Television, and journalism. And digital journalism and me, an old reporter, editor, and recently an escaped publishing executive. What we did was we sat around and argued because we did not agree on the same topic. Were all interested in the same topic and that is the digital disruption of the journalism business. Our question was simple what happened . How did we blow it . What could we have done differently . We argued for a while and said we would do an oral history. I think they thought that we were all crazy. But we had googled the topic and found found 77,000 articles on it. That to say we dont need to write 77,001st articles. We decided to target the key institutions and decisionmakers going back 35 years. The original idea was 10 key moments, 20 key people, we will be in and out in a heartbeat. We met a lot of skepticism but we found the godfather in nico melle. We went to and he said, this is a great idea. He showed us a template for which, frankly, we stole from vanity fair. We improved on it. In terms of adding video. We got some endorsement and we ran into a graduate School Student named alex remington. People do still find jobs in the newspaper business from harvard. He led us to josh, who was already been cited, but really the guy who made our fantasy become reality and did a great job. Watching over it all was tom patterson. More importantly than his subtle help, his wife, lori, give us gave us the video camera that we used to interview all the 60 people. As we learn, we thought harvard with a fabulously wealthy institution. 30 million or whatever it is does not go to video cameras. [laughter] we got carried away. We did 63 interviews. We wrote a 44,000 word essay. The whole thing, in its entirety, and i dont want to discourage anyone from reading our project or looking at it, but the whole thing totals 444,000 words which is more than gone with the wind, but less than war and peace. It is doable. Martin and his very distinguished panel were all really grateful not only for the interviews but for coming here tonight to help us explain it. We will get to the meat, but i want to give you little color from the road with some awards. David bradley of the atlantic media, huge, sweeping views of the potomac. Moguldom is supposed to look like in the movie. It is the first and last thing he shows you. We were going to interview eric schmidt. All kinds of great electronic equipment. Impossible to find out how to get electricity come out of the wall outlet. [laughter] we had to have a technician come and he said, it happens all the time. [laughter] i think it is one of the largest users of electricity in the world and they cannot lug cannot plug something into the wall and make it work. So they do not know everything. The best movie. This is a local award. There is a Vegan Restaurant down , where at in cambridge that is reclusive guy made us meet him for breakfast. Most disruptive workspace award goes to Andrew Sullivans apartment in greenwich village. Two ancient dogs suffering from copd in the interview. If you listen, you can hear [gasps] [laughter] that is what the new journalism looks like. Most camera shy, shockingly, goes to Arianne Huffington was the only interviewee that refused to be video recorded. The missing link, or one that to rupertso far, goes murdoch who agreed in principle but things kept coming up. He had a very busy year. We are hoping someone will with be able to get him next year. That, i will turn it over to my colleague, martin, to get to the meat of the matter. [applause] [indiscernible] the Newspaper Association of america. She is the ceo and publisher of Washington Post interactive. She plays two very important roles in this history. And of course, arthur sulzberger, jr. , publisher of the New York Times. I want to start with a question to each of the panelists, and it has toim do with the state of journalism. If you are a doctor and the state of american journalism was your patient, how would you assess the diagnosis . If you look at the data, you would be concerned. The number of journalists has gone down by about 30 in the last seven or eight years. Newspaper revenue is down by about 55 . You see a distance between the digital landscape. If you froze things right now, you would say, the patient needs a lot of work and there is a continued progress on that work. If you look forward there are some very exciting things on the horizon. One of the things i am most excited about journalism is that journalists essentially network on their own. If you see some of the work that the New York Times has done from a digital standpoint, you see what can be done. Consumers want highquality content and i think there is a big role for journalism in the future. If you froze it right now, i think you would to say that periodas been a rough of time and people need to focus on where the future models are going. I promise you, i would not have my lobbyist hat on. I would say that we are definitely in transformation. We are 80 print revenue. The print circulation has dramatically changed since 2006. Even since 2006. The revenue is diversified. The audiences have never been larger. Fully 70 of u. S. Adults in any given week read a newspaper online, in print, or on mobile. Audiences are not a problem. It is the revenue that continues to be a real challenge. But the stuff that i read, estimates say it is leveling out. I was thinking about using dentistry instead of doctors. Is that ok . I think we are losing our first teeth and growing our new teeth. It is painful. It is tough to lose teeth. We are seeing that happen. We know that what is coming is going to be bigger to the point of reach, bigger to the point of impact. We are now able to reach impact to reach people around the world. When we started this business, that was impossible to imagine. Following onto to that, one of the folks that we interviewed, as part of this, we didnt know at the time, although if you actually read between the lines, particularly in the part we excerpt did at the end of the essay he just , sold the Washington Post to jeff bezos for 250 million. A few years ago you paid 350 Million Dollars for the Huffington Post. It goes to show the relative values out there. Do you think bezos got a better deal than you . [laughter] i think when we bought it, many people western what the many people questioned what the value was overall and