Global News & Technology Leadership in Challenging Times

welcome everyone and thank you so very much for joining our forum today my name is lap nguyen i'm a sophomore studying economics with a secondary in government here at harvard college we are incredibly privileged and honored to be hosting such distinguished speakers today first we have mark thompson the former president and ceo of the new york times he has worked in journalism for much of his career he served as the director general of the bbc and the chief executive of channel 4 news in the uk he has also garnered praise for his critique of political discourse in the media through his 2016 book enough said what's gone wrong with the language of politics next we have maria reza a filipino american journalist and co-founder and ceo of rappler a philippine online news site known for uncover a philippine online news site known for uncovering stories of government corruption as well as documenting the war on drugs in the philippines maria opened and ran cnn's manila bureau and the jakarta bureau and she has received numerous awards for her journalistic work and just this past month was named as a recipient of the 2021 nobel peace prize [Applause] along with dimitri muritov for their quotes efforts to safeguard the freedom of expression which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace she's currently working on her book how to stand up to a dictator which is coming next spring next we have richard gingras the current vice president of news at google in that role he oversees google news which connects more than a billion unique readers each week to articles from journalists in 72 countries and 45 languages he oversees efforts such as the trust project which provides tools for journalists and news providers and he also is currently serving on the board of the first amendment project a coalition an organization dedicated to advancing free speech open government and public participation in public life and finally we have craig foreman who will be joining us virtually on the screen above as the former ceo of mcclatchy he led the digital transformation of such businesses as the miami herald kansas city star charlotte observer and newsrooms in 30 cities across america foreman also headed yahoo's inc news finance sports and media and information businesses and spent time at cnn time and the wall street journal where he was nominated for the pulitzer prize for his reporting on the persian gulf war as a fellow at the shorenstein center craig is working on developing new multidisciplinary approaches and solutions for the challenges facing local news and information and our moderator nancy gibbs is the lombard director of the shorenstein center and edward r murrow professor of the practice of the press politics and public policy nancy gibbs was named times 17th editor in september of 2013 the first women to hold the position and remains an editor at large today during her three decades at time she covered four presidential campaigns and is the author of more cover stories than any rider in times nearly 100 year of history and now i will turn it over to our moderator nancy gibbs thank you so much so for a topic as important as the one we're looking at tonight it's great to have a dream team like this who capture news from the local national international perspective from the business side and the editorial side from most importantly four people who have all operated at the very busy intersection of digital transformation and reimagining of how we communicate and how journalism can function in its critical democratic role so while i want us to really have a chance to look at progress and solutions and opportunities and experiments i do want to level set a little and see how much agreement actually we have about the problem and what happened uh it whether you're looking at approval ratings or trust or the financial health of particularly legacy media the the news is very seldom good and i'm wondering whether you think there was an original sin a failure of imagination a failure of innovation a failure of nerve or whether what has happened to news um was the result of forces beyond anyone's control craig since you are up in the box why don't you go first and then we will work our way across the stage we can't hear you uh i'm hoping you can hear me now yes we can um okay thank you and look i think you have to say it's all of the above and i think we have to take some responsibility for this as news people and i know that on the panel i'd be surprised if we don't agree with that um digital disruption has meant that we are in a battle for audience attention and for many years uh there was resistance on the part of news leadership to recognize that battle and that was a miss of a big cycle and set back the efforts of digital transformation at many places for many years so people have been playing on their back heels and i think we have to acknowledge in many news brands that this scramble to transform has taken too long and has not focused on new audiences and in the effort to acquire audiences we have sometimes played to uh emotion and to entertainment and i think in a world of 7 by 24 365 where maria who right now is able to publish uh the videos that she's shooting as a as a cnn producer among many other things she can do that right now on this panel and we have to acknowledge that the role as gatekeeper is is forever behind us so let's start with a basic principle every decision made by many of those places let's just assert was made by well-intentioned but not smart people what do we do now uh that's the question that is most important for us because it's never been more important for a press to be authentic authoritative and to provide real news and real information for people around the globe and in the local context and let me just finish up here i used to say in the course of a conversation with the miami herald when there's six feet of water on ocean drive and south beach as a result of hurricane andrew it's not from the left or right it's not real or fake it's just news and we need to get back to a notion of um a clear uh uh uh transparent delivery of that which i think is a building block for uh success in a digital environment thank you um mark what went wrong how did we get here so so what went right what went right 150 years ago is the industrialization and urbanization and the arrival of mass products which needed to be marketed meant that suddenly people had the technical means to make newspapers and distribute them to lots and lots of people and secondly they had advertisers queuing up to to to to give them money and that model was fabulously profitable by 1900 i mean you know it's a great model in 1900 it's a pretty good model in the year 2000 so it lasts 100 years you know by 2005 it's beginning to fall apart and arguably in many many in the developed world it's significantly fallen apart completely but what's interesting is that this the you know a really profitable century allows all sorts of things to happen you know you can decide as as as the founders of the financial times who started in in london in the uh in the 1880s and pretty much at the same time every five years later out of oxford the new york times you can go super up market you can afford a newsroom you can afford investigative journalism you can afford to differentiate and really go for the stars in terms of quality as disruption because this this model gets disrupted and it gets disrupted in obvious ways digital arrives it changes