huffington Post now essentially reconstituted and pro-publica, or WikiLeaks, are models that aren't using market or managerial culture to nevertheless produce this country. What the Internet does is it makes all commercial models of journalism harder to sustain. Not impossible, but harder. And it makes public models easier to sustain, partly because of the lowered cost and partly because of the internet. And it makes social models much, much easier to sustain. So we're seeing, I believe, a rebalancing of the landscape in terms of the logic of the creation of public goods away from a market dominated by commercial interests into a market where all three of these modes of production are going to be operating side by side in different ways. So that is, I think, one feature of what we want from the future, which is that whatever experiments are undertaken, we want them to be across that range, all three of those different modes of production. The other thing I think we want is we don't want to replace newspapers. Not just because we can't, but also because the problem we're facing now isn't that a commercial entity that did something we liked is going away. That happens all the time. It's the nature of capitalism. The problem is that the thing that's going away, newspapers account for 85% by the figure Professor Jones has in losing the news, which is the vast bulk of this iron core of news is produced by one class of entity. And anybody who thinks about large scale just in design recognizes that as effectively a single point of failure problem. But if anything bad happens to the institutional model of this 85% producer of this thing we care about, the whole system is suddenly at risk. And that's effectively the issue we've got. So we don't need another different kind of institution that does 85% of accountability journals. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they're endowments or crowdsourced or what have you, we need a model that produces 5% of accountability journals. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row. That's the issue before us. There will not be anything that replaces newspapers. Because if you could write the list of stuff you needed and organizational characteristics and it looked like newspapers, newspapers would be able to fill that role. It is really a shift from one class of institutions to the ecosystem as a whole where I think we have to situate the need of our society for accountability. I also want to distance myself, and I'll end shortly, but I want to distance myself with that observation. I also want to distance myself from the utopians in my tribe, the web tribe, and even to some degree the optimists. I think a bad thing is going to happen. And it's amazing to me how much in a conversation conducted by adults the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking serious. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns, I think that's baked into the current environment. I don't think there's any way we can get out of that kind of stuff. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism because the old models are breaking faster than the new models that we put them. To use the historical analogy from Eisenstein from printing presses in the age of change, there's a long hundred years between the Protestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia. And that was a hundred years in which people almost literally did not know what to think. The old institutions were visibly not functioning any longer, but the nation-state as a new organizing principle was not yet in place. And those were, for many people, not a great hundred years. So I have no idea how long this transition will take, but I don't think that some degree of failure and decay is avoidable. I think our goal should be to minimize the depth of that trough to constrain that trough to the areas we can constrain it to and to hasten its end. But I don't think we can get away with a simple and rapid alternative to what we enjoyed in the 20th century, in part because the accidents that held that landscape in the 20th century were so crazily contingent. And so I'll end with an observation that I think may give Professor Jones and I a place of both agreement and disagreement. And that word is irreplaceable. I believe, and I only take seriously people who believe that newspapers are irreplaceable in their production of accountability journals. And then the question becomes, how do you regard the media landscape? People who believe that the media landscape is still amenable to a high degree of the kind of commercial support that keep newspapers alive. Look at the irreplaceability of newspapers and think we should expend any effort or resources we can to keep ourselves from having to replace them. On the other hand, people who look at the media environment and say the current shock in the media environment is so inimical to the 20th century model of news production that time spent trying to replace newspapers is misspent effort because we should really be transferring our concern to the production of lots and lots of smaller overlapping models of accountability journals knowing that we won't get it right in the beginning and not knowing which experiments are going to pan out. So it's possible, I think, for people to agree about the irreplaceability of newspapers but to disagree about how serious the change in the media environment is. And the more you are convinced, as I am, that this is a fairly significant revolution in media production, the likely it is that the irreplaceability of newspapers suggests that the next step needs to be vast and varied experimentation, not the transfer of allegiance from one institution to another. And there I'll end. We agree on many things. We don't agree that newspapers are ready to be abandoned. At least that's my own feeling at this moment. But I certainly don't, in any way, suggest that I don't think that your thinking has an awful lot of weight and power and, of course, high intelligence behind it. I think that one of the things I would, I just want to ask one question and then we'll open it up, but I want you to imagine, if you will, that thing which you are, you think shouldn't happen, but probably is going to happen anyway, which is that there's going to be an effort to save these institutions or to at least replace these institutions. The Boston Globe incident with the Catholic Church is very instructive for another reason, it seems to me. I remember the day that Sunday morning when those stories appeared on the Boston Globe, and on that day included in that story was the fact that the Catholic Church would simply not agree to engage this at all. They simply were not part of the story. The power of the institution that put that on the front page, I believe, married