how much we had paid for it. As we talk to investors, they think that the Huffington Post is worth a tremendous amount more than what we paid. The reason is that arianna recognized something distinctly about how information gets transferred and how people want information. When you look at the fact we have gone from zero to 100 million video views, it is a migration of what we have bought to being one of the best brands in the world. My experience in newspapers and news started right outside this room. I owned one in boston and we ended up buying something called the square deal. It was a free newspaper that we hand out right up the street at cambridge. The day i change my viewpoint on where news and news points were newspapers were going, i went down to m. I. T. And saw mosaic. I saw the information coming up on the screen and getting electronically transferred. I walked back to our office and said to my partner i dont know , what the internet thing is, but i am doing it. I have never seen information be able to transfer that easily. Arianna was able to do that in a i think disruptive way. I see john henry from the boston globe in the front row. I think the future is bright because that dna will be plugged in and transferred. You did at the New York Times. I dont know how many subscribers the New York Times has now, but i think i got a great deal on the object and on the Huffington Post. I think jeff got a great deal depending on what he does with it. I want to stay on the Washington Post for a minute. You ran the Digital Division at the post and that it was integrated back into the parent. In retrospect, do you think it was inevitable that the graham family would sell to someone like bezos or was or something that couldve been done at some stage that would change that future . I dont think it was inevitable. I am probably not answering it is too hard to say. I think it is quite wise to sell to him. They have been friends for quite a long time and have shared similar values. Understanding the technology and having to understand an audience, which is something that newspapers didnt have to traditionally do but now really have to do it, is quite wise. Bezos understands the subscription model and putting it into a private place. Theyre are not going to have the pressure of being part of a public company. I dont know that it was inevitable. I admire the grahams for doing it. It took a lot of courage, in my view. Arthur, the idea of a paper has changed dramatically over the last century. We have lots of creators and the dominant Distribution Channels are company like google, facebook, and twitter. We have often chatted about the nature of an authoritative source in a highly fragmented world. If there is any one News Organization in the United States that still probably has that as part of its dna, it is the New York Times. But what is the nature of authority in a world where there are literally tens of thousands of highly verticalized publications on every topic . I think the nature of authority have not changed. Hasnt changed. I think authority is about accuracy, breadth. It is about knowing and calling out your own mistakes when you make them and having experienced people on the ground. Dont parachute into a story, not knowing the landscape of the story. I think it has grown in importance. How many News Organizations today have bureaus around the country or bureaus around the world where people actually work and live, in egypt or other places . I think that has not changed. The joy of the digital era is the speed of information, the joy is the reach and the ability to take in points of view very quickly and bring that into some story slot. It is a remarkable opportunity for us all. The downside is clear all of a sudden everyone is looking at the photo of the boston bomber. Everyone knows its the boston bomber. He has been clearly identified except it is not him. Because it swept through the Digital World so fast and is and it was picked up. That kind of accuracy is critical. Especially at a time when decisions are being made so fast. Lets go back to riptide for a moment. During your interview, tim, you spoke quite enthusiastically about aols local journalism effort. Since the interview, several things have been announced but you have decided to downsize the operation. Can you talk about why . What is the nature of local journalism and why is it so hard . Patch, for those of you who do not know, is a product that we rolled out in 900 communities across the u. S. The theory on it is what arthur just talked about it. It is the authoritative nature of local journalism. From a platform perspective, you had the receding nature of publications and news not getting invested at the same level. Patch is a very aggressive stance on our standpoint that local People Living in local communities will want to local information and it is important to them. Patch has basically gone from zero earnings to about 18 million unique visitors. Its expansion was very rapid. We took a risk of the company to do it. Patch has been looked at from the Investment Community as something you should do privately. Our theory was that there was a massive disruption going on in news and information locally. There would be lots of consumer interest, lots of business interest, and from a bold standpoint we should not do a land grab, essentially, after that audience. What we announced over the summer was basically taking the 500 that have Business Models. The 500 patches that have Business Models there are 400. That have traffic where we dont have the Business Model where the sales there fast enough. We are going to partner with other companies. Since we announced that, we have 10 or 15 companies, large companies, that have offline newspapers, television stations around those areas where we have patches. The patches are in 900 of the best gdp communities of the United States. In many in many cases, they have equal or more traffic from the large Media Properties in those regions. There is a lot of interest on partnering with patch. I would say from a standpoint of an investment that matters, not a feature, but an investment, patch is probably the best single biggest investment in journalism and the United States and local communities. I think the fact is that patch will continue to go on. It is such an acute need for information locally. Looking forward on