Doingrnalists had been that work we would have known about it. These are disclosures that are important for the public to know about. Spoke earlier about how many different Media Outlets there are out there now. They are all covering the same story. The things that are exclusive and distinctive are important. There is no better way to set yourself apart. To become somebody who breaks news that editors can get from any other source. Was a great conversation. Want to thank each of you we are going to take a short break. We have the newsmaker with the dnc chair scholz. Thank you. [applause] thank you. It was a pleasure. Coming up, views of the obama administrations fiscal policies. Then a discussion on the 45th anniversary of the woodstock music festival. Then the changing demographics of the 65 years old and older population. Washington journal is live. Friday, a look at the continuing conflict between russia and the ukraine. The center for the National Interest on cspan. Here are highlights for this weekend. A history tour looking at the civil war. Saturday, the communicators. Political commentator, author and former president ial candidate pat buchanan. Books on hillary clinton, barack obama, and Edward Snowden. Danielkly standards hauber hauber. League kansas city monarchs. And the depiction of slavery in movies. Sunday, an interview with president herbert hoover. Let us know what you think. Call us. Or email. Join the cspan conversation. Cnn president tom johnson on the future of news. Is one hour. [indiscernible chatter] ok. Let me remind you. This program is being taped. Taped is not the right description in this world of technology. This is being taped for cspan. Dont embarrass yourselves. Microphones for questions for the program, in the center of the room. I regret that. Those of you on the side of the room will need to come up. It will create a short line. This is being done primarily for technological reasons. Do not let it discourage you from coming over when we get to the q a time. I shouldve introduced to you the person who has been the mover and shaker in getting this together. That is a person who move who worked with me at cnn. She is the executive director at the Atlanta Press club. Lauri strauss. [applause] the elbow of the master on how to get things to happen. Her grandfather was, is the legendary bob strauss who probably was one of the legends of politics in america. The book is dedicated to bill moyers. There is a quote at the beginning that says this is a crisis for journalism that is also a crisis for american democracy. You are experiencing it now. Thank you. Great to be here. I have met so many wonderful people already in this room. Thank you to tom for encouraging me to come, and to you for being here. I might have been oversold a little bit in the sense that i cannot tell you what the future of news is. I guess i would challenge anyone in this world to say what the future of news is. It is in flux. There is a thinker about kie, whosm, clay sher wrote a blog post several years ago in which he says memorably, given thewere in now great digital digital changes in the world, in terms of the scope, to the changes that occurred when the Printing Press was coming into its own. That complete upheaval that was happening at that time. We are going. Change like that now. Because we are in the middle of it we cant know what the to bel effects are going because we are living through it. We cant really get a handle on how it is going to play out. However, i think we can identify some things that are happening. One of them is, as much as i might not want it to be the case, and many dont, we can in serious and probably terminal decline. Have been in the newspaper business for a long time. I love the sound of the presses and the smell of think. Smell of ink. But we are not going back to that heyday in which newspapers profits, to make vast were able to hire at will, and be comfortable. Life is no longer comfortable in the world of newspaper journalism at all. We are scrambling to figure out a way to survive and thrive, in what is an uncertain future. The present is uncertain. Some interesting things going on. One of them is happening at the place i work, New York Times. Has successfully instituted a pay wall. There are 800,000 digital only subscribers. It is bringing in lots of money. In fact, an interesting milestone occurred about a year and a half ago in which, traditionally as many of you know, advertising revenue was the way the whole thing was powered. Circulation was much smaller part of where the money came from. Because ofk times the decline of print, and the cause of success of the digital subscriptions, that was flipped on its head about a year ago. Both in revenue it has surpassed circulation revenue. Advertising revenue. Let me restate it. Consumer revenue has now surpassed advertising revenue. That is upside down of what it used to be. It is a big change and a heartening change. It means something is working. We all want something to be working. The thing that i would say in terms of looking forward is that think is values that i very important the values dont change as the business changes. The values i hold dear and tried ourrite about and encourage those of fairness, accuracy, and accuracy has gotten trickier in the digital world. We are so fast, and can put