consumers behavior but it gives advertisers many more choices and i think essentially there was a model that most of us and by the way broadcasting arrives in the 1920s very similar in many ways you know limited bandwidth fabulous advertising opportunities you know wonderful new thing everyone watches it everyone in the industry is very happy 80 or 100 years of that and everyone thinks it's a kind of like somewhere between a you know just a simple kind of fact of nature or it's it's almost like an entitlement that this structure the money coming in from advertisers and from others and the you know fairly exclusive direction of your content at a particular audience whether it's a city newspaper in america or anywhere else for that matter or it's one of a handful of channels that just gets broken apart by you know technology um and very unfortunately this this kind of essentially probably inevitable moment where a particular business model collapses pretty much everywhere in the developed world it comes at a time when another piece of stability kind of you know the cold war and the kind of multi-multi-um lateral kind of post-war settlement 1945 to the berlin wall and and then a bit after that that also begins to collapse and politics in countries becomes more radical becomes more angry and you start you know this is really really the the uh uh the point we've just made you start getting people pushing at the edges of conspiracy theories and kind of crazy talk and now there are many ways they can actually get that to people of the same opinion and the old days where the newspaper editor could kind of paternalistically stop what everyone saw gives way to a if you've got a strong opinion you can find someone and you can actually reach them you own the means of production and distribution from your cell phone so to me it's like making sense of this i mean the thing it's almost like this was probably going to happen at some point it's not surprising that honestly a slightly lazy industry took too long to see what was what was happening to it our task as an industry now is to try and figure out how the hell and by the way you know a lot of this scope will take us i'm sure to the digital platforms and how we work with them and all of that but we've now our challenge now is to find ways of getting to different shapes of sustainability and continuity and i would say i think there are more hopeful signs in some markets like this one than there were 10 years ago but in much of the world this is not a solved problem maria you've had such a valuable perspective having spent so much time with cnn this big huge global traditional news brand and then become this incredibly innovative entrepreneur so how do you haven't had both of those experiences now what when what went wrong on what both craig and mark have said right which is but for me i will say um i'll remind us of marshall mcluhan the medium is the message and how every medium has actually led to some kind of turmoil of the society that it that it had right and this one for me is technology it's the reason why i left traditional broadcasting when i was handling after cnn when i was handling just bureaus i walked into the largest broadcaster in the philippines managed a thousand journalists he managed much more they did but in this one it was the most powerful and i saw that a legacy news group just couldn't cope because a legacy news group has legacy systems and it has a legacy culture and those are the things that get in the way of the technology so what what has the technology done i think the first is not just the distribution right not just the the ability that i can now go live and it can go to 5 million of rappler's followers on facebook or on twitter but it is so the form and substance there's a shift in the form the substance stays the same standards and ethics and mission of journalism are there but what but what it's done is that the incentive scheme of the internet and i think this is our biggest problem the incentive schemes are not aligned with democracy or freedom of speech even though the platforms will say hi platform no i love but even though tech will say that right and in fact the debate is that you know mark zuckerberg will say this is a freedom of speech issue sacha baron cohen says it's not a freedom of speech it's a issue it's a freedom of reach issue and i'll go to the original sin which is the process of journalism is the news organization well i think we all agree on that right it is one reporter with an editor with another editor with a managing editor with lawyers that make sure that the bias of one person isn't what the the entire process of journalism puts out as facts right that's one in the platforms fact and fiction are treated identically that's okay you can you can come back that's that's i think the first one um and then the second one is imagine that entire very expensive process of having so many people in a news organization distilled to a page view the incentive of a page viewed is you know and what how does that page view spread how do you get more people those are the algorithms of the social media platforms what spreads fastest and furthest on social media as early as 2018 the research has shown that lies laced with anger and hate spreads faster and further when you take that in the context of gatekeepers journalism losing the power of gatekeeping as early as 2014 and i'll peg that to the ukraine right when you had the dual reality when russian military doctrine includes information operations and you saw the impact of what happened right globally that's real world and and the virtual world and info ops so that to me is let's align the incentive scheme so that you know our biology isn't being manipulated television could do it before for ratings all across the world if you're managing a prime time newscast what will rate highest entertainment and crime but if you are a journalist will you fill your newscast with entertainment and crime not if you're a journalist sorry you know because then you're in charge of the public sphere i think that's the other part who is in charge of the public sphere and i'll toss it to google [Laughter] so well thank you maria and first of all i've known maria for for many years since before the troubles uh i adore her she's my constant inspiration we spend a lot of time talking about these challenges and trying to come up with ways to address them um i i want to address this core question of what happened i think in a more simplistic way and i think it's a critical importance that we understand the origin and the origin is really simply this we put in place the internet the internet has enabled free expression in a fashion we've never seen before in the history of civilization it is our first amendment come to its fullest flower whether we're comfortable with that or not the internet also enabled open markets for information and publishing the likes of which we've never seen before right both of those effects have been both wonderful and at the same time challenging right it has made it incredibly easy for people to find information that will confirm their biases no matter how heinous they are it has also allowed many people to express valuable information that people can obtain around the world that's extraordinary it has enabled this new marketplace of information which yes disrupted models of publishing as they simply put it with regard to newspapers they were the internet of their communities until we had the internet itself right what does that mean