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Conference on Excellence in Journalism and the New Media:

Panel 1: The Threat of New Media

Orville Schell: Now we're going to quickly bring up the panelists for "The Promise and Threat of the New Media." Let me just quickly introduce them.

The moderator is G. Pascal Zachary, more commonly known to most of us as Gregg who teaches here at school; Denise Caruso, a New York Times columnist; Katherine Fulton, presently with the Global Business Network here in the East Bay; John Markoff from the New York Times who also teaches here at school; Adam Clayton Powell who does matters of this kind at the Freedom Forum and is based in Washington; Louis Rossetto who is here in the Bay area, the founder of Wired; Jack Shafer from Slate who's article some of you may have seen recently in the New York Times Magazine; and Jonathan Weber from The Industry Standard.

Gregg, let me turn it over to you.

Gregg Zachary: I'm particularly thrilled to be presiding over this panel because I have a lot of admiration for the people collected here, and I'm thrilled that we could get such an interesting and diverse group for the topic of the opening panel.

A couple of things about how we're going to do this format. We're going to open with some four to five minute remarks by each of the panelists. They'll be organized around a question that I'll pose to the speaker, although in truth of course most of the speakers know what the questions are in advance so they've had some time to think about it. We are dealing with journalists here. They needed some prep time. (Laughter)

We are going to start off with Jack Shafer. Jack is an editor at Slate and has had a very diverse experience in the alternative press and is one of the most trenchant critics of the press that I know of and I'm just real pleased that he could make the pilgrimage down here.

What I want you to deal with, Jack, is has anything really changed as technology has met, new technologies have met media? Or are we dealing with some of the age-old issues of responsibility, some of the issues that I think the opening speakers, Orville in particular, addressed. Is there anything new under the sun or is it just that things look different?

Jack Shafer: I really like the topic that we're discussing here, understanding the promise and the threat of new media. I'm pretty sure I understand the promise of new media, so I won't bore anybody with that. I don't know really what the threat is. Mindful of what Oscar Wilde said, that modern journalism existed to keep us in touch with the ignorance of the community. I'll talk about what I really don't understand.

I think when people talk about the threat of the new media, they're usually referring to three things -- Matt Drudge, Matt Drudge, and Matt Drudge. (Laughter)

When the Monica Lewinsky story broke, that expanded to the Dallas Morning News, the Wall Street Journal, a little bit of the ABC News which was reporting stories, that they then pulled back on.

I think that there was probably during the whole Lewinsky episode a sort of over-scrutinization of the new media, and I think it was because the new media sort of exposed in real time for everyone to see how news is made.

We have so many news journalists here, they know how deadlines, how obstreperous reporters, sources who recant their accounts of events, can really muck up the sausage which we make and serve to readers and consumers every day.

My view is that what people have been crying for the last 20 or 30 years is more voices in journalism. Everybody has decried the sort of consolidation of newspapers, the closing of dailies, the sort of conglomeratization of various broadcast properties. What the Web has provided us is exactly that -- more voices, more points of view, and a more free-wheeling approach.

What I wrote in my Times magazine piece is that there's nothing very futuristic so far about the news media for me. In fact it reminds me of the turn of the century New York City where there were 65 daily newspapers, many of which published multiple editions, many of which published extras when there was breaking news. And the readers really understood and could parse then, as I think they can today, what the truth value of all those various publications were. They understood the yellow bombast of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and they knew the sort of prim, institutional responsible voice that they were getting from Mr. Oakes' New York Times.

Every time there is some new media there is a lot of hand wringing, and there is the sort of establishment of concerned journalist groups and concerned reader groups who are horrified about any new changes in media. When the telephone broke on newsrooms, it was much disdained by established journalists because it really diminished the value and the skills of leg work -- going out and meeting with sources. There were a lot of old guard reporters who didn't want anything to do with telephones. Likewise when video cameras made it possible to make news with pictures, there was a great hue and cry that this was somehow tainting the media. Everyone would really describe the threats of those as well.

When I think about the hits that the news media took over the Lewinsky story, I had to laugh because it seems that every day that I opened the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle, the Seattle Times, whatever, there's a boldly and conspicuously marked section that says "Corrections". There are three or four or five corrections every day in a responsible newspaper. Some of them are trivial, but some of them are really significant. So I wonder what the old media's real hand wringing has been all about.

I think that we're right now in the process of the disintermediation of news. Disintermediation is a term that people use in electronic commerce where they say that because people can access, purchase things on the Web, it's going to somehow fracture the chain of distributions from so many goods so that consumers can buy directly from manufacturers. A similar thing is happening on the Web where a young fellow like Matt Drudge can start up this operation out of his one bedroom apartment off of Hollywood and Vine.

But at the same time in electronic commerce people talk about reintermediation, that really people don't want to have to buy all of their goods directly on the Web. They want somebody to aggregate, they want somebody to determine for them whether their e-commerce transaction is getting to be good, fair, right and just. I think that a similar thing will happen in the new media. There will be a shifting of power, control, consolidation, and the establishment of, I think, reliable news values.

I think it's always going to be incumbent upon readers to establish, sort of caveat emptor, establish for themselves what the truth value of the national... The truth value of the National Inquirer or the New York Times are.

So I think in summing up, I think that the promise of the Web is thousands of new voices, new points of view, great competition, and the threat is thousands of new voices, new points of view, and more competition. (Laughter)

Gregg Zachary: Thanks. I neglected to comment earlier that the climate is aiding us here because I doubt anyone, no matter how much we drone on here, will bolt outside into the pouring rain. I don't think that's advisable, so I'd stay indoors for a little while longer.

Jack, you've set a high standard for politeness and civility. I'm hoping that we can lower the bar as we move forward. (Laughter)

I am going to turn to a very distinguished panel member, someone who is really a pioneer in this whole field, and I know everybody's on the edge of their seat -- who am I going to say? But... (Laughter) But Louis Rossetto is someone that I think has inspired many people in the room here, and could fairly be said to have started a magazine that's affected and represented a sensibility for a generation.

