 and CEO of the Museum of Broadcasting and Radio. He's a lawyer and the author of a number of books about communications, including communications, law, and practice. A book almost legendary, I hear, because it's now in its 20th printing. Maybe we should have Stuart give a contribution to the forum, given the 20 printings of one volume. Anyway, it's my great pleasure to introduce Stuart Bracken. Thank you for Professor Thornberg. I'll be here today. The good news, as anyone who picked up The New York Times today or went on virtually any website which features the news, is that the entire world, at least the United States now, is talking about news today and the future of TV news, particularly because there is a news event that relates to it, and I'm sure we'll talk about that afterwards. We have two of the most knowledgeable, experienced, interesting people in the TV news business. From different perspectives, we have Juju Chang, who many of you are familiar with from her great work on 2020, and also World News This Morning, Good Morning America, and for some of you who may have lived in San Francisco at a moment in time, you may have seen her on the local news there. I think Juju, you're also on the local news in Connecticut as well, right? And so Juju has had an incredible career and obviously that career is in its very early stages in terms of working off-air, on-air in a variety of different settings. We'll talk about Juju's career afterwards, particularly in terms of her perceptions of different news organizations, environments, the relationship of technology and news, what is going on in newsrooms, that is actually presented either on-screen, online, or in other formats. Juju's friend is Neil Shapiro. Juju and Neil are married to each other, and as they told me before, this is the, other than their wedding, this is their first public appearance, and I think certainly their first public appearance talking about TV news. Neil is a legendary figure in television news. Neil was there at the beginning of MSNBC, so it was one of the early pioneers in terms of web integration with television news. Neil was the founding executive producer of Dateline NBC, the news magazine which all of us know, and most recently was president of NBC News at a very critical period of NBC News history, including 9-11, the transition of anchors from Tom Brokaw to Brian Williams and many other aspects. We'll also be talking about Neil's career in the same context, how it relates to news organizations, technology, journalistic standards. We're going to have a pretty free-flowing conversation with Neil and Juju for the first hour, and then in the second hour we're going to open it up to an equally free-flowing discussion from anyone who's here. For purposes of our recording, as Professor Thornburn pointed out, this will be audio recorded and also be available on the web. We'd like anyone who would like to ask a question to come up to either side of the stage, there are microphones up front here, and if we need a cue, if you'll just be patient and come in line, we'd also like you to introduce yourself, just tell us your name and where you're from, and then we'll have a free-flowing discussion in terms of questions. So I will now move from this podium to the more comfortable environment of the table, and we'll begin our conversation. As Professor Thornburn mentioned, I was president of the Museum of Television and Radio, and I thought we'd start off with a little bit of history, because this year is a very interesting year in the history of television news. It's the 60th anniversary of television news. In 1946, 60 years ago, the first television news was really broadcast. It was not broadcast yet by the networks. The networks did not have television news until 1948, but local stations began to broadcast, and the broadcast networks at that point owned local stations. So WNBC, which was the flagship station in New York for the NBC network, and WCBS, which was the flagship station for the CBS television network, began to have original local news broadcasts as early as 60 years ago. And so as we fix this discussion from a point where we start to a point where we look to the future, we can certainly start in that early era of television. Probably the next big period was the development of network news and clearly given, Juju and Neil's background will spend quite a bit of time talking about network news. The original network news, there were really two different formats. One was a format that was taken from film, and it was basically the newsreel. Newsreels ran in cinemas in the 1930s and the 1940s, and basically what was done is the newsreels were taken directly and shown on television. They needed to be modified somewhat, and so original announcers were brought in for television. The most famous first broadcaster in television news was a gentleman named John Cameron Swayze, who was brought in essentially to dub in to provide some narration to newsreels that have been shot for the theaters. And the John Cameron Swayze Hour, which was sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, was the original Camel News Caravan and became the first network, famous network broadcast, and that was in 1948. CBS decided that they were going to build a news organization, a major news organization during that period of time, and William S. Paley, who was the founder and the president of CBS, decided to invest some serious resources and hired someone from the New York Times named Ed Klauber, who had been a major editor there, to organize a news operation at CBS, and to the extent that many people have pointed to CBS as the Tiffany network or as the network that has had the most historic relationship with television news, much of that dates back to the early days of CBS, and particularly the legend and the experience of some of the radio broadcasters, particularly Edward R. Murrow. So Murrow, Charles Collingwood, a number of the younger radio correspondents were brought over to television to begin that operation. And the first broadcaster, first anchor for CBS was a gentleman named Douglas Edwards, and he actually originated a live broadcast in 1948, around the same time as the Camel News Caravan. So we had two different technologies and two different formats for network broadcasts of news in the early, or in the late 1940s. One was a film medium, the other was a live medium. Douglas Edwards essentially was a news reader. I mean, there were very few visual images that were brought in. There was no technology such as tape and certainly no satellite or live technology. And so Douglas Edwards primarily would read the news. Occasionally they would be able to run some film in the background. And John Cameron Swayze did just the opposite. He essentially was the voiceover for continuous pictures. So there were two different types of news that were going on. By 1952 there was a different type of news program that was brought into the mix and that was the early morning news. And that became the Today Show. 1952 Pat Weaver, who was the president of NBC, designed an early morning show which would combine elements of talk, news, and entertainment. And obviously Neil has had a critical role in the shaping of the Today Show, so we'll talk about that as well. The 1950s were also characterized clearly by the ascendancy of CBS and the Edward R. Murrow years with Fred Friendly. Many of you saw the movie Good Night and Good Luck. There were clearly some historic airings of hearings, principally the Army McCarthy hearings, which were in 1954. Ultimately was a contributing factor to the demise of Senator McCarthy. And then 50 years ago in 1956, another very historic occasion, the pairing of two young broadcast journalists named Chet Huntley and David Brinkley for the first true original network broadcast, Huntley-Brinkley Report. And that has really been the standard that all network news developed afterwards. Walter Cronkite ironically did not become the anchor of the news until 1963. Walter Cronkite had anchored the political coverage of the conventions in 1952 and 1956 and 1960 for CBS, but Douglas Edwards was the voice and the image of CBS news during that period. Huntley-Brinkley emerged as the voice and the image of NBC News. And in 1956 had a very interesting technological spin because 1956 was when videotape was first introduced into television newsrooms and obviously that had a revolutionary character in terms of how it shaped both the coverage and the presentation of TV news. The 1960s, just fast-forwarding very quickly, we had the development of the 30-minute news broadcast at the networks. In 1963 Walter Cronkite went from a 15-minute format to a 30-minute format and NBC followed. ABC had always been a relative stepchild in network news. They didn't put a lot of resources into the news operation. They changed anchors a lot. And in fact a very young broadcaster from Canada named Peter Jennings took over as anchor of the ABC News when he was 26 years old because he was available and they decided to experiment. ABC has always until probably the past 20 or 25 years trailed in the history of the development of the news but as we'll see and certainly Juju is an example of it. ABC is clearly a peer in the television news environment today. In the 1960s we saw a lot of work in the documentary field with CBS reports and with some of the NBC shows as well and then clearly we moved into the modern era in the 1970s. I thought we'd begin the discussion with Neil and Juju to talk a little bit about your personal histories but more specifically to talk about the point that you entered the TV news business, where you entered, what the environment was like, what the technology was like, what the culture was like and what was expected of your ability to succeed in that environment. What was the measure of success in the news business when you first entered? So why don't we start with Juju and maybe just talk, because Juju has a very interesting and somewhat unusual story in terms of moving from network to local and then back to network which is not a typical trajectory in the news business. Well, I want to thank you all for being here today. I can't imagine going to a two-hour symposium while also being an undergraduate at MIT, so I applaud you all. I am 40 years old. That's the headline because what I'm about to tell you will make me sound a lot older. When I graduated from college in 1987, I started working as what we call a desk assistant at ABC News, which is the gopher, the copy boy in the newsroom. And I made coffee and I made copies and I ran around and one of my first jobs was to rip the telex machines. So you probably have never even seen them. They're these huge basically telex machines that would punch out seven copies of a telegram. So it would be like, and they were overnight telexes from our foreign bureaus. So I would have to rip them up, separate seven copies, roll them up. This was my job out of college in 1987. And I would put a rubber band around and put the executive's name on it and distribute them. It is that far afield technologically where we are today. The idea that we would do that is just ludicrous now. The idea that I took part in that, wire copy would come out in a triple copy and I would rip and read that and rip and distribute that as well. I remember early on I progressed from being a desk assistant to being a researcher to being a kid in the field as a sort of production assistant. And they would issue me one of the first cell phones that was available at the time. And it was about this big and weighed about six pounds. And it never really worked very well, but I felt very important carrying around the cellular phone. We call it the big phone. And you would have to check it out from the desk and return it because there weren't that many of them. Remember, I'm 40 years old. I'm not that old. And so the idea that all of these technological advances took place in my career is pretty astonishing. And I went from being a producer to being a local reporter in San Francisco. There were a number of jumps along the way, which we'll get to later. But another technological change, I think, is that when I first was a local reporter in the early 90s, the idea of being live was very important. And we had these stations, local stations, local stations would invest a lot of money in what are known as microwave trucks, the little microwave signal off the top of the little trucks. They were so expensive and we were so enthralled by them. And I was a nightside reporter at KGO in San Francisco, Channel 7. And we would go live invariably every night. Even if I was standing live in front of an abandoned building that was dark and we'd have to make up, well, four hours ago there were people here doing things, but right now we're live. And that was the whole idea of live for being live's sake. There were a lot of technological changes that took place even in the short time that I've been in television news. And I think that we, as journalists, have to respond to it. And it's also changed editorially the way that we report the news. Because when I started out I was at World News tonight and I can see my husband's itching to get in on this. But the idea that we would get live satellite transmissions and turn them around and air them live was very unusual. We had these pat deadlines, we had Good Morning America, we had World News tonight, we had Nightline. And everything that happened during the six hours in between, we almost ignored. I mean, we didn't ignore it, obviously. We were gathering our string for the next broadcast. But we never really broadcasted or put it out. We would basically hold on to the story until 6.30. Well, with the advent of cable television news and the capabilities of live coming out of anywhere, really dramatically changed the way that we respond to deadlines, the way that we put out our product. And so I was at local news in San Francisco. Then I came back to Washington as a hybrid. I would do the big Washington story of the day on behalf of the network, but reporting for local stations. So that was a lot of live shots to local anchors throughout the country on big stories. And then I