things up immediately. There is so much competition we feel pressure to do so. Accuracy and fairness, and integrity. There is a discussion about whether the News Business should be adversarial. Withd we be adversarial government, with business. A distinction and editor whom i admire much made recently is not necessarily adversarial, but independent, so that we are not in anyones pocket, and we keep our independence, and represent what is best for our readership. As the business changes, i hold fast to those values because i think they are the things that ultimately are going to enter. Endure. They will make what we do worth paying for. I do think that quality fornalism is worth paying and people are finding it to be so in all kinds of forms. The other thing i would say is that we are trying experiments now. Some are working, some arent. We have to be quick to try them and abandon them when they dont work. It is a very unusual time in our business. There is a lot of great things happening. It is scary. When i came out of graduate school and went to work for my i hadwn paper in buffalo, reason to think i could stay there for a long time. I did and became editor of the paper. But i dont think that happens very much for students these days and young people. But you can come to an institution and stick around for 30 years. Probably it is not part of the model anymore. Overview. I would love to delve into the subject more deeply. Because it is timely. Tiesis an article, it directly. It is not just jill abramson. Women everywhere are getting pushed out of journalism. True or false . I dont know where that is from. I have not seen it. Abrahmson, she was until recently the editor, executive editor at New York Times. She was fired. It has been a great deal of discussion since then about whether this was propelled by sexism or something else, or if there were gender issues. It did notis represent some kind of institutional sexism. I dont think that is the case. But, i think you cant say about it that there are no gender related issues here whatsoever. , someone coined the expression recently editing while female. [laughter] a dangerous thing to do. Some tricky things about editing while female. Number ofw a wonderful strong women editors and think the future is bright for women going into journalism. They are going into journalism in droves. I teach at columbia univer sity. The classes are much more male. Y female than i guess that speaks to the pipeline. Editing while mel can be a dangerous thing. Male can be ae dangerous thing. I appreciate comments. I have a few of my own. Thank tom foro putting this together. A couple of comments in the same vein of margaret. Im looking forward to the questions. Dont be shy. When i think about the future of news, i think about it through different lenses. One is the Business Model, the most on down the most unknown one yet. Content of all forms is breaking up from bundles to individual pieces. Newspaper,ness, the it was always sacrosanct. You paid . 50 for it. We will put on your doorstep. You pay what you pay for it. Today there is a growing trend of people reading through the morning package on the internet and picking and choosing the articles they like, emailing providingfriend, and their color commentary. Sometimes you will send an they will respond. That is interesting change. You would get the institutional opinion of the days news. That opinion comes from your friends and family, story by story. , the much more targeted articles that are specifically related to you or picked out of the bundle and sent to you. We still make most of our money from print. The bundle is still king. More and more it is going digital. Oddlylecom business is the same. We sell a package of video, the majority of our business. You pay cable for a bundle. More and more there is talk ofaa la carte pricing and people not wanting specific channels. Like y they would please keep cnn. [laughter] currently the way things are priced if you broke up the bundle and paid just for the stations you want, the number of cnn or espn subs would go down because it is subsidized by selling the bundle. They would have to pay more to make up for the revenues. T would be more expensive certainly there is a model going towards all a card and breaking up the bundle. The Consumer Sentiments when over time. Win over time. Less and less people watch the 90 minute news broadcast from the beginning to end than they used to. Higher a legacy of ratings during the news than the Network Programming on either side of it. We do that in our company. The ratings go down during the news and then back up. But we drive a strong news product. We continue doing that. It is harder and harder with people picking and choosing pieces. Wsb. Strongly recommended. And the cultural model. I dont know how the Business Model is going to turn out. It used to be wellknown how you make money and how you are going to make money in the long range plan. Now it is unclear. We do plan on sticking with it. It is what gets us up in the morning. We love our hometown and the business of news. The second thing is the cultural model. If you look at the cultural model, what does news mean to society . For me that goes back to the beginnings of our company. Our First Business ever in 1898 was a small newspaper in dayton, ohio, the number five horse