patch, youll probably see a few partnerships. Aol will probably own some of the partnerships. Aol employees and audience and investors put a lot of energy into patch which i think was very good for the country. I have had more newspaper people stop me saying, the patch is in our city. They were afraid that you are going to get more aggressive. Im not talking about some of the Bigger Companies that did that. I think patch helped fuel local communities. They should be investing in it. Caroline, when we talk to i dont know if you read his interview, he had commissioned a study and what he found is that the toughest problems economically are on the local side. Many of your members are on the local side. Can you talk about that now . You have heard him talk about patch from a newspapers perspective. Is it as bad as julius study . The numbers suggest that the top 200 metro areas have the toughest time. When you go smaller than that, it is actually stronger. That top 200 is a big number. It is very difficult to cover what Companies Covered in the past, given the pressures on newsroom budgets and a dramatic cut in advertising revenue. Oftentimes, the newspaper, and im not disregarding patch, but a study that pew did shows that 85 of all media stories, tv, radio, start from the newspaper. Can you point to areas of invasion . What are the bright spots . Tim talked about innovation. Arthur talked about losing your baby teeth. You see evidence of that when you look at the landscape . Absolutely. Are people losing their baby teething growing something new . Hindsight is 20 20. We have this walled garden. If you want to advertise shoes in washington, you had to advertise in the Washington Post. And if you wanted to buy shoes on sale, you had to look at the Washington Post. The internet changes everything. On the digital side, you approach it as, well, youve just got to sell a bunch of banner ads and maybe that will make up for the major ones. That does not work. We sort of figured that out. We are looking at a lot of revenue streams. I mean, a huge change, even in the last five years. Some agencies that have been started by companies, niche print publications. There is no silver bullet. We saw circulation go up for the first time in many years last year with 23 print and digital alike. Im seeing again, there is not a onesizefitsall. What works for the New York Times does not work for another newspaper. What fits for a small paper you have to know its market. It is like going to the dentist sadly, it is not true. We have not gotten to cavities yet. [laughter] yeah, right. Right. I am seeing innovation and it is heartening. It is exciting. Thompson has talked about the internationalization of the brand. I dont think there is ever been a newspaper that has been truly international. Obviously, the iht was small we are talking about something much larger with the New York Times. The website went immediately internationally pretty much when we turned it on, but turning that into revenue is hard. The International Herald tribune is owned by the New York Times. We are rebranding it the international New York Times. We are bringing back a brand that did exist in the 50s and 1960s if im not mistaken. This is a digital play. On the web, if you went to iht. Com you ended up at the New York Times website. We are trying to reach the International Community that we believe is out there for an international newspaper. The ft, the wall street journal, have been doing this. They are not general interest. It will be an exciting opportunity for us. Our first language was in china. We wrote a story that upset the chinese government. They shut us down for about a year now. The story did win a pulitzer prize, so there is a tradeoff there. That really speak to our core value. We know this story was going to cause heartache for us in a business we had just invested in and opened. But our core values are so critical to who we are. Let me go back and say, when i travel, it is clear that there is a lot more for us to do to reach our international potential. The international New York Times is just a step. Right now, for example, if you want to subscribe, we dont give you the ability to do that. We are fixing that. That is an easy example. There is much more we could be doing, but there is no doubt that the desire is there. Martin has heard the story, but i will share it. When i was china just prior to us launching the chinese language website, i met with a couple of chinese generals. One of whom, a woman, interestingly, began our conversation by really talking in an angry way. She was very upset. We had just begin to charge for the web not too long ago and the problem was that every morning she would wake up and the first thing she would go to nytimes. Com to see what was happening in the world and it would not accept her credit card. It turns out we did not accept pla credit cards. We fixed her problem. The point is that a chinese general, first thing in the morning, would go to the New York Times. If that does not speak to the changing nature of the world and the opportunities we have, i cannot think of what else does. I want to followup with the other end of it. When we had our interview, arthur, we talked about the meter model. I want to go down the road on that for just the second with you, arthur. We talked in the interview about young people. The notion that young people dont seem to be as willing to pay for content on the web. Music is a good example of that. Do you think that, as young people mature, they will be willing to pay for a digital subscription to the New York Times . Lets start with the fact that more and more, young people and all people are showing a willingness to pay for experiences they value on the web. Thank you, steve jobs. Right . It is now simple to buy games, buy something you find of value at a number of ages. That is changing. The second thing is, lets not pretend a 14yearold spot newspapers. They did not. They never did. People come to newspapers when they find the need for the value equation. That is often when they get a first job, or they have a family and they start to think about what the community is offering and what Public Schools and they start to engage with the community in a different way. Absolutely i think those things are coming together. Tim, i want to go to your content strategy. It is really interesting. I think you create some content and then you sell access or you do deals with people like everyday health, provide access to your audience. Can you explain how you make the decision of what you cover and what other people will cover . How you do that . Our strategy is to essentially we have a theory that most people care about a limited set of things. 