The Future of Journalism and Politics

Transcript by Angela Hart

Georgetown CCT hosted a panel on The Future of Journalism and Politics on December 9, 2015, featuring Andy Carvin, Editor-in-Chief and Founder of reported.ly and Amber Phillips, Staff Writer for The Fix at moderated by CCT Professor Kimberly Meltzer and Dr. Stephanie Brookes, Professor of Journalism at Monash University.

Professor Meltzer: Good morning, it’s wonderful to see all of you. Welcome to our panel today on The Future of Journalism and Politics and I’ll say more about that in a moment. We’re so excited to have this event, today, at Georgetown hosted by the CCT Program. For those of you who are not familiar with CCT, it stands for Communication, Culture, and Technology and we’re a two-year master’s degree program highly interdisciplinary. We have a few students, raise your hand if you’re a CCT student or faculty member, here today. I think the ones here sort of represent our students who are most interested in media and politics.

Today is actually the last day of classes for the semester at Georgetown, so it’s great that any of you were able to make it; it’s a busy time of the year I know for all, and I want to thank CNDLS, which is Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship for allowing us to use their conference room as some of you have heard me say, “As many universities are, Georgetown is often tight on space” so we were fortunate they were able to let us use this room, this morning. And then I just want to thank a few people in the CCT Program for helping to organize this: Sarah Twose and Cecilia Daizovi and, not surprisingly, Angela Hart, one of our students was here early this morning to help set up so I appreciate that!

This event came about at the initiative of Professor Stephanie Brookes from Monash University and Deb Anderson, who is her co-leader in this big tour that the students are on these two weeks. They lead the program for the journalism students at Monash in Australia and Stephanie and I had the great fortune of getting to know each other when she was a Visiting Researcher at CCT back in, I think, was in 2012, and I had the pleasure of meeting Deb Anderson, for the first time, just a few days ago during their time in DC this week. They’ve undertaken quite an amazing adventure with your group bringing this cohort of master’s students of Monash back to the U.S., first in New York last week and to DC this week to tour, again, political outlets. It’s really an incredible line-up and I was able to join them at the Senate building this past month for another terrific panel about media and politics.

So the title for our panel today, The Future of Journalism and Politics, is quite ambitious, I realize! But, I think, you know, we wanted it, the goal was for to capture, to be broad enough to capture the range of perspectives that the two of you bring to it as well as the diverse perspectives, international perspectives that we have here today. We’re thrilled to have Andy Carvin from reported.ly and Amber Phillips from The Washington Post here with us and the plan for the morning is that Stephanie will introduce Andy, I’ll introduce Amber and then we’re going to have each of them speak for about twenty minutes. Hold your questions until those of them are finished and then we’ll open it up to a discussion and questions and answers from all of you. So that’s the plan, so why don’t we begin.

Dr. Brookes: One way I thought I would introduce you, Andy, is by bringing up your file, which I think is an appropriate way to do it and then you can tell me which bits we want to update, which bits don’t we.

Mr. Carvin: Yeah, right.

Dr. Brookes: So Andy Carvin’s Twitter file is real-time news DJ and occasional journalist but not a social media guru, author of the book Distant Witness, NPR alum, and now at First Look Media. So not a sharp succinct way of giving you a sense, I think, of what Andy does.

Mr. Carvin: Well, you’re only allowed 140 characters to be succinct one way or another.

Dr. Brookes: Absolutely. We might squeeze in there, he’s been described as “the man who tweets revolutions” and then you can tell us later how you feel about that description. He’s also spent some time at the Tow Center at Columbia, which we actually had the pleasure of visiting last week as well and is now at reported.ly at First Look Media. I’m actually going to let you kind of tell those guys what that is and what it does.

Mr. Carvin: Sure.

Dr. Brookes: So I’ll let Kim introduce Amber and then I’ll let you kind of give the full details. I think you’re in a much better place to tell everybody that.

Professor Melzter: Okay, that’s terrific, that’s a good plan. So I met Amber several years ago, actually, I think we met briefly back in 2011, when she was a Fellow with the Institute on Political Journalism in DC. And she graciously, since then, has agreed to let me interview her for some research that I’m doing and I was very excited that you agreed to be with us today; so, thank you so much.

