Transcripts For CSPAN Washington This Week 20150322

It just popped into my head that one of our faculty he was giving a speech, a commencement speech and there was a project in the phd student said i dont know if i can do that. He said i would not have asked you to do that if i did not think you could do that. There is a profoundly validated element pushing places. That is a great management style. Can ask you one more questions before you eat open before we open it to the floor . You think about your role in the senior team in helping to keep twitter can you talk about how you keep and think about that part of the inwardfacing role . Gabriel the culture is a living, breathing thing. Especially in the Technology World where you have Companies Like twitter that are young twitter is going to be nine later this year. You imagine this has been there forever but it has not. Not even close. Yet, because of the cycle of our role in the media and Technology World, there is a sense of attachment to things, including culture. Even in Companies Like ours, there is this pull to preserve parts of our culture. At twitter, dean lyons are they well identified . They are. Gabriel they are. We have these core values. We want to create a culture where those values can continue to exist but that is different from reserving a culture. Preserving a culture. Inwardly, our responsibility on the Leadership Team is to create an environment where those types of values can continue to flourish and also, being really openminded about when some of these things are falling down. Ill give you a specific example. We had to core values which are deliberately in opposition to each other. One of which is to be rigorous and get it right. Another is to ship it. We talk about launching things as shipping things. Ship it is just get it out the door. Get it right is a different, thoughtful value. Those two things are at all the with one another. When as a company we felt like the fact these things are at odds with one another is slowing us down, creating tension we dont need and building headwinds that are counterproductive. Then it is our responsibility as a Leadership Team to acknowledge it. I think our companies tend to fall down is these things possibly exist. You are building this. You sit at that table. If you are doing nothing, you are just standing by, you are facilitating this counterproductive thing. Acknowledge what is going on and acknowledge for everyone outside of that room it is going on and say, even if it is the case we dont have an answer, this is something we are thinking about. We are trying to address it. Part of us as a culture, we were talking earlier about our external transparency report. We try to be radically transparent internally also. As a Leadership Team, we are deliberating over a number of things that impact our culture but we try whenever possible to share that with the company as it is happening. That is great. A great internal norm. Dean lyons those are some of the Difficult Conversations not usually framed that way. Usually, we are thinking about a manager and a direct report and something that is not go right. But this notion of saying, this is a tension in our work environment. We dont have the answer but lets talk about it. That is a great example. Questions from the audience. Lets open it up. We have a couple of microphones. We want to make sure to capture it in the video. We have the capacity for questions to come from remote. A recent article on npr highlighted the role with her the role twitter was playing in journalism in mexico with the Cartel Violence that was a rubbing that was erupting. One womans account was hacked and it was reported she died. What response is any dust twitter avenues violet situations . Gabriel the account was not true . She was reporting on the violence. No one was entirely clear if she ever was a real person or not. Gabriel i would say in the context of violence or any kind of crisis kind of situation, part we get this question a lot. I will give you another example. It relates. In the aftermath of hurricane sandy, there were accounts on twitter of flooding in this place and people had these falsified photos of certain places underwater. There, you have questions like twitter and other social media seem to be giving rise to potential misinformation. As i was saying earlier, i really believe it is one of the most extraordinary viral platforms ever in existence. It can be a vector for the viral spread of misinformation. What i always point out in this context is the spread of misinformation in the context of some kind of crisis breaking news situation is not new. It far predates certainly social media. The example i would give from sometime after i graduated from here was the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Before social media, you had established media and news accounts at the time were that there were people of a certain ethnicity who purportedly executed that bombing. The difference, and i think this is the key distinction, it can be this vector of this misinformation but the difference is i dont remember the confines but if you go back it was not minutes that that misinformation was out there. Perhaps someone knows how long the duration was. It seems to me it may have been days. The fundamental change is that you have on one hand, with platforms like twitter, an opportunity for incredible on the ground reporting. I am standing on the hudson river, there is a plane. It just landed. Here is a picture. We later find out this is true. Or, i am standing on the corner of bleaker street and we are underwater. Ps, it is not true. The beauty of social media is it has accelerated the time of the debunking of these things. If we could rewind to the Oklahoma City bombings with that , tragedy, with a platform like twitter, we might have accelerated the time it took to debunk the misinformation. It exists but it can get put act in its place better put back in its place better and mark quickly now. Dean lyons thank you for that. Can you use the microphone . Thank you. Thank you. What is your view on google withdrawing from china . More specifically, to provide limited but still superior service to 1. 4 billion people compared to no service at all. Gabriel that was definitely the most challenging chapter of my time at google without a doubt. You know, it was a source of real soulsearching at the company. First, let me tell you where we stand on this at twitter and i can try to shed some light on how that went for us at google. Twitter is currently blocked in china. As much as we would love for people in china to be able to freely access twitter, they cannot. What we said is that we are unwilling to make the kinds of sacrifices that we believe we would need to make in order to be unblocked there. Perhaps there is a world in which twitter can be unblocked but it would require sacrifices that were just not prepared to commit to because of our values. In the case of google, i would say it was similar. The difference was for us at the time to continue to operating there, it was requiring levels of sacrifice that we were unwilling to continue to sign up for. You can absolutely argue as it was argued extensively internally at the time that being there even in this diminished capacity and giving people some access to the service is better than nothing but what i will tell you about the experience of the time was the premise of it was we will be there and hopefully, the trendline will be one of greater and greater openness. Yet, we view the opposite. Coinciding with our presence was a move towards more and more closed behavior and limited access and then finally, at the time when we decided to take the action that we did, actual targeting of activists and dissidents, the question was, what is the benefit coming from our presence . It didnt seem like it was benefiting the people in Mainland China and it did not seem like it was benefiting people outside either. It is a perfectly valid question. It was one that required years of deliberation on our part. That was a conclusion we can do and it is a similar conclusion we have come to at twitter. Dean lyons thank you for that. Feel free to line up. One of the things with twitter that is interesting is you have seen a decline or not the growth people have wanted to see for monthly active users. One of the trends is around syndication, how is twitter being integrated into tv shows etc. It is a greater measure of the impact twitter is having. Now that you are talking about the free speech movement, i have been wondering, do you have any thinking about what metrics you could use to more quantitatively measure how twitter is being used as a movement and whether it is where you want to see it and the impact it has had as a company . Gabriel this is a great question. Before when i was saying that i feel like being a publicly traded company has not changed us that the spotlight as maybe brighter, this is a great example. We love the growth we see with the company. There are people who have their own ideas of what that growth should look like. The disconnect is if you just view twitter through the lens of monthly active users, it is missing the whole part of the equation and it is certainly missing it in the context of a broader movement. For us, when we think about the impact we had and how best to measure it, it