70 of web users use less than 15 sites a month. As people tend to get older, their time becomes more valuable as well. People start to spend more times on things they focus on. We have started this 80 80 80 strategy. 80 based on women, 80 based on influencers and influencertype events, and 80 on mobile. It is essentially 80 of consumption that happens is about the economy and what people care about. We put a filter on the categories we have from a content perspective and try to figure out where we will have huge influence where we invest in. We are running Techcrunch Disrupt in san francisco. Im headed out there tomorrow. There are 3000 of the most influential engineers in the country, in the world, their right now. Almost every major ceo from the industry will be there on the stage. Techcrunch gets looked at by Anyone Around the world was interested in the technology space. That is an example of a space where we have a major share of and we can be successful from a journalism and monetary standpoint. That was the first generation of our strategy, get in a giant space and be influential. The Second Generation of the content strategy has been to build out massive Partnership Networks around those areas. Aol owns a number of brands, that people know the Huffington Post, techcrunch, movie phone. We have also built a huge b2b infrastructure. We service about 140,000 other publishers with content sharing. I fundamentally believe that technology will not change humans, that humans will change technology. The first couple of generations of the web has been people trying things. They will start regulating back to things they most care about. Last year, i had our interns do the dinner at the end of the summer to get feedback on the company. Last summer, i asked them about the changing patterns they were having as a college student. There were three. One is they were following fewer things on twitter. Second thing was they were following more influential brands, the New York Times was one they talked about. They were following the high level influence of people. The third thing is they were changing their personal profiles on the web. They dont want their personal profiles to be dictated by a giant social network that has all kinds of information on them. A lot of them had started to migrate information towards linkedin where they want to have solid profiles. Not to look for jobs, just to have that level of area. Our content theory is lets invest in the most important areas of journalism, information, and content, build giant b to b information to around them. It pretty much dictates everything we do. How does the Huffington Post get into that . It is a triple play for us. We started this thing called serenity saturdays. We launched the hawaii addition. We launched the hawaii addition. The first blogger we had talked about opera. With the Huffington Post you have a Global Platform now. I think it is going to be aggressively be mobile information source. Arthur, are you doing it in language . At the moment, it is halted. We are Still Producing it, getting lots of traffic, but not from within china. Huffington post is a trusted brand. People want news everyday on a global basis. If you look at why we bought it, it we saw something that looked like it could be indicted by more globalization. With a new pope was elected, we had the Huffington Post italy putting realtime content on the u. S. And i think we have some of the most unique coverage about the pope been chosen. There are other examples of that. It fits squarely into the content strategy i described. I think we are going to turn to the audience now. There are three ground rules. That ive been asked to assess for you. One, all questioners must identify themselves accurately. [laughter] two is that there is one brief question per person. Please, no speeches. Third is, questions and with a question mark. That is what it says. We have four mics. I will try to get to questioners on each microphone over the next 20 minutes. I am formerly a New York Times reporter for 13 years. I am struggling with the issue of how you find news. One of the things i worry most about is the content that the reporters are putting out there. The amount of time, the amount of interviews that each reporter is able to do produce a story. I am worried that a shrinking. Is that is inevitable that we are going to shorter, put your stories and not get quite as many interviews . I do not believe it is inevitable. There is no question that on a breaking news story speed now everybody, the boston bombing, my colleagues at the globe know this, we did a better job of covering the bombing better than television network. People are coming to us for video content for immediate delivery. All that said, are we still engaged in the longform journalism . Absolutely, and i will use snowfall as how you can create longform journalism. A journalist will spend a year working on a story. You can integrate video and graphics and turn it into an experience unlike anything we could do in the old days. I think it really does depend on the story. This is why we need to invest in the journalist. You are looking for a different set of experiences. I was on a train coming up from new york and david brooks was in the same car with me. He does some teaching at yale. He was talking about the Washington Bureau he joined 11 years ago and the one he is in now. It is younger, more vibrant heard lets say there is a lot more diversity. You have videographers, you have the Technical Team that is there to support. It is still a very, very powerful operation. I want to ask you one question with respect to the Huffington Post. How much of your stuff is red on smart phones, mobile devices, and how does that change the form factor . A lot. Depending on what youre on, it it could be that 30 to 40 is mobile now. You consume more news at mobile. If you take Something Like the New York Times on the mobile. Once you switch, they dont switch right away. I think on the formfactor side, i think that one thing