David Carr (politician)

Transcription

Well first, Andy, thank you for inviting us here to Bloomberg. This is really quite an impressive setting. The snacks are so impressive. If I worked here I'd be giant. Yeah. Stick around. More hot food to come. Really? Oh ya! Soup. We do the whole nine yards. It's a very impressive place, thank you David for coming. And what we're here to talk about, the Andrew R. Lack Professor of Journalism and the Business of Media Chair, the professorship. And also, since I have both of you're here, we'll take advantage of your expertise about the media and speculate a little bit about where the media is going and where journalism is going in particular. But first, I would like to start, Andy, with you just explaining a little bit about where this idea came from. What was it that you were hoping to address by creating this professorship? Well, I've been hanging around journalism and the business of media for a long time. That intersection has interested me for the last 20 plus years. And the more you see how that intersection has got a fair number of traffic jams piling through, but at the same time wonderful things are happening you start to think, who's talking about this in ways for the next generation that is simulating new thinking, new ideas and analyzing what's going on. What are we doing? What path we wrought? And, so, the COM school seemed like a great place to get that kind of conversation going and going in an intensive way with people from 18, 19, 20 and on up. How did David's name enter the picture? Oh -- he's the man! He's the guy! That's like being the tallest leprechaun, the best media reporter. He's standing right in the middle of that intersection between journalism and the business of media. He's a journalist, but he's a very shrewd observer of how journalism is being distributed, being created and in the context of the business of media, what are the models? What are the changing economics around that big word "journalism" for us. What was it that made you go, 'Hmmm this may be worth thinking about, having a greater conversation?' Well two things sort of drive that decision For one thing, we had a pretty thorough discussion about the evolving models of journalism and I think that we could both agree that anybody whose in the business of predicting the future of journalism, is going the get clobbered. If you told me oh Jeff Bezos is going to buy the Washington Post, the founder of e-Bay is going to put $250 million into a new news thing. A blogger from the Guardian will break the biggest story of the year. I would have started laughing. And so I'm a little sort of out of the future of journalism, but very interested in the present future that we're living in, so that's one thing. The other thing is, I probably have been teaching, guest lecturing, 20-30 times a year going anywhere they'll have me, partly because I have very strong opinions about sort of journalism education and its willingness or unwillingness to stay with this present future that we're talking about. And so it was an opportunity to engage some of that rhetoric and see if I couldn't come up with a class, a bit of learning that would reflect those values and maybe read on to the benefit of the kids sitting in front. We'll see, that first class, those poor kids. They're going to be my beta. They could leave shaking their heads and going, what was that about, but I think we'll find a way. Well what would you hope to see, what would success be? How would you envision success in a class? Well I think that the old model of work at your college paper, go to the weekly out in the boondocks no body heard of, try and get to a strong regional paper, eventually get to a daily, that whole escalator is gone. And so how do they get from where they are to what is a very rich hiring environment in journalism. I think the main thing is they have to make things with their own two dirty, little hands and so we're going to spend a fair amount of time talking about the making and distribution of media and we'll do it by doing both of those things. We're not going to spend a lot of time talking about back in the day. Back in the day, for one thing, it's gone and for another, you know what, it wasn't really all that great. If you think about in real time we can now know whether what the source is telling us is true or not if their ducking us we can stalk them on Facebook, we can get them on Linked in, we can pop up on Twitter, we can guess at what their email is. The bag of tricks that the average journalist has is so much bigger than it used to be. That old saying about the good 'ol days weren't,' in some ways, I think that's true. You talk a lot about the present future. What do you mean by that? I think as Andy said to start with, there are so many models out there. We're at Bloomberg where a core terminal business is funding journalism seen as something that is of use to the users. Giving them real time information that's going to be efficacious and useful. That's one way to go. You have Huffington Post that's at the other end where it's not a narrow user base, it's the broadest user base possible. You have BuzzFeed which is taking viral content and then overlaying it with a skin of serious news. You have a lot of mainstream journalists, Ezra Klein recently at the Washington Post, Kara Shwisher, Walt Mossberg leaving, Doug Jones, who are now striking out on their own or in alliances with non-legacy media companies. To call that the present future, it's just, there are all these bets all over the table and nobody knows what's going to work and what's not going to work. Well you mention BuzzFeed. I think just this week, they've gone out in search of three more investigative reporters. So here's another direction. What tended to be the purview of major established legacy news organizations, investigative reporting, very