I wanted to ask Louis about the new frontier that technologies are often said to herald, and in what sense does the new technologies of the media abolish the past and send us catapulting into the future somewhat blind but inspired, heading, … down this wired highway? What's your sense of where we're headed and why we have to go there? (Laughter)

Louis Rossetto: I think we should turn this around and ask questions of you in a little while.

Gregg Zachary: Well, we've lowered the bar on civility, I'm glad to see that!

Louis Rossetto: That's maybe the real message of on-line media, that you can actually do that.

Orville last night, when he was interviewing Terry Gross, actually asked her whether she wasn't worried about the news media isolating individuals, and he said -- and this is a quote -- that he's worried that "everybody won't be singing out of the same hymn book." That actually resonated with me because as I was spending the last week thinking about what I might say in these five minutes, one of the things that kept resonating over and over in my own mind was this question of heresy and orthodoxy and what was media really? Media as it's evolved today in our society.

It strikes me that media today is basically the secular religion of our time. What it's about is confirming daily, by the minute, the orthodox, the prevalent orthodoxy of our society. And that in fact what's going on now is the arrival of a new heresy, heralded by new media, by the Internet, by the fact that suddenly there are more voices accessible.

Think back to what you learned about Gutenberg. Gutenberg created movable type so he could propagate more Bibles, which I guess he thought was going to be to the greater glory of God and the Catholic Church at the time. But the reality, what he ended up doing was he got Bibles into people's hands and suddenly the Catholic Church was disintermediated. Luther could come along and say hey, each of you have got a Bible. You don't need the church to interpret that Bible for you. You can think for yourself. That was the strength of the reformation, actually the medium itself that generated the reformation and generated modern thinking and modern life in lots of ways.

True to our patron saint, the medium is the message. That's my message, I guess. The medium is inherently destabilizing in this time because it's putting the power of interpretation, the power of getting at reality in the hands of everybody today, not leaving it in the hands of the priesthood of media that's been telling people for a century what's real and what isn't. And if for all the noise about new media being defective, it's amazing that there's such myopia on the part of media about how defective it's been, how out of touch with the reality of our time old media has actually been.

For every Matt Drudge there's the entire media establishment which crucified a guy called Jewell in Atlanta for a bombing he never did; and for the TWA story that Pierre Salinger spread about a missile taking, an our-sid missile taking down the TWA. The media itself propagated this falsehood that terrorists were the ones responsible, just as the FBI was on Capitol Hill pressing for the passage of legislation that would restrict the rights of every American.

The promise of new media to me is about, and in much the way Jack said, is about democratization. It's about plurality of voices. It's about a lot of people out there talking about the issues. About trying to arrive at reality. Forget objectivity. Objectivity is a construct to allow newspapers to get advertisers. What people really want today is reality, is a connection to reality. That's why media, I think, is falling down and why new media is going to succeed because it is delivering to people today who are swamped with a lot of noise, the ability to get at what's really going on. It's allowing a lot of voices to question and to propagate other ideas. In that swirl of discussion is the essence of democracy is the essence of creating a new consensus in our society. It's not in Dan Rather telling us what the reality is today. It's in everybody talking about what Dan Rather said today is reality. In that discussion is how the new popular mind is being formed, out of multiple communities, out of multiple points of view. I think that's the amazing strength of where we're going to now, is reality in real time.

Gregg Zachary: We'll move to Katherine Fulton who has a unique experience of having gone from being a leader in alternative journalism, city weeklies, and now is a global business consultant and thinker and seer, I guess, as well.

Katherine Fulton: This little piece of paper is on many of your chairs. Probably some of you can't find it anymore. If you have it, hold it up here for a second. Hold it in your right hand, close your left eye, focus on the little cross, and slowly move the piece of paper toward you until the circle disappears. There will be a moment when you can't see the circle. Got it? That's your blind spot.

Gregg Zachary: I don't have one! (Laughter)

Katherine Fulton: Most normal people have them.

Gregg Zachary: We'll stipulate that.

Katherine Fulton: I discovered mine in a big way when I helped to start an alternative newspaper in North Carolina which I'm happy to say survived and just turned last week. My blind spot was I thought I was a newspaper editor. In fact, I was in the business of connecting buyers and sellers. That was the business we were in. That was how we paid for great reporting.

I think that as a business... I was actually kind of normal in that way, and I think that's our collective blind spot, that the money to pay for great reporting has to come from somewhere.

We've lived in a kind of cocoon in sort of mid century to late century where radically non-commercial ideals could live inside enormously successful commercial institutions. Newspapers that could have essential monopolies; television networks that were essentially monopolies of a different kind. That cocoon is now shredding.

There was a great philosopher who once said that convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. I would actually say that some of our convictions blind us collectively to understanding what the real promises and threats might be.

I've been on sort of a passionate quest ever since to try to understand the larger ecology of how economics are changing, and how we will actually pay for great reporting in the future. I just want to say a few things about some of that ecology, sort of helicopter up to a fairly high level.

The first thing has to do with competition and with how the journalism business is changing. The most important thing is every business is changing. We have somehow had the sense that we're different. Actually, talk to the people in banking, talk to the people in healthcare, talk to the people in practically any industry that I've looked at, and all of them are facing a kind of fundamental change of rules of the game driven by technology, driven by globalization, driven by deregulation, by a lot of factors. I think that we can learn a lot from looking around at other industries and seeing how they're changing.

One of the things that's happening is that there's a... Your business can become a feature of someone else's business. Encyclopedia Britannica's business is almost wiped out by CD-ROMs. Local news may become a feature of other businesses, number one.

Number two, we have to think about where we make our stand because the one size all model is breaking apart throughout the economy. Holiday Inns, Burger King, Woolworths -- business after business, there's just radical segmentation going on. There are tremendous disturbing effects for the democracy. But if we make our stand for the mass market and the mass audience, we may lose, and all the sources for great reporting be wiped out.