and a five horse race. My greatgrandfather purchased 26,000 and said he would rather have a failing business and have to work for somebody else. He stuck with it and found over the years that accuracy, integrity, balance wins out in the end. Not pandering to the people in money andcan make you make the world a better place. He was also a politician. He became governor. He ran for president with roosevelt. Roosevelt was his Vice President ial ticket. That gets to the point of this. He believes in public service. That is what news is all about. It is a service. It made a lot of money over the years, which we use to diversify over the years. That gets to the Fourth Estate. A lot of you have heard that. There are three branches of government that are supposed to provide checks and balances. A famous justice said that actually is not enough. It does not do it. You still get too much corruption. There has to be a Fourth Estate that watches the watchers. What we have found is that through the changes in our Business Model, and through everything that was previously known and unknown, will people politicalmost are the. Ruth meter on behalf of the journalists impetus h hc is putting on reporting is essential to this community. If you need a great example, the type of reporting you did on our School Boards in atlanta. I just want to tell you from that perspective. [applause] think it is that type of indispensable reporting that is so critical to us as readers and citizens of our various communities. Thank you for that. Going over to my grandmothers house every weekend. I always remember her on sunday, she would put the paper in her arm and see how heavy it was. That was an indication of how things were going. Chambers. She gave it a field. Over the years as advertising began to go digital and things lightened up we were forced to make changes. Made questionss about what is truly important, and what is going to keep us here in the long run . All the research and obvious arrows pointed to local watchdog investigative journalist. There are things we are going to have to take out of the paper. One is not watchdog investigative journalism. Transparency, telling people what is going on, and empowering them to make better decisions is the core of the business. I was thinking about this this morning. My greatgrandfather has in his will written gems of information that he left for the rest of us. I wanted to read a little passage i wrote down this morning. Newspapers which i have taken pride in developing should make themselves champions of the rights of the people. Such power should not be used as an encroachment on the rights of individuals. I asked my children and trustees to recognize these obligations. Whether we make money at it or not, one thing we dont forget is the legacy that was left to us, the Fourth Estate accuracy, and championing the best interest of our community where we live. Hopefully we will continue doing that. In some ways the future of news has never been brighter. Toyou think about the access information, people are not dependent upon the one newspaper at their local newsstand. Whether it be in a revolutionary state into ran or somewhere else. The technology and the access to aggregate data, cookies and google, and apple, all the data as creepy as it sounds, is being accumulated. There is different ways to bundle it and look at anomalies and trends. It gives us information that we used to have. The Atlanta Public School story started out as a discovery that test scores had dramatically turned around in a short time. Data discovered it was statistically impossible for that to happen. That was what the team uncovered. Putting those scores together paint a picture that was impossible. Had dated different from the date of others that you recall. I would Say Something about families. Owns therg her family New York Times. Have maintained their commitment to quality. That is an exception in an america today. So many families, for many reasons, tax reasons, so their companies. Thank god for the sulzbergers and the coxs. Fewnt tell you how many owners would make the statement that alex just made. Role of thed the watchdog in our newspapers and journalism. We are profitable and other areas of our company and we can support excellence in our newspapers. 5 ind say there are there are some, like jeff bezos, and there is some hope that he will restore that in the washington post. We dont know what will happen to my old newspaper, the los angeles times. A once Great American paper is in a precarious state. Tell us to what extent, what is the future . [laughter] um. I started with a lot of praise. Going back to the Public School story, and recent stories about our elected officials, charging personal expenses,redit cards to the taxpayers things like that would not get uncovered if our folks werent there to uncover it. I can tell you we have a large business. The atlanta newspaper part of it is a couple of percentage points. It is 90 of what we hear from jim kennedy every day. He reads every word of the paper no matter where he is. The phone rings and you know he is calling to talk about something he read in the paper. It has to do with the politicians that think they can charge their cell phone bill to the taxpayers. The passion around watchdog journalism has never been greater in our company. We