came back to New York where my husband and I were commuting back and forth because I met Neil like six months out of college. We were both at ABC. He hit on me, but that's not unofficial. And so we commuted for a couple of years. I commuted to San Francisco. I commuted to Washington. And then I started at the bottom of the wrong on air at the network. I did weekend news. I did Good Morning America. I anchored the early morning broadcast with a young, unknown guy by the name of Anderson Cooper. And that was a broadcast that was very popular among college students because it aired basically in the middle of the night when you all study. Or whatever. Or whatever it is that we do. And we did a number of interesting technological things during those broadcasts, which we'll get into later with questions. And then I had some children and started working part-time. And so working at 2020 part-time and filing for other shows occasionally. And so that's where we are today. That's sort of my career. I'll turn it over to Neil. There's obviously a lot more to talk about. And I'll go back over it during the... You're 40 years old? Yes, I am 40 years old. That's good. I'm 26. Yeah, I know. You age very gracefully. I was just... I said to pick two different things to talk about because obviously Juju and I experienced a lot of the same things. But my quick story about me and it'll interlace with the story is I started as a sort of a glorified internship at ABC News and sort of had a different job every year for 13 years, spent time in the field, spent time working as Peter Jennings producer, spent time at a show called Primetime Live, went to run a show called Dateline NBC and then ran the news division. And that's 13 years at NBC. In those 26 years, a couple of things strike me. One is when I started ABC News, ABC News was still kind of the last with the least. Roon Arledge had come over from ABC Sports with a mission to get back in the game. And to work at that place is a sense of excitement because there's nothing better than being a third and getting second and getting the first. And it was an incredible amount of resources. We took charter planes for anything. We would cover anything. We would jump on any big story because we were trying just to get any kind of exclusive anything first to make people take a look at ABC News. And all three news visions were owned by much smaller companies at the time. ABC was a stand-alone company. CBS was a bigger company but was still CBS. And NBC was not owned by General Electric yet. So all three companies, broadcasting was the core of what they did and news was a big part of what they did. By the time I got to the front office at NBC, things had changed in there. We were bought by much larger companies. And there are upsides of that which is a lot more resources but the fact is you are just much less of the central thing that that company does. You know, General Electric took great pride in what NBC News did. But at the end of the day, we didn't want to cause many headaches. Our job was to make money because all these big corporations wanted news divisions that made money. And that's another huge change. In the early days that you heard about when TV was in black and white, you know, it was also in the red. So yeah, laugh at his jokes. The true sign of a good wife, don't you think? Well that's changed a lot. Just think about any business in anything. Just be okay, don't embarrass us and don't lose too much money. Which for years was the mission of news divisions. You know what, you can make money, then you will make money. And with that comes a lot of responsibility. Manage your resources, show us your growth. And that is part of how the industry has changed. So just getting back, when you first started out, what were you being measured on? You weren't being measured necessarily on the profitability of the division or the profitability of the particular show. So as a young producer, how did you perceive that you were going to be rising in the ranks of TV news? What would you be measured on? For the shows themselves, there still was ratings just as newspapers have circulation. So you always kind of knew who was watching you. And like it or not, generally the sense is that the people at the best ratings are doing the best job. So from a macro point of view, that has always been a target, in the same way that newspapers often measure themselves in circulation. But as a young professional, I still think that hasn't changed as much in the business. I still think it was, are you smart? Are you accurate? Are you innovative? And that, as a younger person, you get smaller tasks because you get older, you get larger and larger tasks. But I still think those are the benchmarks. Would you agree? Sure. I mean, as a journalist in the field, I don't have the same pressures that a news executive does, which is I don't worry about the bottom line. I don't worry about whether the story is even going to be very popular. I get an assignment and I just try to do the best I can with that particular assignment. For me, you know, I'm a worker bee. And now, Juju, you were in a program at ABC News where essentially you were brought in to become a correspondent. Right. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Well, that was part of the journey for me because what they were trying to do was identify people with not just television broadcast backgrounds, but with print backgrounds, radio backgrounds, and also minorities, frankly. And I think what they were looking for, and from my perspective, I had been a producer. And so they wanted to place me in a situation that allowed me to grow and learn the on-air skills because, you know, the core skills for a reporter are you report the story, you research the story, you interview people, you help write the story. And even though it involves a television camera, at the end of the day, you're still just a reporter. And as an off-air producer, those were the skills. And I think that there was a sense that we would try to see if we could morph her into an on-air person. And so the way they did that was to move me to the local station with sort of trial by fire. You know, that was my first on-air job. And San Francisco is actually the seventh biggest market in the country, so it was kind of a big pond to be thrown into. But then after that year, they said, well, you know, we like you, okay. So they brought me back to Washington and let me do that for a year, which sort of increased my live skills because a lot of it was live. And it was a difficult year because I went from covering the White House one day to the Supreme Court the next day to Capitol Hill the next day and, you know, trying to get on top of the big story enough to say something worthwhile and then develop, you know, back to becoming a network correspondent. So that was what the program was designed to do. I wish I'd spent a couple minutes talking about the culture of newsrooms when you came into the business. A little bit about the hierarchy, how a newsroom works, both at a local station and at the network level, how stories get decided. There is some sort of competition, obviously, between correspondents, between producers. And so there is a competitive process to the selection of news stories. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that from your perspective as a correspondent. Obviously, it's an easy question. You can see the overview and then you can say what really happens in the trenches. Basically, decisions are made on two levels. The first is just what are you going to cover? And every network has an assignment desk, which is up 24-7, whose job it is to make sure that you jump on every big story, and what you're not jumping on that we know about. And that, you keep an eye on the wire services, you talk to your bureaus, you talk to your affiliates. And those are the people when there's an instant story, the first job is who are we going to get, what are we going to do with everybody else? These are the people in the middle of the night who call you, you know, if you're my job, wake you up and say something has happened, what do you want to do about it? So that whole thing is happening. If there's a restaurant, they're going out, they're gathering all the food. But that doesn't make a difference because that doesn't always get on the air. Then there's a second level, which are the executive producers and executives above them. And they decide out of all that stuff that's being covered, what do they want to put on the air? And they have some other people they control. And I'll say, you know what, I have some stories I want to assign, it's not really breaking news. And you see more and more of this in the evening news with it's less, front of it's less breaking news, or you see more and more magazines, where those are kind of discretionary stories. And executives will say, or executive producers will say, I want a story about this or that. It depends in newsrooms from newsroom to newsroom and show to show and network to network, to what degree things bubble up and to what degree things trickle down. In the best places, you want a lot of bubbling up. You want to encourage everybody to send ideas up. At Dateline, we used to have a story pack that I would get every night. And people would send, here's my ideas for stories and all the executive, the senior producers and I would read it. We'd get in the next morning, we'd say yes or no, we'd send a message back, yes or no, here's why or why not. In some other places, it's driven much more about the correspondence. 60 minutes is much more of a correspondence shop. And they're the correspondence and the editors of the program. And they kind of say, here's what we want to do. And the executive says, all right, yes or no. And there's sometimes where it's just mostly, it's from the top down, where somebody may say, you know, I think this is such a big story, literacy. I want to own literacy this week. I want five stories on literacy. And sometimes if you see those themes and say, why did they happen? It's because someone at a higher level said, here's what I want. So I think that's sort of the overview. At least that's from the, that's how we see it. How does it really happen? Well, there's a lot of, you know, sort of jockeying for position in any newsroom because there's always sort of the top dog, go-to reporter, right? And once they get the big story, then everybody else is fighting for the scraps kind of thing. And I think, you know, especially, that you see that dynamic a lot in local newsrooms because, you know, it's like a sea of cubicles. Reporters don't really have offices because especially at local news, you're out in the field all the time. You're never at your desk. So you all have open cubicles and everyone's sort of waiting for the assignments to go out and what did she get? What are you working on today? And, you know, and you're like scheming with the cameraman to try to get the better story. And so there's a lot of that. But on another level, I mean, I want to sort of talk about some of my experiences. There have been stories that, I think, touch on the idea of diversity in a newsroom. And, you know, we mentioned that the program was aimed towards ethnic minorities. And I think that in my newsroom, I was often put on the girl stories. I mean, I was, as I say, this seems to be a theme. I'm 40 years old. But at the time that I first became a network correspondent, I was in my early 30s and I was one of the first women, one of the few women, not first, but one of the few women and certainly one of the few working mothers who was on the row of, because at first I was working for World News Tonight when I went back to the network. And it was all sort of middle-aged white guys. Nothing against middle-aged white guys. But I'm amazed at how you walk down that row now and it's still kind of looking the same. There is a sort of, you talked about the culture. That is kind of the culture that's also reflected in the management. I think we made a lot of strides in putting on air people, maybe some, you know, producers here and there. But the senior-level management, there's, you know, there's still some strides to be made. And I remember one of the early stories when I was still a producer. I was assigned with an African-American correspondent to go cover the riots in Brooklyn between the Koreans and the blacks. And so, you know, it's sort of to touch on the dynamics of what happens in that situation. We both felt a little pigeon-holed, but we both felt sort of passionately that we were going to be objective about this story. So Ron Claiborne was the correspondent. He was going out of his way to sort of take the Korean market, you know, Greengrocer's perspective. And I was sort of bending over backwards to take the, you know, sort of local kids' perspective. And, you know, it's interesting how these, the reason why we push for diversity in the newsroom is so that when stories come out and the other guys can't relate to why is this an important story, the mothers in the room speak up and say, you know what? Childcare is an incredibly important story, and we should do it because half our viewers or more, perhaps, are passionately interested in it. And I think that, you know, the sort of culture within the newsroom is kind of a family dynamic. And, you know, there are people who speak up when certain stories get assigned. And, you know, at 2020, the way we do it is there's a story development department that they actually research and come up with stories and then they eventually get assigned. But, you know, it's a very difficult process to explain to outsiders. And are you aware of ratings? You're aware of how much time you spend on the air? You know, everybody knows how the show did. Last week we had a show on and it didn't do that well. I don't really know what the numbers were. Some people are very in tune with the numbers. I'm not a numbers person, which is why I did not come to MIT. But the producers, senior producers know and they have something called minute by minute. They literally know minute by minute who's clicking and who's joining. And so, you know, it's a little