going forward for us because these are big challenges on that one side the key question is how do we manage free expression how do we manage free expression somewhat of a paradox right i look at what we do and part of my role is is guiding our strategies with regard to google searches guiding our strategies with regard to the ecosystem right we strive in a principle way to surface authoritative information that's relevant to you that's an ever-changing challenge in this environment what obviously we are reluctant about is to be the deciders of what is acceptable speech whether it be legal or not or presumed to be harmful that's a challenge how we address these things is going to require nuance i think on the publishing side no one's going to change the fact that the models get disrupted but there are approaches that work and we're seeing them but i do think it requires the journalistic community of which i consider myself a member to completely rethink how journalism performs and presents itself in our modern world how do we win back the trust how do we understand what people really need and want from journalism and address that in a trustful fashion right how do we explore and develop new approaches to not only how we do the craft but present it to our users all these things are are open to question and they're all hard and yes unfortunately when businesses are disrupted it often takes far too long for them to boast recognize the pit of despair that they're in to begin to even try to address it so there's a lot to talk about there but it really comes down to that one core thing of enabling free expression beyond which our society has ever seen so richard just i want to probe that a little because as maria noted the the research is very clear that um the lie travels further and faster than the truth and so how valuable is free and wrong and have we have we overvalued freedom and i can't believe those words are coming out of my mouth but as we live every day with the toll of how easily freedom allows uh the conspiracy theory the hate speech the medical misinformation to spread so i mean first of all the lie has always been able to travel faster than the truth right and depending on what the internet surfaces i always just think mark twain was the originator of that phrase i'm not sure that's true apparently i i don't know for for an absolute fact um that's always been the case so yes how do you address that without completely fettering free expression right it's a particular challenge i think a we have to recognize that it is a societal challenge and we have to address it at every dimension if one simply looks at it from the perspective of the platforms and i'll get to that that's fair but let's recognize right that these challenges of misinformation are coming from our leaders right they're coming from other institutions right how do we address that if we don't have the right norms coming from our leaders we will not address this challenge no way we'll actually ultimately elect authoritarian governments who will clamp down in ways that we do not like now from a platform perspective we have obviously a huge responsibility right google search is a hugely trusted product and it will only be a trusted product to the extent that we continue to try to evolve and do the right thing but how do you do that how do you do that by conveying your principles finding in a sense the authoritative and relevant information to go with that query and not simply amplifying something because it's popular right there's a lot that goes into that there are a lot of challenges there i do think a lot of inroads can be made uh and again marie and i talk about a lot and i think there are things that one can do and suggest that platforms who aren't operating in appropriate fashion should address but if we don't keep in mind that this is a societal challenge reflecting uh behavior good bad and different from all dimensions then we're not ever going to solve it it's a chicken or the egg question and i'll you know in the sense of you talked about leaders well what we have seen and this is from oxford university's computational propaganda research project they said this year that cheap armies on social media have rolled back democracy in 81 countries around the world and we've seen that number grow from 2017 until today and so is is it chicken or the egg are these authoritarians rising because the information ecosystem allowed them to right this hi sorry about that this insidious manipulation of that um and then you know and you say well yeah the the leaders are doing that but the leaders were enabled i don't think you know what happened in the philippines for example i don't think it would have been possible to have filed so many charges against me in two years um without the aid of the astro turfing online oh no no question by the way and i i mean this is a circular problem and you have to address it at every dimension of the circle i'm reluctant to let richard entirely off the hook though um i mean you know be precise at what hook i'm on it's good he's here right we've only only got one in so far but but um when maria talks about about institutions and use institutions news institutions and the structure and the culture of a news institution is an answer to the question how do you decide how do you decide and it's a human answer and i think that i mean i think about the big digital platforms the crime is not in the end megalomania or greed or cynicism or some strange political agenda it's not it's it's a kind of naivety you know when victor creates the monster you know i saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing you put together victor's mistake is to think you can put arms and legs and you know a brain and a torso together and and you replicate human nature it turns out that you know you that's kind of doesn't work for victor and for us the idea that you can you can basically mechanize what are really quite difficult human decisions almost always collegiate almost always multiple people and against the tradition and with lots of argument along the way that you can mechanize that and do it in a fragment of a second because you have to and you reason you have to because you yourself have set the problem with vast scale and and it doesn't it doesn't to be honest it's not working as well as it should and the functional effect i'm afraid is that it is right that that google and facebook and the others as things stand today are responsible for spreading an awful lot of misinformation around the world and if you say well that's an inevitable byproduct of all the good things that are happening with the internet and we will get around to solving this problem as well i want to say that's your opinion i'm not sure that the net net of this as yet particularly in civics is necessarily positive so first of all i can only speak for google um and by the way i don't think i've said anything or would hate that i would say anything to suggest to a cavalier about our role or what we should do and if what you're suggesting is that institutions of journalism are the answer i can agree with that though i will have to put a few caveats on it and and i've spent a decade and we've spent billions of dollars in the news industry to try to help enable its durable success and we don't do that simply at a large s to be clear it's important to the maintenance of our democracies and our open societies and i know our business is more successful in those open societies but there are challenges there because