is a little cloudy on the web right now is that there is a model of Audience Development with people writing fast stories with not a whole lot of facts to get an audience and then there is journalism. If you read the first book, he talks about how he invested in the sob sisters. They would write stories so horrific that would make people cry. Right next to it, he would have the hard news. That is what is happening on the web today. Heres the bad news. You dont have arthurs rand. You have to do things to gain traffic. They will be more aggressive about mixing low quality, high quality together. Caroline, did you want to weigh in on this . The other thing i would say is that there has been a huge shift in content. Apart from smaller newsrooms 10 years ago, a metro paper would send 15 people to the olympics. A bunch of them. Is that really necessary . As you are seeing a lot more information about audiences, a number of newspapers are collapsing into radio and a newspaper newsroom. But really investing on the investigative side and being much more specific about the areas they will invest in from an investigative side. I think that whole area is changing. It is interesting. My name is jason gray. I am a graduate student. I want to thank all four of you for doing this and what an incredible opportunity. I am appreciative of that. I want to follow the conversation on local journalism. My question is around what makes it work when it does and what makes it not work when it doesnt. There is reference that some cities or areas it is profitable, and others not so much. Which that mean for us in the future of local journals . I think a lot of it is trust in authenticity. I put my newspaper had on. People still trust newspapers. You read something by someone in the community who knows the community. That is a lot different from a feed of someone who doesnt. I think that is one of the baselines for living and understanding a community. Thank you. I am sam feingold. I am a junior at the college studying statistics. I am the campus editor for the harvard political review. The view has started from when al gore was in the print publication until now. The culture has changed. You have a much larger publishing board. I wonder what is been like culture wise and what you look for in journalists as far as skills in the organization. There are so many things on the sites. What is it like working at the New York Times now as opposed to 20 years ago . I love that question. One of my colleagues just retired and was responsible for a lot of hiring at the time in the newsroom. Engineers. That is what we did not focus on fast enough. The need to have engineers building the systems that we are now using, building the tools that would here now using. That was the most challenging skill for us at the time. It was getting the engineers at the time. We were thinking about the product that we were creating. We do not talk much about new product development, but we were in the middle of looking why should we be offering the New York Times . That is the working title. Into the younger audience with a point made earlier in the conversation, giving a different experience. We have two people from traditional sales. But highly engineered because it is going to have to be a different experience and it is going to have to be an effort experience across devices. That is where i think we probably missed the beat. Clearly our journalists it is not training. It is hiring and training. The journalists on the web are the ones who are now able to have video. To become part of that experience. Some have been doing it well for a long time. We need more of that. We have doubled the video amount, the amount of video in the last six months time. We are all doing it. We are all experimenting. We realize that video, to you point earlier, is different on mobile that it is going to be on your large screen in your office. So, there is a lot out there. Tim, do you want to take a whack . Who are those interns you are talking about . We have a big intern program. I have to do this myself. I give two pieces of advice. You have to actually use the platforms themselves. I think that journalism is in a newteeth growing stage. You cannot be a journalist if you do not understand the platform and where things are going. The second thing that i think is not a bad idea is that instead of pulling up a chair next to a journalist every time you sit down, pull up a chair next to an engineer. One of the things i saw at the Huffington Post that was really impressive was that the journalist and engineers sat together. In many places around aol, that was not the case. He engineers sat with the engineers, the journalists with journalists. In Silicon Valley, i spent 20 years going back and forth between Silicon Valley and new york. Silicon valley is a more collaborative type environment. What are the five Fastest Growing platforms, Technology Platforms for journalists and you have an account on them . That is essentially i need to know what, you need to know it. It is very important. Over here, then. Over here, then. My name is ben, and i am a harvard alum. Netflix commissioned a high profile series called house of cards. They released all the episodes at one time. They have been playing with the idea of using time effectively. Nbc and other affiliates have been giving limited interviews in a broadcasting longer interviews in shows like the today show. How are you experimenting with more investigative reporting and bundle and releasing as the content as one entire package or parcel it out . I think we are all experimenting. There was a huge section. It was a story about a terrible tragedy that took place skiing. A mountain in washington state, i think. When we printed it, it was a full section. The sports section was totaled. The experience on the web was so immensely powerful. Because of all of the video, the graphics unless you go and see this, i cant possibly do it justice. But when the woman, you are reading, and all of a sudden she is caught up in the avalanche, and next thing you know she is under the snow fighting for her life. By the way, there is the video of her talking to you about. It brings to life. A lot of it is experimenting. We put stories up on the web before they are in the paper. We put magazine pieces up starting wednesday for the sunday magazine. Youre absolutely right. On