is much more to do with the audience associated with any moment than it does the specific number of monthly active users exposed to something. It has more to do with the number of people who got to view and interact with a tweet associated with the oscars or the super bowl or elections in then the individual number of elections in the u. K. Then the individual number of people who produced a tweet. It has more to do with the audience than it does this limited slice of a user base. That is more how we think about it. Most recently, you saw it is hard to experiment with different kind of logged out experience that would allow you to experience this. That is how we are thinking about it. Hopefully, it will let people experience that part of the global conversation. When you use the term audience, you are not just thinking collective followership. It is retweets, expression of engagement with the content. Gabriel if you are barack obama and you want to tell the world you have just and reelected as president of the United States you take to twitter to do so and you tweet out four more years as he did is, but you take to twitter to do so because it is not only your x million followers could see that. You do that because that tweet gets syndicated around the world, around the web, broadcast on television. That is your audience exposed to that particular expression. Our users already think of it in this way and it is just a question of what are the ways to quantify that and we are certainly thinking along those lines. Dean lyons great question. We have time for some more questions. Can you give us examples of things that might be worrisome . Gabriel the china example is a fair one. We have been blocked at various times by other countries around the world also. These are things that keep us up. Suddenly, people are unable to access this platform that gives their voice this broader megaphone, it is really challenging for us. And how do we do that well continuing to uphold our values . Yeah, those are things certainly for me, those are things that are really, really challenging. Dean lyons especially for you you get the first call. Gabriel yeah. Dean lyons how often do you tweet . Gabriel several times a day. One of you was tweeting you were excited to have me here. I responded. Was that you . Good to see you in the world. Just to tread lightly and question the status quo, partly for me what i feel is a visible position, i am a private person, and i use twitter more for professional services, so you will see me tweeting things like we issued our transparency report. That is the kind of thing i want people to know about. I know there are a lot of other people tweeting about seeing their daughters first steps. My daughters first steps were experienced by me in the comfort of my own home and were not disseminated in this way, but that is up to each on their own. Dean lyons i tend to use it professionally as well as well but occasionally i will tweet about my kids, and it sounds authentic to them. I think they respond favorably. Gabriel it is lovely. It is lovely. As a user, some of those moments where i get to see this unvarnished look at people ive never would have had access to i love those experiences. To be able to be exposed to interactions between people i love those experiences, too, and to the extent there is an appetite to see that unvarnished look at me, i am happy to catch up over a coffee at some time, but i am not putting it on display. Dean lyons are there any tweet s you regret . Gabriel that is a great question. Maybe because i am a cautious person, no, there are none, but i stand by them. There are plenty of other people i regret having done. Dean lyons that is great. This is a relatively recent tweet of mine and i thought it was harmless. My daughter had a civilizations history textbook and i picked it up and started going through it and it mentioned that as best experts can tell, christ was not born in the year zero. He was born in the year 5 bc that was the best guess. I tweeted i just learned this, am i the last to know . The birthdate of christ is an important date for a lot of people in the world, and i got a response. [laughter] i was trying to be the scientist. It was one of those things where it got a little more response than i expected. [laughter] gabriel if it makes you feel any better, we had dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson out in the bay area area last week, and he came by the office and i was asking him about an extraordinary exchange he had some of you may have seen this i think it was last christmas, and he tweeted out that on this day december 25, we celebrate i will do a bad job of paraphrasing, but this is the spirit of it, for you factcheckers on this day, we celebrate a man who was born, and by the time he was 30 revolutionized the world. Happy birthday, isaac newton. It turns out people assign very special value to december 25 and he heard an earful about that, but to your question, any tweets that we or others regret he certainly was unapologetic in having made that. You know, i think, again, people are provocative in their lives. He is certainly a provocative member of our society, and i think he is probably just as provocative now as he was before twitter, it is just that we all get to experience it along with him. Those types of behaviors, i love seeing. Dean lyons that is part of why the university is such an exciting place. The marketplace for ideas is open, and that is why we love it here so much. Gabriel, thank you very much for being here today. Gabriel thank you for having me. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] dean lyons thank you you all for being here. Thank you for the wonderful work you have been doing us. Secret server director Joseph Clancy was on capitol hill before a House Appropriations subcommittee. He was there to testify on the agencies 2016 budget request but also took questions about an incident at the white house that allegedly involved secret Service Agents driving into a barricade while drunk. Clancy has been in charge of the Service Since the last director resigned in october. Now isis rears its ugly head in this army is shaky. You should not be surprised by that. You cannot undo eight years of sovietera stuff in eight years. Afghanistan, according to the president announcement, we currently have about 3000 troops and we will drop down to zero then year after that. We will probably see a similar result in iraq when isis attacks. That afghan army will be shaky without albert retired without help. Retired army general Daniel Bolger about iraq and afghanistan and what we should have done different. Sunday night on cspans q a. Discussion on newsgathering in the 21st century. In a look at how Investigative Journalism is impacting consumers. Teddy roosevelt Prince Charles receives the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Award in washington dc. Buzz feed news executive editor was joined at this event when he announced he was stepping down as editorinchief of feiss magazine. This discussion was moderated by tom rosenfield. This is just over an hour. Long gone are the daily doses of news. At night when family cuddled around for the evening broadcast. Down the age of advanced technology, digital reliance and social media news is constantly reported and constantly consumed. Americans are turning to Online Sources for information on major events and issues in our world. This is driven by websites such as buzzfeed and gawker, or the publications which take up more than 50 of your newsfeed. Although they are younger than the people in our audience, they have a dramatic impact on how people see the world around them. It we have an allstar panel. We have rocco pistorio from vice. We have max read editorinchief of gawker. We have tom rosenfield, the american director of the press institute please welcome me in jordan tonights panel. In welcoming tonights panel. I want to start by asking you how you would describe the mission of your organization. Lets start with gawker what do you see as the mission of gawker . What function do planar audiences life we spent a lot of time talking about this because gawker has been around a long time, especially for a blog. We started as a gaza publication and brew into a place that funded culture change. The one thread that has been pulled through that entire history has been our status as a trusted guide as to what is bs and what is not. The idea we can seek honestly because they are too afraid or concerned with their own respectability to say to get take readers and sit them down and give them a stiff drink and see that thing the times was telling you is wrong. These are the Players Behind the scenes and this is what you need to know in order to know the news. Tom it is like the inside story. Max either way, the goal is to make everyone on the inside, to tear down the gatekeepers and to let there be no what journalists are talking about at the bar or when they see each other for lunch. Tom the names are intriguing. Gawker and buzzfeed. It is another name that implies something. What is the mission . We have been working on our shani we have been working on our mission statement, and i dont have it done yet. For news that is really causing trouble, kicking ass, taking names. For the intersection for the entertainment section, we also have a