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well I would usually defer to my boss but he seems to think that I'm the one who should start this going and and and I'll start by telling an anecdote about source sources of information and and I also am shamelessly plugging my book which is in the bookstore but you know you may remember years ago during the Carter Administration interest rates were really high fourteen fifteen percent and this is particularly hard for farmers and I'm from a farm family because you borrow money at the beginning of the season to buy the seed and the equipment that you need and then after the harvest you pay it back but with interest rates going up so high they would change from the time that you took out the loan to the time you had to pay it and farms were going under they had the farm aid program you may remember by Willie Nelson and so farmers to show their anger brought farm equipment and converged on Washington with tractors and combines and stopped the traffic on the bridges for a while to make their point and of course this does not go over well with anybody in Washington as it would not go well with anybody really and people got out of their cars people honk the horn and my friend Paul Houston who worked in our Washington bureau then was out covering this and he was near one woman standing alongside her car when she got out and started yelling I don't need you farmers I get my food at the grocery store true and so now when I talk to audiences I say where do you get your information and they say Google they say Facebook and I say you're all wrong Google doesn't have a reporter at the Pentagon Facebook is not covering your state legislature they take the news that newspapers report and generate and they do it without paying us for it and so we are the poor for our information done in the public interest being in the public hands without paying us to do it and that's why newspapers are in sort of a parlous state among other things and that's one of the issues we're going to be addressing up here so guys I set it up for you I teed it up go ahead I mean the sort of a premise of this panel or the question this poses it's called the printed matter our newspapers dead and I think if you use the word print the verb or the noun print the answer that is sooner rather than later probably not for anyone in this room thank you but soon rather than later but we are seeing a definite transition at the New York Times and I think in the Los Angeles time out the firt of you from print to digital and it's changed the way we've gathered news is change the way we presented news has changed the way we finance newspapers there's some things about it that aren't good but overall I think it's a really good thing it's a much more dynamic business and it much than it once was one of the downsides obviously is that it has shrunk the market we're gonna when I first started going out covering the campaign's there were vibrant newspapers in every city in this country and I just thought against true anymore I mean it's basically New York Washington Los Angeles I would not put San Francisco on that list with all due respect I would not put Chicago in that list actually not anymore if I should name anymore cities so I'll get drop-off so it's a much more concentrated but I think that all these papers are and I when I use the word papers you understand what I mean or figuring out a way to deal with this the New York Times is Los Angeles Times is the Washington Post is Wall Street Journal's a little bit different cuz they had a paywall way before anyone else did so I'm not I'm not as pessimistic as I once was even 5 or 10 years ago I think the quote-unquote Trump bump I don't know what you guys experienced that's the way we did it certainly be to help but if you talk to people at the New York Times they'll tell you that that began to sort of even out after the first don't hold me to the actual date I don't remember it but I think within the first year or two and they're confident now that we're seeing a genuine switch in the way people not only consume news but pay for news subscriber based newspapers I think that you're absolutely right about print go to an airport look around and see how many people have a newspaper or magazine in their hands how many people are looking at their phones they're not all playing Angry Bird and that is the way that a lot of people are getting information increasingly is through through an electronic device of one kind or another print we'll hang on a bit longer than I think the most pessimistic people suggest it is one of these things where every time I ask someone if we can do a profile of them I will be asked is it going to be in the paper or will it only be online and that's from people who have been moving their advertising from print to digital even as they ask the question with the Kobe Bryant tragic death Sunday morning we found ourselves having to go back to press to print an extra 50,000 copies of the memorial special that we produced and that's not that's not an attractive business model obviously for going forward but it does suggest that there's a permanence to print that a certain audience will still appreciate but we must be realistic about the fact that that most people get their information digitally and I think that will only continue in the time to come one thing I would say is particularly in California that one of the consequences of the recent passage of so called a b5 which was meant to try to get the drivers for a mover and lift benefits is that it will have a profound impact on the ability of print publications to distribute in a timely fashion and I think every newspaper in California is now looking at whether it's possible to continue to provide seven-day-a-week publication but as to