dangerous. And in fact, there's a kind of an unofficial policy within ABC that the rank and file is not supposed to know about the minute by minutes. We're not supposed to talk about it and et cetera, et cetera, because it really does kind of... It's insidious, you know, because you don't want to start programming toward the ratings. You don't want to just assign the stories that do well, that rate well. But it is amazing how much research and how much knowledge we have about what people will watch and what, you know, draws an audience. Well, when I talked about the early development TV news, I talked about the signature broadcast. But clearly, television news is much like television entertainment in that it has genres. And we have the genres that typically develop and have developed according to the time of day and the type of programming that the audience at that time of day was taught to want to watch. So I thought what we would do is to walk through the development of some of these genres and get Juju's impressions of them. Obviously, Neil has been very involved in the development of both the genre and also managing the different genres. So I thought we'd start out with news magazines because clearly, Dateline NBC was and is the signature news magazine of NBC. We also mentioned 60 Minutes, which premiered in 1968 and is the oldest continuous news magazine. And of course, now with 2020, we have a third major news magazine. There are others, of course, it was Primetime. Not live anymore, but Primetime on ABC. So in terms of the thought process of developing a news magazine and why a network news division is interested in having a news magazine and the signature news magazine, what does that do for the network news operation? Well, you know, it's a changing, in the ways we talk about how news is changing. Magazines are probably the best example of how news and the environment is changing. At one time there were five Daylines in a week and we did something like 285 shows a year and God knows how many stories in those shows. And that was, I think, indicated several things. One is at the time, networks wanted to do shows that they could own and most shows they couldn't. They were coming from other studios. So even if you had a show you loved and a show was doing well, after a while it got to be so expensive that you didn't have any money on it. And you didn't own it afterwards. You didn't get any share of syndication. And the genre, and frankly, a lot of the entertainment shows which magazines compete against were the same. There was a sense about drama. A lot of drama was going tired. So into that, as TV does with everything, when something works a little bit, you start to see a lot of it. I think it's Fred Allen who said this and that's certainly true with news magazines. So there were five date lines, four ABC shows, three CBS shows, Fox had a show. They still can do some things nobody else can. With an hour to play with, there's something that magazine stories can do that nobody else can. In that genre, you can tell stories with characters. You can tell stories that have beginnings and middles and ends, and where the beginning and middle and end don't all happen within two minutes and 30 seconds. They can happen within an hour or two. It can be a magazine on the air in the same way a magazine in print. It can be everything from breaking news to investigations to profiles to long epics to documentaries. So it's the value in having it. And the other value is you own it so you can put it wherever you want. There's a soft spot on the schedule, you can put it there, and who's going to complain? They're all your employees. And the only thing you can do in 9-11, one of the reasons I think NBC did so well is I had just taken over the job of the News Division president. It's the biggest story of maybe my lifetime. We're on the air, and I'm thinking to myself, what is going to make our coverage different than everybody else? Because everybody else is going to have the same thing. They're going to have an incredibly skilled smart anchorman tossing to incredibly skilled and smart journalists covering a story. So what will make our stories different? I said, well, I'm going to take all those magazine skills, which is about telling stories that are both intellectually important and emotionally significant, and go and unleash you on the breaking news world and come back with magazine quality stories in like no time. And it really made a difference for us because if you recall, as important as 9-11 was, like any story, it starts to run on steam. You get to this point where the story is so important that people don't want to go away from it. But nothing is happening. So you don't go away from the story because people don't know what's going on. And then repeating all the same facts. And so when you got to day two or three and in prime time television to say, well, you're still on, there's nothing on, but news coverage, they say, what's the getaway from the story? What's here more about the victims or the investigators or terrorism, whatever it was? So to have that kind of arsenal within the network quiver is incredibly important. Neil's being terribly modest. When he first went to NBC, Dateline was a failing news magazine show. It was, you know, under controversy because it had the GM truck explode. You guys are very young, you probably don't know this, but just know that it was in trouble. And Neil took it over and expanded it from one night a week to two nights a week to three nights a week to four nights a week to five nights a week. And he oversaw all of it. Every story, every producer that was hired, it was the cornerstone of NBC's programming, frankly, during that era. But what you see now is a retrenchment. And during that time, 2020 expanded. We had 20, 22 nights a week, plus prime time. CBS had 48 hours and obviously 60 minutes. They even went to 60 minutes, too, which we all know had an inglorious end. The point I'm trying to make is that the magazine world exploded. And I think, frankly, a lot because of this man who's sitting next to me, who happens to be my husband, because the stories were very well told and they were very engaging and entertaining. What has happened since, you ask? It's called reality television. And I think that has had a huge impact on the appetite and where it's gone with the news audience. And that's where we're heading. And what's interesting is, you know, I think it's very, what's the word, sort of conventional wisdom to say, ah, reality television is trash and it's the end of the culture of American culture, et cetera, et cetera. But if you actually watch some of these programs, they actually employ many of the same storytelling production qualities that news magazines do, which is not to say that editorially they're the same. They're vastly different, obviously. But I think that's what's happening to the news audience is that you like to hear compelling, dramatic, interesting stories. You've gotten used to that from news magazines. I think maybe you've burnt out on them a little bit. Maybe you had too much of it. And so the audience, I think, turned away a little bit towards, you know, some of the new reality shows. And, you know, reality shows are evolving, too. They've gone from, you know, survivor and American idol to more aspirational, like, you know, extreme makeover, home addition to the Three Wishes. You know, it keeps evolving, too. And frankly, many of the people who used to work amongst, you know, in the news magazines have gone into that world. So it's kind of a weird transitional time, you know, for this industry in that regard. So when we come back 25 years from now, will we say that news magazines are a permanent fixture in the genre of television news? I certainly... Well, listen, I work for 2020, so the answer is, you're damn straight it is. You know, I would like to think so. If you look at 60 Minutes and its contribution to American public discourse, I would argue it played an incredibly important role. I would also argue that Dateline did incredibly compelling documentaries that you didn't see anywhere else on television that Neil is once again too modest to brag about. Help me here. The migrant story, the migrant family, migrant workers, which was sort of an update on the Edward R. Murrow grapes of wrath, the hour you did on black and white in America and, you know, sort of white flight, the hour you did... I mean, there were like hours that were quality documentaries that got good ratings that were in that mold. So I think it would be a shame to lose the genre. And I'd like to hopefully think that it will be a permanent part of the fixture. But what Neil brought up earlier about the corporate demands and the sort of, you know, the way that corporate America works, you know, there's no guarantee. And also add two things, which I think, you know, the genre will... I mean, like all programs, it'll reinvent itself somehow and people will do things to shake it up in some way. And the other thing is, you know, I think there will always be a place for long-form storytelling. And among the many things that's changed since we started the business is, you know, there's so many more avenues now for nonfiction television. There'll be places for it on cable or it'll go right to the Internet. I think there'll still be room for that. The sad thing will be, you know, someone will knock themselves out to do, you know, we did... did you talk to me to a show called Harvester Shame 2, which was, you know, Oditz, Rootsdale, Romrose, Great Show, Harvester Shame, and still say, guess what? There's still a migrant labor in this country. And children, as important as this is, children, you know, are still picking fruits and vegetables to try to help their family survive. But you know what, we did that story. 14 million people see it. When somebody does Harvester Shame 3 and it airs, you know, as a video on demand or it airs on the Internet, you know, who knows how many people are going to see it. The thing I think there's a shame that broadcast television brings you, it still aggregates huge numbers of audience, which is why I think it's so important that our hope will still make a place for this kind of important long-form stories. Neil mentioned the importance of money, obviously, in the calculus of TV news, and probably the most profitable part of television news is morning television news. And I'm sure Neil knows all too painfully or perhaps very well how much money the Today Show makes. How much money does the Today Show make? 350 million dollars. And Good Morning America, I think, makes a little bit of money as well. So let's turn our attention to the morning broadcast as I said, they blend what we know is hard news with some softer news elements. They have some magazine elements in them as well. And clearly, they're evolving. In recent years, the traditional broadcasts have now gone, for example, with the Today Show from two hours to three hours. And in fact, many of the anchors who were there at the early part of the broadcast are no longer there at the end of the broadcast. Good Morning America and the Today Show are now weekend shows as well as during the week. So why don't we talk a little bit about the development of the morning genre in terms of where it's been, where it is now, where it may be going. When people talk about what's going to happen in a viewing audience, there's the one area of growth in network news is the morning. And that's for couplings. One is it's gotten longer. The other is the world's changed. People are getting up earlier. One of the biggest growth in local news is the sort of 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. shows. And those are sometimes among the second or third most profitable time periods for local news. So people are getting up earlier. And our world has changed. I think post 9-11, you realize things can happen overnight that can change my world. There's a bigger stake now like what's happened overnight. I think there's kind of more interest in news just in the more dangerous world we live in. So you've got more people getting up earlier and watching the show. You've got a more competitive atmosphere. And you've got a shows which are spread over so much time that you can grab a lot of people. You can get sort of professional audiences in the first hour, first half hour to hour. People are watching it before they go to work. And then as the shows change, you can get still more of a female audience that people are staying home. And the show therefore has several kind of sub-genres within the show, within the sort of hard news at the top and then sort of gets a little bit softer as the show goes along. And these shows more than any other shows I think tend to be more personality driven. Not that anchors aren't very important. Every show they do. But morning shows are different because there's a lot more. It's longer. There's a lot more that's not exactly scripted. They all have at least two hosts or multiple hosts. So the interaction is a part of the show. And that makes it different than any other show. And Juju, it works in morning as well as in the evening. What's the difference culturally and... Over time or between the difference between... I'll point out one thing. When I was a young producer at ABC News, the show, we called it the flagship show, the show everybody wanted to work on, the show everybody wanted to file for, the show everybody wanted to lead was World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. That was the end all be all. And I can tell you that that's just simply not the case anymore. And within the framework of ABC. And I think that what's happened is that it was much more prestigious internally within ABC. I think that there was a sense of the growth of the audience in the morning and the role that it had within the news division. I think what's happened to, over time, is can be summed up in an odd little fact that I will point out, which is back about seven years ago, when I first started reading the news on Good Morning America, occasionally I would fill in whatever. I always wore a blazer. Today, when I fill in anchoring, hosting the show