expensive, requires a sophisticated talent to do it. Now we're starting to see a start-up like BuzzFeed, it's not a startup any more, but jumping in it. What do you make of that? Can it be taken seriously? Of course it can be because you have the -- it used to be you had old line media, new line media and then old line media started adopting some of the discourse of what was going on. And then much of digital media started to think you know what we kind of have to get it right to do well. And then any time they get a little money, this is true of Huffington post, this is true of Vox Media, this is true of BuzzFeed, what they do is they go out and hire journalists. New York Times is busy with video, busy with blogging, so this thing that was these two things, we talk a lot about convergence, but this is one that's really happening to the point where 20 years from now I'm not sure you'll be able to tell the difference. Ya I think old media, new media, like Republicans and Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives, those party lines, those walls are coming down. It's story telling. There are principles around story telling. There are different use cases around story telling and there are different experiences with the way you consume news and information. And in a digital world you consume it differently than we did. My parents consumed it differently than I did. These are the kinds of changes which when you look in the grand scheme of things, to David's comment about back in the day, back in the day is such a bore. As a way at looking at what does all this mean? This is part of the natural evolution of the great use cases of the technologies of our time as opposed to what television and what video, in your home, represented for generations earlier instead of sitting around a radio. You want to case this in an, 'Oh what does this mean to the reading newspapers or what's happening on these platforms that are killing other forms of news consumption? I think that's a tough way to look at this because summarizing news, for example, maybe you follow the 18 year old kid who was 17 when we sold Marissa Meyers the Summly. What does he do? He came up with some software, correct me on this, that effectively takes long form stories and summarizes them in a few sentences. Sounds like a pretty useful way to get some news and information that you might want. And then lo and behold this is the technology behind something called Yahoo Digest which has the appalling premise of being offered twice a day like your morning newspaper or evening newspaper in previous generations, I mean, this all is of a piece to me. And I think to David's point, breaking it up into what do these changes mean, they're part of what we should be expecting and enjoying and using and discovering in ways that make the passion that we feel for journalism and the opportunity as a business that it creates on all of these different platforms, as we describe them, as maybe the golden age of journalism, maybe we're walking into the best of all possible eras for what we do for a living. I think we have to be aware when we talk about the future that we are living through So the Summly guy goes to Yahoo and he comes up with the digest and so what it means is news is a list right? A list on your phone. That brings a lot of fundamental questions in terms of what the hierarchy of that list is. Is it recent, is it importance, or is it relevance to me, is it relevance to my context, where am I sitting right now? That's a whole new set of questions that is fundamentally different. You know, we, every day at The New York Times at four o'clock our leadership gets together and decides what are the seven most important stories in western civilization. They establish a hierarchy of images and headlines. It's not like that doesn't has value. It has extreme value to me because everything is whooshing by me, I know what happened, but I don't know why or what was important. So somewhere between all that news zooming by on a digest or on Twitter and the full stop New York Times this is what we decided what was important yesterday, more or less a daily magazine. There is a whole lot of territory in between and that is part of what your students, and now my students, which feels weird to say, are going to be negotiating. It seemed to me that one of the motives that you were driven by when you made this decision was a concern about where will the business model come that will pay for that kind of important journalism, the accountability journalism. Can you see good, quality journalism with a business model to support it coming out of this soup that is now going on. One thing you see, which David pointed out at the very beginning, is you're seeing some very smart and actually very wealthy fellows coming in to this line of work and engage wide. Whether they made their fortune at Ebay or an Amazon, they have a relationship with news and information and wanting to see it underwritten and developed and distributed in ways that protect its value and its credibility, would you say, and I am dying to see what Bezos does with the Washington Post in a digital world. And all those who were circling these new opportunities with distributing and producing content in a digital world. There is a great business model for any of it out there, would you say? Well, I mean, to Andy's point if the media space is so frought and ultimately doomed that it be fundamentally existential, why is Warren Buffet in the business? Why is Pierre Omidyar in the business? Why is Jeff Bezos in the business? John Henry? Yeah, John Henry. And if you take even one step away from that. If you talk to an Eric Schmidt or you talk to Tim Cook at Apple, or Steve Jobs, when he was still with us. They are concerned in efficacy and richness of available information, not just data, but news on the web is something they