news section. We try to do all kinds of things to meet people where they are. Tom let me follow up on that. You are known for cat videos. I saw a presentation of buzzfeed , and it is a picture of a basset hound. But you also have a range of things that goes to watchdog journalism. I will ask any minute about resources. What role do you see buzzfeed playing in the life of its audiences . Shani since i work primarily with news, my focus is being a trustworthy source to our readers. That is primarily why have invested so heavily in news media. They do not have a reason to trust us, because we had not been presenting ourselves as a trustworthy source of news. That is what has been changing in the last couple of years. From my perspective, a big part is making our readers helping our readers understand we are helping them. Tom i will push on that when we get to it revenue models. Rocco, you have spent 10 years at vice. Im going to ask you to describe vices mission. Rocco i actually have to take something here. Im in no longer with vice. In order to come to this event given circumstances i wont get into, and it should not detract from this. But in order to be here and talk to you guys, some stuff h appened, well say. Tom so youre speaking as an individual. Rocco as a good american. [laughter] tom so, given that caveat, how does vice fit into this new media ecosystem . Rocco there used to be eight a rate card, one of the guys from tv on the radfio vice is the all swalloingwing whore of babylon. There is some truth to that vice is vice. What started out as a free publication in montreal evolved to being literally about vice, sex, drugs, and rock n roll, and over the years we have different voices in places that were lacking interesting reporting. Some of this was by luck, some by accident, i lot of it with the founders and everyone that works there. We have somehow transitioned that egos into expanding vice that ethos into expanding vice. Vice candy eating too much, it can be can be eating too much, it can be anything. What people are accepting as news these days. All three of us would not be here if this was not a great topic to discuss. Tom before we get to it revenue models let me ask about how all three of your organizations have grown. Why is that . What is the void you think you are feeling that allowed you to do this . Was it knowing it Digital Technology and Digital Publishing and understanding data, was it Something Else . Whoever wants to jump at that one. Max i think gawker there is an information arbitrage going on. Every journalist who has ever worked on a story has had information that they were able to put into that story because they had editors that were afraid of it, work were friends of the people that the story was about, or people who otherwise did not want to put that in the paper. That is a huge amount of information that a lot of people might be interested in that we have long held the perfect gawker story is one user at a bar from another journalist and then you actually go and tell everybody else, because it should be public knowledge. There was nobody really doing that. There were people doing something similar to that at various times certainly tabloids it is a tabloid related kind of things. That sense i hesitate to use these mtv words, but raw unflitered uncensored, these things that otherwise people would not have access to. There was nobody doing news in the way that people actually talk about news. Swing to your cubicle mate at the office and say hey, did you hear such and such about a news story . And you talk about gossip that is not necessarily concerned with the specifics pinning down individual facts, so much as presenting it and trusting yourself to do it. Tom how about at buzzfeed . I know it is a data and technology company. It studies the audience very deeply. What is the engine of your growth . Shani from the perspective of news it comes from the fact that we have a pretty traditional background in our news leadership. We started with politics stuff. We realized that we need to be on top of breaking news. Something that we learned during the Boston Marathon bombing is that people were coming to us to see if we had updated information. That was something that had never happened before in a large numbers. And that was the point at which we really started beeifing up our breaking news operation. Then eachit grew from there. We should invest in Foreign Correspondents and world reporting. Part of it is about being taken seriously, and part of it is because it is fascinating and interesting and worth telling our readers about. There are all of these different paths that we expanded into. Just because we had a very traditional start. Tom part of it is that you attracted a big audience, and you had money that allowed you to expand. What was the engine behind that . Did you make your storytelling easy for millennials and brought audiences to fo llow, was it because you are built around sharing and mobile . Shani part of it is knowing what people like. Our founder jonah, is great at this, spending his lifetime looking up people interact online. He has a note in stories about how information is shared. He has a million stories about how information is shared. People are interested in things that make them feel smart, that make them go good. People want to share those emotions with other people. They let you put the post of some dog story on facebook and share that with friends. There is a aspect of human psychology which is harder to quantify, which is trustworthiness. You can build a big audience and i a lot of traffic but you have to be anything that your audience believes in beyond entertainment. Tom is there something about sharing. Data would suggest that people share things publicly once you share it on facebook or elsewhere, it means you are recommending. Shani yes, although that has changed. Three years ago, people were not sharing as much content about sex and bodies and Menstrual Cups or whatever. Now that has shifted where people feel comfortable about sharing that stuff on facebook with their names attached. Tom some people do. [laughter] tom rocco, what is the essence of vices growth . Rocco we started as a print product. I think max and i can agree on this, but at the sake of arsenic, emergent yourself for the sake of argument, emergent yourself in stories on a lesser level i dont know. youre being very honest about your own experience, not getting in the way of the story. I think that translate to video verys to video very well. It is interesting how that might translate to social. I dont know how that works. We are seeing things like that emerge. We were talking earlier about snappedchat. It is fleeting, it makes you feel like you have an exclusive on something. That may be the next frontier on how we interact the news. One thing that vice has taken from the old guard is listening to its readers and viewers. Those are the people at the end of the day that you have to answer to. Finding and keeping the pulse on of the zeitgeist. Tom washich is it different from the oldstyle different from the olympian voice of the oldstyle . Rocco yes, taking things further out and it knowing that it is recorded in some regard. There will be interesting cultural shifts happening. You are seeing it on entertainment level. With this postsnowden environment, i think it will affect the media ways. All of those things are participatory. We willtom we will get into that. That is a big issue. Before we do, lets get down to a basic thing, so people understand the structure of your organization. Traditional american immediate has been funded by advertising. In radio, that was some version of display. A, ads, video ads. What is the revenue model of gawker, and if it is, what kind . Max for 2013, we were 80 funded by advertisements. It was similar to that last year. We have a very traditional revenue model. A slightly different thing we do from print is that week felt sponsored posts not written by advertisers necessarily, but approved by advertisers that are labeled as such and such post sponsored by brown ale that appears in our feed somewhat somewhat to our post. You see this in magazines where you see inserts of doctors and things like that. The other bit of revenue that is new and growing quickly for us. Gawker is one ifof eight sister blogs. We have a whole host of ajit gadjet and tech focused blogs. Whenever we do a review, it includes a link to that gadget. We have an Affiliate Partnership with amazon. If you purchase it through that link to amazon, we get some portion of the revenue. 