with what you described, this viral espionage, was what brought the Catholic Church to heal and force the Catholic Church to deal with this. I think, though, that it's important to remember that a lot of what was on that front page had already been reported in that same, relatively same period of time by the Boston Phoenix. So the mechanism of viral information was there, but it took the power of the Boston Globe, the institutional power, married with this other to make this happen. Now, what I wanted to ask you is, can you, as you sort of imagine this future, do you see in this array of smaller entities an institutional power that is going to not just simply make this information available online, but effectively force the attention of the public and bring institutions of power to heal? There's a great deal of information on the web right now that's important and damning, but is ignored. Without that institutional power, it seems to me something very important is going to be lost, and I wonder if you see a mechanism of any kind that can replace that. Well, yeah, there's so many, so not in any simple way because of this change, and there's so many different threads there, but that is in a way the weakness of the experimental trough, which is no one institution, no one journalistic institution has the kind of anchor of the community as a whole behind it. Newspapers, people on the newsroom side I think often overestimate the degree to which people buy the newspapers for the news, but anyone who has started to study this finds that various sports scores and their horoscopes, coupons and so forth rate above news often. There's a form of cross-subsidy in which people who are clipping coupons and reading their horoscopes are subsidizing hard political news for the small or even moderate-sized core of people who care about it, but don't make up certainly the totality or even in some cases the majority of the paper. The sort of come for the crossword stay of newspaper reading I think doesn't actually work by and large the one exception is the front page where an editor is essentially saying today this story is on A17 but if something doesn't change tomorrow it's going to the front page and the Watergate story in a way crawled its way up out of metro I mean both those guys were metro reporters and it became the journalistic story of the last 30 years. So at least part of the institutional power is the ability to swing an audience that is there's part of the essentially the political core of any society that demands answers. The easiest way to imagine that is exactly as you say there is simply a counterweight institution to the church and it's the globe. There's a counterweight institution to Ford and it's the New York Times. We've lost the ability for media to operate as force in almost all cases which is to say a lot of the force that's been associated with previous forms of media had to do with scarcity and the scarcity premium in almost all media is vanishing. So I think the question there is can we provide news that gathers an audience that has the function of Boston Globe has of assembling a public that matters to these institutions in ways that bring those institutions to heal. And I think to put the most optimistic face on my call for experimentation we would say we don't know what it is yet but it's there and to put the most pessimistic face on it the notion when a handful of large journalistic outfits whether it's Don Hewitt or Arthur Salzberger can bring institutions to heal is probably fading with the mass audience. So I guess all I can say is I recognize the danger I don't think there's a way to preserve that given the change in the environment meaning I think we have to invent alternate ways of assembling those publics. The one asterisk I might put on there and I don't know enough about the economics of this and you probably do is that rather than rushing around for revenues over expenses newspapers should just convert themselves to non-profit models. If you go up, if you want to see coffee come out of a journalist's nose ask them if they're in it for the money. And yet when you look at I just recently got a copy of the hometown paper I grew up with Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri to show my 25-year-old students like look here is a newspaper and they want to hold it in your hand to see what they used to be like. And reading it I was astonished at how much of it's syndicated in wire service now. It's I think there are about a dozen people in my hometown doing accountability journalism not counting production side but just reporters and editors I think it's about a dozen and I think their salaries are not large certainly not relative to the publisher or the head of AdSense and if you could just write a check to those people you would actually be able to create a world in which freedom from commercial interference was superior to the current commercial model. So I think that may be the one it's transformation in the direction that I'm talking about which is public sources of money held but it preserves the institutional leverage that you're talking about where there is a newspaper in town that essentially is first among equals and being able to hold institutions in the local purview to hold them to task. We're going to give the first shot to students. If you are a student at the Kennedy School you have, yes please. Where do you do magazines such as the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly and radio investigative journalism been in your thesis? Well, so I asked Nick Lemon up at Columbia about this and he said we were talking about in particular subsidy models and he said of both the New Yorker and the Atlantic these are essentially non-profits operating in a commercial environment. The New Yorker, there was a period there where the New Yorker actually made more money from ads than it's spent on its writers and that period preceded a global recession and I think it may be in fact a leading indicator of an ad market gone mad when an organization like the New Yorker can actually make enough money to pay for what it costs to run because the New Yorker has operated at a loss for almost the entire history of its existence and that's effectively in the normal case as it is for all journals of opinion, right? Richard Mellon's sky's ability to understand these economics in the 80s the great funder of conservative journals of thought and to use them to build a conservative movement I think indicates how dramatically the leverage changes when you step even slightly away from the commercial model. Radio journalism falls into two camps NPR and not NPR. I think the amount of radio journalism done by not NPR is a pretty limited utility and tends towards mob hits and car crashes whereas NPR again freed from to