on the weekend or reading the news during the week, I never wear a blazer. And I think it says something about the sort of casualization, I don't know if that's even a word, of the culture of news, which is to say Eric Severide and Howard K. Smith and the people that you mentioned would never be caught dead reading the news without a blazer on. It's a funny little quirk, but when I was anchoring World News Now and World News This Morning for ABC, we were like the little kid sister show or kid brother show at ABC, and we decided that the theme of the show would be, we take the news seriously, but we don't take ourselves seriously. And the signature sort of wardrobe issue of the show was that the man, in my case, my co-anchor was Anderson Cooper, as I mentioned, wouldn't wear a blazer. And he would wear, you know, work like a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. And I think what has happened over time is that news can be presented by someone like Katie Couric with gravitas and with authority. And I think what we're seeing, this transition that she's made in the last few days from morning television to, you know, the Tiffany Network Evening News chair shows that the culture is changing and I think morning television has had a lot to do with it. The fact that she can dress up as Marilyn Monroe one day and come in and read the news the next day and not really ruin her credibility in any real way. Let's get to the 800-pound gorilla, which is obviously the evening news. For those of you who are reading, Dowd, there was a column yesterday that she wrote where she characterized the evening news as an anachronism. And, of course, there are many people who are saying that that is the last bastion of television news, but it's a dinosaur, because basically when you look at the demographics of who's watching the evening news, by and large, these are people in their 50s and the 60s. Clearly, we see that people are getting news in a variety of different ways and they're not waiting until 6.30 in the evening to get their news. So I'd be interested, particularly because we're in this era of tremendous change. The three historic anchors of the past 20, 25 years are now all gone from the scene as anchors and we now have the major transformation of CBS, which was announced yesterday and will take place later this year. We have the one-year anniversary of Brian Williams and NBC Nightly News and we have an interesting, to some extent, tragic transition going on in ABC News by virtue of Bob Woodward being seriously injured while in Iraq and now Elizabeth Vargas going on maternity leave. These are the co-anchors of the Nightly News. So why don't we talk a little bit in terms of where the evening news is as a news genre today and where it might be going in the future? You know, the one thing, ever since I've been in TV, my 26 years in TV, I've been asked, and I've been asked to research, is the evening news going to survive? It is worth noting that even today as we sit here, 26 million and 26 to 30 million Americans every night watch the three evening newscast, which is more than watch any single cable channel in 24 hours. You know, the audience of all the cable audiences together who are watching at around 6.30, it's a couple million people. So there's still a huge audience that watches this show. There's no doubt it's declining a little bit and it's, you know, that it's about 60 years old. I don't think it's going to go away for a while. I still think there's still a huge number of people who still say, I've been busy all day long and I want to sit down and I want someone to tell me I have 30 minutes. What's important? What do I need to know? I mean, I think that institution is going to be around for a while. It may change, it will change. The evening news has always changed. And if you look at it for a number of reasons, you know, one is the people producing it are different. In the glory days of Walter Cronkite, some people, Andy Rooney talked about the glory days of CBS News, the glory days of Walter Cronkite, the people who produced that show were all white males who, you know, said to them news was what happened in Capitol Hill, what happened in Moscow, what happened around the country, and things involving healthcare education were not news. Save a different broadcast and different people and we live in a different time. So I think the institution is going to be there for a while and I think it's going to keep changing. One of the reasons it changes is because it tends to reflect some of the personality of the people who anchor it. You know, Walter Cronkite was passionate about space and the CBS Even News did a ton about space. The Huntley and Brinkley had sort of a rye quality because David Brinkley was an incredibly clever, rye fellow and they looked for ways to do it. Tom Brokaw had a passion for the American West and the outdoors and that was there. Peter Jennings loved foreign affairs and he was an obscure province in China. You could be sure he would work that into his story. Everybody brings something to it. You know, Brian is evolving his broadcast and you can talk passionately about Katrina and NBC Night News covers that a lot. Katie will no doubt bring something to the CBS Evening News and she's an incredibly smart and passionate woman and she will find ways to change that. And ABC with two anchors had interestingly changed the dynamic and I think that will keep changing. The other thing that makes that job important is that job tends to be sort of standard bearer for the network. That traditionally has been and I don't know that that's going to change. The person you turn to for the next big story, whatever it is and for the planned events, the inaugurations, the conventions. They are the masthead if you were for the network and I think that's still going to be a very important job because part of that job is not just what you put in 30 minutes but you have to be there to answer the bell when the world falls apart. And that is when you see how incredibly talented and skilled these people are. You know, there's nothing... and you can talk about this more than I but there's a few things more frightening than you're sitting there and suddenly the world is changing there's nothing on the prompter and you just have to figure out where do I go, what do I talk about and you make it a little help in your ear about we're going to talk to this person or that person but news is literally unfolding in front of your eyes and you have to be the quarterback and the coach and the counselor and help America through it and that's a really challenging job. How many of you here regularly watch the John Stuart show? The Daily Show? And how many of you regularly watch one of the three evening newscasts? Probably a lot. I'm surprised that many of you. Well, Maria, you're the exception. I find that therein lies that little mini poll sort of demonstrates the big problem that network executives like my husband have faced for many years which is that young people just don't get their news from the evening news anymore and I think that's the problem that you're the demographic that advertisers want and so even though there's a prestige factor to being the anchor man and I think that being the sort of wise uncle in a big national... Or aunt, if the case may be is a very important role to play I think that it will continue to be diminished over time. I'm frankly really surprised that Les Moonves made as big a play in this particular move. I mean I think it's bold and it's definitely a game changer for CBS and I wouldn't be surprised if Katie Couric who is known for her strength in live television changes the format a bit to be more spontaneous and a little bit more live which is what Bob Schieffer was doing anyways with the evening news at CBS. At ABC what our news division has been reaching towards is this idea of the two anchors one of whom would be on the road a lot the idea of anchor as reporter and the other anchor would be at home. Now obviously with Bob Woodruff's grave injuries all that has changed the future of that particular broadcast is still sort of fluid in large part because Bob Woodruff's recovery and I just got an email today updating us on his health and his prognosis is an evolving process and so I think it's difficult to say where ABC will be in terms of our world news tonight broadcast but certainly NBC has done a beautiful job in transitioning to Brian Williams and he's definitely going to be the one to beat. Why don't we talk a little bit about that transition because Neil you were one of the key people responsible when you envisioned how to go from a Tom Brokaw to a Brian Williams what type of transitional mechanisms were obviously there was the exposure on cable and Brian has gotten particularly active in web integration, writing a blog having various updates why don't you talk a little bit about that? I should say I began with two incredibly skilled journalists to have Tom who's as great as he is and as gracious as he is and have Brian who's as incredibly skilled as he is and as willing as he was to put up with everything I wanted to do that was the first thing but when we first started doing this I had friends from ABC who would say to me I'm really sorry and I'd say what about it well this is never going to work I mean it's never happened before every time you can do the studies and by the way we've done research and I'm really sorry there's nothing you can do which is exactly what you want to hear when you're trying to plan this thing so my view was this first I began with Brian as I said had a huge smart hard working and I said you know what I have to do is use the time I have to we made a concession we announced the transition two years before we did it you know we called Prescott and said this is the future anchor man of Nightly News and a lot of people thought that was a big mistake they said you know you're diminishing Tom you know you're telling him he's going to be leaving they're going to stop watching him we thought it was a great way to sort of stop to whatever fighting there might have been the network and said look here's our guy, here's the plan and then you know Brian was on the road almost constantly it was every big event if Tom's not going Brian's going how many times can we just try to show off Brian's reporting skills or any other assets of his personality his sense of humor, his compassion it was like a political campaign in the sense that I knew what election day was and I knew who my candidate was and then every day we met once a week and we talked about what's our promotional strategy what's our coverage strategy and that said I'm pretty proud of where we ended up I mean I think nobody thought that NBC would be where it is right now let's talk a little bit about the role of technology now in the both in the newsroom and the presentation of news in the way that consumers access news clearly we're in the brave new world of web integration we will be very soon in the brave new world of mobile integration as well combination of video iPods and cell phones and other devices what sort of thinking is going on both at the executive level and at the correspondent producer level in terms of how to begin to produce news across multiple platforms to some extent to some extent repurposing to some extent creating new content for particular media well I'll go first from the macro level I think part of the reason that we look at all the assets that news divisions have and you look at still the notion okay if Nightly News is if that is a declining audience and therefore a declining source of revenue but you still have this huge infrastructure what do you do well you try to reach people in other ways on NBC we have a whole cable arm we both have a cable division so we're on there 24-7 it can use our people report not just on the for today or Nightly News or Dayline but to report 24-7 on live breaking news we have a website and MSMC.com is one of the most watched news sites but that means for our correspondents I would spend time saying alright now that you've done this why aren't you blogging, why aren't you writing you know so I hope you were sort of nagging the correspondents to say it's not just about feeding the beast on the broadcast it's not about feeding the beast on the cable it's about feeding the beast online and I think correspondents feel stressed about that on the other hand our view is like we got to play in all these platforms we have NBC does things on cell phones now and all these things I think have to be done produced or shot a little bit differently I think it's going to be a mistake if everybody just says I'm just going to take whatever I did and give it to you looking exactly the same way I think there are different experiences things look different, they feel different and things have to be produced differently you know even when I was in college we had classes on convergence convergence, convergence, convergence and I remember thinking that it was around the corner and then it wasn't around the corner and then it wasn't and we still to this day talk about convergence and what I mean by convergence is this idea that the television and the computer and the phone and the iPods now and everything else will converge into sort of one sort of closer unit we're getting closer and it feels like a lot of the theory that I learned in college is coming true we go out of our way to do things for our webcast even though it takes a I'd love to know what the ABC budget is for the webcast because it must be enormous we have to fire up studios which is very expensive we have to hire crews we have to get the reporters and the producers we have to put hair and makeup on them we have to do all these things and I think about 17 people watch I mean I don't know what our audience is on the webcast right now but it's not high what we do do we do do very smart things and again this is all sort of reaching toward the future audience wherever it's going to go is it going to be on cable is it going to be on broadband is it going to be on the computer is it going to be on your iPod that's what news executives are trying to figure out what