the COBE thing I think that's a very human impulse you want the tangible evidence that something big happen if you go into your parents or grandparents closet I'll bet you find JFK assassinated headlines there those are the things that we save because it makes it real to us there's also a perception yes people want to know if it's in the real paper or online there's a perception and a rightly so it's virtually impossible to hack 600,000 copies of a newspaper someone might be able to get into the New York Times website the LA Times website and fiddle around and make things look different God knows they've done it with supposedly secure government websites and so a website just doesn't have the same sense of authenticity and depth that an actual newspaper does and there's a couple other things about newspapers when you're reading online you're interested in Kobe so your search takes you deeper and deeper and deeper into Kobe if you're reading a newspaper you're turning the pages past stories that you may not be interested in but the headline will register with you subconsciously and maybe you'll catch an I like you know solution to Ethiopian famine is a fruit fly and you go how the hell does that work and so you find yourself reading about the Ethiopian famine it's a broader experience of learning even if you're not out there then if you're searching a smaller and smaller funnel on the internet and the other point I'd like to make is that Tom Friedman's book about the world being flat about the economy of the world is important but I turn that around to a newspaper metaphor which is the Internet is flat there's virtually no topography to tell you what's important what's right what's wrong all you have to do is change the spelling of one letter of Encyclopedia Britannica and you can drive a lot of traffic to your crazy conspiracy website by people who will think it's the Encyclopedia Britannica because it's spelled wrong so the the traps of those the lack of typography to show the mountains of truth and the valleys of lying is really one thing the Internet does not have that people still I think look to the idea of a newspaper if not in future the physical model to guide us and to help us out okay you make a really good point here I'm definitely not arguing that the internet is digital news is better than the printed paper I tell you the New York Times still makes its khana money off of the printed papers any of you who's paying $850 a year ago probably attest to I am shocked by the fact that even younger reporters this is a variation what you were saying about Kobe Bryant are really concerned about their stories appearing on page one or getting in the print edition at all even today but I also know that I got back from New York City I get your your allusion to airports but you know I heard one of my first job is at the Daily News in New York and when you were in the subways at the time every single person in that subway would be reading a paper right it would be the New York Times Daily News in the morning sort of my other papers before that and then York Post in the afternoon I did not see a single person reading a newspaper on on the subway when I was there I was there for seven days not a single person so my point is I I agree with you it may be I'm showing my age that I prefer the print edition of a newspaper I prefer everything you said I prefer the tactile gratification I prefer the fact that when I wake up in the morning I read in York Times the LA Times and I get a sense of everything that the editors of those two papers think that I need to know that's how I start my day but I just think the reality is and I agree it's not as soon as I can be soon but we're moving in the direction where that's just thought could exist anymore not preferable just reality sorry I think that the general rule of thumb is that for the last few years a print revenue from both advertising and circulation has been falling faster than 10% a year and some of the forecast for this year suggests that if the trend is continuing and if anything accelerating so it is really incumbent on anyone who wants to stay in the news business to create new new products for new audiences on new platforms and if we don't do that I think it will end very badly what you're seeing for instance here with the unit paper is that the tremendous financial pressures that are on that organization really make it very difficult to see much investment in in editorial anytime soon one of the things I things I think newspapers serve an advantage paper is that you just look at how it's laid out you have hundreds of eyes exercising judgment opinion to decide what's the important front page story what's the importance sports story the idea that you have different sections different themes in it helps people orient themselves to understand what's the important story of the day in that particular area or that particular topic and if you do away with that format and again only have this screen which is tries to replicate it and say this is the most important thing you don't quite get the sense of the significance that taking out here's the front page of the feature section here's the front page of the business section what's the big business news and then bluie there's page one where Kobe who is a sports story all of a sudden becomes the story so I think the organizational principles that help people understand how news is decided what's important and what's not is one thing we would certainly miss with physical papers well if you're an editor you'll miss it because we've enjoyed since Gutenberg a one-to-many model where we where one person decides what other people should read and I think that the real understanding that we have of the digital age is that the power has really transferred to the consumer and