some degree commercial constraints unfortunately the web has now erased the difference between sponsorship and advertising because a URL and sponsorship spot is a piece of direct marketing but so the NPR is unfortunately more beholden to its advertisers than it used to be nevertheless NPR by going to donation and now this grant route is relatively free to make longer term larger scale more speculative kinds of reporting they're also feeling their way because they have significant channel conflict with their affiliate stations and so they are in a real period of realignment but I think it's no accident that Schiller the new head came from the New York Times and I think that communicates something about NPR their sense of stepping into the gap again because they don't they're not suffering from the commercial vagaries and NPR which used to be you talk about media and then you go at the end oh yeah and then there's NPR like what a weird special case is turning out to be something that may be closer to the model of a next set of institutions than really the whole of the clear channeling so I think the the magazines that we reflectively look at again you know Atlantic and New York and now we used to be Harpers in the New Republic but those have also shrug the ones that we most respond to and the radio we most respond to has exactly the characteristics of having exiting in one way or another the short term commercial constraints in order to be able to do the kind of work they do and I think we're going to see more of that if they're losing money how are they able to stay afloat I'd say that of the government too I mean they're able to stay afloat because somebody gives them new money every year they've all been supported by millionaires or now billionaires The New York Times is vanishingly close to that model now with Carlos Slimy investment except he's getting 17% off the top but the subsidy by people who want to see that kind of media succeed but for the entirety of its life with the exception of a handful of years in the 2000s so the loss of money becomes almost conspicuous consumption and it's a little bit sort of icky and renaissance to think oh yeah we have these great magazines because they're being funded by rich people but that's also the that's the fact of their existence and were they to be remanded to the commercial market they would shrink or fold so that's the that's you know I think that's really the conundrum the way you get around the problems with any one media model I think is to have lots of models rather than to pick the one that's wrong so in my mind the bug in the newspaper model is not so much that this is how they did it as the and we let them do 85% of what we needed because suddenly their loss is not a crisis but a catastrophe I think New Yorker though is a very interesting situation because what happens when Simon Louse dies by a private family controlled company and Simon Louse is one of two brothers that provided the authority for running this company and Si had the magazines like Bogue and The New Yorker and his brother Donald had the newspapers the newspapers were providing most of the money that's no longer true Donald basically for instance at the Newark Star Ledger cut its newsroom in half if something happens to Simon Louse I really wonder what will happen to The New Yorker and I think that's almost inconceivable to a lot of us but I think that the ever say that word but I think that we just don't know I mean GM thought that too like every time I hear that word unthinkable or inconceivable I just that is the danger Simon I think I think the corollary with the net eroding the base and the revenue base for those things it's much easier to acquire information now as well like for example I worked with someone on Open Congress I'm sure you're familiar with that yeah I did so funny little man right what he does I'm trying to stop the tape rolling please but what do you say hi to David? well all of a sudden you've got this ability to aggregate all this information about congress and also from the public sources as well that trumps anything I can't find as much information at times about congress as I can on open congress.org and so you've got that as well as a corollary of more legislation about transparency about electronic availability of resources and things so do you feel like maybe that takes out 20% I don't know 20% but this is exactly the model of lots of overlapping 5% which is a way to keep the federal government in check is to have better transparency and better reporting and interestingly in the history of communications the executive branch has always embraced new technology and the legislative branch has always fought it so even as FDR is doing radio fireside chats over the radio congress is trying to ban reporting of its doings over radio so the whitehouse.gov preceded open congress by some use because the executive essentially has as the bully pulpit whereas congress of course has the gritty daily workings on it here's the one first of all my society stuff in the UK open congress sunlight foundation all of these are really fantastic inputs to the democratic process the one thing I would say about their subsequent reuses the last time we had a big push for transparency which is post watergate it created because prior to the sunshine laws hiring a lobbyist is like hiring a shaman they'd shake some chicken bones over some senators the senators would go off and bribe it you know the association of seal club salesmen would come in and lobby it for no restrictions on clubbing seals the senators would go and vote and then they'd come out and say oh I was really fighting for Americans rights to club seals but sorry you lost no one really knew how the senators voted so you couldn't do lobbying as a fee for service business and after after the sunshine laws after Nixon all of a sudden you could because you knew how everybody voted and K Street is built on the sunshine laws because it's not just having transparency that matters it's who does what with it and you would expect other things being equal that the more organized groups will do more with transparency so the thing that I keep saying around the open congress and sunlight feathers is it's not enough to make the data available we also have to make the public able to assemble and act on the data and that's the thing I take from the two slide comparison of Paul Shanley and John Gagan which is the ability of people to make use of the material was one of the one of the facts I think the big point is yes, absolutely transparency is valuable but downstream we need to worry about the consumption of that data and organizing ordinary citizens not just waiting for K Street on steroids to form around these data well that's the frustration we've only got a few