they're trying to do is sort of keep as much content available for those different delivery streams but it's hard to do because it taxes our time the editors are like you know trying to cut a piece and you know I have a little example you know it takes a lot of energy and time to polish a piece that will air on 2020 but at the same time they're saying well can you dub off a piece of the interview so that we can stream it on the web and that's just raw material that you would never have seen that we would never have used because this is a profile just so you know of John Bon Jovi who's the big rock star and the polished piece is a very traditional straightforward magazine piece about John Bon Jovi's life but what we streamed on the web was something that once again would have ended up in our tape library would never would have seen the light of day but was used to attract a lot of viewers to our website and to the 2020 home page and to our webcast and to you know broadband and you know in order to see it you have to sign up and pay a little money and you know whatever it is I mean what I find interesting is that I think we're still looking into the future when we talk about convergence and yet the real scramble is you know how do we get those eyeballs and how much pressure is there to begin to repurpose some of this I think that is funny because within ABC there is a real sense that digital is the future digital broadband we gotta whoever da da da and yet we're a network television so to air on 2020 is millions and millions of people watching and sitting down and it's a totally different experience than if somebody's logging on and catching a little clip of something and you know the webcast that we do you know you can download it on your cell phone you can do all these things but I think at this stage and you know today April 5th 2006 not that many people are doing it well we are gonna go interactive now so that's part of our exercise we have microphones here microphones here microphones here and the floor will be open for questions as I said anyone who has a question if you could come up to the microphone if you could just say your name and if you have any affiliation that would be fine Hi my name is Emily Galati I'm really short and I'm an undergrad at MIT and you were just talking about the internet and everything I was just wondering how much if you realize how much adolescents young adults kids in college go online to get their news I know personally that I never watch the news but I go practically to CNN.com to read the news and I know a lot of my peers do and I didn't know if you realize that probably more people my age are getting their news online because we just don't have the time to sit down and watch a news magazine or anything like that but we definitely have time to spend a couple minutes just clicking away. We totally realize that in fact you are your generation not just that that you're looking online while you're watching something or you're multitasking every we get that which is why everybody's interested in trying to figure out how to make the internet work the question is having still serving the millions who are still watching TV and still wanting to serve them I think the question is and I don't think we've reached the answer yet is can we make the internet any better experience for you so that if you're content to just click on CNN.com that's fine but ultimately we would like whoever running every website would like to make their website special make it something different make it something that you and maybe the answer is the experience has to be something that's a little better than clicking but not as inconvenient or passive as sitting there watching a TV. Hey my name is Steve Schultz I work for an organization called the Public Radio Exchange I'm curious actually following up on your passive your comment about passively watching television with respect to technology to what extent if at all is the sort of spirit of participatory media or viewer feedback or writing your own news how much does that actually play into television news because some of us exist in a sort of hype bubble in which that's a huge buzz right now I see sometimes anchors reading blogs on TV but that's the extent to which I know about it so I'm curious is there anything actually happening there is that the future or not and then my second sub question is I'm curious if you have any comments on public broadcasting especially with relation to the magazine show so I have particular interest in that thanks alright so to the first part I'd say yes I think news executives are trying to figure out exactly how that works and there's clearly some kind of interactivity already between you know blogs are proving to be either another social opinion or often a reality check sometimes on what we do and whether it's structured blogs or even email there's I mean believe me people read their email Brian Williams reads every bit of his email and responds to it so to the notion that and that the technologies change you're not just able to sit three executives with three networks that dominate everything and sort of ignore feedback technologies made that impossible I think that's a good thing whether TV ultimately gets to the point and there are things, there are websites you can go to right now I think you can go to Yahoo for instance and you can I'll do this guys, you can click the stories you want to see in other words you can arrange your own newscast you can be your own executive producer my sense is that are we really going to take off I don't think so, I don't think people are going to sit there and do I think you may I think they're much more likely to hunt around as opposed to building a broadcast for them and sit down and watch it, I don't think that's what that experience is like but you know what I think we're still trying to figure it out and I remember doing stories 15 years ago and I was a producer about the internet and having the senior producer look at it goes aren't you kind of over-hyping this thing it's not really going to change people's lives is it and about PBS I think PBS does some terrific stuff I think Frontline does some outstanding reporting and I'm glad it's there I was just going to add to that I've done pieces for now with what used to be with Bill Moyers and is now with David Brancontio and I do them in part because I'm transitioning from working part-time at ABC which has allowed me to do other projects outside of ABC so I've done pieces for PBS and what I find interesting is that for me it's like using hold, it's like cross cross-training because the pace of the stories they literally told me to slow down when I was tracking like slow down this is public television and I was like oh right and no no no you know what it is I think two things no no no I think it's two things one is what they're used to and it would sound funny to them to have somebody like me go and I think but more importantly I think that and this important point is that the subjects on PBS and on shows like now with Bill Moyers are incredibly dense which are the kinds of subjects that commercial television stays away from and as a result you're dealing with concepts and you're dealing with ideas and even vocabulary that requires some thought and that's why it's sometimes harder to watch commercial television because talk about passive I mean you could watch 2020 like and barely nothing but PBS you know you really got to sit and concentrate and I think that's part of it this is my pet theory but as for technology I think things like Tivo for example are best friends and our worst enemies because on some levels it's our best friend because you don't have to get home at 6.30 that was part of the reason why the evening news audience nobody was home from work at 6.30 now you can time shift but you can also skip through and or choose not to watch certain things the one comment that I forgot to mention to the young woman who spoke earlier is that the one thing I fear about young people only getting their news from the net and my brother is a young person who does this and I find that he only eats dessert do you know what I mean like he checks to see how the LA Dodgers did and then he checks to see if there's anything about architecture and then he checks to see if there's something about blah blah blah and there's no sort of gatekeeping involved because you are clicking to what you want and not what I you know granted a bunch of middle-aged white guys would tell you is important but you know arguably that's kind of important too because it sets the public agenda it drives you to issues that are important you know there is something to be said about that hi my name is Swati Saini I'm a senior studying neuroscience and engineering and media studies you're a busy woman I was wondering if you could talk about how you got to where you were did you have a formal program I don't have a formal broadcast journal on your program the idea being I'd like to go into financial journalism currently I intern as a news reporter so I'm on an assignment desk so I can kind of testify to some of the things you're talking about behind scenes and I'll be interning at CNN the summer before I start a real-time job I get to know the cameraman because they're the ones that will let you build a reel because that's really more than anything what's important but I don't have you know I've taken a couple classes at BU and they're graduate school communications but I don't have first of all the time or the money to take a formal broadcast journalism program so maybe you can talk about that you know I didn't do it either you know there is a weird kind of bias against journalism school within you know sort of working journalists even though Columbia Journalism is a big deal and very important and an institution at which my husband teaches currently so maybe I shouldn't say such things but that camera isn't on is it no I'm just kidding I think that journalism was always considered kind of a trade and not a profession and so it was something that you were supposed to learn on the job and while I you know we would all benefit from reading Stuart's book about communication law which was one of the one courses I took at my undergraduate career that I thought was very helpful and a few of the concepts that I learned I was a double major in political science and communication we didn't really have a journalism thing either but I learned as much by being the news director at my college radio station then I did almost anything else and I think that the bias that working journalists have is that you should have a depth of knowledge in economics or as you say in business journalism whatever that you're much better off studying economics than you are studying journalism but yeah I mean you'll learn on the job with internships it sounds like you're interested enough and are there any tips you can give once you're on when you're in an internship what you should be doing the people you should be talking to how do you what's that borderline between being too annoying and too aggressive and also getting them to know who you are there's a lot I mean I would volunteer for things I'm amazed at how often interns will sit in their cubicles and wait to be called on you know that's not the way it works in a newsroom you just kind of have to and I wouldn't be annoying and nosy but if you really if you just stand there they'll be like you try the do-do-do-do you know because you know we're all short staffed in newsrooms so you know that's my advice great thank you good luck my name is Ed Embier I have a TV production company and one of the interesting things I've seen on a Bob Schaefer's show at the end he talks about on the web he lists three stories that people vote on and then they run two or three days later I'm just wondering if you've kind of tossed that idea around of what kind of stories people like to watch before you actually present them well there's clearly you can look at Yahoo or somebody to see what the most watched stories are what the most viewed stories of the day are at MSNBC or any of the websites you can do that it's interesting about you know letting the audience vote on what they want to see to go back to Juju's point I think it's fine to actually let them vote on features I wouldn't I think part of the reason if you only have if you only have half an hour to watch the news I think it's better to let people who are spent all day long thinking about it decide what the most important things are and if you don't you can go on the web and make your own decision but in terms of actually interacting with what's on television I was I was telling earlier a story about one of the things I did at Dayline I thought was such a cool idea it was a murder is a good interactive murder mystery and we're unraveling this tale and at every break you'll be able to say what do you want next do you want to know who do you think it was A or B or C you don't know how complicated the show is to produce and then during the break they would vote they wanted to see and that decided in what order the clues unravel so there were you know they're infinite combinations at every most complicated show I've ever produced but I thought this is it this is the convergence this is you go on the computer you vote what you want to see next and we did it three times each time it did worse and worse and worse now it could be that I'm like in the internet 15 years too soon and this is exactly what you'll be seeing but at the time I think but it was incredibly complicated to go through all that work and then they realize people were actually comfortable the original product the thing that is interesting to me is internally within ABC we get an email every day with the top downloaded webcasts and the top hits on the news site and it is invariably this weird amalgam of like President Bush speaks on immigration bill Hillary Clinton says X, Y and Z Pitbull adopts orphan kittens it's literally it's literally like that every day it's like Foreign Summit does this Iran's nuclear weapons then it was like the two-headed snake was born and it's always the two-headed snake I