15 of our revenue in 2013 was just through affiliating alone. It is a weirdly growing thing. I am not 100 control with it, but we do label it. We say if you purchase this through our link, we received some of the revenue. Tom it is transaction revenue. How easy is it to note that sponsored content is sponsored . Max it depends on the person. I am skeptical that the majority of our readers know what gawker is. Given that a huge portion of our audience is revenue to gawker. It is unlikely to me that they would know what a regular gawker post compared to eight sponsored one. Compared to our sponsored one. There is an offset of color there is a post that says is sponsored. You cannot comment on them, obviously advertisers are not interested in letting you comment. [laughter] it strikes me as pretty similar to what print and newspapers and magazines have done with big ads that are meant to resemble a newspaper. Tom what are traditionally called advertorials. And do you sell banner and popup ads . Max we do. i am not super pretty toivvy to the actions of our advertising departments. Tom i wont bore people with all of this. But when we started buzzfeed summits of the traditional revenue is popup ads. He said, we start with the perception that banner ads sucks, that is why we cant charge much for them. We will invent a new form that people like as much as the rest of our content. And he gave a big this to what is now a big impetus to sponsored content. Is that a big part of your revenue model . Shani i tend not to think about that in the arena as editor. Tom your people have no involvement in creating the sponsored content. How about itat vice . Rocco none. Rocco it is interesting. Popup ads are annoying. People that flipped through magazines look at the advertisements that for so long. I think there is a church and state. If you look at ink on paper for so long, exponentially technology develops more quickly. You seek public ads replete lose their value. Popup ads quickly lose their value. There is going to be new platforms through which content and advertising. The first thing is that there are three problems to me. Three prongs. Those three prongs are in some way the weightay vices revenue problem works. I tried not to think about it while i was there. [laughter] what the advertiser is buying an association. That is what advertisers want. You do not want your acura ad next to a pileup on the freeway. You are buying the readership or the viewership. That is what an advertiser is looking for. I think model advice is similar. There is also advertising or a Creative Services division. I think the ultimate goal is to not do anything that crosses that line. And because of our content, we work with brands closely so that they think there is an authenticity. You can make a Custom Campaign for them. There is a different leg there then what is going on with you guys. Tom as the editor, there is some sponsored content that you think is terrible, do you have any role in raising concerns . Max i have an open mind to the people who do that. To their credit, they want us to be good. That is what their job is, to make stuff that ghues three version of the gawker voice that takes some of the shine, has some of that gawker aura. We have had trouble in the past. The division is enough, that our site kotaku mispelled the site otaku the entire post. That sort of thing will get fixed immediately. Tom one way or another, you are selling trust. At gawker, you are selling an inside story. At buzzfeed, your trying to build up trust fund these other topics. As editor, you are in charge of detecting that trust. Do you agree with that . You are in charge of protecting that trust. What metric is most important to you . Max traditionally at gawker it has been page views. Most of my job has been page views, we are asked to bring a certain number of visitors every month. Recently we talked about moving away from that to some nebulous new set of metrics. This is a corny thing to say the best metric is to get a couple emails from people that like what we do, even if it is just toothree you know thatt 2033 emails. Is the closest sense to feeling that you did some a good. Tom; that that is remarkable. That is the kind of thing you might hear an editor say 30 years ago. Tom what about at buzzfeed . Shani michael is getting someone my goal is hitting someone acting badly fired from their job. We have a socialist, which is a proprietary a social list, which is a proprietary way of seeing how many people have shared it. Is about getting a sense of how our it is spreading beyond the people that you seatededed it to on twitter. We also have time spent engagement, and obviously page views. Tom so it is not just sharing. Shani no. Rocco i think putting someone in jail was lying and get away with it. That is my ultimate goal. You can get a lot of traffic off that. [laughter] internally am a of course. Views matters internally, of course page views matter. I think there also might be part of our job to not be disingenuous, not to trick anyone. But you do want to bake them into theit them into the honey. The world is not just cats. [laughter] tom you are not entirely new there. Okay. So lets talk about ethics. Do you guys all have an ethics policy . Max we dont. [laughter] max i mean, i have a personal set of ethics. I hope our writers do too. My ethics can be used to trap us to give us an idea that we are in a publicly accountable box. The executive editor of gawker says that ethics is a measure of how much scurrilous and this your brand is 00 how much scurrilousness your brand is willing to bear. We are willing to do stuff that a lot of folks are in control with. Tom what would you get fired for at gawker . Max not doing a good job. We have not once had a writer fired over a story. Plagiarism generally we recommended a we reprimanded a writer for even the hint of pleasures on a post. It is not about kissingpissing off an advertiser. Tom you just recently wrote one . Shani might central concept is that i can missed i canvassed people across my editorial. My thought is that it needs to make it easy for reporters to do their jobs. That, to me, means giving everybody guidelines. Not necessarily exact answers on how to approach ethical crises, but a general sense of how we operate. How jack, our editorial director thinks. Because we have become a large organization. Making it easy for people to access how we would approach. Tom are there established guidelines, what theys should they be . And this question of massive amounts of data that of been obtained by who knows . This touches on that, and also on the question of information that is secondhand, that you did not gather yourself. By the way max, i will send you a copy of the ethics of journalism so you can build an ethics code. [laughter] what do think the stance of journalism should be about illegally obtained info, but not illegally obtained by you . Rocco i i think the standard is the same, and still is. I read the ethics code, it is really great. Shani thank you. Rocco i thought it was spoton. They are pretty traditional values i think. Really the question is, is it in the publics interest to know . You can get into the cold gatekeeper thing. The whole gatekeeper thing. I feel that morality is no longer a religious thing it is not something that your mom teaches you, it is an efficiency. Because if you lie, you die. That is my ethics policy. Because it is going to come out, and it is going to be far worse than bw, whatever is going on right now. You can see how bad things can get. That, to me, is the most simple policy. In terms of these leaks have you go through gigabytes, or terabytes of information and not look at peoples Social Security numbers, these things that are illegally obtained . Hackers have an agenda of putting that together. The story becomes so big at some point. I think the only loadstone you have is that it is in the publics interest. Eye thati bet max has some thoughts on this. Max every story is different, and every writer is different but there are a huge host of factors you are waiting. Your are weighing. Tom by Public Interest, do you mean is it interesting, or is it a public good . Max maybe those are the same thing. Public entertainment is the public good. Sony is an interesting example. To think about things are scurillous, i disagree with son in y in particular, that is a slamdunk. Were talking about a multibillion Dollar Company that is having trouble. In this case, Angelina Jolie is instrumental to a set of Business Decisions being made by this company. This is celebrity gossip, and what we were accused of when the published in a between jolie the producer and head of sony Motion Pictures entertainment. We published it because it had hollywood quality expletives, but it was also because of a famous disaster of a movie. The steve jobs movie was a huge disaster for this powerful company. They are private emails that unquestionably serve a Public Interest. Versus the Social Security numbers of thousand sony employees, there is no case you can make that this would serve a Public Interest and no reason we would want to publish those. That did not even come up. Shani similarly, we found the email between amy pascal and scott rudin about obamas supposed favorite movies, which all happened to be starring black people. I cant even remember what they were. That is actually news in that where we are in a moment where people are looking at the likeness of oscar nominees. 