Silence your cell phones. It is truly my pressure to introduce martin baron, moderated by matt hackman. Matt hackman is the executive Vice President at the beacon counsel greater miami it is truly my pleasure to introduce matt hackman the executive Vice President at the beacon council. Greater miamis Public Community miami focusing on mentioning the miami of 20 40 and helping build it. Was the Miami Program created and built a Foundation Program that played a pivotal role in jumpstarting propelling miamis rapidly growing tech and startup unity. Numerous efforts funded and supported under his leadership are pillars of the Economic System today. Prior to that he was an Award Winning journalist at the miami herald and his award included the highest honor in business journalism. Just seven months into his new job at the Washington Post, longtime journalist and newspaper editor and amazon founder would buy the paper. Just over two years later, donald trump who can pay tickets the press is the lowest form of humanity won the presidency. The Washington Post exported the nature of tech, media and power in the 21st century. Please come on stage. Thank you. Thank you very much. What an honor this is and what a treat we are in for to be here with marty. Right to be here, thanks everybody for coming. This was an amazing book. Felt it was a little sad when it ended because i enjoyed it. If you want to listen and read, leave shriver azure narrator, huge win. He came to the party to launch the book and he and i were talking and we concluded that we are the same person. For those who may have forgotten he played marty and spotlight, the academy Award Winning film. In writing this book, there is an illustrious history of Washington Post leaders writing books about their time, 1995, 1998, now you with the collision of power, what were your primary motivations in writing this book . What were some of the things sought to share with readers in doing so . I was living through an incredible moment in history and the paper had been owned by the graham family for 80 years sold to one of the richest people in the world, they tried to transform us and set a whole new strategy and along comes donald trump, a candidate unlike any weve ever seen before. Is that somebody should tell that story. We in the press play an Important Role in democracy and the press plays an Important Role in all of that and nobody else is going to tell that story. I could tell that story and i felt i should. We have this mission statement, democracy dies in darkness and i thought i should shed some light on our own role in that democracy. Secondly i felt i wanted to give the public a vivid sense of what its like to be the top editor of a major News Organization in this country. I think there are a lot of stereotypes and preconceptions on how we do our work. I wanted people to live to the judgments and decisions i had to make and understand that. People can agree or disagree with the judgments made but they should have a full understanding of why i made them. Just how difficult this judgments really are. There were some trends in our field that had me concerned and i felt they had something to say and i wanted to get some of it off my chest i guess. It was more like compounding my own ptsd, i felt like i needed to say it and say it in a way where i could discuss these things in full and explain my reasoning and thinking and that means not doing it on twitter but in a book where i can explain it. I want to dig into each of those, obviously talking about covering the truck presidency and jeff bases coming on any transformation of the post and journalism. Lets start with trump. You and he became cut youre going to read about a dinner you had at the white house with him with other fellow leaders at the Washington Post but he would call you on the phone. Give us a sense of what these exchanges were like and if it was even a conversation or a lot of listening. s were calls and they occurred after the dinner we had at the white house, five months after he began to occupy the white house. He called to complain about some stories, one came at about 9 00 at night after he met with the leader of india and he complained about a story by two over white house correspondence and said the story portrayed him as a child. Then he said words i never thought i would hear from the president of the United States, he said i am not a child. I have to say, i thought it was kind of childish. A few days later he called again as we were wrapping up her morning meeting and he complained again about a story and he went on a rant about this being because of amazon and jeff bases. I heard him say that during the campaign and on other occasions even after he took the white house. I was so sick of it and i responded and said thats not true and you know its not true. I dont think he was accustomed to being spoken to that way. He then broke out to a bunch of profanities. He said the post is nothing but a hate machine and a big fat lie. This is all jeff and amazon. He went on like that pic this socalled conversation which was just him talking went on for so long that i was looking at the time thinking, i have work to do today. I dont really know about the president of the United States but i dont have the time to keep talking or to let him talk. I said thank you, i appreciate your call and sharing your perspective and that was the last time i heard from him. In the book he pulled no punches. You talk about how he was dehumanizing the press, celebrating balance at rallies, hateful language and dog whistles, continued lies and misrepresentation, i want to be autocrat but of course in talking about all this, its not just history, here he is likely going to be the nominee for the republican party. From all of your time leading the coverage of him, what you think those lessons, how should we be covering him Going Forward . How do you think journalists should be covering him Going Forward . I think some of that coverage is