 Welcome, everyone. Good morning. This is Washington Circle, our international exchange alumni show, where we are trying to connect alumni with fabulous experts in various fields across different industries. We're joined this morning at the Foreign Press Center by Nancy Gibbs, who's the editor-in-chief of Time. Time has 50 million readers around the world. She's the first woman to hold this prestigious position. She joined Time as a fact-checker in 1985, and she is one of the most published writers in the history of the magazine. She's covered virtually every major news event over the past two decades, including presidential campaigns and the September 11th attacks. She is also co-authored to best-selling presidential history books, and she often appears as a guest on radio and television. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. Thanks for having me. We're honored to have you. In addition to this live viewing audience we have here in New York, we have viewing parties around the world at embassies, consulates, and American spaces. So we just want to give a quick shout-out to our guests in Cuba, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Seychelles, Nigeria, Israel, Canada, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Welcome to all of you, and to everyone who's joining us online at alumni.state.gov.slive. Please remember you can always join in the chat space to ask your questions, and you can also tweet us at exchange alumni. You can also use the hashtag Ask Nancy Gibbs. Don't know if you saw that hashtag floating around this week. I hope that doesn't get loose. It might. It might continue on. Our guests in Cuba were the first to ask questions, and so we thought we'd start with them, if that's all right. So the first question from Cuba says, time has featured Fidel Castro a number of times since 1959. Which other Cuban person or subject could become a time front cover page anytime soon? What was interesting was last year or the year before, as the sort of new opening to Cuba was really becoming a reality, we did a cover that was not about a Cuban personality, leader, athlete, artist, but just about what it would mean for Cuba to open up again to the U.S. and for people who have not been able to easily visit for generations to be able to go. And what fascinated me was it was one of the favorite stories when we do research with our readers of what cover stories did you like the most over the course of the year, and our newsstand sales are a teeny tiny fraction, so they don't tell you much, but it was both one of the best selling on the newsstand and one of the ones that our readers liked the most, which just clued me in on the fact that interest in the U.S. at least in Cuba is really significant. So I'm not sure that we would, we always like to tell stories through individuals, but I think people are interested in the country and in what the experience will be like for these two countries to reinvent their relationship. And of course, assuming that that reinvention continues under the next administration and that's going to be the asterisk to probably every single thing we talk about this morning. Very true. Our next question is about women in journalism. So Time Magazine, you have next generation leaders that you feature and we're very proud. Two of them are actually exchange alumni. Ikram Ben-Sahid and Negat Dodd both work in different aspects of women's empowerment and in women's issues. As a woman in journalism, do you feel any special responsibility or pressure to discuss women's issues in the magazine? That's a great question because, and it's one that we, there's a new group at my company, Women at Timing, where we were having a conversation about this very subject. In fact, I'm in a dinner tonight that Harvard Shorenstein Center is running that's about women in journalism. This is very much an active conversation. And I think one of the reasons it's challenging is I always get anxious at anything that sort of treats women as a minority group or as any kind of a monolithic group that at some point, like back in 1974 maybe, Times Man of the Year, it was still called Man of the Year then, was women. It's just like, really? And so where I find myself always getting a little uneasy is thinking about women as an interest group or as a special category because the, I mean we all know this in our own lives, the differences in attitude and interest and priority among individual men and women differs much more than, you know, it's not, so many things are not defined by gender, they're defined by, you know, your job, your family, your community where you grew up, your faith, you know, so many other factors. Having said that, I think that, you know, certainly time for a long time, like many news organizations, especially sort of traditional news organizations, was heavily dominated by men. And, you know, many of you know it took lawsuits for many of these newsrooms to actually start integrating women into their upper editorial ranks. And I can't help thinking that the conversation around the table changed simply by having twice as big a pool of people to draw on when you're hiring writers and editors and when you're promoting writers and editors, that just by definition the range of topics that we would be aware of and thinking about. And so in my newsroom, especially this year, we've been having a lot of conversations about gender, about gender politics, about identity politics, and how to cover this. And there isn't anything like a consensus either among the women or the men or the newsroom as a whole. I'm glad it's a conversation