the tablet, people come to stories at 9 00 at night. There is unbelievable tablet news because they want to see whats on tomorrows paper. And i am one of them. But that is part of the power and that is part of the answer. In a very astute way, i think netflix took the normal distribution windows and the set up, you know what . Human beings would behave different if you gave them content all at once. In a testing way but a thoughtful way, we looked at how you actually disrupt the behavior. At one point, we have the saying internally we dont do a lot in sports. I worked at espn for a while. You cannot beat Espns Sportscenter by being 5 better. You have to be 75 better, 100 better. When we look at doing disruptive things around journalism, it is a disruption point as much as the content themselves. The other is distribution partnerships. One thing were working on also, the googles and the facebooks, another way to be disruptive is how we actually use those partners to do it as well. We need to have multitiered strategies. I applaud netflix recognizing the difference between Human Behavior and how Distribution Systems were set up. They went for Human Behavior, and they did an amazing job. We have come full circle now. Im sorry. I apologize. Go ahead. Im a junior at the college interested in broadcast journalism. Given the fact there are so Many Organizations that offer online, where do you see the future of tv . I have a different viewpoint on this. If you look at the consumption pattern and how people use phones and tablets, the fact of the matter is when you look at the average tv show, if you took 22 minutes of content and date 8 minutes of commercials, when you watch how people basically use the web, i think in a disruptive way there is a faster way than 22 minutes to get people tones of information. I think you will exceed the advent and scale of faster, Higher Quality content overall. From a curation standpoint, people still want trusted brand. As much as the world seems it is usergenerated content. When you ask interns what they are following, they are not randomly going out to poke around downside information. They want someone to tell them. I met with someone who was really wellknown on friday. She said to me, why do you think you are successful . She says because i tell people what they want. I think the future of television and web video together will be a disruptive way about how much content you get in. There is a major potential for disruption. Im paul, a sophomore at the college and a staff writer for the harvard political review. Im interested about your anecdote about the chinese woman who read the New York Times every day. How are you able to convince more of the worldwide readers to read your publication . How have you managed to maintain your National Reader set . Why should i read the nsa news from the New York Times as opposed to going to the guardian, der spiegel, or somewhere else . Good question and there is no simple answer. As i mentioned, we will be rebranding the International Herald tribune. We want to further tighten the journalistic ties. We will have a newsroom in hong kong, new york, and really what were looking at is a 24hour news cycle. When people are asleep in new york and waking up in china, asia, we want the ability for them to come together to the site and see something may be more tailored to this point of view. That does not mean that the stories will be different. We will put different stories in different places. Give people different experiences. All of this as being driven by the fact that more and more people can create the content experience they value. If they care about sports, they can put that higher. Its about the human adaptation as well. Its going to be an ongoing issue as we learn more and more how to do this. No question. Our strategy has been to partner with local news providers. Most of our International Editions have a local large media partner. We believe we are getting the best at the Huffington Post plus the best of what is actually local in france together, the example i used with the pope. I think its really competitive. We plan on competing. Is it also political . Is there a point of view issue . Is part of what you are getting at is that there is a political scientist as well as a journalistic side . I dont know. Im asking. There is no question. One of the challenges is how do we get the same and make sure the experience is not just were getting the New York Point of view in spain. We have to make sure that we are giving people a broader breath than that. I think that is one of the beautiful things about the internet. You can go to the guardian and you can go to the New York Times and you can get a lot. The guardian may cover a story differently than the New York Times, and thats an advantage that we all have. Im asking this question on behalf of the john f. Kennedy junior forum committee. With regards to social media, how do you view it because many complex ideas cannot be reduced to 100 or the characters . Is that a hindrance or has it brought an impetus to cliques and the sharing capacity overruling negative effect of social media . Whoever has any thoughts. A general question. Does anyone have a quote about social, twitter . Twitter is a caption to a photograph. Youre going to find out more about what that person has to say about something. Sometimes they use twitter to say whatever they think to get in trouble later so it depends on who is tweeting. Its a caption. Isnt it just a giant distribution for journalists . It is. Its a powerful tool for getting information in as well as out. The challenge for journalists is to be able to sift through the information you are getting to make the story, generally a complex story, understandable. The next generation would debate this right now. Twitter is launching other things so what started as a feeder for information quickly, they are now building and more infrastructure in twitter. They are starting to build a more inclusive pieces of content that fit in twitter, so you not only get the links but the longer experience. A lot of newspapers are doing it. That is where twitter is today and my guess is they will try to build on Distribution Capabilities overall. It is best known for the short, but you will see things get longer on those platforms. A lot of journalists use twitter for storage material. Did