beginning to take place now. Like to see more of it. What will he do if he gets back into the white house rather than paying attention to the standing in the polls. Obviously politics is a bit of a horse race so you cant ignore it but where should the emphasis in coverage b and i think it should be on what would he do on his first day anyway house . He has been quite open about that. He has not hidden anything. He is quite open with what he intends to do. Its all out there. What he has been saying has been the definition of authoritarianism. Its not even an opinion. If you were to define authoritarianism this would be the characteristics. Hes the only politician ive ever heard talk about suspending the u. S. Constitution from the same individual who when he took office swore to uphold the constitution of the United States. Talked about using the military to suppress legitimate protest in this country. His talk about Treason Charges against the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and most likely having him executed. Talked about Treason Charges against nbc for coverage he deemed to be unfavorable. For all his complaints about weapon i think the u. S. Government, he talks openly about weapon icing the u. S. Government, is talked about a defunded and reconstituted department of justice to prosecute his enemies and ideally imprison them. Maybe worse. All of that is the definition of authoritarianism. That is the nature of authoritarianism and on top of that he continues to talk about crushing the press, free and independent press, i think we need to focus on that and how he expects to achieve that focus a bit less on the political horserace. Is your view as well, talking about the support that is there, where that is humming from . We really need to understand that. Think we should do a reporting on that. I think its a mistake we made before he became a candidate. A talk about that in the book. Think its one of the most serious mistakes we made. We did not anticipate a candidate like donald trump. We did not understand the legal level grievance this country. People were talking about the former governor of the state, jeb bush. He didnt go anywhere. People mentioned to everybody else is a potential front runner except that it was donald trump. We did not understand this grievance in the country and i think we need to and we need to understand it today. The reality is there are many people in this country who live in communities that are really struggling. The communities have lost industries and they are not working at jobs that pay them what they used to pay in their not opportunities for kids and a lot of people blame the elites in washington, they feel they are being condescended to her being held in contempt and they accuse the press of doing that. I think its important that we not hold people in contempt but that we understand who they are and reflect all of that in our coverage. That way we understand people in all corners of this country and i think we should do that today just as we should have done it before donald trump ever announced his candidacy. There will be two and a. I want to talk about jeff bezos buying the Washington Post. He didnt lavish tens of millions of dollars on the post treating it like a personal charity but instead tried to run it as a business, a something to stand on its own two feet. Is there from this lesson a blueprint that can be applied to other newspapers. We all know newspapers have been so disrupted trying to figure out that revenue model and how they should operate. Other lessons from this experience that can be applied to other ones . To some degree i think there are. Its true he wanted us to be a Sustainable Business. He did not treat it as a charity. I always told people we should be glad for that because if he ever got tired of the charity we would be in bad shape and we should use this ownership as an opportunity to create a Sustainable Business. The first thing he did was change our entire strategy. We had been focused on our region, washington, the district , northern virginia, maryland, that meant we covered politics but other than that we focused on a region. He did not like that was the right model anymore and we had this Incredible Opportunity to be national and global because we are based in the Nations Capital and because we had a name that can be leveraged. We had history going back to watergate where there were millions of people around this country who never read a word of the Washington Post but had the idea pick the internet had given us a gift. That the gift is you get to distribute journalism everywhere digitally which is at no additional cost so take the gift. So we did and we changed. The lesson there, that did make a huge difference for us. Have not done that, i think the post would be in terrible shape today. It was in terrible shape when he bought it which is why the graham family sold in the first place. The importance is the strategy and understanding it and committing to it and making hard decisions that are necessary in order to execute on the strategy. Also understanding who our readers are and what do they want from us. This model we had is famous which is democracy dies in darkness which was a real struggle to come up with. Anything i could think of was the serenity prayer. Cannot change it, most marketers dont use darkness and death in the motto but were going with it. It worked incredibly well. One of the things he talked about was he wanted this to be not a newspaper that people want to subscribe to the idea that people wanted to belong to. He understood newspaper is different than other products. There is a real relationship between us and our readership and they have expectation was to serve a mission, to be a product. Need to think about every News Organization, what is that mission we are going to serve it went down some interesting paths. He talked about this, we are focused on the reader and work from there to an analysis of who in the