00 the whiteness of oscar nominees. This jokey racism plays into all of the stories we are seeing. Tom would you say you are all in the journalism business . [laughter] tom ok. I mean, that was a question i wanted to ask not based on the answer people have given. There is a lot of new media that resists that word. That thinks no, that is somethi ng old, and were inventing some thing you. Max something new. Max gawkers founder said that we do not do journalism, but we might do journalism accidentally. Tom what made you become journalists . Max it became clear that what we were doing was journalism. We always believed that allsup was news. That gossip was news. And if that is the case, then it gossiping was an active journalism. We have been doing news and porting for so long that it deems silly to reporting for so long that it seems silly to put up a falseruse. Tom what is the biggest mistake you think your organizations have made so far . [silence] [laughter] tom im going to give you a pass, rocco. You start, maybe i will come back around. Shani i think one of the biggest mistakes we made is something a gawker reported on quite astutely. In the early days of buzzfeed when we were a content laboratory, we did not have journalists. This predated news, predated our editorinchief. There were a lot of bizarre and not quite up to par posts on the site. At some point, someone decided to delete from the site under the auspices of it being predating our journalism operation. We should not have diluted this post. Not have deleted those posts. Not because we got caught, but it is not right. [laughter] tom how about a gawker . T gawker . Startups are supposed to learn from their failures, so what do you can sit or a failure do you consider a failure . Max we kept our foot to the huddle on pagespedal for page viewds for too long. Recently facebook change the way it serves news to people on feeds. It has meant that stories now get all kinds of insane numbers of people reading them without much effort or quality. When we started, we believe that quality and popularity are, if not identical, or very close together. Facebook has changed that dynamic. We should be thinking about new ways we can another wewe can measure success and quality. Tomm would you think the biggest mistakes new mjeedia are making in general . Rocco i think not being transparent to your readers at all times. Is the biggest mistake you can make in this game. That is all i will say. Tom when you say transparent does that mean about how you got the story, transparent about your personal politics transparent about your intentions . That is a major concept in my books. My view is that is what objectivity is, but what do you mean . Rocco; gettingoo places to make mistakes. If youre going to say that you speak the truth, you have to be able to do that unfettered. I dont know. It sounds like you guys can talk smack on your boss, and it doesnt hurt you. Max; are encouraged to. Tom shani i lockve talking smack on my boss. Tom so what we are going to do is going to the green room and then max can post it on gawker. , before we get to questions where do you see this being in five years . Wherewhat do you see news looking like . Shani i dont like to make predictions. Max, we were talking earlier about how it is useless, usually. Tom but you have to make business plans. Shani true. But has a pretty traditional journalists, i dont perceive the fundamentals changing very much. , in terms of what is good and how to report. Beyond that, i dont know. To wetom we know we are going to mobile. Shani a majority of our readership comes from mobile. I think about 60 . Tom is that changing the way you write stories . Shani it is fun with our tech team. They are able to give us a preview of what the post will look like on mobile. It has been code thealled the mobile preview. Because we are sitting at computers all day, that is not what most people are seen. To see what people are actually consuming in a buzzfeed post is useful. Tom and better understanding the audieneces behavior . Shani yes we like to know what theyre thinking. Tom leading or following . Shani it is important to know what kind of couple you want to have a threesome with. [laughter] obviously they should tell us if they want. Rocco i hope the future is smellovision and holograms. Max i think shani is right. Anyone that thinks they know what the content industry looks like 18 months from now is lying to you. Building trust with your regulars and your publication the quality of the stories you are bringing out, if you have a fantastic tech team as Buzzfeed Buzzfeed does, to deliver stories in a way that readers will appreciate. The hope is that nothing will change so much that it will push publications out of business. I dont know, either not the business guy. I am not the business guy. Tom how much of your traffic comes directly to the page versus social . Rocco ours is about 30 max ours is about 30 facebook, 1 3drd called arkdark. Tom how about at buzzfeed . Shani i cannot tell you off the top of my head. Primarily facebook followed by pinterest and twitter. Tom what about vice . Rocco it follows the same, maybe minus pinterest. [laughter] tom how important is your understanding facebooks mysterious algorithm to know what will succeed in their delivery . Shani i think you cant obsess about it because it is constantly. It changes constantly. There is not one outgrow them, there are 40 and they are tweaking them constantly. There is not one formula. What will get me traffic today over what people actually care about tom you dont focus on that intermediary. Shani yeah. Tom in an increasingly crowded marketplace, one argument could be made and you have all talked about this you have gravitated towards being more trustworthy. You have passed journalism. Do you think that your brand is going to migrate towards becoming more serious, more trustworthy because that will serve the Business Model . Rocco trustworthy is a funny word. I want to torture it to mean something that it doesnt. Which is to say, i want people to trust that we are being honest with them, not necessarily that what we are writing is true, or that we are 100 positive it is true. We are a gossip rag, and we embrace that and publish gossip. The hope is that we have the integrity and identity that allows people to recognize that without them making the judgment about the stuff we are presenting based on the transparency and so on. The only thing you can rely on is your name, and if so, you want to make sure it is taken seriously, or at least understood. Tom it is a sort of 21st century tabloid. Shani and buzzfeed . Tom shani yeah, but not too serious. Tom dont take yourself too seriously. Journalists to be funny because they deal with all kinds of stuff. Some serious issues need to be addressed that were not addressed earlier. So i think it is a trend, if you will. Tom our trend is to go to the audience. Thank you so much for coming. [indiscernible] tom good question. Max i would say i believe that essentially. I believe that rocco is good at his job. What we are talking about his Business Models. We have a history of reporting on vice and people coming into stories and telling us that they are only reporting on vice because we are jealous. Everybody is jealous of advice they have a lot of money. [laughter] it is important that readers reckon id were doing the reporting because we believe those stories to be important. Tom lets stick to one question per person. Hi, thank you all for coming. You will consider yourself to be in the journals in business, but also you work for websites with a lot of people viewing your articles. How do you balance publishing Quality Content that is important, but also being quick based . Tom shani we dont do quick base. Tom remember, youre in the trustworthy business. Shani not every story needs to get the same amount of traffic. That is the most important thing to understand. For us, for me, what i think about most is this story reading the people in needs to reach. It needs to reach. If we are doing a story on a Chronic Fatigue syndrome and it goes to 60,000 people, and then you go to a quiz on moments that historic your community and it goes to 400 Million People that is okay. The people that read the story on Chronic Fatigue syndrome are sending you emails and asking if they can translate it into their journals. There are so many metrics we can measure success on that thinking about everything as traffic is detrimental. But it is also bad for business. Tom do you guys have expectations about how well a certain kind of story should do . Worse that more refined or is that more refined . Shani i have a general idea depending what a success looks like. But we dont have traffic goals. Tom how about itat vice or gakwer . Rocco the metric is quality and it needs to be determined somehow. Youre doing this job in some regard, you can say that one piece is going to go nutes ors or get on reddit or something. And sometimes i think, this is a shitty story. But that is our job, to predict that. There are other pieces, trying to be dispassionate about it. People will email you about the stories, and if the right person reads it, maybe one person does change. And realworld changes the real metric. Is the real metric. Shani we got a senior nsa official fired because of a conflict of interest. That didnt go wide on facebook by any means. I would take that almost any day. Tom thank you. Hi, thank you for coming. This is been a very entertaining event. [laughter] tom a little bit of seriousness. My question is do you think that someone reading exquisitely as a media like her companies could be considered fully informed . Followup to that would be, do you think your readers have the perception of being fully informed if they are only getting your media . Rocco i do think there is any such thing as fully informed obviously. Max if you read facebook or gawker, i can see yourself being very well informed. Shani i will steal this for my boss who always says people think of