that's going on, but I don't feel as though there is a, there is one specific mission or set of goals and priorities that any woman in a leadership role in media needs to adhere to or work against. I think it's more complex than that because our audience is, especially at time, you know, there are fewer and fewer media organizations, news organizations that are speaking to as broad an audience as we do. It's, as this indicates, it's a global audience. And it's almost equally male and female. And sort of ideologically and politically, we speak to a very wide range of people. That's, as we all know, it's as the president talked about last night. That is less and less the case as we all, you know, find our information bubbles and decorate and inhabit them. And so one of the things I'm most conscious of is thinking it's a huge part of our mission at time to maintain that audience that welcomes everyone into the conversation. And so if I feel like we are skewing one way or another in our approach, that starts to make me anxious. And so again, having the most diverse possible group of people around the table. And I define diversity in very broad terms. I was very, I was angry at Rick Stengel, my predecessor at time, and who went to the State Department, that he took with him at one point the only person in my newsroom who had served active duty in the military. And I felt like we lost a crucial piece of diversity and of insight by losing Nate, who is also just a wonderful colleague and a wonderful journalist. So, you know, it'll be as high a priority to me of like, okay, how do I address that as any other kind of recruiting challenge? And in follow-up to that, some people are wondering what obstacles are women and others when you talked about diversity more broadly facing in the field of journalism nowadays. You mentioned the lawsuits and other changes that have helped shape current newsrooms, but what are the big obstacles now? Yeah, I think we've seen over the years, you know, we've seen so many women rise to the top positions at, you know, everywhere from the New York Times to anchoring the evening news to, you know, very important magazines and newspapers, that this is no longer, I was actually surprised when I was named the editor at time that it was treated as being as big a deal it was that, oh, you know, after 16 men there's now a woman in this position. Because I sort of assumed at this point that these barriers have been coming down. I think that the obstacles to women in many cases are the same as the obstacles to men, which is as a almost a matter of lifestyle journalism has become very challenging. If you're doing it in many parts of the world, it's become very dangerous for men and women alike. If you are, at one point we realized that most of the reporters and photographers we had in combat zones and in the most hazardous postings were all women in their 20s. And we were like, well, this is, that's interesting. That wasn't intentional on anyone's part, but the most sort of frontline reporters during that period was a bunch of really talented, fearless, enterprising women covering really challenging stories. You know, those stories are challenging for men and women. And in the age of 24-7 news, the job really never, you never feel like you're off duty. And so for anyone who's trying to figure out how do you have a balanced life, which I think is important to everyone, I think is particularly important for journalists, I think you have to make time to live in the world that your audience lives in and not just in the world of hyperactive media consumption and creation. How do you discipline yourself to figure out when do you turn off, when do you unplug, when do you actually talk to human beings and take your eyes off your screens and your devices? This is not a challenge unique to journalists. It's certainly not distinct to men and women. But I think it's a real one. I mean, I think that the fact that we can be working all the time and feeling like we never can be completely on top of the stories that we're covering because these stories, I mean, think of the last 24 hours. These are just extraordinary amounts of important, interesting, fateful stuff that can happen in one 24-hour period. And so if your job is to make sense of any of this, you feel like your job is constantly impossible. And so it becomes really hard to say, you know what, it's actually more important for me to go take a walk or talk to my kids or meditate or, you know, make a smoothie than it is to just stay continuously revving within the new cycle. I think that's a challenge for certainly all journalists and for a lot of people who are in all of the related fields that we're in. Definitely. I think we all feel that anyone who works in digital media as well. I just want to remind our audience here if you all have any questions, just signal and we'll make sure we get the microphone to you as well. We're going to open the floor here. Does anyone have any questions? Yes? Yes? Okay. We've won in the front row. Good morning, Ms. Gates. Hi, Kristi. I'm a teacher and an educational consultant. I'm concerned about my students' future. So could we talk about climate change and the press? For so many years, the press gave equal voice to climate deniers who had no background in climatology or were hired by oil companies. And climatologists like our own Dr. Wallace Broker, a professor at Columbia University here. As a result, it's now 2017 and many people in America are still confused about the science of climate and climate change. So how does the press help us get out of that