don't know where they get all these two-headed snakes but there's always some weird and that's what people are driven to is you know for three days in a row the woman with the perfect memory had the highest hits on our website there's some woman who has perfect memory and it was like literally the highest hit story we talk a lot about broadcasting by thought we should also spend a little time talking about cable because obviously cable has had and will continue to have an enormously influential role particularly going back historically 1980 which was the birth of CNN obviously MSNBC CNBC and Fox so why don't we talk a little bit about the role that cable has had in the shaping of news both within cable and how it's affected broadcast television well there was as Juju referred to when we talked about early days and to be this incredible arrogance the broadcast networks used to have they still do but because of the timing you sort of knew that the news cycle stopped when you said it stopped what else were they going to watch if you had a big story you could sit on it if you had decisions you wanted to make some interesting or controversial or perhaps dangerous alarming video comes in you go what should we do with this nightly news is not coming up till 6.30 let's all discuss it let's meet about it let's look at it those days are gone while you're sitting and meeting and looking at it you can look up on the monitors and everybody else has it so it's accelerated the decision time I don't think it's a particularly good thing that's just the way it is news happens and it gets covered like that there's an advantage to it if it's 2 in the afternoon you want to know what's going on with a big national issue you don't have to wait until 6.30 or 7 and I think all the cable networks during the day do a pretty good job of jumping on the big story and weighing in on important stories in Washington or if there's a big debate you can see it live I think that's a good thing at night where the most people actually watch cable television I think it's interesting that Fox and MSNBC would have been more than CNN have really if it were newspaper really kind of moved the op-ed into prime time and a lot of those shows I really like living breathing columns they're anchors or monitors with points of view they're not necessarily about informing you as much as they are about getting information and entertaining you and that's an interesting development for the broadcasters I think it's an interesting question are people being trained more and more when there's news happening to go to cable or to go to the internet clearly a lot of young people are on the other hand when 9-11 happened where's the one place people came back to in gigantic numbers they came back to the three traditional networks both young viewers and older viewers came back to that so there's still maybe a special role that broadcast networks fill a special value that they bring you know that it's great to have news 24-7 and that's a great function on the other hand it's great to have someone who can sit back and watch stuff and say you know what here's what the immigration bill really means here's why it's important here's why it's important to you there's four developments in the world of the war on terror and you could watch any number of press conferences or you could have somebody distill it back to you and say you know what this is the big thing to watch and I hope that what the networks provide in that sense doesn't get lost I think of it in from an editorial perspective as a reporter two things one it was the beginning of the cable news generation when I was in that job in Washington doing live shots to local stations and because there was a CNN and because there was MSNBC we were I was tethered to the satellite truck I literally couldn't go out and report the story I remember very vividly I was at a plane crash it was must have been Pan Am 103 and you know my editors kept saying well can you confirm this can you find out this and I'm like the officials are over there I'm cable to the truck I can't un-cable because my next live shot is in two minutes and the reason why my next live shot was in two minutes and there was this endless feeding of the beast was that the local stations felt like you know I'm being trumped I have a new newscast and I'm being trumped by CNN and I got to get it on I got to get on now and so there was a lot more of the you know feed the beast mentality which was difficult as a reporter it's good and it's bad I mean if you're Tim Russert and you have a scoop but you have to hold it until Sundays meet the press or that evening's nightly news you can now put it on MSNBC so the official who's just leaked it to you is happy because it's out quicker and you know there are all sorts of implications of that there's also the I mean this is also happening in the world of newspapers too because newspapers are now sort of what is the word when they put news out and they scoop themselves by putting things out on their websites now traditionally the competition on the newspapers were you wanted to keep the story away from your competitors but if you scoop yourself and put it on your website you know it's good and bad because now your competition knows exactly what you have and especially if it's an exclusive or you wanted to keep it and do you hold on to it do you wait for the printing presses do you put it on the website I mean it's an interesting set of questions you know strikes me what would be what would change my life as far as make me want to be a journalist is Wargate I was in high school when it happened I remember watching the hearings and seeing this is what an incredible moment history was and what I thought what a great public service reporters were doing by uncovering things that otherwise probably wouldn't have been revealed and I think now what would that world be like in the New York Times more the post in the Times but those two papers kind of own that story and every day in those newsrooms they would wait they would agree they would fax I think the story they're from pages to each other so they could see it and then they would know okay we got 24 hours to the next edition to try to catch up well what would happen now if that story broke even little bits of it broke first of all be discussed endlessly on cable there would be you know there would be a constant churning of it if the post got a big story would they wait or maybe not maybe they put it on the website and then they move out on the website with the network start to jump all over and then with the network news start breaking that story part of what I think happens is it accelerates the whole news cycle it means we have less time to make decisions it means policymakers have less time to make decisions because there's the policymakers are always concerned about what they call the news cycle it's like we have to get it out before the next news cycle and that news cycle is getting shorter and shorter I mean it's interesting that look at a story like Katrina I doubt it was an incredible story but I think part of the notion about officials being at whatever level you know and sub par performance because not just did you see it on the evening news but you saw it constantly all day long on cable you saw these horrific images so the day is just saying look we'll just get to the morning broadcast then we can breathe for like five hours we'll come out strong at six o'clock and we'll try to play well with the evening papers that's a lot harder to do now let's get to the questions do you know who was first? okay go ahead hi I'm Tess I'm with the CMS department and I'm just sort of wondering what you see is the role of network news television today because granted that it is there to appeal to a large audience and sort of give people a common alvey for something in common especially when things happen there's a lot of skepticism especially on young people like if I'm going to get news I'm listening to NPR and especially when you have globalization being so radically important it's something that feels like you're only giving the American audience this dumbed-down American version of the news speaking for all my brethren I think they're probably just the dumbed-down part I think there's no doubt that we probably it is more towards an American perspective because I think that is that is the audience you know if you I remember during the war I'm watching how different the BBC was than American reporting and it's not so much I think because either one had a specific agenda I think it's because the BBC guys were in Basra where the Brits were having a much tougher time in combat and their stories were more more grisly because the British troops were having a harder time and when the American troops were rolling easily towards Baghdad the American stories reflected what American reporters saw that American troops were in you know I think there's clearly some skepticism about the mainstream media that I don't mean to imply there isn't I think the challenge for the established broadcast networks are many it's to try to figure out how to get their products out on other platforms is to try to I think reflect as much as we can or be sensitive to people who have objections about what the broadcast do but I think for the most part you know it's not so long since I stopped doing this I'm pretty proud of what the networks do I think for the most part it's pretty fair and objective and it's people doing their best to try to tell you what happened that's important and trying to call it down the middle it may not always seem that way I accept that and I think especially the more you're maybe passionate on one issue the less it will seem like they were calling it down the middle I was speaking to another thing the other day about journalism and I had one person come up to me and say you're so incredibly unfair to the Palestinians I don't understand why you don't talk about how repressive the Israelis are I don't understand why the calls for homeland aren't reflected I don't understand why you didn't talk about the demeaning way in which they're treated and that person left and someone came up and said I don't understand why you're so unfair to the Israelis you don't talk about the constant threats they were under you don't talk about how the Palestinians are totally unreasonable you don't talk about the life it's like for an average Israeli I think both those people are calling it they really see it for us many times is to say you know what we have to try to look at it as I said down the middle and if you're passionate on one side or the other I accept the fact it's not going to seem that way to you why don't we alternate so we'll go here and then come back here Hi my name is Dean Janssen I'm a student at the Harvard Extension School and I was just wondering I wanted to get you guys's opinion you were talking about the having gatekeepers and moderators are you guys familiar with Newsvine it's a service that I think some people who came from ESPN maybe and also Disney have started kind of a news community almost where people are able to Newsvine where people are able to submit stories and kind of create dialogue on the different stories and in doing so communities are built and so people will kind of become trusted sources on certain topics where they're regularly making interesting comments and submitting interesting stories so I just want to get your opinion on I think that's an interesting concept how that kind of gatekeeping compares to the type of gatekeeping that you find value in well it sort of points to the rise of blogs and this idea that there are incredibly smart people out there who write some of these blogs the problem that I have with it is that occasionally it's hard to know online what someone's credentials are and what someone's biases might be and again, I mean look we're all human beings even at the network we try to be objective and we try to keep our objectivity but we're all human beings and we are flawed no doubt the concern that I would have in something like a Newsvine community well I think it's an intriguing concept and clearly an area that would be sort of like the news equivalent of Myspace it sounds like and I think that increasing the public discourse is current events is an incredibly valuable and important thing so on that score it's really important I do wonder though sort of what happens if a corporate sponsor or somebody posing to be somebody else which often happens on the internet you can often pose as somebody that you're not starts to manipulate public opinion in a way either with as we often find on information sources from the internet is either completely wrong or distorted or untrue and again there's misinformation that often makes it all the way to the network news too but we try our best to vet our sources and to make sure that that doesn't happen I think anything that gets people engaged in news is a great thing it's a tragedy that 100 turnouts in this country are so low it's a scandal that we live in a time where you know we face threats perceived or not from around the world we live at a time when when terrorists could strike anywhere we live at a time when issues about fundamental civil rights and human rights around the world are often ignored it's a pivotal point in history and yet people I mean people aren't engaged I think that's a terrible thing in any way people can get engaged in that is good and whatever news communities and whatever form people get information I think one of the best things that news can do is to make you re-examine your views that's one of the best things that any reporter can do and what I think is a shame in any group whatever it is is that if you morphs into something which only seeks to reinforce your own opinions right because you know the world changes you can be right today and wrong tomorrow you can be right on one set of circumstances and then the circumstances change and look at the different ways our countries flow to the different political voting patterns and the way the countries move from left to right and back and forth again I just think what would be a bad