bring up over and over again because you can see and have the best search function in the world but if it is crawling across a cesspool, it is not going to bring back much of anything interesting. In terms of what is working and what is not, a couple things I would point to, both the FT and Dow Jones, I guess we could say Bloomberg, as well, were early about that user of the news is going to pay a substantial amount of the freight. And that even when you switch platforms from a print product to a digital product that the consumer of that information is still going to play a role. The New York Times gradually decided that that was the case and we made the switch to a metered model and a lot of people told us you'll disappear from the ecosystem of the web, you'll lose visibility, you'll lose uniques. None of that happened. What it did in fact happened, in 2012, which I think will be viewed as wider shed consumer revenue, meaning money from readers surpassed the money we get from advertising. I think that points a way forward that news has to be useful enough to be worth extracting money form the people who use it. We had recently this week, story that twitter is starting to flatten out, Facebook seems to be flattening out a bit and it's loosing some of it's younger readers. Is that because the space is getting more crowded and there is more choice, or is it just there is an hour glass that says turn something new will come up. Personally I think these ups and downs are There is no interpretation you can apply. I don't think there, I think in the long run whether it's called Twitter, I think Facebook is going to be there for the long run, globally in particular. They, they're learning too. They're learning how much... These are interesting words that were in my thinking about business and journalism five years ago, ten years ago these words aggregation, curation, algorithms, getting content in a form that didn't have any human decision making around them. That is it. You also see in that group of people David was mentioning in particularly the Bezos and Zuckerberg now A different view of what they want from editors, for example and how the content that you might be getting in lists with BuzzFeed or Summly is getting more and more interest from them in structures that are familiar to us as journalists, using editors, hiring investigative reporters. Where that goes, I am not sure. But I think it probably is headed in a good direction. I think part of what's going on is the lifecycle of any business. Facebook is a pure utility social network for its users. What's not to like. At a certain point they've got to make dough. They've got to make money. With Facebook, with Twitter, with Tumblr, with Instagram, that sort of inflection point over and over is When they go from being a pure play utility into being a business How do they twist those knobs in such a way that to not offend their user base. This generation of students that will be your students, they have not known the world when there hasn't been certainly the web The air they breath, so to speak, has been digital. And there have been a number of concerns, probably from people my age, your ages, who wonder if perhaps something is lost in the process. That perhaps there is just too much information out there, this will be a generation that is unable to be reflective or think more deeply, have a longer attention span on things. Do you have any concerns about that? Well I think it is a fair worry, but I see guys like this, this kid I mentioned before, Nick D'aloisio, who came up with Summly and he is no indigent, lazy hipster, who's not interacting or thinking through lots of interesting aspects of what he thinks about journalism and what you want, how you want to get your news and information and what the business model is around that. So I think, I worry a little bit, I got a nineteen year old and a fourteen year old and sometimes you think that face to face interaction is slipping away while they nod into that four inch or six inch screen, but I don't, I can't say that I think that That doesn't haunts me at night. I think it is just a part of the excitement really, around the changes that are now in our hands. This word mobile is just just kicking everything we thought of in terms of behavior, as it relates to content, entertainment, music, reading, and news consumption It's just kicking it in the butt. Three or four years ago I walked in this building there weren't any tablets. I didn't have a four-inch, eight-inch, twelve-inch, ten-inch screen as a choice. That I now I can't live without that screen. I can't go anywhere in the world without that screen and it helps me read the New York Time, the FTC, my Bloomberg, Top Wired, News Wire. You gotta love this stuff, But what is it going to do with human behavior? Our generations? Our kids generations? We'll see. I am pretty optimistic. This lament about a generation incapable of significant or long thoughts is a hearty perennial that comes up every ten years. Now we're worried about the millenials. Before that we were worried about the gen Xers. Before that it was the punk rockers or the hippies I forget which That somehow had lost their ability to think critically about what's going on. I've been both the problem and the old grampypants, pointing a finger at each. And I think we cycle through this. I find both in interactions with younger colleagues, with students, and indeed my own children that they know a lot about a lot. How they know what they know, where they got it from, a little bit of a mystery and so if information is moving into them osmotically off the zipper in Times Square, off the chiron in the elevator in their feed, what is to ensure efficacy what is to ensure the the quality of that information? As a matter of course I see the web and the ecosystem that we're living in as something of a self