quagmire? Yes, I would challenge the idea that the press gave equal coverage or treated climate deniers as being every bit as authoritative and sources as the scientists who were... The standard thing that most stories about having to do with climate policy say is that there is a consensus in the scientific community that climate change is driven by man-made actions. And climate deniers are typically called out as being a minority that is very much at odds with the consensus of the scientific community. And so I don't feel like there's a sort of equal time, all points of view are equally valid in the way that climate change is covered. But, and I think this may be partly what you're getting at, it is exactly because of the siloing of information streams that it is certainly possible for someone to have a media diet that only includes people who are disputing the science of climate change because it is very possible to tailor your sources of information to the ones that support a world view and where you will not encounter any kind of disagreement. And so the larger question is how do you... And again, this is one of the things that the president raised last night as a challenge I think that certainly policymakers feel, politicians feel, journalists feel of who has authority to be orbiters of fact. And I doubt there has been a political season in which Moynihan's injunction about your entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts has been cited more often as having been now challenged, that now people feel entitled to their own facts. And the 2016 was a year in which the notion that there is a set of agreed upon authoritative expert factual knowledge that can be taken as a baseline for debate was routinely undermined by the way the political conversation unfolded. And I think that that's very much where we are now in everything from the age of fake news to the what is reported as proven, what is reported as rumor, what is reported as... Because nothing stays unreported anymore as we are reminded again that the ability... And this goes back, I mean you can sort of put a date on when that started which was when the Drudge Report was first born and published the news about Monica Lewinsky where there were reporters who had been following that story and trying to figure out what was going on in that story but didn't feel that they had proof that met their standards for publishing. And every news organization has how many sources do you need and what kind of evidence will make you confident enough of the truth of a story that you're willing to publish it. And that has been true in newsrooms forever. Now where if a story doesn't meet the standards of these news organizations it will meet the standards of these outlets or this blogger or this individual with a Twitter following and so nothing is ever likely to go unpublished. If by published it means put out into the information ecosystem through one channel or another. The days in which editors like me controlled the channels are obviously long past. And so anyone with an agenda, whether it's an agenda about climate or an agenda about foreign policy or an agenda about health and health care reform or vaccines and whether they're safe. Anyone who has a point of view has a way of sharing it, promoting it, publishing it, whether or not it ever appears in any kind of a traditional news organization. I think that that is the challenge to authority, the challenge to expertise. It has been so much the narrative of this past year and it makes the stakes all the higher for those of us who are operating on principles that what our readers and viewers need most from us is that we be disciplined about our fact checking and our sourcing and how confident are we about something that we're willing to publish it, that there have to be sources that people trust when you are operating at a time when there's so many sources that are not adhering to those standards. So when you mentioned people who have blogs and Twitter accounts with large followings, how they're now able to publish their opinions often as facts, we did get a question as the editor in chief of time, how do you see social media changing the landscape of traditional media and the way the press functions and gets information out and what do you think the future relationship will be between say those people with those large Twitter followings and blogs with traditional press? I'm suspecting most editors keep wondering if this is sort of a devil's bargain where on the one hand if all of us who are in journalism aspire to reach as many people as possible and engage in a conversation with as many people as possible and to just raise the quality of debate about issues that matter. The power of social media to amplify really great reporting and profound insight is extraordinary. Henry Luce was the greatest publisher of the 20th century and in his wildest dreams he would not have been able to reach an audience that we can reach now. Even at a time when I would be the first to admit that time as an institution is less powerful than it was in 1950 or 1960 and yet our audience and our ability to engage with people and not just one way but in a two way conversation has never been greater. That's an extraordinary gift. But on the other hand the challenge that it represents to the business model that supports journalism has been profound. It is just much, much easier to have access to information without having to pay for it which makes it much more difficult for us to fund the creation of important... I mean some of the work that I think is most important that