with voice recognition with personalization getting that much better it will be very easy for you to really create the daily me something that people have been looking for for a very long time people will differ as to whether you're dealing me as as good as mine and whether it leaves you just reinforcing all the prejudices and stereotypes that you brought to the exercise but that the same could be said about the choices of what publications you choose to read and print the you know what do you go on is like um I'm not an expert sages in Middle East or economic news and I rely on editors to tell me in terms of what they put on the front page what news they consider important what development is going on that's important and I and I think it's true that anytime soon there's a group of editors to decide every day what are the biggest stories of the day what's changed here and this is kind of an obvious big deal as you were saying it's no longer editor it's consumer-driven and people really now make their decisions about what their what they want to read I'm in the process of writing a book about the New York Times now and one of the editors that I interview whose guy named Joel le belt who you might know talked to me how we used to take a kind of hidden delight back in the early nineties I guess about putting a story about Bosnia in the lead position of the front page of the New York Times he knew it might be read by 20,000 people he knew it was the most important story of the day he didn't care he didn't have to care because there were still whatever the number was 1.2 million people gained the newspaper every day and there was still all these advertisers who were spending all this money to buy space in the paper that's changed right and the struggle that I think all newspapers have but I'm not talking about papers like the New York Post but more mainstream papers are to figure out a way to make sure there's lots of stuff in the paper that people want to read because they're not going to go to the Bosnia story anymore but at the same time kind of remained true to the values that have defined some of the great papers of this country over the past hundred years but but Adam is right that mechanism of delivery the front page is a way to give Bosnia to people who wouldn't look for Bosnia at least to register in their brains that Bosnia matters not read it and feel guilty about not reading it but no they should have read it maybe even tell their friends that they read it but the flip of that if I can just just one second I have special gratitude to Jahlil ago because his daughter Nita is one of our Star columnist and has been doing some extraordinary work at the Los Angeles Times but the the flip of that is that we'll take today the Trump administration yesterday announced a new Mid East policy a number of our editors took a look at it and said well given that it was only done in negotiation with the Israelis it's kind of dead on arrival so let's not put it on the front page let's put it on page a5 of our print edition well I think there's a significant part of our audience that was very interested in that development regardless of its full prospects who would say if I got to make my own front page it would have been right there and now at least I have the choice of getting access to the kind of content in a way where I don't have to really trip over the mistakes of those editors who weren't smart enough to put it on page one but that becomes a kind of narrow casting as you were saying the daily me where you're not exposed to and this is the danger of cable television channels which all push a particular agenda or a news agenda in a particular kind of political echo chamber is that you aren't exposed to that into the things that you need to and I think one of the reasons that the founders were so adamant about the First Amendment why we have thanks to Ben Franklin the ability to ship newspapers and magazines around the country at a cheaper postage rate is because they believe people should have that information in hand that you should read beyond just your own community because you are a citizen of the country and not just a citizen of the place you live one of the most devastated areas of journalism in the last 10 years has been local newspapers these are the papers I see the Desert Sun at breakfast I think thank God it's still there you know they cover the pancake breakfasts and you know the prep score sports but they also keep an eye on City Hall and on County government and they have found that in communities where newspapers aren't there anymore covering this the bond rates go up the borrowing rates that you the taxpayers pay go up because there's no monitor there's nobody sitting there taking notes while the City Council season and know is that everything they say is going to be in the newspaper the next day it isn't just a question of whether it's gonna have land on the front page there is no front page for it to land on anymore and that is a real danger when you lose that local part of the ecosystem that local newspapers are like the plankton in the ocean of news you really have to have that there and when people say what can I do to help newspapers fine I hope you're subscribing here but if you're from Indiana or if you're from Tennessee subscribe for an online subscription to the paper from the place you came from or certainly for the paper that covers the Capitol and the legislature in the state you came from those are the people who are doing you know the real back-breaking daily work who see the people they write about in the grocery store every day Adam and I and norm we don't run into our readers that often the people we write about but if you work for a local paper you do the kid the guy you wrote about the principal of your school because