anyone see such and such happen . And lets not pretend this is something that news. Newspapers and journalists have had to deal with for decades. We dont remember what it was like when you could deal with a telephone and you are not dealing with your source oneon one but it had a big impact. You cannot trust what people will say over a wire. Go back even further. The telegraph. In the late 1850s, someone wrote that he had just witnessed the death of newspapers. He said that literature will survive but newspapers must stay away. He had just met the telegraph. This is going to feed information in. Its a tool that we are all Getting Better and better at using. Social media is an extension. I will be presenting the official twitter question for tonights forum. The question primarily addresses it goes off of what someone asked a few questions ago. You are talking about choosing a more political angle based on what you like online. This addresses because of the combination of Huffington Post and aol you can expose to people who may not even be using the internet to obtain news and you can feed them political information. How do you go about not necessarily choosing but basically choosing the political angle in which you show the information. There are a lot of stories from Huffington Post on aol and there will continue to be. There is a news chooser to customize the news that you want. I think the Huffington Post started with more of a political angle overall. One thing that happens a lot as if you look through the Huffington Post, over time there has been a lot of forearms set up for people with political views to share. If you go there on an almost daily basis, there is a pretty wide range of views. You have different brands with different users on them and by using the Huffington Post, we think it is one of the best resources but we also offer a lot of choices as well. From the standpoint of opportunity, this is different from where a lot of their competitive set is going. Everything is a feed and there is no voice at all and we said we are going to have an opinion and we want to curate in the safe people time. We try to give people multiple views and voices but we really like the Huffington Post. Maybe just look at facebook starts or twitter stats. We offer that to aol users but we do give a source on what our users want. Hello, my name is jenny, im a sophomore in winter fell and they work with sam and paul on the harvard political review. We have seen an amazing increase in the ways you can pick news. Interactive, video diagrams and even with the boston marathon, the most shared thing on my Facebook News feed, was an interactive interaction rather than describing. What do you see as the place of the written news article in the future of journalism . Who wants to take that . I will preface arthurs comment. I think the written word provides a lot of contacts that an image or video cannot provide. As i was reading today, the report having to do with the context, theres a lot of context there that nothing other than the written word can really convey. I think it is context more than anything else. If you think about the Technology Changes over the last 100 years, the internet is the first one to bring us back to the written word. Radio took us away. Television took us further away from the written word. The web gave us the ability to integrate the written word act in. Im actually a huge fan for a number of reasons because the technology does give you the ability to engage in all different methods and what we are learning over and over again is using any single method is failure. Its the multiplicity method integrated with each other that is breeding real success. Great. I think we are full circle again. Im a freshman. Mr. Armstrong, i believe, earlier if i did interpret it correctly, you said not just anyone could be a journalist is what you said . What about bloggers and how they have disrupted professional media . How are journalists working to go around these people whom i who might just sit around and steal news from different websites, i guess . [laughter] anyone can be a journalistic they want to be. At the end of the day, consumers are smart. They actually know who is feeding real information to them. I will not make it public but there are hundreds of thousands of Digital Subscribers and i at the times, correct . And my guess is if you started doing content that was things people do not want to pay for or see as real, you would not have that ability. From a disruptive standpoint, let me take one step back. What you see happening in the Blogging Community and across the internet is people almost like a netflix example of taking advantage of being disruptive to gain an audience and i would not undercut the ability of people building blog specific topics to interrupt the information flow of whats happening in larger publications. Ive been a huge investor in that. The reality as we go back to this, theres something that i think is about newspapers in new york city and if you read the book, this is the same thing happening there. People are using different forms of content, bloggers, twitter feed, they disrupt peoples flow to gain audience. Theres a difference between Audience Development and journalism. Theres a lot of tactics on the web and its about Audience Development. They turn it into journalism. There are very wellknown properties that started as a disruptive, disruptive, disruptive. Then they decided they could move it into a business and then it turns into journalism. I think bloggers can be very powerful. If you look at the people on youtube that have categories that are disruptive. You find more people resemble bloggers overall. I think this is a big opportunity for people to do disruptive things. For journalist to become very successful bloggers and expand their footprint not only for the institution they may represent but individually. The journalist as brand is the subject that all of us need to be spending more time with. We only have time for one more question. In deference to my mistake for, i will turn to this microphone. Hi, im jenny. Im a freshman in harvard college. There is a lot of talk about a bunch of new people coming online in the coming decades. Some of them from conflict zones and other areas. Im wondering how that might change the target audience for online journalism. That is a great