What flows from that is my third point, which is the sort of ecology of electronic commerce, which is that we're not actually going to be in one business, but many. And that we're not in one new medium but many new medium. What happens to how cars are sold, how books are sold, how houses are sold, how information is sold may actually be very different kinds of businesses, and we may have to collect them together, the whole ecology around us is changing.

What all this adds up to to me is that I'm particularly worried about local news and information. I think all of these forces will hit... I'm not worried about the New York Times, which has actually already figured out that it's a niche market. I'm actually worried about local news. We're going to have to examine our assumptions and our blind spots about things like the JOAs of the future may be cross-media, may be local television and local newspapers. The words like navigation, broker, curator, facilitator may have to come into the lexicon of journalism because information is no longer scarce, but attention is. And finally, I think as a business we have to collectively look at the future of non-commercial journalism and media because that model is endangered as we all know as commercial. And some of the things that we don't like to think about doing, like getting involved in political debates to say journalism may be necessary.

So I wish us to keep this in mind and watch our blind spots all day.

Gregg Zachary: Katherine, thank you very much. That was very, very interesting, and I think it will stimulate a lot of questions.

I do want you to know that I noted that you didn't let me ask you your question, and that kind of transgression -- the rest of the panel members -- that's not going to go unnoticed next time, okay?

Playing off of some of the themes she raised about how A, other industries may give us some guides. We tend to look at the history of our media as the guide to the future. Maybe it's what happens to Safeway is really going to tell us what happens to newspapers in the future.

All that seems to suggest that we're more engaged I think in a genuine way with the business and economic issues that undergird our craft, and yet there's obviously dangers to that, or at least warning signs. What are some of the issues that this relationship between church and state at a lot of old line newspapers are at least formally adhered to with a passion, a vengeance, that business people do not truck with each other? So what's the future of that?

Adam Clayton Powell: Wasn't that John's question? (Laughter)

I think I like what many of the other people said which is really not unique to new media and that we're seeing trends in old media which are quite obvious.

David Weir talked about one of our cherished values being the church/state line. Well that's really being erased. Orville Schell worked at an institution where there was no physical connection -- no stairway, nor doorway -- between the editorial and advertising side at the New Yorker, but now we see the Los Angeles Times deliberately and openly exploring the breaching of this line which as David Talbot pointed out, is not happening at any new medium organization that he knows of.

But at the same time we're seeing something different because a lot of attention is being paid to new media, and because at new media, as with many other processes, the breaching of the church/state line is simply more obvious because new media are more transparent. So we see that the New York Times book review section that we get every week on Sunday, or earlier, had ads for books and book stores for years. The New York Times book review section on-line has ads, except now the New York Times actually gets more revenue depending on the sales of the book. So suddenly you have a qualitative difference there which could set up a possible, at least an appearance of possible conflict.

But if you look again at the old media, some of these conflicts have been there all the time and we simply haven't noticed them or haven't chosen to talk about them.

Does anyone really think that a newspaper automotive or travel section is an institution that has the same kind of separation between editorial and advertising that we hope goes on in the A sections? Probably not. But what we're seeing in new media is the more apparent certainly appearance of conflict of interest, and we're starting to see it come into the on-line equivalent of the A section.

Bruce Koon, who will be speaking later, managing editor of Mercury Center, the San Jose Mercury News pioneering on-line site, on Monday at our conference, they're thinking of deconstructing the newspaper. What he meant was breaking up the newspaper. Yes, there will probably be a big Web site -- Bruce can correct me if I'm misstating him. There will still be the SJMercury.com Web site that you can go to, but that the real growth in readership is happening in little mini-packages. Good Morning Silicon Valley. One person comes in at 5:00 in the morning, spends a few hours writing a sort of edgy summary. That gets e-mailed, you can sign up for it by e-mail. That gets e-mailed to close to 40,000 people. As he said, any paper, physical paper, circulation manager would kill for that kind of growth. They're developing other mini-packages. One based on finance, another based on other kinds of reporting.

When you start to break things up into these very narrow niches, you may begin to see at least more potential or at least more of the appearance of a conflict of interest between those banner ads that are going to be running around the edges of the content, and that may spring upon your screen before you can even get to the content.

What we're also seeing as emblematic on the Web is we can make connections, more obviously. Those of you who read automotive sections, you may not read many of the articles. I'm not commenting on a specific newspaper, but you may not read any of the articles in your quest for the classified ads looking for a used Toyota. But when you're on-line, the editorial and advertising is right next to each other. It's harder to avoid, almost as hard as in broadcasting.

That's going to be my last point, which is that we're definitely seeing the church/state line not just erode but vanish in broadcasting as news and entertainment quickly blur.

Disclosure, I must confess that 25 years ago I was the news director at WINS the all news radio station in New York City, who first started attending sales meetings when I realized that our sales people didn't understand what we were doing in the newsroom. So I would go and explain to them why we did that story, why we did a story a certain way.

I could be blamed, therefor, for setting up a situation where my successors go to the sales meetings and the sales people say, you've got to cover this story because we've got this great advertising package relying on it.

Let's look at a national example. I know I saw John McChesney who will be moderating later. When he and I were at National Public Radio we had a number of cases where the government of a certain foreign country said we will pay for the cost of your having a news bureau in our country. All costs and the salaries of four people.

Voice: Do you have the phone number... (Laughter)

Adam Clayton Powell: It begins 011. (Laughter) And in both cases -- it was offered twice. In both cases we said no, because it would seem to distort coverage of the world.

Actually since then...

Voice: The U.S. government? (Laughter)

Adam Clayton Powell: No... Since then NPR has, in fact, has accepted support from one of those countries on the theory that we'd cover it anyway. (Laughter) Again, it raises at least the possible appearance of conflict of interests. I'm still waiting for the other bureau to open.

Gregg Zachary: Thank you very much.