thing in this world of technology is if people get together and say let's just keep talking to people who will keep telling us that we're correct and we'll make sure as we look at everybody else we'll find ways to screen out or adjust or you know analyze any fact that doesn't quite fit into our atmosphere and we'll talk about it so it does fit in our atmosphere I just think that would be a bad thing it reminds me of Italian journalism Italian newspaper journalism in Italy there are a bajillion newspapers and you would think that's a good thing but each of the newspapers is controlled by a political party so they have obviously they're built in you know buying whatever paper that you're buying that it's that built in bias but it is what Neil is saying it just reinforces what you already believe it creates further divisions and that's why I think the idea of journalistic objectivity is so important and again this is an intriguing idea again I would applaud anything that would increase public discourse on current affairs but I do think there is some importance to having an objective gatekeeper even possible Hi I'm Cory I'm an editor from the world of print what do you think it says about TV news when more and more people are watching John Stewart and more people in this room watch get their news from what's essentially a fake news show as opposed to the evening news well you know I don't I don't know frankly it's that much different in the sense that though he talks it's a fake news show and it's a funny news show you know I think there are people who used to get their information from Johnny Carson what's in the news and they want the funny spin on it and John Stewart is incredibly funny, clever, entertaining guy who also has I think oftentimes a point of view on some issues and I find him incredibly interesting and entertaining I think it's too bad that we have to say one has to negate the other I think it's great if you want to laugh about any bit of absurdity that John Stewart can find I think it's a shame if that tends to drive out just actually understanding the story or the issue in a deeper way I think your question is a great counterpoint to her question though which is you know we can do NPR type of stories all the time but then we drive away the audience I mean there's a reason why PBS gets a fraction of the audience that the commercial networks do is because the commercial networks are concerned about the commercial imperative so we try to be more engaging and more entertaining and more like John Stewart not in the literal sense but in the conceptual sense and so we are often we are driving between these poles of trying not to alienate people trying to give good information trying to do the right socially responsible thing and maintain an audience maintain the John Stewart audience which is enormous and growing John Stewart has said and is the first to say don't just rely on me laugh with me but you know learn from somebody else yeah I wanted to do a follow up on the John Stewart question Henry Henry Henry Henry Henry Jenkins head of comparative media studies I wanted to do a follow up on the John Stewart question because it seems to me the usual explanation is John Stewart's funny well what if we take the view that John Stewart represents viewpoints that are not on the evening news which is to say Libertarians for example are more likely to be guest on John Stewart and Bill Maher than on the evening news which is to find the debate around the two central parties and what if we look at the fact that Comedy Central provided more hours of coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions than the three networks combined and say that people go to that not because Comedy Central is trivializing the news but because some of the things that you as network news used to do like provide gavel to gavel coverage of presidential conventions you're not doing it anymore you know and the argument is that's not news but the fact Barack Obama's speech didn't air on several of the major networks one would have to say it was one of the most important speeches in the late 20th century political rhetoric but it wasn't as fine as news by networks so I think one wants to say what is he doing well that you guys used to do and are no longer doing and I think that's one of the one reason why I as someone who's not of the generation of people in this room get more attention now from John Stewart than I tend to do from the network evening news I think there are two issues here let's separate the conventions from the other stuff John Stewart does because if you wanted to watch news on a conventional news audience you could watch it on CNN or MSNBC or C-Span which provides by the way natural sound versions you just hear exactly like you're sitting in the hall so if you want to get it there so I don't think that's the reason and it is more lefty libertarian there's no doubt about it but I don't think that's what the network news used to do I don't think it was ever funny I don't think it was ever particularly lefty or hopefully ever particularly writing I just think that's not what it should be about I think that's things we give up and I think if we I love John Stewart I don't want to see only John Stewart I think it would be a shame if everybody felt like that's the only way to present the news Hi my name is Chi-Seng Fu and I'm a scientist at MIT here I want to go to the lightest side of the broadcast tonight and Jiji, you're a correspondent for 2020 at ABC and I'm very impressed that tonight you've been extremely gracious and graceful actually being very vocally complimentary to new your husband who is really, let's face it, your rival exactly at MBC News so I'm curious what is the real dynamics it's like back home when you guys go home at night is it like you hate each other during the day or behind closed doors it's a different thing you know it's funny we were always in different places within our respective news divisions and so we never went sort of head to head it's funny there were occasionally times when I would work on stories that Neil when he was at a date line would be working at also like we would be going after similar characters and the whole booking wars between networks is a big deal but it's always been friendly I mean I don't even feel like it was ever very competitive although when I first became made a producer at ABC News I remember turning to Neil and saying how old were you exactly when you were made a producer and did I beat you to the punch? did you guys compare notes at night? yeah sometimes we do I mean you know shop talk is not we're not immune from having shop talk at home unfortunately so I'll tell you that Beth she's just an incredible person so I would I would be married this incredible and I'd feel that way whether they had the same profession or not but having the same profession there's a lot of great things about it you just know instantly you only have to tell each other when 9-11 happened we weren't going to see each other for a while if we're working on something I have to work way I get it that's what it's about I understand the pride she can feel in something which may go by you know four minutes of television or three minutes of television or two minutes of television but I think I know how hard it was to do or some of the great things she does or some of the great lines she writes and I know how hard that is to do I mean being a correspondent is really hard and we talked about how the world has changed there used to be a time when you could just be a great writer and that would be it if you worked for the network because networks didn't do live things they were on the air for these fixed period and point signs and that was it or you could be like in local news you could be a live person but you wouldn't write all that much anyway because you're mostly talking to get to a point where you have to be able to write beautifully anchor live breaking news be out in the field interviewing people and doing a two camera interview which Judy does a lot is very very difficult to be able to have all those skills in one person you know is a really humbling thing I'll pay him back later the one thing I will tell you that's kind of funny is that occasionally we've tried to work together on a few things and you know he used to be at ABC and so that's when we first met but I've occasionally given him a script of mine and said you know what do you think you know and he'll make a little note or a thought and I'll say what do you know anyway and we cannot work together I mean it's way too personal so on that level I am always in awe of husband and wife working couples because we just we can't do it I love you honey question I'll apologize in advance I have a terrible cold my voice veils me I'm Brian Henderson I worked for CNN and I also worked for a local station in Connecticut I think what a lot of people don't understand or don't think about is that in local news most packages are about a minute 30 and when I worked at CNN most packages averaged about two minutes 30 seconds and I think when people are talking about the dumbing down of news they don't understand that we're trying to squish and summarize all that information at a time and I think that's sort of been the difference between television and newspaper where in the newspaper in a magazine you know if people complain to me in the field I say well you know check a newspaper on the web or something if you want to find some more in-depth information and I was thinking just sitting there that you probably already do have this on your websites but you really need to make it a point that they can go to the website to get more in-depth information about whatever the topic may be because that's been the number one complaint I've heard about local news or all news network news as well anyway my question you were talking earlier about being a gatekeeper and I've noticed especially since 9-11 and the advent of Fox News Channel and all that news has become much more Americanized American centric at least that's the way it seems to me and there's a lot of stuff happening in the world and I would like to see more reporting on places where people aren't just killing each other we always seem to hear about the Israelis and the Palestinians or the latest war but there's a lot of stuff happening around the world that I think Americans need to be more aware of that it's not just us we're on this little island that there's a lot of stuff happening around us when I left CNN they were talking about squishing down the bureaus but 9-11 happened so I was wondering to make a long question shorter are there any plans to beef up your foreign bureaus and to focus a little more on international news instead of just the sort of America centric news that we've been seeing lately I could just sharpen that a little bit Neil when you got to NBC News as president how many foreign bureaus were there and at the time that you left was there a difference in the number I don't think we actually I think they didn't really change the Tokyo Bureau sort of went away we added more people in London we opened and we opened a bureau in Iraq so we probably have more people overseas now than when I got the job but there's no doubt there's not a lot of there's not a lot of foreign news on television and I think that's for a couple reasons one I think is some of the big foreign stories eat up so much attention and time you look how much Iraq is the biggest running international story we're certainly the biggest American story and properly it should be and that eats up an awful lot of time secondly the world's changed parties I think you saw so much more about the rest of the world is before the wall fell when the cold war was sort of defined what foreign relations was in this country that meant at the most base level was us against the Soviet Union that played out all over the world it played out in Eastern Europe it played out behind the wall played out in Southeast Asia played out in wars in Central America where we perceived all these places because essential the view was our interests, our survival essential US interests are all on the line between that time the falling of the wall and 9-11 I think the world changed a lot I think there was a growing prosperity increasing peace around the world and Americans tended to view and the country's priorities were much more about economic growth and we started to cover the world in different ways we started to cover in terms of new markets and competition in China we changed it again I think the fundamental question people get up in the morning the single biggest question I think somebody has is, am I safe? I think that nothing trumps that and that does mean that terrorism is going to be the primary focus of what we do now I wish as someone who I could read as an economist I wish Americans had more appetite for foreign news and you can argue it's chicken versus egg but I will tell you that every time a date line I would put foreign news stories on the air there are always the lowest rated stories we did as a journalist I was there I was there when the Berlin Wall fell I was there that night I worked for a show called Primetime Lab we were live as the Berlin Wall fell it was the lowest rated Primetime Live ever I may ask just a very quick follow up do you think that people's surprise about the events that happen on 9-11 has to do with basically their lack of understanding of what's going on in the world around them maybe if we heard more about what's happening why people feel about us however they feel about us maybe we'd be less surprised and maybe we'd do more about it you know I have to say just personally and not as a journalist and not as a employee of ABC News I think at the highest levels of policy making in this country there was surprise I think even major counter-terrorism experts were surprised I think the idea that we and Tom Friedman talks about this all the time and he is a preeminent foreign policy columnist for the New York Times he talks about his surprise the idea that we were unable to fathom that level of evil that men would fly airplanes into buildings filled with