intend to stay committed to it. We believe that news and business can make the world a better place, if you dont focus solely on profit, if you have a where youed culture, spend the money on the right things and are willing to take a hit on some things in order to do it right. Inintend to invest heavily watchdog journalism. We hope over time as print the clients we are able to make the switch to digital effectively. Our Digital Subscribers are up 25 , which is a huge growth rate. We need to see that continue. We need to see people do what they are doing at the New York Times. You can build a business off that for the future. There be 80 printer version of New York Times . I think there will be. I dont think there will always be. That it will be around in 10 years. There are those, and i am not sure how accurate this is, but there are certainly those that dailyat some point some papers will be eliminated and the sunday will live on, the lucrative one with the advertising and it and the biggest editorial effort. There is no discussion of anything like that that i am aware of. But, there is no question that is the trend. We have no way of knowing exactly how quickly that will happen. You dont have to go back far to realize, 10 years ago things were very different in the newspaper business. It is difficult to look out 10 years. Past, most newspapers generated 85 of revenue from advertising. 15 from circulation. You can imagine the tremendous difference. For those of you who have questions, and we take questions on all topics, i want you to work your way over to this microphone if you will. I will ask you to identify yourself and your organization if you are proud of it. [laughter] if not just give us your name. Him i the only one . This is a wonderful event. I admire your contributions to our industry. Im a working journalist. I have been guilty of editing while female many times. This is a great conversation about the future of news. I am particularly interested in a journalist as a broadcaster, what is the future of the news consumer . Of the service of news . I will take a crack at it. Nice to see you here. I think you cant make a sweeping statement about what consumers want. Consumers wantnt Different Things. They will find those things. They are all available. But i do think that if you are going to ask people to pay for news, you have to have it at a very high quality. As things begin to settle out and differentiate those organizations that can provide the values that i was talking about, and the attributes, those will be an absolute necessity. Individuals want to read pretty much about foreign affairs, and some people want to read about Jennifer Anistons baby. There are different audiences. You cant really generalize completely. It is tough when during my era, we would want to do straight news, hard news, and then comes o. J. Simpson. The audience levels went absolutely we would try to shift back. An important speech by president clinton at columbine. Whend total meltdown people wanted to continue on the o. J. Story. I dont think Public Television has ever been better than it is. [applause] i take rate pride i take great pride. I am just delighted. If i might ask a followup question. Question is about the balance between what the audience, giving them what they want to know, and giving people what they need to know. What is the expectation of americans about First Amendment and what they want to know . We did a study about peoples changing perceptions of the news, where it falls in their daily needs. It was fascinating. Is a few pieces of it. One of the things that stuck out with me, what do i need . It isounds funny but true. People said their cell phones ranked higher than water. They didnt think of it as something they needed to get on about their day. So, obviously it is not true but it is what they think. A lot of people said they believe news was an inherent right as an american. You are entitled to news. It should not be cap from you. It should not be edited. Facts are in the public domain. What people dont know is the difficulty it is to uncover facts. There are people in power who hide them, and left unchecked they will hide a lot of them. It gets rampantly out of control without some kind of a good for the state. Grand scheme the of things we are in the early years of the internet. If you look back through the emerging technology, electricity, transportation, most of the money and Business Models were solidified in the last half of that era. Not in the beginning. Right now we live in the wild west and people dont think about where information comes from. You just pick and choose. If you want good, Reliable Research information yet the thing about who is giving it to you, and not trust everything you read. Google doesnt do that for you. Organizations like ours go thr take and this team will any big investigative story and talk it over. Are we sure we are right . They go through a discussions about where did you get your facts, how did you research this . Are your sources accurate . Are they telling you the truth . Google does not do that for you. Without an owner like this [indiscernible] thank you. Hello. Im glad you are here. They key for having this conversation. I am lisa calhoun. Im the founder of right to market what i founded after i was fired as the managing editor. Best