we've been doing as a business proposition is counterintuitive. I feel like we've talked about how a lot of news organizations are going to be hiring people who can write grant proposals that some portion of journalism is going to become a philanthropic, nonprofit driven because the business model to support... We have a project that I'm very invested in that we launched at the beginning of the year with a fantastic photographer, Lindsay Adario and Aaron Baker, our bureau chief in Africa called Finding Home where we're following the newborn babies of four Syrian women in refugee camps in Greece about what is the experience like of being born stateless and you come home from the hospital with your newborn to attend. What is this year going to be like? And the investment in resources and trying to take this enormous epic story of mass migration and the challenge of refugees in Europe and making it human, making it one that we can all identify with and follow and imagine ourselves walking in these shoes. That's at the heart of what we need to be doing but there isn't any business model for supporting that. There isn't an easy way to have that make sense as a business proposition. And yet to go back to the social media part of this when we do a project like that if I want to put that in front of an audience that would not normally encounter it who might not be subscribers to time, who might not find us and Christy Turlington tweets out what we're doing or Ben Stiller does or any of any number of celebrities or for that matter David Miliband and any of the NGOs who are profoundly invested in this topic where their entire news and social ecosystem is now tapped into this project. We have the ability to reach people that we never would be able to reach otherwise. So it's an enormous tool of amplification even as it's, of course, you know, it's in some ways an economic challenge and it's a challenge in the sense that, you know, who is the arbiter of what counts as true or not true? What deserves attention as opposed to what gets attention? Not always the same thing. Definitely. I'm glad you mentioned finding home. That was actually one of our next questions for you from the chat space. It's something that Brittany and I looked into. We're both really looking forward to following that project. And when we've polled alumni on social media, Facebook and Twitter, refugee and migration issues always rank at the very top of the things they're concerned about. And last year we hosted one of our very first ties, the Matic International Exchange Seminars in Croatia on refugee and migration issues. And we gathered European alumni who work in the field together to find solutions. And one we're really proud of, Zuzana a month later was actually awarded the International Woman of Courage Award by Secretary Kerry. And so we were all fascinated by the finding home project and we wanted to know what led your photographers and the time team to take that on and how did they pick the location and the families that they wanted to follow. Lindsay and Aaron had been covering the refugee crisis from any number of different angles all through as our other correspondents in Europe and the Middle East had been. But I think in a way the tipping point came when they were looking at, after the land routes were either closed or became much more difficult and a lot of the traffic shifted to Libya. And the idea of hundreds of people including pregnant women and children, hundreds of people boarding these rubber-wrapped that it was absolutely certain they could not physically make it to Italy. It wasn't even like it's risky, it's dangerous. No, the number of people on that kind of a vessel traveling that distance was not going to happen. So what they were gambling is that they will be rescued at sea either by the Italian Navy or by any of the Doctors Without Borders and the humanitarian rescue efforts. That they will be spotted by the many spotters in the air and rescued before they all drowned and that they were willing to take that risk. So Lindsay and Erin embedded on an MSF ship that was on these missions. It was the most harrowing tale of really just bringing home the desperation of these men and women who would have set out on a journey like that. So they did that project last year and then started looking to see if they could get access to the camps in Greece where a lot of the Syrian refugees were ending up. And getting Syrian women particularly to open up in this way, getting access to those camps in the first place, which we have not as journalists typically been able to get into. And then to find these women who were willing to let us be in the delivery room with them as they are giving birth and trying to imagine giving birth in a hospital where none of the doctors and nurses around you speak your language when trying to explain, in a couple of cases these ended up being pretty high risk deliveries of what is happening to you and what are the risks and decisions that you're facing. And then imagining leaving the hospital with your newborn to go back to a place that has no running hot water, there are no toys there, and what that is like. We thought it was really important as a way to make this story that is so typically told in terms of enormous incomprehensible numbers or of huge geopolitical conflicts and players on the National Security Front and the Economic Front and what is this going to mean for Angela Merkel's electoral prospects. Lenses through which the refugee story is told, which are also important, it's very easy to miss just the very human experience of this. And so