the the institution of journalism isn't all good right there's a spectrum as we well know um and that has to be considered as well and i just screwed up so but you're absolutely correct and and and if you look at for instance how we address these things on google search you'll see a massive predominance of of of traffic and rankings that go to authoritative institutions and particularly journalistic institutions so i really don't disagree on that point but so i'm just saying we risk really unfortunate consequences if we don't address every dimension and if we don't recognize every dimension of the problem so we are at a school of government so naturally at this point i want to bring government into the picture and craig you've been spending a lot of time working on this problem another number of countries particularly australia are moving more aggressively in trying to figure out not just what accountability looks like but what platforms that have profited enormously off of the work of newsrooms oh if anything and so craig can you talk a little bit about the the tension between the the different ways that local news being hollowed out and newsrooms generally being hollowed out the accountability and the dynamic with the platforms the lawmakers are considering sure and nancy i think just this last few minutes have really illustrated something that i think you brought up it's a provocative question um have we i think you said um overvalued freedom uh if we look at take a step back we have a very strong culture in the united states on individual liberty and at the moment the pendulum swinging between individual liberty and civic solidarity one could argue from a variety of measures has moved towards individual liberty but that pendulum swings and in different cultures and in different societies and parts of western europe as mark well knows there's a concept of um a civil fault for not intervening uh when you know that you have a social responsibility to do so we don't have that concept in u.s law the reason why i bring this up is you know for for every facebook there's a myspace for every google there's an alta vista if you've been watching technology for a long time we have to take a step back and actually say where's the problem here and what problem are we trying to solve um if you look at what technology has done to the local news industry 40 billion dollars a year of revenue has gone away in advertising many metro newspapers including many that are part of mcclatchy lost most of their profitability when local advertising went to the internet was that foreseeable absolutely was there too much resistance on the part of executive suites to the idea that craigslist or ebay was going to result in a loss of classified advertising i think so and i think mark would agree with that in fact he even said it i think what we're seeing now is um the crisis that that has caused uh but saying that technology has caused the crisis is a little like saying um well let me put the analogy a different way we don't drive around with sextants and astro labs or protractors in our teslas and we don't blame the internal combustion engine for the reason why fedex doesn't operate the phony express technology is not the sort of thing that um is going to stop because it's challenged a business model we're here at harvard and everything about creative destruction that joseph shepherder talked about probably has no better current example than what's happening in the local news industry and i think although we've explored some of the causes and some of the root cause analysis what we valuably can talk about now is what are the solutions in some cases these will be probably smaller businesses more focused on smaller audiences in smaller jurisdictions and they'll just be smaller than the dozens of metro papers uh that previously existed in the united states some brands like marx and mark's former uh uh role at the new york times or the washington post can reach well beyond their metro areas and become global news brands but not not many local news brands can do that i think for richard and for the platforms the discussion becomes how do you best understand where the economic splits should be and how do you get best to a better place where there's a better split or a better share of the economic pie for the various different folks who are providing value in the ecosystem and i think that's a conversation that still needs to be had and in fact in other jurisdictions we're seeing legislation that's requiring some of the platform companies to take steps in that direction hasn't happened yet here in the us so mark let me pick up on that um it is true that the new york times just announced another 455 000 digital subscribers close to eight million now when you once projected 10 million that was just a fantasy they laughed they lost yes and now you're well on your way richard could say that information that on google is free the success of the new york times depends on a paywall that of necessity is replacing the advertising revenue but means that access to some of the best quality journalism is limited to people who are able and willing to pay for it sure so just just a step back it's almost like there's two different conversations going on one of which is how do we limit the spreading of really dangerous you know hatred intercommunal kind of um divisiveness uh conspiracy theorist and that's really about what are the boundaries not not of freedom of speech but actually of editorial discretion you don't do it because it's going to be you know it's the it's the don't cry far on a crowded theater point there's another point which which really craig's taken us on to which is how do you make sure in a kind of positive way that there are properly researched properly reported alternatives for the public as far as possible everywhere and i think this is one area where i i do want to say google's done and and indeed facebook have done you know begun efforts to try and help with the ecology and i do think it's up to individual players um around the world to do to do everything they can things like the founding of rappler in the philippines with some philanthropic support as well but also making a business um building a business building an audience that's the way forward one of things that maria are involved in is we're co-chairing a new global fund to try and help bring donors together to grant across the global south and ultimately maybe the whole world grants to to startups and to really valuable independent news organizations to try and give them the chance to reach local sustainability it shouldn't be subsidy forever it should be what combination of local supporters local sponsors local advertisers maybe local philanthropy so i think we we really do have a collective responsibility and we need i think the big platforms to help us and there's some signs i think very positive signs there to you know separate from this issue of what do you stop what do you control over here how do we build um you know really sustainable not just institutions for the sake of it but actually supplies kind of you know pipelines of great journalism and you know to me to me that's the great work and i i would accept it absolutely exactly as greg says a handful of players really a handful of players in big industrial countries like the united states big markets like the new york times can probably reach very profitable you know not just self-sufficiently but they can be great businesses with very large numbers of subscribers if they're