thing that happened to me. My question is in the new york , mozilla is building a platform of reader contributions. I was curious about your comment on this platform that is uniting amazon, the New York Times, and mozilla. Thank you. The specifics of that project. I do know things are far different now than they were wasthe New York Times competing with these organizations. Now there are partnerships. It is all part of this experimentation. Many of these things dont work out. Someday. It is a question of trying Different Things and seeing what will work. Sensek in the general that is what is happening. I cant give you chapter and verse on that particular experiment. David . Im a former cnn journalist. There is a deep and growing cynicism in the news consumers, that the very standards that you profess to have dont really exist. Maybe it is best personified now by the glenn greenwald. Lets just admit we have biases, and we act on them. It is impossible to be fair. What are your thoughts . I would love to start. I very much disagree with the idea that no one can be fair. Eres a debate, thr happening about the extent to which it is important ot to come off as if you have no beliefs. Can you let your stripes show, or do you need to be neutral observer . That is a valid and interesting debate going on. A deeper value is fairness. That goes without saying. Glennn be greenwald, or a reporter who would never vote, and there are people like that. Glenn greenwald is the workalist who did the and allg Edward Snowden the revelations concerning the National Security agency, and the surveillance. He has done a great deal of butl liberties journalism, most prominently he was one of the chief contacts for snowden. Set, a believer that you stand for something and you can know exactly what it is but i can still do journalism. I think there is i could argue both sides. I position has moved a little bit from know the journalist must be completely neutral to feelings, ok to have beliefs, and to let them show. You need to be transparent about them. The catchphrase on that is that transparency is the new objectivity. [indiscernible] every human has bias. Your experiences are your bias. I can say at our news operations, when bias comes up at a table of discussion around news it sticks out like a sore thumb. You are looked at as an abnormality if youre sitting there saying i dont like republicans or democrats and we should cover this angle of the story. You would never see that in a newsroom. It is so completely improper. Critics to believe that. A lot of that comes from a long history of opinion writing. A lot of influential and powerful opinion writers that. Ur brands with legacies the journal and constitution used to be two separate papers. Combined. All the legacies tie into your perceptions of the newspaper. The New York Times is no exception. They have a brand of bias. It should never get involved in their News Coverage on the front page. I will say, however, people who have biases, and i know what they are, and they share facts that are well researched, i dont find a problem with it. Transparency is the new objectivity. Economist is biased economists. [laughter] s is like your old wife uncle telling you things. You know what he thinks. The history of opinion migratesas readership online it is very difficult to tell what is an opinion piece, what is an analysis, what is a reported piece . It doesnt come with signifiers print did. This is on the front page. This is on the opinion page. This has a tag with a logo that tells me it is someones column. These things have blended in. With that these traditional differences have started to go away as well. The next questioner is anita shaw, the president of the Atlanta Press club. She coordinates investigative reporting for bloomberg. Thank you. Quick question. What new technologies are you both watching closely and think will potentially be the most disruptive . This is not a new technology become al say i have heavy user and a fan of twitter. I find it an indispensable source of news and information. I havent seen anything that is as useful to me as twitter. Twitter has only existed for less than 10 years. Well under 10 years. I watch what is happening, that is something i am weighing against. The impactng to have of facebook . What is going to have the impact of twitter . I have seen interesting things, but i havent seen anything that looks like it is as dominant as that. Monitoringedia allows you to see trending, stories trending that sounds popcultureish. But in the old days, it was an editors job to find out what people had on their mind. What story should you put in front of people is what they wanted to know. Its easier to know that now because he you can put out a package of information and by the end of the day everybody is tweeting or chatting about a particular croup of stories. It gives you good direction on what to follow up on. Your news tomorrow will be more relevant than it was today. Are you worried about apple roku. Wrote to r know, itse who dont allows people to Stream Television without going through a dbs provider. They dont have as much content. Netflix is an example of a Company Investing in countenance in content. House of cards. But they dont have espn, cnn, fox. News. Nt get current it is part of the changing technology. We have our