question. I didnt quite hear the first part. Right now, we have roughly little over one billion people online mostly from developed countries. What she is saying is in the book, they talked about 5 billion people becoming online and how it changed all of your approaches to journalism. Its a great question and a great opportunity. A year and half ago, what was the largest country outside of the United States for people coming to the New York Times . Anyone want to take a guess . Coming to the ny times digitally, after the u. S. , canada, the uk was next, australia was number three. You get the thought english language. On mobile, outside of the u. S. China. China was number one. This is before we did a chinese language website. This was in english. I think that speaks very much to your thought. The possibilities of our growth, the possibilities of the value of quality of information that maybe cannot get in other places and it really speaks to the opportunity, i think. You look at the world today and theres a lot of people working on various lowflying satellites, things to increase the broadband capabilities it smartphone capabilities. So while they will probably come online at a better bandwidth than we think also. It just accelerates the integration that arthur talked about. I wish we had time to take all of the questions. Now i want to introduce the third member to wrap it all up. Thank you, everybody. Its great for the three of us to be here. We feel so grateful from when we came. This project would not have happened and if we have intrigued you, if you cannot remember this url go to nieman labs and find the link. I dont think they scared you too much with the word count you dont have to read it all. You can watch some of the video. If you let these people speak for themselves, you will be engaged and you will learn. The truth is in the 60something interviews if youre having insomnia trouble, there are some that will put you to sleep. I will not tell you which ones those are. The three here are not group of that. They are exempted. Its not a pessimistic discussion and we are not pessimistic about the future of news. We certainly look back and we find the truism most true, we agreed on a few things. Dont be nostalgic. It is easy to be nostalgic for what we have lost. The truth is that there are 70,000 other articles in that journalism was not always great. There were many flaws, many incorrect stories. Many communities that were just not covered at all and not enough diversity. It is one thing we encountered we went to interview people and did not find the diversity in every aspect of our life. It was not in journalism before and digital disruption had exacerbated it in some ways and improved it. We were not nostalgic about the past and across the board, great journalism that was even more illuminating online to get more voices there. A couple things about the past that were not touched on tonight, one was the idea of original sin. Mostly they had a martin and arthur not giving away the news for free, this would have worked out ok over the long term. That was not the case. If everyone who had news had not given it away for free online, the digital disruptors, if a different model gave it away, if you need to string someone up, david gray gave it away for free with a different Business Model and that is where the genie got out of the bottle. People had to react. The other thing that is so important. You would not have heard this in a panel years ago and this is about the importance of engineers. Journalists and engineers sitting together in referring to need to know, one thing that News Organizations did not do and they seem to be learning now is that you have to embrace engineers, figure out how to higher and collaborate with them. The Biggest Online disruptors today are engineerdriven companies. They are in charge. Most of the Traditional Media Companies to did not have them, could not hire them, did not put them in charge. That has to be a theme for successful news online. Whats going to happen next and how is serious journalism going to get paid for since the subsidy of advertising has been ripped away . There are lots of predictions about the future of news. We did not have a full consensus either among the three of us which is really why we built riptide as a webbased platform. We hope others here at harvard pick up on it and that more voices and interviews get shared so we can keep documenting what happens. Even after we finished the draft of the essay, the globe was sold. The post the grahams sold to jeff bezos. There is an aspect that is a rashomon tale. No two people agree on what happened. It was confirmed as we went. If you have enough people involved, you could get close enough to understand to what we think happened and to learn about what might happen next. We tried to do that in the project, and we think its important. Understanding how journalism will continue and thrive is important. This is embodied at the Kennedy School and the importance of a vibrant press, one thing that was not answered tonight, are we going to find ways to cover the obscure School Board Hearing as and the Damascus Bureau alike as effectively as the Digital World has already figured out how to cover celebrity gossip, the daily political rants in washington, and even the weather . On behalf of martin, john, and myself, the stories ahead will be far more interesting than the stories we have told. We hope that youll stay tuned to what we have done and more importantly to this evolving thread. We have a warning. Watch out for the riptide. Dont get washed out to sea the next time it rolls and because it always does. Thank you very much and have a great evening. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] at 10 a. M. Eastern on newsmakers, look at how the nations insurance makers are dealing with health care law. After that, a discussion about women and politics. Coming up next on washington journal, retired commander jd indon talks about his piece the washington times. Later, a roundtable discussion with Trevor Burrus and wendy r. Se good morning and welcome to washington journal. We spend the first 45 minutes or so going through the morning news. Theres an article in the paper this morning about healthcare. Gov. Later this morning, the administration will release an up date on the november 30 deadline for fixes to the website