sensible they'll let a lot of their journalism be seen for nothing you know 95 percent of you read new york times don't pay for it it's only the most you know it's the most heavily heavy users of times journalism pay for it but for most people particularly the local level or in smaller countries and in much of the developing world the economics are brutal and i think but the point made you know early on we can't put the genie back in the bottle economically i mean the old lovely economics of you know uh profitable ad driven print journalism that's gone forever i think so i'm about to open this up to questions um so there are there are four microphones for you to line up there are two on the main floor and two up in the lodges and i would remind you please identify yourself and your university affiliation and keep your questions short they end in a question mark um but i'd so richard i'm sorry i cut you off because i'd love to hear the kinds of experiments that you were seeing and maria you know you've talked about creating new platforms of the kind of innovation that you think holds promise to solve maybe both the not just the business model problem but what we almost have identified as a human nature problem about what is the content that people seek out and want to consume and share so and i'll try to keep this brief i can talk a half hour for the you know the the work they've been doing not to not to brag about that but frankly there's a lot of work and we're learning a lot there are a lot of very healthy new approaches to journalism at both the national level and the local level right they're emerging companies that are doing an extraordinary job some of them advertisers supported and for profit others not i mean this is less so the legacy companies particularly those big chains who ended up being acquired by hedge funds right their business was a huge advertising based business and it got cut by 80 and that's not going to come back right but there are it's i have no question in my mind about us being able to find as an industry durable paths for independent journalism going forward i think we do have to acknowledge some key facts and and be careful about memes for instance the notion that the internet disrupted the news business the money didn't come to google it's important to know that and not not that that changes what you know our sense of responsibility but it's just an incorrect statement 80 of the revenue of newspapers in the united states was classifieds department stores supermarkets and automotive dealers right you know where that went right we know where the classifieds went uh department stores are a shadow of their former selves with uh with e-commerce uh automotive dealers market in different ways and then no such thing as coupons anymore just disappeared into the into the ether of the internet right so let's make sure we keep our facts straight in that regard and often there's misinformation on those points yes people come to google we serve results on say google search or google news people click and they go to the site right we don't misappropriate the information we send 24 billion visits and traffic to new sites every month around the world that's great you know fine but let's move beyond that because the most important thing is how do we move forward and again further efforts to drive innovation make a huge amount of help because this is going to come from this is going to come from organic efforts to build new news products more than anything else and then second and last is be thoughtful when it comes to regulation and we're not suggesting there shouldn't be regulation it just needs to be smart and it's neat to respect a couple of key principles one is respect the openness of the internet right and the fact that we have this wonderful internet i don't want to see search commercialized because it need not be given the value equation between publishers getting traffic from from google search so let's maintain the principles of the open web let's maintain principles of of freedom of the press let's be wary of legislation that might serve to protect hide bound interests who haven't been able to navigate forward right there are lots of secondary i my mo i spend a ton of time on public policy more than anything else these days around the world and my biggest concern is politicians understandably trying to solve problems and they want to solve them quick and they don't usually spend a whole lot of time understanding the secondary consequences of the solutions that they're putting in place and i one thing that really frankly disturbs me as i look at that landscape is the level of expression and reporting for that matter about the nature and and challenges of internet regulation is not being expressed thoroughly enough to inform the public discourse that's crucial to our getting this right so i have lots of things but i see joan there but i will just take two strands of what the three of them have said i think one is the strand of freedom of expression i think think about it like a physics problem right which is maximum entropy leads to chaos right the organizing principles that you know you need to put energy into the system to organize it so we can have a discussion so that we can have democracy so we can solve problems of climate change that's the energy that needs to go in right and i would say you know google google has been more transparent than and i'll go to my very favorite facebook um we are partners of facebook right i mean you can look at their 130 page thing of their of their of what searches of page rank but at the same time also realize that the world's largest distribution platform for news is not the new york times it's not the washington post it's not cnn it is facebook and that's where i go to what you said nancy which is the social media platforms by coding bias into the algorithms and if you guys have read weapons of math destruction you can see the impact on the educational system of the wrong signals getting put in of the wrong incentives getting put in well what's been coded into the world's largest distribution platform of news is something that has become a behavior modification system it is changing us as human beings and now i sound like i'm a dystopian science fiction writer but it is really what it is so think about it like this if you have you know in when i was a kid i used to watch this cartoon where you know to talk about your conscience your choice there's a devil and an angel on your shoulder well the algorithms of the world's largest distribution platform for news gags the angel and kicks it off your shoulder and gives the devil a megaphone it brings out the worst of human nature it rewards the worst of human nature and this is where we are today this is not um sustainable at any level if we don't fix this and i'll end it with this if we don't fix this in the philippines we have elections coming up you will have elections coming up our elections are in may 2022 if there are no guardrails put in place and i'm not and that's facebook i talked to richard about youtube it is twitter it is tick tock which is even more of a black box right if no guard rails are in place we will not have integrity of elections without integrity of facts which means i could go to jail so i got skinned in the game guys thank you my name is jorge caravaggio i'm an eman fellow here at harvard um i have two questions uh super short the first one is i want to create my own media organization in colombia journalism organization in colombia