own product called ntour, which allows you to stream it to your tablet. You can slip through the channels and like a particular show. Are trying to get our user interface out there now. Apple has lots of billions of dollars to spend. Whereoverthetop video, video is trending. The power that comes from being a moderator. I would like to bring maria up for a moment. Theres a reason. In washington there were reporters who were the stakeout reporters. Away. Uldnt get they were standing outside the door, and ice, rain, sleet. Good example. As a one of those. They cant get out that door without maria being there. I have had tremendous admiration for her enterprise, please. What you are saying is im a pain in the ass. [laughter] website. Own supporterreport. Com. I have a foot in both doors. You talked about it being the wild west. I think it is an apt description. Im on the board of the Atlantic Press club. One of the things we wrestled there is a lower barrier to entry, what can we do, and this is more traditional news world, to help the consumer be able to differentiate what is credible news, and what is either madeup or not substantiated . I keep thinking, get it first, but get it right. I think there are certain standards not everybody plays by the rules. What can we do to help the public understand there is a difference between solid journalism and all the clutter . I would just say having these discussions is good. I dont know if you can have enough of them to reach enough people. But telling people that you go through Great Lengths to fact check stories will allow them to see the difference between that check and not fact checked. It isk talking about important. For us, i know i have great faith in our news organizations. I have watched the discussions that go on. If they didnt go on that would be of great concern to us. We internally know when it is happening and when it isnt. I get we get phone calls and emails, bombarded with them. People will send you an article from some source. , blank. You blank i have no idea where that came from. Who is saying it. There is no editorial judgment going on. But it is out there and people are reading it. That is dangerous. That is why it is the wild west. In time people will want less static and more signal. It may be the biggest issue. , thinking about our granddaughters, will they realize the importance of the New York Times feed . Option, all the other information streaming into them, and realize this is fact checked, and they were to get accuracy . Tremendous need of our educational system, and our parenting. Here is more garbage coming at you then there is solid information. I would like to see schools bear down on teaching news literacy. To the extent that an organization can support the and foster it, it would be very helpful. When i was in buffalo we had a publication called next. What we found was geared towards teens. Those preteens and teens who likelyxt were much more to become subscribers to the paper. They understood from an early age that what this was, so get them early and teach them, and support the programs that do that. I hope you will take a copy of her article which is outside. You will find one of the best. More. Going to take one i asked the aba question and not a commentary. Im going to take two minutes of your time. And tell you who i am. Why i came here 45 years ago, title of this gathering is the future of the news, i feel i have moral obligations to you all to tell ea about the past of the news. The troubles for this country faced. I will add one more thing. Those troubles have their seeds in georgia. Atlanta, georgia. Im a structural engineer. Iname to the United States 1969. 45 years. I got my masters degree in 1971. With one mission in life, degrees are not important. Money is not important. Positions, not important. Citizenship, i am right now citizen of two countries. The United States and iraq. Neverne in citizenship, subordinate your country to a pocket book. Once you do that you violate rule one. Here,hen i came to speak me im nottold supposed to carry those documents in my hands. Im going to give those documents to those gentlemen. They will see the horrible things going on. Respectful. Be very could you this is a q a session. Would you put the question to our panel . Id be glad to. If somebody told you that some of the major media in this nation kept the American People in the dark about major events, and this question is addressed to all three, if somebody told you that, intentionally cap the American People and the world in the dark, if somebody told you that, what would you tell him . That we have failed if we have cap American People in the dark about any significant event. I have served in several cnn. Ions, chairman of if we have kept the American People in the dark on any major significant event and we have failed our jobs. I hope that we have not. I would be pleased to answer specifically what topic we may have kept from the American People. Im not going to comment on that. I would agree with what tom said. We would have failed. Sometimes there is information we dont report on because we dont deem it to be newsworthy, or verifiable. No comment either. The New York Times. Our job is to get out the facts and not withhold them. Im going to give you documents. You study them and research them. If there ian