he's a lousy coach of your kids softball league and got caught with his hand in the cookie jar he's gonna be giving your kid grades you have to have the goods and stand up to the people and say I'm doing the right thing for our community I think that that well that may all be true there are new developing sources of information that people also have to get accustomed to accessing the largest Bureau covering Sacramento is not if not owned by any news organizations called Cal matters and it has four times the staff of anyone else and it's information is free to any news organization or any individual who wants to access it we see how is it funded it is not funded by advertising or by circulation it is is it private donors and foundations for healthcare kaiser Health News with 22 people writing for it provides a similar kind of service and while it is not a complete replacement for having a very large staff of reporters of your own pursuing stories that are designed specifically for your audience it nonetheless is an example of where one can find information in an age when so many of the traditional models are struggling you know angry Cal matters is terrific and I really good in terms of covering state stuff I don't know if it's duplicated in any other state in the country and one of the things that I've seen alarmingly as Pat was saying over the past 10 years in state houses in Sacramento and Albany where I worked more years ago they'd like to admit which used to be packed with reporters and news organizations there's fewer and fewer and I think that just is bad for government and it's bad for democracy and I'm glad of things like how matters end up filling the void but I think the juries really at all but whether that's gonna happen or not and it's all because it's all who wants to fund it and who wants to donate the money Pro Publica is doing a bang-up job a lot of old LA Times reporters are they're calling out scandals hospitals that fail water systems that fail Civic entities that fail but they need money in donations a friend of mine who just died a former colleague and said in lieu of flowers send money to Cal matters because as it even in death he knew that in journalism this was going to matter this was a service a public service because you send people out into the world of civic engagement without this knowledge and you're going to be at the mercy of press releases and celebrity gossip you won't know what's really going on in Washington you look at when you go in and vote on your California ballot you see the names of organizations like citizens for a wonderful California versus citizens for a swell California you have no idea who they are what they stand for what their real agendas are we recently had the plastic bag industry trying to overturn the ban that Californians voted for in their legislature on those flimsy plastic bags and the landscape is so much better for it we're not wasting plastic we're not littering the landscape and it's not costing us as taxpayers to clean up the mess as we had to do before but if that stuff goes away you have no idea Paula Poundstone the comedian is an old friend of mine in every election I do a ballot party for her friends we need to do an LA Times online ballot party so you can explain what these are and you can tune in and watch as our experts who know covered politics can do this kind of stick we can do it as comedy norm to know what all this means don't just go in and say am i for a beautiful California or a swell California your votes tell these people what to do and you can scare them by doing the right thing if that's not what they want you to do I think the New York Times is actually very much in the vanguard having had many rough years in seeing that it's digital audience is just expanding in a far bigger rate than anything it had ever experienced in print and correct me if I'm wrong about this but I've heard that the daily we the daily podcast has a circulation significantly larger than the print significantly larger I think it's now up to 1 billion total billion with ABI downloads it's remarkable it's really remarkable I'll tell you what worries me a little bit obviously I said like doctor gloom here I'm sorry about that I'm actually more positive than that I mean the paper at the time is put in a paywall in whatever 2010 it was a really controversial contentious discussion I think the discussion the idea was there really was no other option and so far it started really really well I mean as you were saying the numbers go up every year they have a goal down 10 million subscribers by they 2020 they seem to be on the way people are seem to be willing to pay for digital news the problem here and the concern here is you this has always been the audience the paying audience in the times it tended to be older older meaning 35 people who could afford to do it right that's young right who can afford to could afford it right the concern is whether as younger people come of age will they be able will they be willing to pay for a digital product and we don't know and I know when this was being discussed at the time there were some people who were saying this might work for 10 years but at some point as forget-me the older audience begins dying out will the younger people step up and begin paying for this digital model and I think that's a really critical question for all of us who are concerned about News and society to watch in the coming years I don't know the answer I wish I did and if I see somebody at Starbucks and using a swipe card to pay $3 and 79 cents for a cup of coffee and I think you're so used to doing that why not set up your monthly fund and here's your news information monthly allocation and so every time you download a story it's five cents that you take out of your monthly fund and