Amber Phillips is a political blogger for The Washington Post politics blog, The Fix, which probably all of you are familiar with, where she writes about 2016 and Congress. She also has a three-day a week afternoon newsletter, which all of you should sign up for; it’s aimed at making politics accessible for everyone and called The 5-Minute Fix, you could provide them with some more information about that. She’s covered Congress as the “one-woman DC bureau” for the Las Vegas Sun prior to going to The Post and she’s freelanced from Taiwan and reported in . She studied journalism and international communications at Texas Christian University. Thank you both so much for being here. Mr. Carvin: Thank you. Well, it’s great to be here and I really appreciate all of you getting together today. It’s sometimes hard to explain what reported.ly is because we’re really considered a global news organization so I thought it might actually be helpful for me to rewind back to when I was in college because, you know, it’s been awhile and the things I was doing immediately after college kind of evolved into this.

So I went to Northwestern like a number of other journalists do but I wasn’t a journalism major. I just studied rhetoric and religion. Rhetoric and religion which made me fairly unemployable, at the time, so in my free time with a few friends of mine and I started a music magazine on campus primarily to get free tickets to concerts but that was the extent of my journalism stint giving concert reviews. Eventually, I ended up staying for graduate school and getting a degree in telecommunication science, management and policy. And, afterwards, I ended up at a fellowship at a place called Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is the entity that helps fund public interest broadcasters at PBS and NPR and the like and they didn’t know what to do with me so they basically told me to keep busy for a sum of four or five hours.

And so this was the mid-90s and so I was really not interested in traditional telecommunications policy so I decided to write about how education was going to have to change in America once every classroom had internet access because, at that point, only around 5% of the classrooms did. And they didn’t want to publish it because they had to deal with what they were doing; so, I learned HTML (HyperTextMarkup Language) decided and figured out how to turn my desktop into a server and post it online. I didn’t even have a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) because I didn’t know how to do that yet so I just had an IP (Internet Protocol) Address. But I started making the rounds in the education and technology venues and I started getting these really amazing questions from experts in the field, and I suddenly realized I was certainly way in over my head. They were asking the questions that they should’ve been asking among themselves; these sort of internet policies issues. So rather than make a complete idiot of myself – making up answers that I knew weren’t going to be correct – I asked them if they’d all be interested in having a conversation among each other and so I sent them an email list, www., and the issue was – this was 21 years ago this week – and next thing I knew I had all these amazing people from around the world sharing their knowledge and insights in stuff that I kind of pretended I knew about but honestly didn’t; but because of it, all of us were better because of it, there was so much open knowledge sharing going on.

I then spent most of the next ten years working in internet policy and education, technology and communication; and, again, it still wasn’t journalism but I really hit upon this idea that if you’re able to get a lot of people willing to share openly with each other about what they know and what they don’t know, it’s a hell of a lot better than pretending you’re an expert and falling on your face… and so I did this type of work for a number of years until on September 11th, when New York and DC were attacked. I was working here in DC; my office was a few blocks away from The White House, so we all got the hell out of there and went home. And I remember sitting in front of the TV saying to my wife, “I feel pretty useless right now.” And she said, “Well, you know, do what you know how to do. Why don’t you just start some conversation online and see where it goes.” So I set up another list called ‘SEPT11INFO’ and spread the word on other email lists and some blogs and saying, “None of us really know what’s going on so let’s just all come together here and figure it out…” and so it was posting at a rate of one email per minute for the first thirty-six hours almost so it was almost a twitter-like speed. People upstairs on their balconies in New York watching The Towers come down and then running downstairs for their laptop because, remember, no one really had data plans on their phones yet. But, immediately, we started to see people question things such as ‘so they’re reporting on ABC and CNN, but there’s a fire on the National Mall and a bomb went off at the State Department’. Well, I lived right up here in Dupont Circle, at the time, where you could view straight down to the State Department. No smoke, no nothing, we couldn’t confirm anything didn’t happen there but what they were describing was at least not visible at that point in time and, you know, I just did this as a concerned citizen trying to figure out what the hell was happening to my country. Again, not approaching this as a journalist, but it became yet another example where I realized that if you get enough people together in a space and they’re willing to share what they know and what they don’t know, it can produce some incredible results for everyone.