to contribute to the yeah peace process and how we're getting to know each other after a long civil war but the economy is super short like it's not big and many of the organizations the new organizations depend on grants from foundations from other countries and that puts you in a very vulnerable position so you cannot be like this entrepreneur of like getting membership and all that because the market is not ready there so just what's your advice what do you think about that in the like entrepreneur journalism getting business in the developing world that's the first one the second one is just what kind of media organizations show me the organizations are inspiring you right now um i'll quickly answer and then i'll toss it to the guys who've managed large news groups right i mean we created rappler in 2012 and that was when social media you know this i drank the kool-aid social media for social good social media for social change this is before the algorithms got so fine-tuned that now you can't tell fact from fiction on your feed so so here's the thing um you know it in when we were creating rappler i we i raised two million dollars that was all it took and i i started it with 12 people including myself and it was kind of you have to think about it like an iterative process because you will use the technology to actually grow your audience right so it's a combination of both another news organization in south africa the daily maverick like axios here in the united states used email list if you have that right there are many you have to look at distribution now and i think that's the biggest shift the largest news groups no longer own the distribution system so try to there's three ways three pillars i call from rappler right that i focus on even down to finding solutions the tech critical the journalism unique and critical to mission but you also need the sugar because that brings them in and then the finally the third one is community what communities do you want to create in raffle we say we build communities of action that was in 2011 when we were starting to raise the money so don't lose hope even though we sound so i sound so negative but i am like the first person to tell you go for it because the destruction has already happened the creation has to begin i would say the same i strongly encourage you there are people there are thousands of people around the world who are doing what you are suggesting you do and they are making a difference and they are finding success and i'd gladly talk to you beyond today's forum in that regard look on the one hand this is an extraordinary time to start a media property i mean the expense you if you doing this 40 years ago would be unworkable right you've got access to distribution you've got access to off the shelf technology so the tools and the capabilities are there the only thing i would urge you to do is as you think out how you want to approach it is think carefully about what audience are trying to approach and really really listen to them the one thing i think that has been so missing from the world of journalism and it pains me is this fear of research they fear research is going to tell them what to do and that's not what it does it gives you knowledge to allow you to be wise right understand what they're looking for understand how best to get it to them understand what create creates a sense of value on their part because it's only through that that you can create the right product for them it's only through that you can create the right pitch for advertisers or write pitch to them if you want them to be your members hello my name is robert i'm a first year at the college and i know you guys were talking a lot about how misinformation on online platforms uh we've seen in recent years and it's led to real-life consequences what role do you believe the government should play in regulating platforms to protect uh the american public and democracy overall well now for me i i forgot that i i mean something by the way i want to agree with with i think this part of what richard was saying a few minutes ago you know freedom of speech i mean who who is the who is the biggest risk to freedom of speech it's the government the second amendment is written actually to stop the future federal government from from from from restraining freedom of speech and i do think that richard's right when he says that the understandable in some ways move towards regulation in many territories and that's partly about economic transfers from big digital platforms to publishers it's also about trying to define hate speech and all the rest of it i think the idea of giving governments and the people a point the chance to decide which journalists get what money and to decide what people can read is frankly that's the kind of medicine which is worse than the illness i think and so i think something we've we actually need to stand shoulder to shoulder with with tech on this one um i have to say i don't think any government is entirely trusted with freedom of speech because even if they they are to be trusted when it starts and the people writing the legislation are good people and well-intentioned who knows what the next lot are going to be like so i i think you know we've just got to we've got to and the reason i think there's some urgency about our industry and and tech working together towards solutions because if we don't it will be taken out of our hands by by politicians who as richard said earlier don't always think particularly strategically and even if their intentions i mean sometimes i always think good intentions are kind of one of the most dangerous signs in this it's even if they're determined to make the world a better place by regulating this and regulating that the risk is we end up in a far far worse mess can i on that one though but i'm a little bit different from the two of them in the sense that i have waited for the platforms and worked with them behind the scenes and not enough has been done because i treated the platforms like i treated journalists which means that they are they believe that they must protect the public sphere again present company excluded for the for the moment right like but i think that what we've seen for example i don't think the world would have gotten as bad let's take a look at january 6 right that is behavior modification that was a meta-narrative and this is from the election integrity partnership it was a meta-narrative that was seeded a year earlier on rt and then picked up by steve bannon on youtube seated and closed pages picked up in uh by tucker carlson and then picked up by q anon by october 2020 and then it comes top down from president trump stop the steal right so this is this is changing our reality i think that's one i don't i i think that there's three legislation that's interesting and we talk about this a lot um uh we testify i testified last week at the uk parliament looking at the online harms bill the online safety bill the one i like the best but still has a lot of things that are wrong with it is the democracy the eu's democracy safety what is it called again the democracy safety the essay is the dsa but it it needs to move it away from the downstream which is freedom of expression and move it upstream to to me algorithmic bias algorithmic distribution and to have a radical transparency in that because this is still coded by human beings and you know i don't think you don't want government doing it alone but you also don't want government abdicating responsibility for