John Markoff who is going to be speaking next begged me before, and said he could use all his time to defend the New York Times against the predicted charges that would emerge in this panel, and I really love this guy but I flatly told him no. I said John, run it in your newspaper. Use that editorial page, but not here. Not on this panel.

John is, of course, a veteran observer of the innovation industries and has one of the keenest minds on the scene and what's coming up. I wanted to ask you, because you're so attuned to the constant pace of change, is it possible that we are going to see so many changes in the future that it's almost moot to talk about how things are now because we're going to be moving into some new stage and the rules are going to be different, and so we should just what? Existentially moan or something? What would we do? (Laughter)

John Markoff: That sounds like a setup. This was supposed to be the rested judgment portion of our panel.

Gregg Zachary: We used that in the Kennedy assassination we did the other day...

John Markoff: In that line I was going to propose the Mark Lane theory of new media. (Laughter) I have proof that Bill Gates was at Dealey Plaza... (Laughter)

I tend to want to sort of remind you that this whole thing we call new media is really based on the silicon-based technologies. I'd like to belabor that point for just a couple of moment. Silicon is an unstable element. So here we are, we're three years into this and we're all wringing our hands. I just wanted to put this in perspective in the sense that i's been three years, and this is the horseless carriage panel. The risk of horseless carriages in this case are different than the risks of speculating about horseless carriages at the front end of the automobile industry. Very different. Because of the nature of the industry that has created this platform on which all of these debates are going on.

There's this thing called Moore's Law, which everybody knows about and we all give it credence and bow to it, but nobody I think really understands what it means about exponential growth. Exponential growth begins, you have this flat curve and then all of a sudden the curve becomes vertical. We're right at the point where the curve is becoming vertical.

So making judgments... So right now what's new media? New media is people sitting at desks in front of boxes, right? That's largely the sociological exercise we're talking about. The visionaries, the people that are sort of far-seeing, think that maybe that's going to shift in awhile to slightly larger boxes and people will be sitting in [bark] loungers. That's sort of the extent of the thinking from the sociological point of view. (Laughter)

A decade ago, we were talking about... Here at Berkeley they were talking about wanting to give students these things called 3M machines. That was '85, '84, everybody wanted a million operations per second, a megabyte of memory and a million pixels. Now we're really disturbingly close to what I think of as 3G machines -- a gigaop of performance, a gigabyte of memory, and a gigabit of band width. So that's the framework in which we should be having this discussion. But I don't think anybody has sort of "grocked" how quickly that's coming and how pervasive it's going to be.

The thing about Moore's Law, there's this corollary to Moore's law, and Moore discovered that not only does density of transistors go up every 18 months to two years, but the cost [of factories] go up at that rate. So what does that mean? It means two things. One is that the fastest computers are going to be the cheapest computers; and that the only people who are going to build those computers are the kinds of companies that put things under Christmas trees.

So when you realize the way this silicon world is turning over... Because the government... It used to work where the government funded super computers and the technology trickled down. The government largely got out of the super computer business and now that's been taken over by the consumer electronics companies. So there's been a lot of talk, so that the last component of this thing that I wanted to mention is the interesting sort of next stage that we should look at is not so much band width, per se, which is coming. Everybody's talked about it. But the sociological consequences of symmetrical band width. Because the most interesting thing on the horizon, and it's only four or five years away, is broad band CDMA. So what does symmetric band width mean?

People talk about Matt Drudge, so Matt Drudge came when we could all put up Web pages. But I think the interesting thing is not Matt Drudge, but it's JenniCam. JenniCam is the future, and that's why I think of these things as post media. If you haven't seen JenniCam, be careful in going there because the porn site's...

Gregg Zachary: That's not a diet franchise is it?

John Markoff: No. JenniCam is a young woman who's put a web cam in her room, and it's on almost all the time, and you can go there and you have to be careful about how you spell it because you'll end up at a porn site if you type the name wrong.

Gregg Zachary: That never happens to you.

John Markoff: Never. So we're at this world that David Gelernter described, which is mirror worlds. Sort of the negative potential is that journalists become video repackagers because why do you need a journalist when you can go there yourself much more quickly and much more accurately? That's perhaps the downside. The upside might be that the only role left for journalists will be investigative journalism because everything else will be public, and why would you need to have somebody tell you something you can find out easily for yourself?

Gregg Zachary: I guess that brings us back to David Talbot, then.

We're going to shift gears here. I'm really chewing on some of that. I had debated on whether to hand out a glossary in advance of your talk. I didn't, but would you ever use the word "grock" in a story? What is that? (Laughter) I know it rhymes with crock, but what is that? Was that a Star Trek episode? I don't remember.

John Markoff: Heinlen.

Gregg Zachary: Of course.

We're going to shift gears a little bit to talk with John Weber, the editor of The Industry Standard, a new publication, and also a former technology editor at the LA Times. One of the questions that I really have, because I'm a closet demographer. I wonder sometimes if some of these questions just don't reflect generational shifts. If you just parsed the debate you would see it, with the exception of Louis who's young a heart, you would see it falling out by age.

My question, for somebody that... You've just been engaged in sort of staffing up a publication. Is the issue of how do traditions and core journalistic values carry forward in new media, is that maybe really a demographic question about a generational difference that younger people, say under 30 or even under 25, may have different concepts about what journalism is based on their experience of media growing up, coming of age?

I wanted you to talk a little bit about your experience with some of the young Turks and both what drives and impassions them, and also what some of those blind spots are that they've got.

Jonathan Weber: That wasn't the question you said you were going to ask me. (Laughter)

Gregg Zachary: Sue me!

Jonathan Weber: It is an interesting question and a funny question for Gregg to ask me sitting next to John. When I was the LA Times tech reporter in Silicon Valley, you're looking at about a third of the universe of who covered technology in 1990. The change since that time has really been rather stunning in terms of just the attention that's paid to the technology industry and now the Internet and the new media industry and business journalism in general.