more we'll just play off what you just said what is the model or something like pro-publica and you have this great investigatory reporting but Joe in the past model of the newspaper they pick up the newspaper and they may not be looking for the investigatory piece on city hall but they were getting it so what is the model now that you kind of pick your own newspaper almost no one got the investigative piece on city hall unless the mayor was having an affair with the DA city hall news is not front page news by and large so we have this view that the readers of newspapers read the whole thing but the cross subsidy of the people who care about sports scores and mutual funds of the handful of us that cared about what the water board is doing in city hall has always been the mechanism by which newspapers hold city governments accountable which is to say there's never been an Arcadian paradise in which all citizens care about all all politics so that is a nakedly elitist one of you but I think it's one that corresponds better to the historical fact of particularly civic government than the kind of populist view so the question about pro-publica I think is not is it reaching elites so much as is it reaching elites as efficiently as it used to or less or more and is it giving those people same tools they had to keep city government in check as before or less or more the grave danger of that I think is not reaching Joe Sixpack who has long since turned away from newspapers as a form in any case right the newspaper audience has been sliding since the mid 80s the grave danger is that our political life is still organized around geography but the web that's a much and so political issues that are intimately tied to a particular county or a particular state the kind of midpoint between nation which is a wholly imagined community but one that people focus on or my local neighborhood which is a real community that middles on like county government the sheriff's office what the state comptroller is doing that's really hard to do on the web because web stories are either hyper local or there kinds of things that spill across national newspapers like what like the Catholic story right you know the Italians and the Poles are reading this just as surely as the Bostonians and that's I think ProPublica is well suited for both national and local reporting but regional reporting both the sense of states and counties I don't think it's well served for because there's the advantage of newspapers was the fact that you can only sell a newspaper as far as a truck could profitably drive effectively meant that you had the side effect of driving the media market and the political markets overlapping and now not and that's where my worry is is not either end of the scale not hyper local or national or in the case of the New York Times are only hyper global publication in English but state and county that's where I think this trough is going to be it's going to be worse and I don't think I don't think the ProPublica can do much about that not because I think the ProPublica I think they're great but because I don't think anybody's cracked that and I think that's where the problems are going to be there's a student over here yes I mean I don't know how does the economist fit into your thesis I guess because they're actually growing aren't they they are growing so the one big asterisk to the value of sharing model is financial news because financial news is not valuable the larger the audience is it's in fact valuable the smaller the audience is I don't want my mom reading what I know about IBM until I get my trades in and so a paywall is a paywall damages general news and benefits financial news and it is no accident that the three great models of paywalls the Wall Street Journal of Financial Times and the Economist because although they have general intersections they are all at base niche publications for traders and business people you can see something of the tradeoff around paywalls when the FT held up as a successful model FT's audience online is around 1% of the times is on it and if the times would go back to a paywall model and see even a one order of magnitude shrink rather than a two order of magnitude shrink suddenly you have millions of people who are not as well served by the creation of public goods so I guess the answer is I don't believe that the Economist FT and Wall Street Journal model are applicable to general news as the Economist doesn't right the Economist put its own opinion columns outside the paywall because it knew that for an opinion column this wide circulation is the value but they don't put their they don't call them stock tips because they're not allowed to but their stock tips are inside the paywall because people will pay for the fact that there's barriers it's the $17 martini logic what goes into a $17 martini is $3 worth of gin and $14 worth of I'm drinking in a place where people are drinking $17 martini so the obstacle to consumption is a service for the models that work but that not only doesn't apply to general news it damages the public utility of general news which is why I think Brill's plan for the R.A. for news may, I mean it certainly could provide some revenue as paywalls have always provided some revenue but in the matter of what we care about as a civic population not for the commercial fate of newspapers it destroys the village in order to say The New York Times is telling us that they have had $800,000 rears over two years they're now charging the newspaper and they are counting apparently on this strategy to take them into the future is that sustainable? No, I mean someone wickedly tweeted the other day that newspapers should rename their local obituary column subscriber countdown the the the industrial logic of the printing press which is given so much of the geographic reach and bundling and overcharging while underserving advertisers and so forth its salience is itself a waste of asset so they should certainly get all the money they can out of that but everyone pursuing a paywall now, not everyone but many musicians pursuing a paywall are essentially saying we're doing this to stave off the leeching people there's no even creating the superiority of reading on paper to reading on screen, Hewlett Packard is a better source of that value than the college point printing press you'd rather have the bits delivered to your house and print them than have them produced at some distal place and then driven to some other place to driven to another place to have somebody deliver to you so the economics the basic economics of industrial production around paper are inimical enough that that strategy will carry them into the future only as trailing revenues Clay, it's been wonderful to have you and we'll be back thank you so much