protecting us number one number two you don't want tech doing it alone because they've already shown us what they're doing um i invite you to find this gentleman in the front row who's a fellow at schweinstein tom wheeler who is working on this very question to pursue it um in greater depth dr donovan the dsa the members how's it going uh i'm joan donovan i'm the research director over at the shorenstein center i was really uh inspired to be here tonight and i just want to say again maria congratulations on that nobel prize that was like a whole thing uh and we're super happy that you were able to come still um uh my question relates to some of the ways in which we think about the tech sector and regulation going forward a lot of talk has been going into antitrust how do we break up these businesses is it uh useful to think about dividing facebook up and moving instagram into its own business but by and large and richard you hit on this when you said you the one thing you cared about was that we didn't commercialize search we didn't uh but i really feel like search is already commercialized i feel like as i do research on digital platforms they're really nothing more than advertising delivery systems where users are really the the cabbage that is harvested and sold back to the producers right and so there's something going on here where google gets in a disproportionate amount of advertising revenue and sometimes we hear wikipedia complain because a significant proportion of their knowledge panels are shown on google search we also see uh significant uh even advertiser boycotts on youtube where advertisers are able to get youtube to change their algorithms or to get certain performers or white supremacist platform so i really want to hear about what you think the proper coupling of advertising and data should be and if you're in the data business maybe you shouldn't be in the advertising business and do you see a business model that moves forward where we separate online advertising from content delivery which would reduce the incentives for trafficking misinformation um a bunch of interesting questions there i mean first of all on that one you know in a sense it has always been thus if you're selling advertising it's because you have rendered something some degree of data to the advertiser to make them believe it would work obviously today that's gotten more much more ingredient based but it's certainly true across the industry right and if you ask european publishers for instance what happened after they passed additional privacy laws in europe and made it more difficult for them which by the way is not to say there shouldn't be strong privacy laws we agree on that completely but i think to disconnect knowledge about the audience from advertising as a revenue source or i think harm a publishing ecosystem and certainly yes it would hurt our model as well when i say the commercialization of search um you know our organic results which is the core of it right that's you know there there is no commercialization there we have deep you know honest results policies at google which separate what we do algorithmically from the business side right we don't i can't talk to someone about their ranking on google search that's simply not allowed right so we protect that uh extremely and what concerns me is the notion that for instance like we've never accepted payment for being in search nor paid to be in in organic search and i think that is a core principle um as the inventors of the internet have you know espoused even recently of let's be careful that we don't destroy the core construct of the internet particularly as it relates to certain platforms two points the narrow one i think again there's there's a history a century-long history of how you think in a in in an institutional setting this could be by the way there's some reason why it couldn't be a tech platform as well as a newspaper about the segregation of duties uh between selling of advertising and the commissioning of content and although of course there are plenty of i want to say they're theoretical risks if you if you have the controls in place if they're not there if they're not the canals are in place they'll become real risks and you'll let you'll end up in a bad place but i think that there are ways at least potentially i mean they're currently very human again and sort of it's not obvious how you algorithmize them but that's possible i i want to say your broader point about commerce and the truth in a way and freedom of speech is is really important the most single most shocking thing um uh interaction i've had with the digital platform i was 20 years with apple who had generally excused uh these conversations um and apple um um we learned from a kind of pretty junior executive at apple that apple had decided to switch off uh the the refreshing functionality on the new york times's chinese language app in china in other words so the app could no longer have any news on it which is a obviously a big issue for a news app so they were just turning it off and i spoke to tim tim cook had a chat with tim cook on the phone and said well you know what what's led to this and you know fate accompli you're just going to do it due process have you a letter from the chinese government no it was a phone call informal phone call and i said you're going to literally shut off the entire new york times on the basis of one phone call and honestly i mean he didn't have a straight answer about why but i i got the sense that business is business um and so i i do want to say that like i can imagine digital platforms getting to the point where they could be trusted with this stuff there's exactly this point about they have the control of the distribution in this case essentially this was the only way we had of getting our stories about china balance stories in my view to the chinese public and it was switched off by in a very informal way by a major digital platform basically because it was bad for business not to and i just think we need to be very very brutal brutally honest about this nancy uh would you mind if i jump in here for a second i want to pick up on what mark just said um look uh it's it's often said in silicon valley where i live that the business has to scale and that humans don't scale machine scale and that's sort of true but as maria points out that's part of the problem mark raises a thing that i part of what we're trying to do this evening is to share some leadership observations you know i'm often struck by the idea that reputation is what people see when they look at the five of us character is what you see when you look at yourself in the mirror there is nothing that stops the technology company from being able to ask the question that mark just asked there is nothing that stops a technology company from showing these aspects of character and many do many do i would like to point out that even some of the toughest economic times that the company that i had ever faced uh going through a complicated financial restructuring we still spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers to get after jeffrey epstein and i'm extremely proud what julie brown and emily michaud and others did in order to get jeffrey epstein's uh truth um in the public sphere that is the responsibility that the public civic discourse requires journalism to have there are some platform companies that see it the same way and i think what mark and richard referred to is is something that has been missing and that we do need to