And so after a fairly roundabout journey working in internet rights and internet policy and running a non-profit social network for a few years, I ended up at NPR. Again, not as a journalist – NPR is the National Public Radio – a main public broadcaster for radio in the U.S. and I was recruited by a vice president there, the vice president for digital, knowing full well that I wasn’t a journalist but was interested in my skills as an online communicator organizer and wanted to see what would happen if he dumped someone like me into a newsroom.

Well, the results weren’t pleasant because people, with their very high appointment, weren’t pleased I wasn’t a journalist. In many traditional newsrooms, people take their job titles very, very, seriously and so if your type dog-pedal does not have words like researcher or editor or host or whatever, correspondent, my job title at the time was senior product manager… but, again, that was intended so I could basically confuse and confound everyone there and not get automatically sucked into the traditional daily newsroom production cycle. And, instead, I got to spend a few years observing what they were doing and tinkering with the tools I found online to see what I could come up with. And so we slowly started pushing towards uses of social media and journalism during the 2008 presidential election. Actually, in late, it would be in December 2007, there was a presidential primary debate and we used social media to collect questions from across the Internet to pitch to the candidates and those that directly responded know how it’s done. Later on we used Twitter for fact-checking actual face time; we used a full range of tools from Twitter to text messaging to voice mail to Facebook for people to collect reports on abutting regularities and we got somewhere around 15,000 reports from all around the country. And I think it was at that point the newsroom started to realize there was something to social media even if they didn’t totally understand it. So, then, almost exactly five years ago, mid-late December 2010, I started seeing on my Twitter lists, some buzz from people I knew in that this young man had set himself on fire on December 18th of that month to protest his fruit cart at being commandeered by the government because he refused to pay a fine for some arbitrary infraction. And I spent some time in Tunisia and I worked on internet policy issues and Tunisia had huge internet rights problems for a very, very, long time. And so I had gotten to know the local waters as well as gotten to know the local police state for better or for worse from some of my experiences there. So I began tweeting about what was going on there and started recognizing this pattern that every time someone held a protest, someone was there to make sure it was recorded on video and then uploaded wherever they could put it, not just Facebook and YouTube but to Daily Motion, Vimeo, even to dating sites with video profiles on dating sites, which they figured that the government wouldn’t look there. And no one took this story very seriously but, all of a sudden, the streets of Tunisia were overrun with protestors and became news around the country.

So I spent about two weeks monitoring this in real-time kind of amazed that all of this was happening and then I saw one or two of those bloggers I had gotten to know a few years earlier and tweeted, something to the effect of “Okay, Arab world, you’ve seen how it’s done. Tag, you’re it.” And it was at that point that I went to my email calendar and just started blocking off random days over the course of the next several months because it seemed like something interesting was going to happen. Once again, I’m not a journalist, though, as far as NPR was concerned. I’m supposed to be doing internet projects and testing and things like that but that wasn’t interesting anymore and I figured, well, the worse they could do is fire me for reporting a major geo-political event and so there are worse ways to go.

So I started covering this thing… full-time and started to see people on Twitter and Facebook using hashtags as RSVPs for protests on certain days. So in Egypt it was 10/25, it was 10/14 for Ukraine, 10/17 for , that they were so excited to overthrow Gaddafi that they started the day this way; it was just absolutely crazy and the next thing I knew I was basically spending eighteen hours a day on Twitter seven days a week; and, starting the source networks that I had built while I had been in Tunisia a few years earlier, the Tunisians started vouching for me to the Egyptians, the Egyptians started to vouch for me to people in Ukraine and Libya. And the next thing I knew I was building a source network of around like five or six hundred people, activists on the ground, who were using social media to plan their own revolutions. And it took about two or three months for Andy Carvin to notice that I wasn’t doing my job anymore and someone complained that I wasn’t showing up at meetings or something like that and so the VP I worked under came over to my desk, leaned over very sternly, and he said, “I don’t understand what you’re doing but please keep doing it.” And with that he officially cleared everything off my calendar for the next eighteen months and just said, “Go down the rabbit hole, see where it leads you.”