our priority was to say, okay, how do we really make this story and the experience of these people real to the largest audience we can? Very nice. We're all looking forward to reading it and looking at those photos. Your photographers are amazing. Looking at the opening piece, I was all in seeing that opening photo, really captivating. In your 30 years of experience of journalism, these questions from Ethiopia, what are the ups and downs you have seen? In Ethiopia, for example, the media is more restrictive. How could we move to having more independent media? You know, in any country, the ability of journalists to operate safely and independently is, I think, something of a grand bargain where in the United States, what has been vitally important to the success of the vibrancy of journalism in America is a tradition that's practically embedded in the Constitution that, or is it Jefferson, if I had to choose between a free press, that you pick a free press, that a basic premise that having a free press, having freedom of assembly, having freedom of speech is an important enough core value that the people in positions of power, whether positions of political power or economic power, who have the ability to block or undermine or diminish that, are deterred from trying to block or undermine or diminish it. And creating that sense of shared value that as a society, as an economy, as a political system, as communities, we will all be served by allowing the free exchange of information. That seems to me to be the baseline that is necessary in order for journalism to be able to work. And if you have powerful interests, whose interest is opposed to that, as we have seen in many countries around the world through history, then it becomes very difficult and very dangerous for journalism to happen. And what's fascinating to me now and what we're seeing in so many parts of the world is because of access to mobile technology, particularly, it is just harder to censor information. It's harder to keep people from being able to find stuff out if they want to. And I was amazed on my wonderful, full-bright excursion last summer in New Zealand that I think someone had told me that there were more time readers per capita in New Zealand than anywhere in the world. And I certainly came to believe that because this was the summer of 2015. So the American presidential campaign was just starting to kind of come to life. And I was having conversations with people there that you would have thought it was face-to-nation. I mean, it was the level of interest and knowledge, I mean, detailed granular, like down to the which way will a given congressional district swing a year and a half from now was unbelievable. And I'm just thinking, how is it that, because I feel like I have flown all the way around the world because I had flown all the way around the world to be in this magical place that feels as far, far away from the green rooms of Washington, New York, as you can possibly get. And yet here we were having the same conversation about the same issues, whether it was the future of Uber in Auckland or whether it was about, is Donald Trump really a viable candidate for president? And so it was just such a reminder of how there is the ability for people in the United States who's preferred source of news as the Guardian or people in China who figure out ways to work around firewalls in order to have access to information that they're not going to find in local media. I think that that's a fascinating challenge to authoritarians everywhere, that it just technology is making it harder and harder and harder to limit the ability of people who want to know what is happening in the world and find out. Definitely. I just want to remind our audience here, we've got about 15 minutes left, so if you have a question, don't forget to signal. Okay, we've got one. Thank you. Hi. I'm a teacher, a middle school teacher, and we use time for kids in our school, and I'm just curious what time's mission for young people, particularly adolescents, is moving forward and how you intend to reach them in coming years. We have just undertaken a partnership with something called News Literacy Project, which is a reflection of an awareness that teaching news literacy, teaching kids how to distinguish reliable sources from unreliable sources, good information from bad information, which you can have taught your students that Wikipedia is not the source for their term paper, but how do you go multiple layers deeper in educating students at all ages of how do you know if a source is trustworthy or not? In a sense, that's always been part of a teacher's mission, but it's become so much harder because bad information is so much more readily available, and I could say good information is more readily available too, but that means that the ability to tell one from the other becomes an essential academic, intellectual, social skill. I think our obligation is to foster that process of learning any way we can. I think Time for Kids is a fantastic institution that I'm looking, which I would like to be a much bigger presence in classrooms, particularly digitally, as more and more classrooms turn into essentially digital classrooms. I think Time for Kids should be a portal into an information environment that helps kids both stay on top of current events but also be able to tell why is this piece of information more reliable than this piece of information? It isn't just obviously part of common core standards about informational nonfiction and providing content that kids want to read and engage with to turn them into