There's been an incredible boom which I've largely been the beneficiary of in hiring up for this new magazine. I spent most of the last two months or so interviewing people, talking to people, in some cases a kind of assembly line almost, interviewing process which has been extremely interesting and a very interesting insight I think into some of the journalism culture that's developed here in the Bay area especially.

The obvious thing that struck me first off was sort of the scale and the volume of it. Coming from a kind of tradition where there were a few jobs out there, it was literally kind of a small club of ten people who covered this stuff. Nobody could get a job, there were no jobs anywhere. You could kind of pound on doors forever and maybe after five years of perseverance you could get in the door somewhere. What's happened over the last several years both with Web journalism, new media journalism, with traditional journalism as, well print journalism in the form of Wired, in the form of a lot of technology trade publications, there's been a real explosion. So I've seen a lot of people who have a lot of very diverse and interesting kinds of experience in different kinds of media who have been part of very fast growing organizations, have kind of risen to relatively high positions in those organizations in very short periods of time. And clearly all of that is to the good for journalism as a profession. Obviously more is better, particularly if you're from Berkeley looking for a job, and just generally the diversity of voices and the reduced barriers to entry that that's a reflection of, are certainly a good thing. It's been very interesting and kind of inspiring to see how that has played out, especially in San Francisco.

The flip side of that is that there has been a real gap in what I expected in terms of some of the kind of aspirations and sort of focus on craft and skills of a lot of the people who have come through. In doing this magazine, we're a business news magazine. It's really a pretty traditional kind of magazine model, a weekly news magazine. The people I was trying to hire were people who would do relatively traditional kinds of beat reporting, business reporting, and who were really good reporters and really good writers, and so people would come in and we'd talk and I'd say well, what do you want to do? We're doing these things. And they would say well, I really like editorial and I love the publishing environment and whatever you've got, I'm kind of interested. I'd say do you want to be a reporter, do you want to be an editor, do you want to be a feature writer, do you want to... What kind of things do you want to do?

That often prompted a somewhat quizzical look like they didn't quite understand entirely the question. So I would emphasize as the process went along and people would come in, and I really wanted the people who came in and said I want to be a reporter. I just want to go out and cover a beat and find stuff out and put it in the paper. I didn't really see very much of that kind of ethic somehow. Not because people didn't appreciate that ethic, but that they weren't quite tuned into that as kind of a craft thing which I think was a function, is a function in part of how rapidly this whole area has grown and how diverse the set of opportunities are. So that, I think, is the flip side without really addressing the more cosmic questions of sort of what is journalism in this new era.

I think that some of the basic craft things of really good reporting and really good writing are things that everyone can agree are valuable and deserve continued sort of attention and support.

Gregg Zachary: I think you've been a little kind there. I know when we talked about this, your rendition of one particular interview was that you asked someone well, would you like to do editing or reporting and they said to you, well editing's interesting, but what do you mean by reporting? (Laughter)

That reminded me of something David Weir had told me about some months ago, that some of the people in his HotWired newsroom had never had the experience of interviewing someone face to face, or at least until David became aware of that, that was the case. (Laughter) That kind of experience I think maybe gives different perspectives on this.

I see that the rain has stopped and yet few are bolting, so I consider this a success so far. Basically the last panelist is Denise Caruso who is another veteran practitioner in the middle forms of media and she writes a column for the New York Times, has been involved in advising interval research, and has also just watched the culture and society of the Valley for many years.

Actually, I asked Denise to simply, to get off the next phase of this panel is going to be spending a little bit of time for the panel members to go at some of these topics that they wanted to have some rejoinder on, so we thought Denise could kick the spirit of that.

Lots of clap trap here, obviously. A tremendous amount of…among these folks. What's going on here? How can these people stand up and say some of these things?

Denise Caruso: If you actually think I'm going to bite on that... (Laughter)

There are a few things that I just want to sort of comment on the morning in general. I was really happy to see people starting to talk about the issues about journalism in general in a larger sense because I actually don't think there's a big problem as David Talbot said, with new media journalism. Katherine and I met actually at the Nieman Foundation when I came to talk at a conference there, and I started talking in 1994 about this thing that I really think needs to happen, if somebody could make this happen it would be great. We need to actually think about some kind of -- I know Zachary's going to rip me on this, but sort of the Milk Advisory Board of Journalism. I would like to see on not necessarily the New York Times Web site, but it has to be there because it has to be everywhere. A bug that says "journalism practiced here". And that you'd be able to click on that and that people on these Web sites can tell you what it means to them to practice journalism. We check our sources, we aren't just publishing hearsay. If it's an opinion, we tell you it's an opinion. I really think that the American public has completely lost faith in journalism for a very good reason, and I agree with David that old media likes to give a lot of grief to new media because they're very threatened by it, and I think actually much more of the fault lies in how things have been practiced in the old media.

I've actually tried to get Columbia Journalism Review to let me write about that, and they won't let me write about it. They're terrified. It opens up a big can of worms.

For my money, I think that opening cans of worms is what I do for a living, and that's all I want to do. I don't have the answers, I just want people to start asking the questions.

I hate to disappoint you, Zach. I don't disagree with a lot of what's been said up here. I think there's been some incredibly wise things said by everybody. So you said you were going to ask me questions, so you'd better start asking because I don't have anything else to say.

Gregg Zachary: Why don't we give a chance for some of the folks that have been on the panel, that have been listening before we kick it off to questions, to see what, if anything, anybody here wants to add to some of these comments.

Adam Clayton Powell: I'll pick up on something which John said, and that's the issue of what is journalism going to be? We've seen a little taste of it in old media with C-Span and Cal-Span, but when every news event is routinely offered live on the Web, and cached so you can go back and look at it all again, what is going to be the role of the journalism?

People watch C-Span and then read some of the articles written about Congress, and the two don't necessarily track. When you see that expanded to every major news event and every minor news event and every Jenny who puts a camera in her bedroom or office, we're going to begin to see a very different kind of role for journalists and a very different standard for journalists to meet.