cleaning oven where things move from wobbly and sorta true into more and more true as it goes. And that through both the wisdom and the sourcing of the crowds that information tends to move from not so great to great. I saw a millennial data point too that struck me recently. One was that 50%, I think this was the Bureau of Labor Statistics or something like that, 50% of the workforce in 2020 are gonna be millennials. So imagine their ownership of the workplace in many ways that will be dramatically different from the workplace that we knew 10 or 15 years ago. I think you also have to be careful about that the pendulum swings. The importance of things and artifacts, actual physical objects, I think are gonna have a little bit of a renaissance. And I think that if I see you on the train with your iPad I'll know that you have $500 dollars. If I see you on the train with a copy of Pitchfork, a very well followed young website, a website for music that just put out a big, thick magazine of all thing, then I know you and I have something in common. I do see a return, a little bit of a Dave Eggers, the author of American Educator he runs McSweeny's, spends a lot of time on artisanal publishing, on coming up with artifacts. And I think between what he's up to, sort of the Ariana Huffington sort of slow down look around I think some of that's gonna gain some traction. I think that's part of the problem that Twitter's having, part of the problem that Facebook is having, which is it isn't that people aren't engaging with those platforms, its just they're not engaging as frantically as they once were because if I'm in here, what is going on up here? You want a balanced diet. I like my Cheetos as much as the next guy but you wanna be able to take in some brussel sprouts. You'd say though, wouldn't you, that competing for their time has never been more intense. The amount of things they can do, see, access, read, think about, watch We didn't quite have that diversity. Yeah and I wouldn't put a demographic prism around it. I worked late last night and so what was there at the end of the night for me? I had a section of the New York Times I hadn't yet gotten to, I had a new issue of the New Yorker, I had the latest issue of Wired, I had my Twitter feed which I hadn't looked at all day long. That was all more or less waiting for me on the nightstand. The other thing that was there was my remote, my television remote, I also have a Roku box. You know what won? The latest episode of Justified. I'd already heard that it was an amazing episode and it's a show I love and it's sitting there in DVR so that whole stack of stuff sat there and I watched Justified which I gotta be honest, I was pretty happy with my choice when I got done. this sort of paradox of choice that you talk about There's so much opportunity in there and there's also an opportunity for us to know what is good. One of the things that I think defines this generation is you can say they're constantly hunting and gathering. I don't know about that. In a story that Brian Stelter, my former colleague now at CNN did a couple years ago, a kid, I think he was a senior in college said, "You know, if information is important it will find me." And this idea that important stuff will surface and be made manifest in front of you is one of the things that defines the generation. The pleasure actually of having millennials in your house living, and watching them, observing them in our line of work is to begin to trust what they're doing. And how much they're absorbing and how smarter they may be getting from all that. And a lot of that process of watching how they're working is great, is helpful to inform our judgment about how we should be thinking about new technologies, new platforms, new ways to consume information. That engagement with that audience, that 18 to 24 year old at BU, and our ability to engage with them and have a really interactive conversation with them opened up what we see, have them open up what they're seeing. Using, that's what school at it's best will be. Well a good way to wrap up and circle on back it goes to, there's been the claim that journalism education today is an escalator to nowhere. Oooh. That seems sort of spicy. And that of course is driven by the business models, the legacy media struggling. I think some of the odious comparisons that are hanging around that notion of escalator to nowhere is that you can make a lot of money doing a lot of other things. And journalism has never been out there as a marker of here's a good way to get rich fast. And somehow, we're in a culture sometimes where that creeps in in ways that I find a little dopey but I actually think, this'll be the last reference to this fellow guy, I don't know him, but I'm enamored with what he did, D'aloisio you know, $30 million pay day at 17 wasn't so bad when you're trying to make a buck getting in the news business. And there are a fair number of opportunities out there I think it's a good way to make a living but we haven't figured out all the ways I suppose. The dirty secret. Journalism has always been horrible to get in, you always have to eat so much crap to find a place to stand, over and over. I have a daughter who's in Iraq at this thing of ours. She's on her third job. She had to do terrible things. She had to endure a lot of privation to get where she is. So did I. I waited tables seven yeas, did writing on the side. It's always If you're gonna get a job that's a little bit of a caper, that isn't really a job, that is you know you get to under ideal circumstances you get to leave the building or at least least leave your desktop, go out find people more interesting than you, learn about something, come back and tell other people about it. That should be hard to get into. That should be hard to do. No wonder everybody's lined up, trying to get into it. It beats working.