readers. One of the things I'm heartened by is I actually think as much as we may decry what has occurred to all of our attention spans, I would bet if there were ever a way to measure how much my children have read and written compared to how much my generation growing up read and wrote. So much of their time is spent reading and writing. You can say it's all reading and writing, snaps and texts and Instagram posts, but it is still true that communicating, I mean we joke that they don't know how to use their phones as phones, that they are consuming so much information, they are consuming so much media that the appetite for news broadly defined is vastly greater than it has been in the past and surely that's an opportunity for us to include not only news about whether One Direction is going to get back together but news about, I mean I was fascinated by how engaged young people were in this election, I was very heartened by that, how passionately they felt about it and so I think that that is an opportunity that can start at a younger and younger age that part of being a citizen, part of growing into adulthood and into citizenship is learning to be a good consumer of information and a good analyst of information of what is reliable. I think the mission of time and time for kids is to promote that as much as we can. I'm going to take another question from Kenya and then we'll come back to you. What would you like to accomplish in your time as time editor in chief? How do you hope the stories you oversee will be different or stand out and that's from Olive in Kenya? I think that the, I'm very proud of what, I have a very young team, I have some very grown up experienced people but I have a lot of people in my newsroom who are very young and tireless and enterprising and excited about journalism which is hugely inspiring to me and where I push them, and again the events of the last year have reminded me how important this is, is to be extremely ecumenical in how we define news and how we define what counts as news and it's very easy, given the pace of the news cycle now to never take your eyes off institutions and individuals in positions of power and institutions that are regulating, ruling, legislating and that just keeping up with the news generated out of institutional life could keep all of us occupied all the time but if you do that then you're going to miss the opioid epidemic. You know, we did opioids on the cover three years ago when it was not being written about but where if you went into any rural community and you talked to any EMT any police officer any teacher they could tell you just what a scourge this was in these communities and now three years later we are seeing how the whole way that we are thinking about a topic like drug addiction is changing from how much is it a criminal matter how much of it is a moral failing versus how much of it is a health emergency and how do we think about our resources and our treatment and our approach and our thinking and our conversation about a topic like that so that kind of story is, you know, it begins on the ground it begins at people's kitchen table it begins in a coffee shop or a rotary club or the Walmart in a town that is never going to be on the radar of big institutional makers of news and so I think we aren't serving our audiences or taking advantage of our opportunity or serving our mission if we aren't really disciplined our resources are finite I don't have nearly as many reporters as I would like how we deploy them and how we define news and what we go out looking to find out what kind of prospecting we do has to go beyond just covering this week's Supreme Court ruling this week's Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing or this week's you know, Goldman Sachs earnings report it's just, we have to go deeper and broader and look beyond the sort of traditional makers of news and to that end, alumni in Guatemala are wondering what you pay the most attention to in terms of Latin American news and Latin American happenings that you'd like to report in time one of the things I regret is, you know, in the contraction that all news organizations have gone through at time as many other places there just are not as many reporters covering Latin America and other regions when you start to have to make choices okay, if you're going to go from this many foreign correspondents to this many foreign correspondents what do you give up where do you no longer have permanent people where do you rely on stringers and contributors and so one of my regrets is even though we've gotten really interesting important reporting out of Central America and South America I don't feel like I have the same kind of eyes and ears that I have in Europe the Middle East or Asia and I think that I would bet if you pressed a lot of news organizations that they would say the same and I don't know what it takes to change that this goes back to at some point as a society we're going to have to figure out what is it that's important to us to know and how are we going to support that, how are we going to make it possible for this news gathering this coverage to be supported because if it's at some point this is every day is bringing us another headline about how many jobs are being eliminated at the Wall Street Journal or at the New York Times or the Daily News this or that network and those jobs are often going to be the people who are covering far-flung parts of the world and stories that editors have decided okay, if you force me to choose this is what I'm going to choose which is not the answer that you want to