this middleground reader who reads the newspaper every day. He is a little bit interested about the latest incident, and a bit interested in the rocket going to space them, and wants to read the paper to get an anchor mental update on thse thinese things. To get an incremental update on the things. I dont think that kind of person actually exist. Rocco i will say people are more complex than Marketing Department or editorial deferments think. Editorial departments think. Thanks for coming. Buzzfeed gawker, and vice all have sister sites or subsections. If you could add a sister sistte or remove one which one or why . Shani from each others . [laughter] its open. Max something we do well, and could be done better his coverage of internet culture. Is coverage of internet culture. We call it weird internet, but it is not even weird, it is just to let. It is just internet gizmodo does a bit of it. Is ait is incredibly important and influential. I really to find a way to tell climate stories in a way that is readable and compelling. It is just hard. The market for climate journalist has been so diminished in the last 10 years. There is hardly anybody doing it. The people who are doing it are doing it were isoing worthy, but not readable work. Tom can i ask a related question . Traditional newsrooms, as they have shrunk, have largely given up on diversity pulls. What we have done in research at api, the Digital Divide in terms of minority publishings not being connected to the internet, that problem may have been solved by wireless. The other problem of digital, this new diversity of content, also has not happened. There is a growing concern and now we see in technology, there is even gender diversity issues. Do you see this as a major concern . If the goal is to get to scale and brand as fast as possible those broad appeal categories are not going to be served . Rocco if you can successfully use some of that to push forth stuff that people might not read otherwise, it balances out. In terms of diversity in tracking using, that is a tough dilemma. Diversity in news media. They can choose. They cross over. The way things are going categories, whatever you want to call them, sister sites. As long as there is that, it only serves the reader more. Hi, my question is merely for primarily for shani. You said you wanted to remodel buzzfeed. Maybe getting rid of cats. Shani not at all, i love those things. Do think that may reduce the seriousness . I havent read articles on for ferguson and oped pieces that i appreciate. I have read articles on ferguson. But also the less academic type posts, to be gentle. Pictures of cats, those are fun but do you see those as being potentially harmful or detracting . Shani i genuinely do not. I think it is great and love it. I think most people are not reading buzzfeed as ia whole. Most people are reading the pieces that cross their facebook page. The thing that we have found through doing research of our users. We like to research what our users think. We felt that people who find out that we do serious news, their estimation of us shoots up in a way that is fascinating because they just did not know. The answer is not to do less of the fun stuff, but to do more of the news and make it clear that is what we do. They dont think less of us because we have some fun quizzes. Okay. Thanks. What is your approach to International News, and have you picked people will consume and learn from it . Rocco vice news has had such strong conflict in the past, but also with the future of Buzzfeed News . Rocco i cant speak to vice n ews particularyly now. For we had a saving south sudan issue. 30,000 word story about why he was a failed state. I would love to bring attention to issues like that. Maybe i didnt answer the. Question i would love to do maybe i did not answer the previous question. Keep building on the story. How does it effect me . That is an important thing. We can say this is how it affects you this is the oil incident, follow the money trail. That can be in it shooting thing, and i hope that is the Way Technology and news go. Shani im not quite sure what your specific question was about those. Im just curious about buzzfeeds approach to International News will go forward . Shani there are two fronts in which we do International News. One is our Foreign Correspondents. We have people based in nairobi the border of turkey. We are hiring a correspondent in nigeria. We have somebody in ukraine. We have people scattered about just sending dispatches in a very traditional way. We are also expanding in terms of our bureaus it other countries. We have a london bureau. They are becoming a new source for people in the uk. They are doing news and fun stuff and entertainment for the u. K. We also are looking to expand in brazil, sydney, and other places like that. Hi. So your organizations have been around almost sense the beginning of communities that have been formed and started on the internet. Your websites are very entrenched in those kinds of committees and were built around the same time. Kinds of communities and were built around the same time. You have to contend with groups coming in this new edge while still being this new media that was born from the internet, aside from vice, which started in print, but came to the internet. How do you do with those communities coming to the internet and more eestnet the old media and more based with the old print media compared to the newcomers . Max that is an interesting question, and one i dont think about much. I think my audience is one young enough we are not an appealing place to people, as my parents are fond of telling me. [laughter] in that sense, we dont think about them much at all. We arent generally a publication largely by people under the age of 40. Entirely under the age of 40. We think about news from the perspective people that age, weve rated a write it with that perspective. It is not an accent that our audiencese is young. I dont know if that answers your questions. Kind of. [laughter] i havent thought much about people who are not internet age coming to our website. We do wide variety of things. There are things that will appeal to them, and things that will not appeal to the middle. Hopefully the right things find them. [laughter] tom do you care less . If the reader less important if they are 60 . To your advertisers, or to you . Rocco to advertisers, probably. Shani i have no idea. Nmmax i dont think about our demographics much. It is about who we are at this moment in the web more than anything else. I am a bit more afraid of teens who are vigor in number 00 bigger in number dont care about as much because we are not instagram or snapchat. That is a vigor business problem that is a bigger business problem for us. Building on that idea of the community, one thing you need is commenters. I was wondering about the commenting seen on gawker. It is probably the most fiber and i have seen anywhere. I was wondering how you viewed that because most sites hide it. We saw commenters how do you see commenters playing into the new media scene . The founder of our country would be pleased to hear he said that. Part of the itoswe saw is the ethos is we give readers the ability to hold us accountable on pages we write. The idea is we have fiber and, intelligent, sharp writers who can call us out when we are wrong or doing something badly. The problem is i think anyone who has done this long enough is in order to have a productive and worthwhile commenting community for online form community, yet that moderators to weed out trolls but also not to fall back on injokey, meangirl things which is something gawker has struggled with, both writing and in the comments. [laughter] there is nothing worse than having a writer write something extremely brave or intelligent that they put a huge amount of effort into and the first thing is tl;dr and i looked you up on the internet and you are really ugly. [laughter] women writers are subject to misogynistic, terrible comments. Now that i have rambled for too long, to answer your question, if you have a comment moderator great. It can only strengthen a website. I think it can only make a publication better. There is a high chance you would just be publishing with actual racism on your platform. Are there other ways do you want to add anything . For news, we have removed that we call our native comments. Anyone who makes those easily, there is no reason for anyone to comment like that. I made it difficult to comment on news stories. For things like lists and quizzes or lifestyle things, comments are useful in that people can say i tried this and it worked for me or people will be like there are funny people who tell funny jokes and go along with the vibe of the host. We like our Community Moderators to spend time moderating those places rather than terrorism and racial strife. There is less by you l you have comments oness value less value to have comments on that. Journalism is constantly evolving. My friend says every agent invents its own journalism. The New York Times was invented in response to yellow journalism. It was a reaction. What we think of as journalism is a permanent thing has never been the case. When i got into the business a very long time ago, we were trying to essentially put our footsteps into the prints of our elders. And almost ciceronian way of doing