innocent people was beyond the scope and I think that the surprise was almost universal aside from Richard Clark I can't think of very many people even on a policy level who stood up and said I knew this was going to happen and I know that there have been hearings at what did the NSC know and when did they know it but I think that on another level it was bigger than that I'm sorry I didn't mean people in government I meant just general normal Americans who seem to be less aware of the world around them right there's that argument to be made but I think that on another level the surprise was more universal than that thank you actually I have two questions one is a follow up to the general discussion here that I think I'd like to hear more from both Juju and Neil about this question of the response to 9-11 because one of the country's idea of 9-11 Neil when you said that you think the number one priority for most Americans now is am I safe I think you're probably right about that but I think that the explanation for why you're right about that is a critique of the news media is a critique of the abjectness with which the news media in the United States bought an account of 9-11 and subsequent accounts that essentially came from the Bush administration this is not my own complaint of course it's a very widespread argument that many critics of American journalism have made and one of the points they make of course is that many of other societies in the world including Great Britain including the Israelis who have lived with a constant threat of terrorism far greater, far more systematic far more real than the threat of terrorism at the United States has faced and maybe still faces we had one attack on us it was a horrendous and horrific attack to be sure but nothing has happened since it's only been one attack and yet it is true that Americans now believe that they're under constant threat and yet they believe that where do they get that idea the answer that's proposed by certain critics of American journalism with whom I have great sympathy I'm not sure they're totally right but I think that there's something in their argument is that American journalism in general not just the broadcast media but the print media as well have been relatively abject in simply accepting an account of these things that is already partisan and in addition of course it plays into the hands of the people in power to create a sense of constant fear because then any civil liberties that you want to over go you can over go because after all we need to be safe before anything else so I'm wondering whether or not as observers of journalism I don't want you to sort of say maya culpa I'm responsible I don't think either of you are but whether you feel that there's anything in this indictment of the news media in general and maybe the broadcast media in particular news in general I think you could look back over the history of the war and say why don't we know more I will say that you know it would be great if journalists had the ability of historians to look back over a long period of time and sift through documents and try to get people months or years after something happened and get that point of view but for journalists kind of doing day to day I will say this I don't think anybody I think everybody that I knew tried to get the best picture we could of what was happening and why it's happening not just about the war but about terrorism in general and I do think part of this is in any story you are bound by kind of what you're able to learn we live in a this administration is particularly loyal to each other it's not an administration where they're just full of leaks so even though we're finding out things now we're finally hearing from some generals we're coming forward three years after the war to say here's what happened I assure you that if we could have found those people then we would have put them on if they were talking then they would have put them on there were ordinary citizens let's mention Noam Chomsky as an example and many others less crazy than Noam Chomsky less extreme than Noam Chomsky who were making this argument there were people saying it they weren't officials and there were people in other countries heads of other countries it wasn't the case that there wasn't a vast body of opinion the overwhelming majority of the world had doubts about there were people to be interviewed I don't disagree with that and I have to go back and look I don't think that the sense in the appropriate opinion in the debates on CNN and MSNBC you didn't find people who said I'm suspicious I think it's true you didn't find a lot of reporting that was able to uncover things but I don't think that was from the lack of trying this is obviously an ongoing problem I wanted to turn to another matter that has also come up in your discourse Neil although I think you alluded to it briefly but Neil you've emphasized it more Neil it had to do although you were very sort of generous about it and in a way didn't name names but you talked a bit about what I would call the polarization of the news and you talked about what a bad implicitly you were saying it really isn't such a great thing at least there's a downside to the idea that this proliferation of news outlets creates an environment in which reactionaries can go to the reactionary news reactionaries can go to the libertarian news and the experience is therefore not to be informed of anything but simply to be confirmed in your prejudices now I think that's a rather acute description of what might be one of the dominant tendencies in American journalism right now and certainly on American on television news especially if we extend it beyond the broadcast networks and I'm wondering if you would develop that a little bit further one implication of your argument is that the phenomenon of Fox News and the fact that Anderson Cooper has replaced Aaron Brown as an anchor which is to me a much more actually significant event in some respects those of you who don't know this Aaron Brown was a kind of intellectual cronkite type he was very well spoken he was analytic, he was witty he was essentially laid back and tried to get perspective on stories he was dropped as the CNN anchor for Anderson Cooper Anderson Cooper's show is unbelievably personal it's almost as if Anderson Cooper doesn't want to give straight news but he wants to talk about how people feel about the news and how he feels about the news there's a tremendous emphasis in Anderson Cooper what's the name of the show Anderson Cooper 360 on Anderson Cooper's feelings and I'm not exaggerating this if you ever look at the show it's quite remarkable and he also emphasizes the feelings of the people and their views as if the show is really about the emotional state of the world instead of what's actually happened I mentioned that because it seems to me an instance of this another instance of this tendency first do you think that this tendency will come to an end or is it going to get worse are we moving further in that direction is news going to be more polarized and more specialized than it was before more opinionated than it was before and even if that's not the case how serious do you think this problem is the implication of what you were saying is that you thought it is very serious well I think news is an evolving thing and I would say there are two separate things going on I would say what the Anderson Cooper Aaron Brown and I know both of them so I don't want to make this a personal thing and I've worked with both of them I think that's one phenomena which I would call the authenticity side of where news may be going I think part of what made Anderson reporting stand out in Katrina was this notion that you felt it was very authentic that he wasn't sitting there reading a carefully polished script that he was reacting to some of the absurdities he saw to some of the indignities that when he talked to people and they seemed to be spinning him he was almost offended by it that I think is different and that may be and part of what younger people seem to like about news is the notion of a formal anchor sitting there with a tie reading a carefully scripted thing feels less authentic to them feels like it's not real in any sense you have to tell me what's happened you spend all this time polishing it and some people like that more than others that doesn't bother me as much maybe whether you want your news carefully scripted and polished and you want the perspective and you want someone to spend all day long or you want to know here's what it feels like right now the notion of getting some personal emotion as long as it's not policy bothers me less in other words the notion of saying in a disaster is you know this is a horrible scene people are screaming and what everybody would agree is objective not affected by policy troubles me less I think that's maybe where reporting is going and some people like it and some people won't that's different than I think reporting which seems to come from a policy point of view which seems to be when whatever organization or group or news community gets up and says our view about this we think that policy A is wrong we think that's wrong and so we're going to look at today's events through that prism and nothing is going to change our mind about policy A being wrong if stuff comes up that makes policy A seem not so smart we're going to tear holes in that if you have something good to say about policy A we're going to make sure you hear about that that's unfortunate because policy A might be wrong and if that's the only thing you watch you're never going to know it and I do think that's a troubling thing I don't even mind programs which are give and make in the world of cable in which it's clear people have points of view and that's what it's about but I do think when the lines start to get crossed and it's not clear that that's what you're seeing that troubles me I think some of Fox's like that there was a very prominent article in the New York Times probably in the last three or four days about Lou Dobbs I'm only quoting from the article and it basically said that he has been very outspoken about his view against the immigration legislation that's moving its way through Congress right now and he made several points and he was even if I remember the article correctly and I'm just quoting from the article heading to Mexico to meet with Vicente Fox and other leaders during this summit on immigration so this idea that he's not just a newsman not just reading the news but stating his opinions about his opinions and even literally trying to influence policy makers face to face is a whole new world and so in answer to your question I think there's going to be more of that because Lou Dobbs is a pretty popular man at CNN and I think that people are on some level drawn to that Do you think that Lou Dobbs has been defining themselves as the anti-Fox in some way? It's hard to know I think CNN is changing a lot and they've got a bunch of different shows up in the air I think I want to cut you off but I think it's a mistake necessarily to say that one show does or doesn't typify a network you know I mean I think that CNN has been pre-vocal it says Lou Dobbs does not necessarily reflect Anderson Cooper they're two different distinct personalities and I think some of the Fox shows are more alike than some of the other ones I just think the confusion is that nobody should watch a show that has clearly got a clear point of view and think that it does not have a clear point of view I think Bill is very clear that's how Bill sees the world I think Bill is a great communicator I don't think he's shy about that this is my view, this is how I see it My name is Kent Jackson I'm a parent of a pre-frosh but also a journalist I think maybe as we talked about we've talked about the different perspectives that the let's say Fox News might have versus ABC News you mentioned Italian newspapers are owned by one side or the other some people are drawn into that part it's a debate and it might be a way that it also recharges the citizen tree but I was wondering how do you tell people to spot the filter on a news show how do you take it off and pull out the real news versus the spin I think it's actually a fun debate in newsrooms to have is to try to get at what we really think is going on here at NBC I say how do you think Fox would cover this story and it's interesting just to say is that right or wrong you know Bernie Goldberg has written a series of books one of the things he says is there's not so much conscious point of views but unconscious point of views which perhaps get reflected in our newsrooms more likely to say liberal senator Ted Kennedy but more like say conservative senator Jesse Helms but not liberal senator Ted Kennedy it's good to always ask yourself do we do that that's an important thing for any newsroom to look at I thought we should close with a little bit of prognostication so if we were looking to figure this out what do you think the television news landscape might look like I think five years from now you're going to see get more news in more places in more and more different ways I think the challenge is going to be for people to try to figure out what's different or makes their news broadcast or site or phone special because everybody's going to basically have the same information I think you know today was the day that Meredith Vieira was announced yesterday Katie Kirk was announced I think that on some level in order to cut through television news is going to continue to require big names and big personalities and I think that it's going to continue to move in that direction as well it's fractionalizing the audience on some level through the different delivery mechanisms but also keeping this sort of big network entity as embodied by these big personalities and do you think that the three broadcast networks will still have central roles to play here or everything will be relatively diffused across technologies I think five years from now you're still going to know CBS, NBC and ABC those big powers in news I have to agree thank you all for being here thank you so much