so at the end you say do I have any money left or do I need to put some more in and that may be the case no matter what you're reading you have a consortium of New York Times LA Times Wall Street Journal papers so you can choose among those so you start the month saying I'm paying for this stuff and I think it becomes less of a hassle that's one possibility I hope you're right I think again how many of you have either a a bratty child named Siri or a slightly older one named Alexa whom you speak to well I still think they're young enough that they don't do too much damage but that as they grow up they are going to be critical to the conversation and if I find myself going to and older more mature more knowing version of Alexa and I want to say tell me about Liz oh I'm not going to say Alexa tell me what the Los Angeles Times critic said about a lizard Alyssa it's going to say tell me about Liz oh and then Alexa will decide what source of information I'm going to get just the way Spotify decides which raycharles album you're going to be listening to and so that loss of control which you spoke about initially in terms of the Google's the Facebook's the apples I think is only going to get more and more important in our conversation and among them I think apples done the best job of working with publishers to maintain brands but that even there it's a tough battle and Alexa is not going to do perhaps what we do which is tell me about Bosnia and they'll say Bosnia is the country located on a map that mary-louise Kelly can find you know even if my exactly right you know and and give you some context that the United States was involved in a war there in the 1990s it's it's just gonna give you the basics and then you think well I know then all about Bosnia and it's it's kind of dispiriting to think that we're going into a complex economically and politically complex world much less our own countries as a politically complex entity knowing so little and yet thinking we know so much and it's a little bit concerning that it's happening at the time when there has been such an assault on the veracity of newspapers obviously with the president but I think on all sides at this point and it's been going on for a while and I think it's really undercutting newspapers and sort of polarizing the society and making people less likely to sort of subscribe or pay for news because they don't know whether to believe anymore it's as compliments of avenges of really a little concerning I think one thing that is worth keeping in mind is that we tend to think about a golden age of newspapers as one when there were large budgets large staffs and very few publications in any one community but in fact if you go back to the turn from the 19th to the 20th century you would find that there were scores of publications in every city that tended to serve small audiences of committed readers who's either philosophy or economic status to find what they were reading and I think that's one of the things that is emerging in this electronic age I think a second is to really keep an eye not only on those big not-for-profits like at ProPublica or Cal matters but to recognize that in every state and in most communities now there are local not-for-profit organizations that are doing journalism there are services like next door which for all of the editorial gaffes that it encourages nonetheless is pretty good at telling people what's going on in their community at anytime and I think these are still early days for the technology we it's hard to think about the fact that it's only 25 years ago that Netscape had its IPO and sort of ushered the first commercially viable internet product onto the markets and so I think that before well I think the future of print is definitely at risk and that the kind of journalism that many of us grew up doing for those big print products is absolutely challenged the ability of individuals to get in for me I think we're just beginning to understand how that's going to work although I I don't really like the term citizen journalist just because somebody's out there with an iphone seeing something we just had happen on Sunday that our police reporter lives in Calabasas and he heard and saw the plane helicopter crash but somebody who just takes a picture of something is not a journalist and and let's not forget everybody up here knows that you bring certain skills you bring a vast piece of knowledge and background to what you're writing so you can tell significance you know where to ask questions how to ask them you ask intelligent questions because you know something about the subject and if you watch a reporter taking notes 90% of what's in that notebook probably won't get into the story but it shapes the 10% that does and so there are a lot of smart people working at papers who are the editors who may themselves have covered South Africa like Joel elavil you know who may have covered the Pentagon who may have economics degrees so when they deal with business stories they have that background and so that's not something to be sneezed at it the citizen journalists who just runs out and says ah the stock market is crashing you know you want to know a lot more about it than that and we're the people who have trained ourselves and believe in giving you as much background as we can so you become to give you the power and the knowledge to become your own powerful person is is not something insignificant well yeah I think that's true but keep in mind that you know when the First Amendment was thought worth including in the Constitution and Ben Franklin was worrying about the penny press it wasn't about big organizations like the Los Angeles Times or New York Times it was about the functional equivalent of the bloggers in pajamas that that he was really trying to protect