it. Youre inventing a new journalism. That can always be messy. It is also a very dynamic edge. If you are young and thinking about this, youre going to invent the next journalism and that is pretty cool. At its very exciting. One thing i would add, the disruption in media, the most profound disruption is financial. It is not that the audience has gone away. The audience is bigger and more constant and it has ever been. This is a search for revenue as much as anything else. We want to thank our fantastic panel for being here. [applause] thank you so much for joining us. Are you doing . Good. Monday night on the communicators, we met up with tim moynahan to get a tour of the latest in tv technology. What does oled stand for . Tim organic light emitting diode. It refers to the backlight system. We use led backlight to color liquid Crystal Display and this one is using the individual oled particles as a source of light. They can turn on and off independently. With an led set you will always see some sort of life seeping light seeping through. To my eyes this is 4k and oled which is the buzzwords at the show. As the holy grail of tv. Monday night on the communicators on cspan2. The event included a group of journalists discussing the important of Investigative Journalism and this is over and hour. I think will begin right away. Thank you all for staying in place. We will move quickly my name is jack gillis. I am director of Public Affairs for the Consumer Affairs of america. I would like to welcome you on the Investigative Panel of reporting. For the consumer advocates and working with the media investigative reporting is one of the most critical components of being an effective advocate. Today we are going to talk about something near and dear to the heart of advocates and that is investigative reporting. The traditional and the traditional and as a result, the increasingly difficult business challenges facing news outlets, the new types of investigative reporting. We will look at how all of this is impacting a key bill in consumer advocacy. Because the media is so critically important to advocates there are new questions being raised that will affect the way we are able to change policy. Who is emerging as credible news sources on the internet . Do the new Business Models affect editorial content . What is the relevance of print and broadcast outlets to their internet partners . How do news recipients, how do we consume us address the concern that the internet content may not be as carefully edited as daily print content . Our blogs real competition our traditional news outlets . And what are the challenges in integrating blogs, social media, usergenerated content into organizations like abc, nbc, yahoo , the wall street journal and propublica . Who has new and bluechip reputations for unbiased and carefully researched content . The bottom line is well look at where investigative reporting is going in the next five years. As we asked these questions, the news, about the news is kind of scary. ]a recent pew report discussed that the continued erosion of news reporting resources combined with the new media opportunities, present growing opportunities in politics, government, and agencies and corporations to take their messages directly to the public without a filter. Heres a snapshot from the pew report. Newspaper newsroom cutbacks for the industry down over 30 since 2000. In local tv, sports, weather and traffic now account for an average of 40 of the content. Cnn, the cable channel that branded itself around deep reporting, has cut story packages and half. Across three of the major cable channels, coverage of live events and live reports during the day, which requires expensive cruise and staff, have been cut by 30 . Heres where it gets interesting. To combat dwindling resources, a growing list of Media Outlets such as Forbes Magazine uses new technology to produce content by way of algorithm. No human reporting necessary. This adds up to a new industry that is more undermanned and underprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones into question the information putting their hands. All this is happening at a time as howard kurtz said, the , average consumer can in effect create his own news, picking and choosing from sources they trust and enjoys rather than being spoonfed by a handful of big media conglomerates. Of which we have here, the big media conglomerates. Almost every year for 20 years we have examined at the media from a variety of perspectives and weve had some incredible participants. I can say without question that this year we are honored to have what could be considered the best collection of investigative reporters in the country. So thank you all very much for joining us. So what i would like to do today is just ask a series of questions come encourage the panelists to interact with each other, and most importantly encourage you to interrupt, as ask questions, and be part of this discussion. The first question goes to brian ross. Brian is abc news chief investigative correspondent reporting for world news nightline, Good Morning America and 20 20. Hes also began his career actually prior to nbc where he was before abc in waterloo iowa. Well, he is a chicago native graduate of university of iowa which explains that water to i waterloo, iowa, beginning which i could understand when i first read his bio. He is receiving of the most prestigious awards in journalism including seven dupont, six device, 16 in the scope five overs to press awards and five edward r. Murrow awards and and many, many more. I could spend an hour listing the stories that brian and his team have done to generate these awards. A couple of them are worth noting, however. Exposing the dangerous conditions at factories in bangladesh, making clothes for Tommy Hilfiger and walmart. A toyota report which prompted one of the largest automobile recalls in history. Pay to play grading system for overseas. Walmart use of overseas child labor for their buy america clothing campaign. In fact, i was in walmart result and theres pictures of brian all over the place. Do not let this man in. [laughter] there are many, many more stories, but it mustve been when he was 10 years old that brian also broke what many of us remember as a very important story, and thats the abscam story. I guess, brian, you can also be credited with a great movie american hustle. In introducing brian i also have to acknowledge cindy who is in the audience today, probably one of abcs star investigative producers and some of you i know many of you know quite well. So cindy, welcome as well. So, brian, what is your awardwinning stories was done in cooperation with the center for public integrity. How did that come about . What was the relationship . What do you see as the future for joint investigative reports . And if there is a future, what protection do you engage in when selecting a partner to avoid the appearance of bias . Brian thank you, jack. Its nice to be here. We partner with the Center Republican integrity on in the tribal story about whats happening to coal miners vying for benefits under the black lung law. And what we discovered working with a Great Research at the center, chris, was one doctor at the country most prestigious hospital perhaps, Johns Hopkins, became the cocompanies go to doctor. Coal companies goto doctor. After course of 10 or 15 years in every single case he failed to find black lung. He thought it was summer more so he thought it was some sort of lung bird disease but he never found black lung. And what chris at the center did was to go back and actually compiled the precise medical records of some 1800 cases, and 1700, examine the findings to some of those people had died and the autopsies showed they had black lung. So chris came to us from the center, and with the producer we worked together using the incredible research and, frankly, they can research what we probably would not spend a year and a half doing. Thats what chris did. And then putting that together with our ability to sit down at Johns Hopkins and introduces doctor. After our report, that program was suspended by hopkins. The department of labor since moved to reopen every single case where miners had been denied, and again and again there were many who died who had been determined by their own doctors they have black lung. After this doctor hopkins said they did not, the government reached out to take back the benefits, some of them were in debt for 60,000 because there 50,000, was a callback of the benefits. That was for me one of the most powerful stories weve done in recent time. It led to a number of awards but more importantly to a real change in how the law was administered and how the program is nothing looked at again by the department of labor. And it was, partnerships are not without their issues. We all seek to have credit and we try to share the credit as as much as possible. There are a number of awards the center won a pulitzer prize. We won the goldsmith ward at harvard. We won a number of other awards for and it was one of the more rewarding projects i think, but, frankly, as i said, abc probably would not have spent a year and half to go through every single medical file. He did incredible work. What we brought it was i think the ability to help shape the story and to give it a broadest possible broadcast