And so I spent the next eighteen months embedded, virtually embedded, essentially as a war correspondent for social media working closely with other reporters on the ground especially in Libya and Syria but then also in Iraq and with protestors, brigade commanders, revolutionaries, all sorts of folks: smugglers that were trying to get people into Syria and all sorts of things, and the next thing I knew people were calling me ‘the man who tweets revolutions’ and people in Libya were saying, “You should get an honorary citizenship and passport once we get rid of this guy.” …I still don’t have an honorary citizenship but I did mention it after the war… before chaos… before things got really out of control.

And, in my visits, so when things slowed down, I was able to go to, I spent time in Libya and Egypt and along the Syrian border, a couple of different countries – Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere – and I really began to realize that even though I thought I was being really clever using these methods to report on social media, a lot of them really complemented the type of journalism I called into care, what we were doing on the ground, and sometimes we’re to help each other. I remember, at one point, one of my colleagues was stuck at a very expensive hotel in Tripoli, at a notorious hotel, where reporters were practically being held hostage; their phones were being tapped and they weren’t able to leave the place and I had mentioned to our foreign editor that I had been in touch with the brigade commander of the country and it was beginning to sound like they were planning a final push on Tripoli in the next couple of weeks. But she couldn’t make the phone call because if she did, they wouldn’t let her, it would have been a disaster. But the Libyan government had Skype and the brigade commander and I were reportedly both happy to talk on Skype and I basically served as matchmaker in all of this – brigade commander meet reporter, reporter meet brigade commander – and have a nice conversation. And because of that she was able to get them a pick-up truck a week or two later and ride with those guys into Tripoli.

And so I did this for almost years at NPR and then for a period of time things started slowing down in the Middle East and I found myself in this weird position where they didn’t know what to do with me anymore so I took a buyout and left NPR just about two years ago, at this time, and as I was leaving I got word… there was a new journalism outlet, First Look Media; it was kind of a ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants’ – they didn’t know what they would do exactly – and I talked with them and some of the people on board and they said, “Why don’t you come over and spend a year thinking about what you can do” so that’s basically what I did. I spent a year brainstorming projects and things that ultimately became reported.ly and so reportedly we launched in January of this year. So it’s been about eleven months now and essentially the way people have described it is an attempt on my part to clone myself and to scale myself. And so I have a team of a half dozen journalists in across Europe and the U.S. as well as a source network all over the world maintaining about four hundred Twitter lists at this point representing almost every country on the planet, every major city, every single U.S. state, and almost every major news outlet you can think of, and we’ve been building, cultivating those sources, over the course of a year, and using it to monitor kind of what’s happening all over the place with a specific goal of doing public interest journalism with focus on the global human condition overall so there’s a big focus on conflict, human rights, civil rights, the refugee crisis has probably been the biggest story this year along with the world’s response to terrorism and the culture of fear surrounding it.

And so what we’ve ended up doing is – again, just with six of us – we do real-time reporting for about eighteen hours a day, five days a week, starting around 5:00 AM east coast U.S. time to 9:00 PM east coast U.S. time. And we’re spread across ten different time zones and we do a combination of social media reporting – doing the kind of deep live data, intelligence, and forensic work that been developed by NPR – along with sending our folks out into the field to places… and so we really try to spend our time figuring out ‘how to thread the needle’ between real-time social journalism that allows us to breaks news and also debunk rumors in real time but then also do the longer form journalism based on the sources of social media… so, for example, when one of my team members was based in Greece after months of reporting on refugees going into Laszlo. We sent him there for a week before he did any reporting, I asked him for the first couple of days, as a volunteer, let everyone know that he was a journalist and he’d be reporting later that week but to put his camera away and put his note pad away and help people with things and, literally, just help people off the boats.