and I think while there are certainly examples where citizen journalists can do some mischief there were a lot of rumors upon Twitter before the identities of the bodies on the helicopter were announced that that certainly caused a lot of concentration and pain at the same time TMZ had that story well before anyone else because it is built to get those kinds of scoops and I just think the proliferation of new ideas and new means of distribution are such that for the despair that one might feel for the kinds of news organizations that I I'm so glad I managed to be a part of for so long I am just stunned at some of the new things I'm hearing about yesterday for example I had a conversation with an editor in Boston who with two dozen people is reading academic papers all week long and then deciding which ones to translate into useable English and then distribute them to news organizations around the cost of the country we were talking because she had found an academic who had done a study of who were the role models and hero figures for young african-american boys and it was of course Kobe Bryant who was at the top of that list for people who only knew of him from that one dimension of the NBA Adam what I mean you see these new sources all the time the people who have a microblog because they're so interested in you know the water quality in Silverlake for example and they're very opinionated and they're very personal but they may also get information that we don't we can't possibly find we can't ferret it out we don't have enough people to do that how do news things might even be true yeah and you know service yeah I mean I definitely pay attention to all that kind of stuff look there's a lot more information out there and there's a lot more wrong information out there and there's a lot more information out there that maybe we would not have put out quite as quickly I think the kobe bryant story being one example of that other by was following that correctly i mean it's one of the issues that we're dealing with now i mean the past newspapers began using the word generally were eight keepers to some extent on what people were hearing and getting not in a political way and I mean in the political way but in terms of attempting to assure accuracy in fairness certainly not always with a success that's kind of changed I began noticing that covering campaigns years ago and you saw rumors about presidential candidates having affairs beginning to slip into the mainstream we have to sort of a chase that and that's because there's ways for people to get this kind of information out there through blogs or whatever and I mean there's a direct line between that and the bloggers over in Silverlake who's alerting us to bad sources of water there's just a lot more different ways to get information and I just think it's part of the breakdown of the delivery system it's one of those things where it is what it is I'm not sure it's a bad thing information is a good thing it's good that people should be able to get information in as many sources as possible hopefully people learn to distinguish between what's right what's wrong I believe that some of the stuff that was coming out about the helicopter crash had incorrect victims as I saw right over those hours and it also had premature identification of victims that newspapers might not have quite jumped on before the sheriff's officers the coroner's had a chance to other families I'm not sure that's a bad thing at all but again it is what it is this new world that we're living and I think we all have to adjust to it and I think that overall that's a good thing I'd also be cautious about romanticizing too much all of the publication's of the past obviously in this part of the world the name Walter Annenberg is is well known he was a magnificent benefactor of great journalism schools at USC and the University of Pennsylvania but I grew up in Philadelphia's a police reporter for the Philadelphia Enquirer when he owned it and my first night on the job I was handed a list of Walter's friends and his enemies and was told that if any name popped up on a DUI charge or in a hospital I was to call the city desk and find out whether it would be published or not depending on which part of the ledger it was on and that was sort of standard practice for his publication and they oh the only thing people would say was that he was better than his father so oh my so I just you know these papers of the past there were some great ones and then there were some not-so-great ones and I think that's very much worth keeping in mind one of the things we confront now because of what Adam was talking about is the is playing whack-a-mole to some crazy rumors and conspiracy theories you know people will say why don't you cover this and therefore the LA Times is covering up this whether it's Pizza Gate or you didn't do the moon landing honestly the 50th anniversary moon landing we were still getting letters and calls saying why are you buying into this crap we never landed on the moon and I hope you all saw at some point Buzz Aldrin just taking a socket a guy who was confronting him saying you're a liar and a coward you never landed on the moon that's how you you want to feel and then sometimes there are serious consequences to these conspiracy theories whether it's in the political world or as we saw with pizza gate a guy who shows up looking for child sex slaves in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor that has no basement he has a gun and he shoots up the place because he was there to self investigate because the papers weren't printing pizza gate and so we find ourselves in this quandary where there's data out there that isn't information but enough people believe it that it creates a critical mass and puts that pressure on us not