organization is working to directly impact readers and indirectly impacting. Those including editors they needed fewer of. It was pretty disappointing as an editor myself. I believed in editors. The idea was direct, indirect. We should put our resources in the areas that had a direct impact for the consumers. That would be reporters, social media people, things like that. You could see the direct connection with the readers. Editors, he kind of thought on the complicated stories are sensitive stories or investigative stories we need editors but on the others we probably dont need that many editors. He thought of us as a bureaucratic administrative layer. I did not like that. I protested that and made clear that editors actually had a direct impact on the coverage and he had a clear misconception of what editors did. I think he is come around to better understanding the role of editors and the importance of editors but at the time he was not. We had a really difficult time getting approval in the budget to hire additional editors. Every opportunity we had we tried to come up with a different title for them. Strategist, analyst, things like that and that was our way of disguising the fact that they were editors. One of the things you are really clear on is that jeff bezos did not engage in any of the journalism that the Washington Post took. He did not pick there were a lot of worries at the beginning. Here is a person who had a huge commercial interest with amazon in a lot of controversies. Would also before he came published the most sensitive documents that were leaked by Edward Snowden and i made the final decision to publish those documents. There were people in government and the intelligence agencies and congress felt people like me should have been thrown into prison for that decision and one of the big businesses for amazon Cloud Computing and they had a big contract with the cia so i really wondered if we would be able to do this anymore and how he would react to coverage of his company for amazon had this reputation of when they were asked a question by the press, they had one answer, no comment. It was asked that the first town hall, how can you buy a newspaper when amazon always says no comment and he said you have the right to ask the questions in amazon has a right not to answer them. You do what you need to do in amazon will do what it needs to do. I was concerned but he said at the beginning, you can cover amazon or me anyway like and he reiterated that to me the entire time i was there and he never interfered in the substance of her journalism. I think my biggest take away from your book is that is a ringing defense of traditional journalism values namely objectivity which arguably has been lost. Talk about that. You raise real concerns about how journalism is practiced today and how the standards that you came up with are quickly disappearing. Not everywhere but in some instances for sure. I was very concerned about that. I think we need to define what we mean by objectivity because i think its been miss. It is a concept that goes back more than 100 years to Walter Whitman who wrote a small collection of essays called liberty in the news. He popularized the concept, the idea was we should take the approach of scientists. You have a hypothesis going into the story and you have to tested and you go over the evidence need you to go but you do it with an open mind. You acknowledge your own preconceptions and your own feelings but you move beyond that and say im going to do an independent job, openminded job, ill be comprehensive and thorough and what weve done all of that we tell people what weve found. Theres no requirement that you do all this work and pretend you didnt do the work and ignore what you did in everything is 5050 even though the evidence shows otherwise. It also acknowledges that it requires recognition on our part that we dont know the answers before we start. We should go seek the answers. And journalism your often thing the world to a keyhole and you try to work to push the door a little bit open so you can see through the crack in the door and if you get lucky you get the door wide open and you see the entire picture but often we are only working with part of the picture and the best we can get. We need to acknowledge that in my concern is that there are too many people in our profession who think they know the answers before theyve embarked on the reporting. What does reporting mean if you already know the answer you just confirming your own preconceptions and i was concerned about that. Concerned about people expressing their opinions on social media and twitter and i think it has a corrosive effect on public trust in public trust is already greatly threatened in our business. I dont know why people would view, steve mannan said the press is the opposition party. I dont think we should behave like that or think like that, we should not be pursuing personal agendas. Our agenda should be to find the truth wherever the fax file. Whoever they benefit, whoever they hurt, thats what we should do. Our agenda should be the truth, facts and the context in which things are occurring. Not be pursuing her personal agendas and assume we have the answers before we do the reporting. At one time he famously said we are not at war, we are at work in talking about your posture. Of course we are covering someone who is at war with the media and at war with democracy, is your point that the journalism is the work and you how you can bet somebody is at war with democracy and journalism . A little context, that came about because trump on his first full day in office went to the cia and he stood in front of the memorial and what did he choose to talk about in a place like that . The media. He said as you know i am at war with the media seemingly wanting to enlist cia agents in his war with the media because they were work for him. I was asked by reaction and i said we are not at work, we are at work. I think we ha