Denise Caruso: I thought John was in the process of saying something that we ought to have out there, when you start talking about broad band CDMA. I don't know what it is. But I actually think you're talking about what medium we now have is going to morph into something else, and it would probably be helpful to say... Can you explain what that is

John Markoff: That's one of many standards for broad band wireless digital networks, and I think that the model of the future is basically not being trapped in front of a box, but being able to carry this thing with you all the time. It seems so obvious to me.

Essentially there have been two visions in Silicon Valley, and everybody else is a pretender. There was Doug Englebart who figured out oddment and hypertext; and there was Allen Kay and Del Goldberg who got the dynabook. Everybody else has been imitating ever since. The vision of the dynabook, going all the way back to 1972 at (Xerox) PARC, was this notion of this thing you could carry, and you could carry something else at the same time while you were carrying it, that was connected to this whole global network of information. It seems obvious to me that that's where we're going to get to and everybody will take it for granted and it will be one of these G3 machines, or 3G machines... Not G3 -- no ads for Apple... (Laughter)

Denise Caruso: To follow up on Adam's question, I think that it poses a really interesting role for journalists. Someone on the very first panel said something about the Greeks saying that journalism essentially multiple sources with direct knowledge. There are a couple of things about that. If I am wearing a camera, and MIT and a lot of other places are dealing with these wearable computers now, and wearable video technology. If I am able to record everything in my environment, there are a couple of things we have to remember.

Number one, as is with television journalism and everything, you still only see what's in the frame of the camera. So what a journalist needs to do is be able to describe context or find a way to synthesize a number of different point of view that are providing direct knowledge. If I'm walking around turning my body around so I can shoot this whole scene and there are a number of different people doing that from different points of view, one thing that a journalist might be required to do is to synthesize those things and put them in context. That, I think, is definitely a trend that I capitalized on when I was a newsletter editor. There was a lot of news going on in the technology business when I started Digital Media back in 1989, and the synthesis of points... Coming up with a point of view and synthesizing a lot of different information became more valuable to people who didn't have very much time, than news itself which has become, clearly has become a commodity.

Voice: If I could jump in on this general point. I've never really understood this notion that somehow the ability to view something yourself will reduce the need for journalists. Our function is to look around the world and filter things and understand things and present things in a way that people can hopefully understand and digest and get something out of. People obviously don't have time to witness every event that happens in the world, and therefore they will pay, hopefully, for people who will be out there and help them look at the things that will be interesting to them.

So I'm not really quite sure... A few years ago it first became very possible that okay, you could go out, in covering business news sure, anyone can go out and read all the press releases themselves. Well trust me, people don't want to do that. (Laughter)

Louis Rossetto: I wanted to come back to a point that David made in his introductory remarks having to do with business plans. The sort of greasy underside of journalism and media. And just try to point out that it isn't just new media that has a problem with its business plan, it's media in general. If you consider what's been going on with the audience for television over the last decade -- mass media broadcast television, which has eroded at least 50 percent. So what is the role of media going into the future? And how is it supported? What is the economic foundation of it?

There are two things I think people should think about. One is the implications of precision targeting of advertising, that the whole foundation of mass media is the unaccountability of the ad spin. When you add accountability to the package then you find, I would imagine, a general erosion of ad support for capturing large audiences that you can't really measure or quantify the kind of returns you're going to get. Which means that the advertising is going to migrate to those people that can deliver audiences that are going to support the markets that the advertisers want.

The other thing is this idea of tiny news. On one side you've got the advertisers migrating to a different platform, and that platform is probably going to be an interactive environment. On the other side you've got the consumer of mass journalism or mass media that is bombarded with a lot of noise. This is a Forest or George Colony observation about tiny news, that to get any value, personal value, out of television journalism today, you've got to expend an enormous amount of effort to get a very little return. Humans don't do this indefinitely if they have an alternative. The alternative is to go to someplace that will deliver more value for less effort and that happens to be in the interactive environment where you can tailor exactly what you want to get to.

So the economic foundation, the advertising foundation of mass media is eroding and the consumer side of that is also eroding at the same time. So the question then really is not whether new media has a business plan for the future, it's whether mass media has a business plan that can support itself in the future.

Question: I'd be curious at some point before you all disburse, to hear you tell me what is the biggest threat that you think about? You all in one way or another are inside this. You really haven't addressed that. What's the danger? What keeps you up at night when you think where this thing is headed and where it might really run off the track?

Question: Betty Medsger. I had a sense from some members of this panel and from earlier speakers, too, that there's a certain pleasure taken in thinking of a dichotomy of old media and new media, us against them. It seems to me that that is an old discussion and that in fact there's a lot of merger of the two media that has already taken place. Maybe one of the things that should be discussed is what is the result of that synergy. It seems to me that the criticism that was taking place about the coverage of Monica Lewinsky really wasn't fastened so much on Drudge or new media versus old media, but what came out of the synergy that's now possible in either one as a result of that relationship. I'd just like to know what you think about that.

Jack Shafer: I think that one of the things the Web has done is it has exhilarated the news cycle. You saw it happen with the Dallas Morning News, you saw it happen with the Wall Street Journal. They were breaking stories to their Web sites because they didn't want to be scooped by the other guys. I think this is salutary. I think this is great. Now they both screwed the pooch with those stories, and they had to qualify them later, but I would rather have...

Denise Caruso: But hey, they were first. (Laughter)

Jack Shafer: First is better. Presumably you want to be right and first, but no one wants to be last. I think that that's the significant change.

I agree with you, the old versus new media, Katherine had a great comment win we were listening to David Talbot talk about how the big media had basically ignored Salon scoops. She sort of nudged me. We both edited alternative weeklies in cities and she says, "Sound familiar?" Because at the Independent and at the Washington City Paper, we would both break stories that the big dailies, the television stations, would ignore. So I don't really think there's ever been... I agree with you that there is that kind of convergence. The velocity I think is the most breathtaking thing that's happening with new media.