And so it’s that kind of approach that has allowed us to cover what’s going on in the world in a very intimate way both in terms of relationships with people, people on the ground for social media and then whenever possible the chances to meet a cohort and converse with them in ways that are more than just getting back and forth. And so, for example, some of the other stories we’ve done – we’ve been very interested in covering Saudi Arabia’s immersion… for six months… and so some sources of ours found some documents from the Saudis, the Audi government granting permission for some bomb ports in Italy and Sardinia, actually, to be transported through the Suez along the Gulf in Kuwait where they could be assembled and then used to drop bombs on the entry. And, working with sources on the ground, representatives in Saudi Arabia, we were able to find exploding emissions on the ground, find your serial numbers, track them to the point of the manufacturer and then track the shipments and bills-of-way bringing them from Sardinia all the way through to the latitude and longitude spot on the ground where it blew up and then created Google Earth to use so you could follow from the plans in Sardinia to the view of the bombs… and then the footage of the aftermath. Well, as part of that, we also looked at an old range of invest funds around the world that had new investments coming.… and it turns out that everyone from the state pension in New York to Norway’s solemn globe fund, millions and millions of dollars were invested in this company and now a number of these funds were to reevaluate their plans for future investments, some have pulled out, and there’s also a problem right now… it turns out some of the documents we found suggested that they didn’t have export licenses...

And so it’s really a good example of an attempt at what we do that starts in social media and uses very social and digital tools like Google Earth and other things; websites that track shipment lanes and people who are essentially shipping containers in waters doing this as a hobby or track ships going back and forth and pulling that altogether to get a sense of how this all works out. And so that’s basically what reported.ly is – we’re a weird hybrid of people, many of them, most of them, we consider ourselves full-time journalists here-and-there but we bring a particular set of skill sets to the table that will help us do and approach the news in some ways that are non- traditional and hopefully useful to what we’ve been given.

Ms. Phillips: Andy, thank you so much.

Audience member: That was so cool.

Ms. Phillips: I’ve never heard Andy’s story from beginning to end but, I, like most U.S. journalists have followed his career right around the Arab Spring to becoming a household journalism name and I think your story like, first of all, December’s a big month for you, there were so many things to your story that happened in December and January

Mr. Carvin: I can’t explain it; it’s one of those weird things.

Ms. Phillips: No but I think Andy’s story, I thought, like epitomizes that journalism today in the U.S. is just what you make of it like your job; there aren’t as many rules any more. Even in a traditional publication like The Washington Post, where I’m at, and I saw a lot of parallels on a much, much, much smaller scale from Andy’s story to my story.

And so I am a political blogger for The Washington Post, for this squad called The Fix, which was started about a decade ago by this guy who really pioneered the idea ‘brand’ journalism; the idea that when something happens, you know, in the Middle East, you’re going to go to Andy or when something happens in national politics, you go to my boss, Chris Cillizza. That wasn’t a thing and now, today, it seems so obvious to all of us, right? We all want to be sort of known but how do you translate that into your journalism? You know, beyond just tweeting and I think, Andy, you’ve done a great job of it and that’s something I’m trying to do and, I think, all journalists, you know, in this city are trying to do. How do you be creative and authoritative about news that everyone else is covering especially in DC talking about national politics? And, so, that’s my struggle and my successes every day at The Fix, where there are six of us and we sort of look at the news with different lenses on. Mine is like Congress, State Houses, and Governors so, basically, you know, laws and say like, “How can I do a smart take on this?” And a smart take is different than a hot take, right? Like a hot take is like, I don’t know, like “No, this is bad” or “Are you like just trying to be contrarian?” And a smart take is trying to take analysis and draw parallels and make a point that few people are making. You know like traditional DC operatives, here, smart take is to connect here, and here and here, and be up here, if that makes sense. And so I do that three or four times over every single day, I write about seventy or eighty stories a month; it’s just like super boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! But it’s really fun and I think Andy’s story is like not having a traditional background? Nothing wrong with traditional backgrounds but not having a traditional background is a great example how you can think so differently about ways to present the news in a creative format, right? Because that’s my bottom take away, I think, that I hope you all will take away from this is that everything just needs to be creative and a different look and a different angle these days because it’s all about the brand as a journalist.