and it went on every single Major Program on abc news. Is this something that could happen in the future . How do you work out the organization bringing a bias you want to avoid . Brian we dont want to group with a organization may bring a particular bias. I do think the center came to with any particular bias to we work with propublica on project. Were picking and their people who make decisions about who we would and who we would not work with in that kind of joint effort. We are prepared to interview lots of people into stories about all kinds of groups. We are going to go in the trenches together. As journalists we are very picky. Moderator next we have mike chief investigative correspondent at downtown. He has one repeated awards for u. S. Intelligence failures, apple grape the abba garrotte scandal, abu ghraib scandal, president ial politics and the coverage of the aftermath of 9 11. What is particularly, mike is particularly wellknown for a couple of major stories, fact has exclusive report on the lewinsky scandal gained International Attention is coverage of the event of children to the president bill clintons impeachment. In doing so he earned a whole series of awards and for newsweek. The National Headliner award the edgar a. Poe award and white house correspondents award as well as the gerald r. Ford award for journalism. Is the author to New York Times best selling books and as a result both of those books have chronicled much of his reporting, and in 2009 mike, along with brody, he will meet in a couple of minutes was named as one of the 50 best and most influential journalists in the Nations Capital by washingtonian. He graduated from Washington University in st. Louis and received his masters degree in journalism from northwestern. We are familiar with with nbc and newsweek, which may be today we are not so familiar with. Tell us about yahoo s news philosophy and how are they reaching an audience with the news. Mike well, thank you. And actually this is sort of new uncharted territory for me in the Digital Space. And it is evolving. Yahoo has made a commitment to be a serious news player. Its invested heavily in recruiting people, katie couric is a sort of chief global anchor. Matt bynes of the New York Times cheap political call missed. I came aboard last year. Although yahoo is a huge Silicon Valley player, in the news side, it is kind of like in for a startup. We are inventing it. We are trying to see what works, exploring, experimenting with different ways of delivering news, both written and video. But a couple things stand out. One is the incredible reach that we have. Yahoo is Something Like 800 million users globally. When i write stories for yahoo now, i rarely see the numbers. There are people that track these things, that you get a rough gauge by looking at comments. I never read the comments on my stories. Thats a true way to go down a rabbit hole. [laughter] but i do try to look at the numbers to give you sort of an idea of whats out there, and the numbers of comments i get on what i do now at yahoo is 10 to t20 fold greater than anything i would get when i wrote for newsweek or online for nbc news. There is a vast audience out there in the Digital Space that sees your stuff. That is one reason why a lot of major news organizations have wanted to partner with yahoo . In fact, we have a partnership with abc that was just renewed and that was a sort of highly coveted. Other networks wanted to partner with yahoo . We chose, or yahoo chose to continue the abc relationship, and thats because to the extent that more and more people are getting their news digitally and mobile, this is where the audience is increasingly going to be. So in some respects, although, you know, in Silicon Valley, yahoo has a reputation as something of a legacy company. It was one of the early internet companies. It is, i think, very much a pioneer in news on the web. And weve got, weve got resources and there is a commitment, and im so very excited about the opportunities. Jack thanks, mike. You are famous for these in depth investigative stories, the penn state scandal comes to mind. You spent hours and hours. How does that translate to two paragraphs on a yahoo page . Mike you know, the stories that im doing at yahoo are a lot longer than two paragraphs. Maybe thats what people might see on their mobile or something but its all there. We been able to do some pretty interesting investigative pieces. Theres one that got a lot of attention last year. Ive done a lot of reporting on governments war on terror, particularly drone strikes and the effectiveness of those. And we discovered a drone strike in yemen last year that killed a bunch of innocent civilians in the town, caused a huge uproar in the village, antiu. S. Protest backlash because when those killed was an anti, was antialqaeda imam who spoke out against the violence of alqaeda, a Police Officer was killed. These sorts of errant drone strikes have led to a real question because all Drone Program is cloaked in secrecy. What does the u. S. Government do, what does it do when it kills innocent civilians in a foreign country like this . When the u. S. Military inadvertently kills civilians, theres procedures for condolence payments. They will make compensation to the families, but what happened with Drone Programs have been cloaked in secrecy. We found a guy who was a relative of some of the innocents who were killed who recounted an incredible story. This had been a cia drone strike the we tracked him down in yemen, and to get him by skype and were able to get help bunch of records showing that after the drone strike and after some Human Rights Watch had written about this, Human Rights Group in brought him to washington to meet members of the white house, he gets called to the National Security bureau in yemen but it was still functioning, they still have a government in yemen then. Im not sure what would happen now. And basically he was slipped a bag full of 150,000 in cash. Greenbacks, sequentially numbered, no paperwork. The deal is, you take this money, take it back to your village, pay the families but does anything about it and there will be no record of it. Fascinating account. We were able to actually get the records showing how the money was ultimately wired to an account in the guys village, fully corroborating his story. We have others who were able to do it. And this was the first window into, first the u. S. Technology acknowledged that it was killing innocent civilians in that town in yemen and also what it was instructed to do tamp it down. , there was a big debate in the village. Some people thought it was hush hush money end they didnt want to take it. They ultimately took it. But it was a fascinating window into what happens in the aftermath of a drone strikes ago something were able to do on yahoo . We spent a lot of time on it. We have some really gripping video, and it got a lot of attention. So thats just an example of the kind of work we can do in this sort of new era of digital news. Fascinating. Quick question before we go on to larry. You invested all this time money and effort in this particular story, which could have been anything, including consumer investigative story. You put it up on the internet. Do you have any concern that other reporters will just grab it after your investment and repackage it . Mike i mean, i have that concern, the Washington Post, newsweek, if people see her stories and they dont give you credit and then run with it. But by and large people sort of know, you know, you had it first and where it came from. And its very hard to take a store like that that took a lot of time and effort and a lot of accumulating documents and interviews for somebody to sort of rip it off without it being clear where the story is coming from. Jack lets go on to larry roberts, Senior Editor at propublica. Previously he was investigative editor at the Washington Post executive editor of the Huffington Post investigative fund, projects editor at the hartford current, and editor at large at bloomberg news. He became a Foreign Correspondent for press international. As an editor, larry was a leader on the team that received three pulitzer prizes, one for the current investigation into the flaws of the hubble space telescope, a foreign examination of the Vice President dick cheney, and another for exposing the details of the paper half lobbying scandal. At the Washington Post business director, he directed an investigation showing how aol misuse accounting the few its disastrous merger with time warner which one the gerald loeb award. He taught journalism at Wesleyan University and graduated in new hampshire. To larry, first of all propublica seems to be the hottest discussion item among research and polling communities. So what in the world is propublica . How are you funded . Who is your audience . What is your overarching asian . What is your overarching goal . Larry thanks, jack. Appreciated being here with the Consumer Federation and with this clusters panel of reporters. As a lowly editor im somewhat , of an odd man out, but propublica is a nonprofit independent newsroom that started about six years ago. And that was in the midst of the real upheaval in the way the internet was changing the news business. There was real fear among many of us at the time that the traditional news organizatio