Denise Caruso: The thing that's interesting about the synergy question I think for large media organizations in particular is that the economies of scale are really sort of at odds with each other. You see big companies like Time Warner with Pathfinder. They can't make enough money on that to really put a big investment behind it because you know it's so much cheaper to put things on-line, they're having a hard time figuring out what do you do with this asset threat you've got.

One of the things that I find is interesting about news becoming a commodity and this whole idea that no more exclusives, that people can get things up on their Web site immediately, is that it presents a really interesting opportunity for organizations that do... I guess the new term is transmedia. That have properties in a number of different media, and how they figure out the best way to use them.

Jack says nobody wants to be last, but when I published a newsletter, I can tell you right now, I loved being last. I wanted something big to happen right when I was going to press because that meant in three weeks I could look at everything everybody else had written and say why they were wrong. (Laughter) It was fabulous. If you've got the luxury of having a bunch of different media, you can do all of it. You can break the wrong story and then correct it and then commentate on it and then be there to film it, you can do the whole thing. It's just figuring out the...

Voice: That's what journalism is. Journalism exists because there's not time enough for a Ph.D. dissertation on everything. We laugh about the rush to judgment and we rightly bruise the knees of people who get there first and get it wrong, but that is our business. Our business is not to sit back... That's the business, I think, of the professor, or the press critic.

Denise Caruso: But I think what's interesting to me is that there's a space for all of it in a company that can...

Voice: ...how Kissinger drew all the really powerful and important Washington journalists inside his orbit. He would charm them, but it was always on background, and it was all this confidential sourcing. Whenever they were about to break a big story Kissinger would bring them in and seek their counsel and say oh, that's not really true. When you go back and you look at those years, the absolute best reporting about national security reporting happened outside the orbit of Washington, D.C.; happened outside of what we would now call the old media. There were guys like Seymour Hersh that were doing it on a wing and a prayer, magazines like Ramparts breaking powerful, important stories, because they didn't have access, because they weren't inside. I think that's one of the, to bring us back away from technology, away from marketing, away from advertising, and talking again about journalism, that that's one of the great promises of the Web. That the new Bob Shears, the new Seymour Hersh's. If they've got a story and a few bucks to put on a Web site can break big, big news. I think they'll always have the established mainstream media at a kind of disadvantage.

You talk to anybody who works at a big daily or at a big television network, they're forever bitching about the levels of editors that they have to go through, all the gloss that we as responsible and I guess concerned journalists think is important. But a lot of that, a lot of what we have lacquered onto the top of our craft prevents the truth from being told. I think that will be one of the salutary things about the Web.

Question: Karl Schoenberger, I'm a teaching fellow here this year, and also in the interest of full disclosure, an old media, low tech curmudgeon. That will be reflected in my question. I wanted to ask you about a different kind of exponential growth curve and that is one of elitism in the media. Usually when I go to hear a group like this I ask about the accessibility to the media by the have-nots in society. It seems to me the new technology, the new medium is going to get farther and farther away from not only being accessible to the have-nots in society, but also exacerbating one of the worst problems in the old media is it doesn't cover all the broader community. To me that seems like a real possible threat to democracy when the elites of our society are further and further out of touch with what's happening on the ground.

Adam Clayton Powell: I think if you look at high schools, 78 percent of U.S. public high schools are currently wired; 63 percent in minority and low income areas. That's far more than high school students reading newspapers. Perhaps especially in low income and minority areas. So actually, new media to some extent reflects the elitism of old media, but it has become more pervasive precisely among those age groups where old media aren't reaching.

At the Freedom Forum we've done some research crunching Nielsen data showing that those under 18 have dropped out of broadcast news. They don't...

Voice: ...coverage of...

Denise Caruso: There's a couple of things... I agree that it's a problem and we should really be careful and monitor it, but there are a couple of things that might make you feel a little bit better which is that people are working very hard to make sure that the most people possible have access not only to e-mail and the Web, but have access to the tools to publish, even through libraries or through their schools or whatever.

For me, I have a million e-mail addresses, unfortunately. I get tons and tons of pitches and stuff from people every day who through the normal channels I wouldn't ever see, and I usually ignore them just because there's only 24 hours in a day. But what's interesting about the Web is that if you have a strong point of view, if there's something big going on, if there's some scandal brewing, and I sort of get wind of it or somehow am interested in this topic and I search the Web, I will find your Web page that says "Guess what? There is this weird thing going on." That person would never be able to get that information to me through the normal channels. But when I go out to look for information, some weird quirky thing from some medical journal in the middle of nowhere pops up that says we have some evidence that this drug -- Prozac, I'm making this up -- actually harms people terribly, and here's how. So there's more of a flow in the other direction than you might think, just based on the fact that it is really... There are sites that actually provide e-mail and Web pages free to people to get them to see their advertisements or whatever.

Katherine Fulton: I think probably most people in the room, in many ways, would share your concern in the following way. I see Clay Felker sitting in the back of the room. When we were desperately trying to make a business out of the Independent we went to talk to Clay, and he looked at our paper and he said, you know, you've got to write about your readers. Because we were constantly writing about migrant workers and all these people that were social problems, and wanted to bring it to the attention of our readership. The segmentation that's happening, my point about mass media, the question is can it be fought and how within commercial media or non-commercial media? Because the question of what happens to what's been called society-making media as opposed to segmentation that is about selling products to people is a fundamental, deep concern I think for the future of the democracy.

I share your concern. I think everything people said was right, and it's also a real concern.

Voice: I don't share your concern and the reason is I don't think that there's ever been a time in which publishing a newsletter could be cheaper. When you think about the power of desktop publishing, how incredibly cheap time at a Kinko's is to use state of the art page layout, printing, technology printout for pennies a copy. I really fail to see what the fuss is about.

Voice: I also don't share the concern, because if you look at the statistics, this medium is expanding faster than television did. Nobody's going around saying there's a gap between the TV haves and have-nots. It's just a beginning... This medium is three year old.