And, wait! So, now, a non-traditional background, so I studied international communications in Spanish but with a news focus in college, graduated in ‘08, wrote at a local paper outside DC, you know, did a political journalism internship here in DC – knew I wanted to sort of be at The Washington Post but they don’t hire people with no skills right out of college so I ended up in and did two years of local news. Great, you know, just like a traditional reporting job, nothing wrong with that, I tried to make the best of it. And then my now husband and I were like, “Let’s go abroad,” however young we are, “Let’s go abroad.” So we ended up in Taiwan, where I freelanced and had some really cool opportunities through networking to like, you know, help strengthen for The Post so the Beijing bureau chief, there’s one guy in Beijing, now there’s two people – one person covering all of China and Hong Kong; this is the state point of correspondence around the world. I’d say like I’d love to be a foreign correspondent but I think it’s like a hobby, a very expensive hobby, it’s like to help you make a career out of it. And so when he called me up and said, “Hey, I hear you have a little bit of journalism skills and the president of China, Hu Jintao, is coming to do a state visit” – I think it was his first official state visit in the Midwest – and I’d love to interview the president of Taiwan, which at the time Taiwan was a very, you know, difficult relationship – and “see what he thinks about all this stuff.” And, sure enough, the president of Taiwan is launching missiles, you know, off the southern part of the island… not literally flying over but basically smaller is what he meant, “Did the missile testing go well?” and the president was pissed; but it was just like, there was tension there that the Beijing bureau chief picked up on so my job was to like source my way into this executive office and, for whatever reason, I think it had nothing to do with me, he agreed to do an interview with us. And so then, you know, I sourced opposition parties and all this stuff and I don’t speak Chinese – only a little bit – and just figure out a way to get it done in a strange country and he came over to Taipei for two days and we interviewed, you know, opposition candidates and like people in Parliament and then, finally, the president himself. And just like, wow, the story grew quickly and it was super fun and I knew I was hooked on international politics.

And then came back and just did a journalism job in Boston just because that’s where I ended up; and, came to DC, and I was part of like this little bit of personal media. I think the best media organizations, right now, are so difficult to explain. Just like reported.ly, it’s kind of like I do this and that – I was trying to cover Congress for a company that owned seventy local newspapers around the nation because local newspapers, I don’t have to tell you all, are not doing that well. These two major companies were going bankrupt and so the CEO of, you know, this larger company decided, “Oh, I’ll buy up these companies and I’m going to hire this really smart guy, this former Washington Post.com executive to figure out a way to make all these local newspapers viable – it didn’t work but we had like a very interesting year, basically, of a group of digital journalists and some people who don’t have traditional backgrounds; one of these people now works for Andy, who were like, “How do I get people to read their local news?” You know and like think about paying for it because some of these guys had payrolls, some of these guys didn’t, and that’s a whole different story about what payroll’s sorted on. But, what we thought we would do at the national level is create a national international desk that tried to cover the news in a different way. So instead of the AP (Associated Press), you know, ‘just the facts ma’am, here’s what’s happening’ right? We tried to focus on here’s ‘why’ something’s happening – skip the ‘what’ entirely – the ‘what’ is one line, you know, in your second or third paragraph; it’s the ‘oh, by the way, I’m writing this story because the Senate passed this bill’ but here’s what I really want to tell you about the visa waiver program. So I thought that was a really ingenuitive way to cover national politics – we had people doing it for international business and national news as well – and it made me think very creatively about how to tell a story. No longer could I just accept, no longer could I write a straight lead – I had to think of and I got help from great editors ‘how to tell a story in a traditional format that would be engaging tweeters’ and I’m still trying to figure that out every day. You know, we came up with an idea – and this has been done before but – ‘how to argue about the Iran nuclear deal’ – and it’s kind of like analysis, not editorializing. No problem going down that route but, I think, modern journalism, I think we were a little bit ahead of the curve and everyone’s trying to do what we’re doing right now, which is like analyze and do smart takes and be the journalism form of your buddy at the bar at the end of the day because ‘here’s what’s up with Ted Cruz and Donald Trump’. But not telling you whether you should or shouldn’t vote for them; just saying like, you know, real talk ‘here’s what’s going on’ and I think that’s truly where political journalism is going right now. I think all journalism is trying to go there and I think some people do it well and some people don’t; every day, I do it well and I don’t. And, yeah, that’s my story.

Professor Meltzer: Great! Thank you so much. So, I think at this time, we can open up to questions from all of you.

Audience member: Hi, I’ve got a very generalized question for the both of you, “Do you see the difference between new media and old media and how that’s going to influence journalism in the future?