address there needs to be a conversation about that as opposed to a hostile interaction of a blame game as i tried to say in my first remarks there's no point blaming anyone from anything you can only change the future you can't change the past and the reason why i'm so passionate about this discussion is it's one of the better discussions i've ever been part of in sort of arranging what those issues are let me pause there and see if we can't get a few more questions in if i if if i might just jump in on that quickly because i want to be i want to be constructive towards our the challenges we face uh i'll i'll put aside them i mean i hate the generic term platforms people toss that around as if they're all the same and they're not they have not let's not say they're all good or bad they have different business models different driving motivations for how they operate huge difference between a social network and a search engine right i'll speak with what i know but when it comes to a search engine i think reasonable print reasonable guidelines for how algorithmic operations should work and this is built off of what we do i think it should be very reasonable to expect anyone operating an algorithm be it a search engine a social network or an insurance company for that matter to publish the principles in detail that guide their work right you can find a document on them 160 pages that tells you how that works for google search right to disclose how their systems work to the extent they can within the bounds of security because everyone's trying to game you but within the bounds of security disclose how your systems work and third and most importantly is make yourself available for third-party accountability and i would say a good example would be through academic research right as i often say like with search like we show our work every day all the results are there but we do enable third-party organizations to do rigorous research on are we doing the right thing or for your criticism fair game if anyone in this business on the algorithmic side says their work is perfect they're kidding themselves our work isn't perfect it's an ecosystem that changes every day and so if we can't be principled and thoughtful about how we engage with those who hold us to account then that's on us we are actually already out of time mark am i allowed to take one more question thank you very much for your insight my name is lap i'm at the college uh my question is we focus a lot on our institutions but how much responsibility should the public at large share i mean after all our society asks the news to be entertaining instead of asking it to be informative right and the companies could arguably be the ones who are following the direction of society so is it possible that the solution out of this is some kind of grassroots efforts that that can be fostered to create a more informed and media literate society and what would that look like as kind of uh from the citizens perspective and what would it look like from your perspective uh in regards to the institutions you have influence over so it's it's a it's what we are living through right now in the philippines right so we're building these communities of action much as i demand you know more from the from the social media platforms i also because 100 of filipinos on the internet are on facebook back to my favorite um we are partners of facebook rapper right so what we're doing now so let's assume nothing happens and we're still in this quandary we are actually building communities so for a while i was afraid of embracing human rights activists in the philippines because they were getting killed i was getting threatened with jail but i wasn't getting well i'm still alive and i'm here with you right so um one group that we embraced as a partner is karafatan karafatan has had 16 people killed during this time period right under the duterte administration so we've documented all of these and yes we are doing that but i do think it's a little bit and i'll quote a harvard professor who studied emergent behavior in ants to talk about what the crisis is we are facing today it's very simple e.o wilson said that we are facing our paleolithic emotions our medieval institutions to the government questions and our god-like technology as long as the technology doesn't look at its impact and add that to the feedback loop not just the individual manipulation of us that will be a problem i think that's the first and then i guess the other part because you know mark mentioned apple well let's talk about something called neq news ecosystem quality a button that can be levered that can be turned up and you can after january 6.

i sound like a facebook broken record but these are the ones i study right so what they did is they turned up the news ecosystem quality it's a button that you can turn up and after the violence all of a sudden the top 10 um on crowdtangle which is how you measure it were the new york times npr cnn but it they made less money at it because there was less engagement you know we spend a lifetime learning how to tell stories with facts it's really easy to spread a lie and it's really easy to spread a rumor so that's the the part of like i think it's it's out it's not just now one it is there and it is all of us um i will end it with one because he's sitting in front of me right i think the reason why you can't just say it's our fault collectively it is not the user's fault we are being insidiously manipulated but what is the role of the journalist the big difference and i hate it when we're called content creators you know because right because someone like jim ryzen who's sitting in the in the front row weathered eight years and legal cases from two american administrations right and he stood up and and based on the principles of journalism did not disclose his sources there's something it takes a lot to be a good journalist but it takes these principles and so i worry that the principles in tech in the internet are thrown out for profit um at least that's what francis hogan says again you know richard can respond to all the tech but but you know that's that's that's our problem we can't just do it alone if the tech is insidiously manipulating us i think this is one of those moments where i was talking about this atom bomb that exploded it's an invisible atom bomb and more insidious because it is think about so here the last time a journalist won the nobel prize was in 1936 and that journalist languished in a nazi concentration camp he didn't get his award and i think that's the signal of the nobel committee this is another one of those times we must do something collectively tech journalism civil society or we will lose all that all the rights our freedoms our democracy our shared space let's even lose those labels our shared space where we can talk to each other note to close on than that call to action for those of you who will still be on campus a week from now you'll get to hear maria deliver the salon lecture on the freedom of the press which is a i'm very excited about and looking forward to i'm very grateful to craig for being the orchestrator of this remarkable collection thank you craig and thank you to the forum to the students for hosting us to mark and richard and of course to maria and craig and maria as fellows will be on campus in the weeks to come so there'll be many opportunities to continue this conversation but in the meantime have a good evening everyone and thank you for joining us you

2021-11-12 15:46

Other news