just to write what we are what we know when we report but to say that this other stuff isn't really happening what they'll order I was thinking which is this before in terms of the Trump bump we've seen I think interests in news really kind of been goosed up over the past three or four years because it's Trump and because of this intense interest in politics and because we're such a critical pivotable time it's in this country right now and it's some point Trump is not going to be president anymore it might be next year might be in five years or years but oh boy yeah let's just hope yeah but I wonder you know a concern of mine I wonder whether or not people will still be as interested in what newspapers and websites are doing at that point as they are now and I wonder whether we're just going through this in terms of period of this hyper active interest in news that we might go back to what the 80s I guess for the 70s where people weren't really that interested anymore I I can't tell I think it seems to be a pretty critical question 70s were pretty good because of Watergate oil prices etc but the disco and you know news hey disco news nothing boy I think news will track political involvement there were a lot of stories about who voted in 2008 who voted in 2012 who didn't vote in 2016 and who will vote in 2020 the the Millennials and younger have shown I think a greater interest in news than many of us would have predicted given the other trends that we're talking about and so it may very well be that this is a trend that will outlast the current inhabitant of the White House but even if people aren't reading or subscribing to the newspaper that news pushes itself into this ecosystem of social media with that I think we very much need to be a presence and an identifiable presence as you were referring to on that landscape now it's actually never been a better time to be a journalist unless you want to get paid because the tools available to anyone to do serious reporting are there and it's easy enough to get a megaphone and to find some people who will follow you the economic models I think are what are tricky we've seen a few examples of the very affluent owner who comes to some of these publications Jeff Bezos who bought the Washington Post and invested heavily in its turnaround Marc Benioff who bought Time magazine last year patrick Cintron who bought the Los Angeles Times are all examples of people who really felt that there was a sacred calling to provide quality information to to audiences I think there are other examples where that's unclear whether that's the motive or not I think about the review-journal under Sheldon Adelson in Las Vegas as as one example we're putting aside the politics the quality of the coverage is just nowhere near what it was previously so I in the National Enquirer and catch and kill well that too although it had a pretty ignoble history before David Becker took over but I think that there is always that risk with the individual owner that but that it is to date at least more often than not I hope the alternative certainly to be the hedge funds that want to be the next-to-last seller and that's what we're seeing certainly with organizations like Alton Capital which now has 33 percent of the tribune group and which is you if anybody's been in Denver lately you get a pretty good example of what happens when the hedge fund owns a newspaper yeah Denver used to have two very vibrant competing newspapers the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post and that era is long gone the Rocky Mountain News I think barely reached 150 years old and a hundred fifty year old institution was gone virtually overnight so that's what newspapers face in many cases Adam right I wonder whether the future of you know where the choice is here between corporations coming in and found a way to make as much money out of a newspaper as possible and therefore stripping them of the journalism that they do versus benefactors if I may use the word I guess you'd say that with be Zoe's Bezos who are but for whatever reason we can discuss motivation as much as you want but the net result is they're willing to put up a bunch of their own fortune in to produce a quality newspaper and if that is the future for for at least on family owned papers in this country and places like Los Angeles and Washington going forward I I do I'm not so sure about corporations like an ad and Stapleton you know corporations like that that are I think are into more making money but it's also a concern that this is a passing phase to that you know it's like all the billionaires had to have super yachts and now you're doing a good deed by getting a newspaper when will attention turn to something else and you know the the consistent need and presence of what newspapers do news agencies do should should not be subject to whims and fancies these owners also introduce new technologies or new ways of thinking The Washington Post had four engineers working for it when Jeff Bezos bought it today it has 300 and that's one of the reasons that its website is as powerful as it is and so reflective of the people who subscribe to it our owner has a huge interest in health care and we're talking about things like a rewards card for cut-rate prescriptions or having doctors on call online as part of a Los Angeles Times subscription these are things that are far afield from what you think of with a news organization but I think it's really going to be figuring out what you have licensed to be the best at what you have license to be competitive at and then creating new products for the audience's that would really respond to you so we hope well I just want to thank you all I'm gonna be in the bookstore if anybody wants to come over and I'll do my little plug thank you [Applause] you