hear but I think it is unfortunately the reality of where we are at least what I'm seeing across the industry it's good to know and before we close I'd like to give one more question back to our audience here hi, my name is Wawa Guthero I'm a recent alumni at the University of Thailand it seems like we've been talking about the phenomenon of fake news and inaccurate news it's a topic that's been circulating in the news community in the recent years especially after its role in the most recent presidential election so we were talking about the emergence of news literacy programs in American education programs so what advice do you give to the youth that have not yet been educated about news literacy and how do you think we should be able to navigate this world where there are so many different news outlets and when the definition of news is so inclusive right now I think that you've put your finger on a fundamental challenge because the trick about fake news is that it looks very much like real news these sites have been named and designed and created that you could very easily mistake it for a reliable local newspaper or a national news organization it's obviously self-interested for me to say that established news organizations, whether it's time or the New York Times or CBS or NBC or Reuters are it's incumbent on us and you're hearing a lot of this messaging of saying there is a difference between what we do and how we do it we do not publish fake news doesn't mean that we are always right doesn't mean that we're perfect but the standards that we live by are different and to make that very much a part of the messaging that we all make I've looked at some of these sites and I think if I were especially if I were a young person that doesn't know all the visual cues doesn't know the established organizations and my Facebook feed is full of these these stories I think it would be very challenging to be able to tell I think it's fascinating challenge to Facebook that's a really interesting conversation about you know Mark Zuckerberg talks about we're not a publisher, we're a platform I think the obligations that platforms are going to have to acknowledge in the role that they are playing in creating this ecosystem they will say the last thing people want is for us to be the arbiters of what can and can't be posted what is and is not true they are hoping that there will be a technological fix to this problem but this is a you know if the press barons of the 20th century had a set of ethical challenges that they faced about libel and slander and when you publish a rumor and free speech versus national security and what those competing values are their legacies in the 21st century include Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook and Evan Spiegel and the creators of I ask people like Tim Cook about this, what is your ethical obligation when you're having the debate about unlocking iPhones as part of criminal investigations I would put it to any of the leaders of social media platforms isn't that you have to have an answer right now but what is the mechanism whereby your organization is going to explore and address and weigh the competing values and challenges that we are now seeing you know we've seen Facebook Live can be an extremely powerful force for good or for ill and so how is Facebook going to have the conversation about what their obligation is about how that tool can be used and I think that's going to be one of the most important media conversations one of the most important media conversations occurring right now is going to be occurring in organizations that we don't traditionally think of as media organizations thank you and in closing we have a request from two viewing parties in Cuba in Ethiopia if you wouldn't mind giving some advice to aspiring women in journalism women who hope to become journalists, do you have any special tips for them any encouragement you would give looking back over your career anything you wish you knew this may sound counterintuitive but I think this is a golden age of journalism for a couple of reasons it isn't that we don't face very real challenges as a profession but this goes back to what I had been saying the fact that you have a combination of appetite and audience and opportunity that if you find and tell a good story that matters the ability to you don't have to be employed by a huge news organization or have 30 years experience in the field the ability for quality to find its audience is now just as enormously powerful corporations can now be started in garages the power of a single individual or a single idea married to the technology that now makes everyone a filmmaker everyone a music composer everyone a novelist everyone a journalist these technologies are are almost limitless in the opportunity that they give people who want to tell stories who want to have an impact that I just think it's the great challenge to us is is how do we make the best use of the incredible advantages that we now have to do the kind of work that we want to do I think that is a perfect note to end on thank you so much for joining us today on behalf of the Office of Alumni Affairs at the State Department and our colleagues at the Foreign Press Center we're so thankful that you all hosted us this morning and to all of our viewing parties particularly those that stayed up really late to join us thank you so much for being part of this conversation and we hope you all will continue it online with hashtag we'd love to keep talking to you about this we'd love to keep chatting with you so thank you again for joining us