Voice: And in the beautiful response that Louis and I are going to get into here... I think that if we fashioned the question as a Newsweek cover story, the Newsweek cover story this week would be "The Have-Nots: minorities and the poor who don't have access to new media." I would guarantee you, I bet you $5,000 that in nine month it would be "Infoglut. We can't get away from all the information. There are too many providers of information on the Web. Something's got to be done."

Voice: To follow on that...

Voice: Louis and I are going to start a Committee for Unconcerned Journalists. (Laughter)

Voice: Actually my concern, to follow on what Orville said, what is the real threat here? The real threat is that there's a new consciousness emerging that none of us will ever be able to unplug from. And that in the future it's not going to be the haves and the have nots that's going to concern people, it's how the fuck am I going to stop having to look at my e-mail every five minutes? The rich people will be the ones who don't have to do that. The poor people will be slaves to computers.

Voice: But Louis has mastered that because he never looks at his e-mail, as I can attest. (Laughter)

Question: I'm Nick Densig from (inaudible)... One (inaudible) that we haven't actually talked about are the (inaudible), the Yahoos and the (inaudible). I'm really curious about your thoughts about what that means for how editorial judgments and origination of content actually work together? Is the notion that editorial judgment and origination of content, that they should be together within the same organization surrounded by some kind of firewall? Is that an old fashioned notion? Are we going to see an unbundling of those two functions? If so, what does that mean?

Voice: What do you mean by origination of content?

Question: Actually writing. Commissioning and writing. And on the other side the actual selection of what gets [appeared]. At the moment you've got Yahoo. They choose, with their headlines page, they choose what people see. They don't actually produce anything themselves. They are just a new media company. We haven't really talked about them. What does that mean?

Voice: I think that's a good observation concerning the sort of separation of aggregation from creation of content and I think that aggregation is going to be an increasingly important thing, aggregation and filtering are sort of two sides to the same thing. I think that will be very important.

I think the issue with that is whether it has to do with the business underpinnings of that. I think if it turns out that aggregation is... There are a lot of aggregators out there to the extent that aggregation becomes the way that you can make money, that threatens to undermine the financing essentially of the original creation process. So there's... Everyone's an aggregator, but eventually there's nothing to aggregate.

Voice: Reader's Digest. Isn't that the old media Yahoo? Utney Reader. We've been there before. The San Francisco Chronicle... (Laughter) We've had this problem before. The appetite for that is limited, I think.

Voice: The problem with aggregators as a threat, is number one, a lot of old media organizations that are in new media are now chasing aggregators and trying to either have alliances with or form the next Yahoo. But if you go to Yahoo, my bigger worry is that we do a lot of work in Africa. to go to Yahoo for say coverage of President Clinton's visit to Africa, so you want to look at some African newspapers and news sources. It turns out if you go to Yahoo and click on Africa, they miss most of the newspapers in Africa. They don't have them. You've got to actually get out there and find it yourself. So I think one problem with the aggregators is the illusion of completeness.

Denise Caruso: Absolutely. I think the top three search engines, the statistic I heard is that they only crawl a third of the Web sites on the Web. I don't think most people who use the Web really understand that they're not getting anywhere near all the stuff. I usually use at least three search engines if I'm really looking for something. So I do think it's a problem.

Voice: Since we're nearing the end of the panel and since everyone is a participant, if you have statements, but I urge you to keep them within 15 to 20 seconds, you may substitute for questions.

Question: I have something of a prolonged question which could also be a statement. My full disclosure is that I was once a sort of participant/observer in David Weir's HotWired newsroom if it could really be called that. Now I'm in old media, I guess, at Mother Jones. But my question actually had to do with Mr. Weber's observations about the journalists that were coming to interview for Industry Standard.

I think actually his experience about their confusion as to what they wanted to do at the magazine speaks to the effect that the culture of new media has had on journalists not necessarily as professionals, but as consumers of media themselves. I think young journalists, and here I am a young journalist, coming of age with so much information at their fingertips have just begun to assume that first-hand experience with the world will be filtered for them somehow through media. That reporting is something other people do.

Voice: Older people, hopefully. (Laughter) The job of like analyzing, aggregating, and filtering information to make up a story, that's their job, is like to take this raw data that already exists out there, that comes to them through e-mail or the Web and to turn that into a story, or to turn that into at least some kind of processed information stew. I think that that job is actually not that dissimilar to the job of just a normal consumer of new media. I think that that actually kind of addresses perhaps why the growth in new media at least what we were talking about earlier, how Good Morning Silicon Valley or the Slates in the papers, those are real growth areas for new media, these things that kind of consolidate a lot of different other primary sources.

This brings me to Louis' point about, when he expresses a hope for the reality in real time, I wonder if what he's proselytizing is actually kind of a life-size map of the world, which is really an unmanageable guide.

The parallel to Gutenberg I really liked, and I think that Bibles did disintermediate the church and allowed people to think they had a direct connection to God. But my question is, the Net allows people to have a direct connection to what, exactly? If media is our secular religion, then what is its God? Who does it serve? What does media stand between? The people and what? How do we identify what reality is without some kind of media?

Louis Rossetto: If there's no God there's also probably no reality, either. But what Gutenberg allowed was for lots of people to talk about what that was. I think in that discussion they got closer to a sense of what God and reality might be. That's what I'm driving at. That more voices would at least take it away from being a monoculture to being a plurality, a diverse discussion. That discussion is to me the essence of democracy It's not about voting, I keep saying it over and over again. Democracy is not voting, it's how we live our lives together and how we reach consensus on how our society should be. It's in that discussion, it's in that polymorphic discussion that I see the Web and the Net as being really, really useful.

Voice: That's a great theme. We're going to have to end this panel now. About 15 minutes for a break...

On to Panel 2: Excellence in the New Media

Back to: The Conference Program

Panelists and speakers at the conference came from a wide variety of new media companies and organizations.

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