Mr. Carvin: We’ve been calling new media ‘new media’ for about thirty years now. I generally call it media but there aren’t many entities that are solely one or the other anymore; I take that back, there are a lot of digital media that have no legacy value whatsoever, purely digital, but on the flip side, there aren’t many news organizations – radio, TV, print or whatever – that are completely shown online because they know it’s going to be done anyway. And so the thing that’s been most interesting for me is observing how each side influences the other and absorbs ideas from people – like a lot of people assume that reported.ly – we’re completely out there doing bizarre social media journalism that has no ties whatsoever to traditional journalism – whereas what we’re really doing is shoe-leather journalism without the shoe leather, often without the shoes because we’re at home with the jobs. But, you know, it’s the path to find the sources and the way you pull together a story may be radically different than what people did maybe five or ten years ago; the principles are basically the same.

The work you guys do at The Fix is built on a long tradition of thoughtful analysis from commentators and from history of journals of newspapers; some of the best stuff you get is public radio doing it in a way that there’s an immediacy to it and also, like I was saying before, there’s an intimacy to it where you get to know all of those who are around The Fix. You look forward to seeing them every single day and what they’re going to bring to the table and I think one thing you hit upon at the very end was – it was key – because you said right upfront there that, you know, some days you do well and sometimes you don’t. And I think people in journalism, today, whether they see themselves purely as new media journalists or maybe a transition from the new traditional platform to digital; the ones that are successful aren’t the ones who are the most tech savvy – they’re the ones who are willing to admit their own vulnerabilities and failings and having a comfort level of saying, “I honestly don’t know what’s going on right now but I’m going to have to figure it out.” Because I know plenty of folks who, they’re in their early 20’s, and they’re at journalism school, who are completely tech savvy but will never be good at this type of journalism because all they want to do is be the authoritative voice – and in their minds being authoritative means never being wrong – and so you don’t talk with people on Twitter about what you’re working on, your concerns, and or asking for help. You only share it once the thing is done and then you don’t have to repeat that. Those are all the typical character traits of the type of journalism that might have been successful further back because that ‘voice from the mountain top’ is what was valued in journalism. But now there’s this combination of being a bit of an iconic class but also has you being more of humility than was usually the case before. And so while the practices of journalism and the platforms and e-comments are changing, I think, fundamentally, the personality types for journalism today are evolving as well.

Dr. Brookes: I just have a question for Andy. I’m still just a little bit trying to get my head around just about when you’re working in social media and sort of like talking with people around the world on what’s happening so, “How do you monitor all the traffic as you get more and more known and popular, isn’t it true more and more traffic is coming your way?”

Mr. Carvin: Ah, yes, of course, increase in traffic over time is a good thing; it certainly helps justify our existence and all of that. But for me traffic to our products is less elemental than interaction with actual sources and people who want to help us; that’s what I want to see increasing over time. So, for example, two weeks ago, my colleague, Kimberly, who you also know, she was the only person online at that moment; the European team had just signed off, I was traveling in Europe as well, her colleague was taking a lunch break, and one of our Twitter followers messaged our Twitter account and said, “Hey, I’m at this football match in Paris and we just heard some explosions outside.” And so Kim jumped on the account saying, “Getting reports of some sort of incident. Unclear what’s going on. Does anyone know anything?” And very quickly people started responding. And so in terms of breaking the news that something was happening… but what was different is, of course, we’re not going to say anything about what’s going on. It’s their job as news wires to wait until they have more of the facts then share them whereas the type of journalism we do – I don’t consider our Twitter account as a news monitor – it’s a work space; it’s a very public open newsroom that anyone can observe and contribute to it. And so we’re fully comfortable going on there saying, “Something is happening. We don’t know what it means yet.”

Audience member: That’s scary.

Mr. Carvin: It is scary! It’s scary but we’re able to get away with it because we’ve carefully cultivated this reputation for being quick but cautious. So when San Bernadino was going on, we were early on that as well but, at the same time, we started seeing things circulate from other news organizations that we thought were bat-sh*t crazy. Some of which were pointing to a Twitter account claiming to be ‘someone in hiding and they’re hearing shots and all that’ just by the fact that their Twitter account had never mentioned San Bernardino beforehand and it turned out to be a prank.

In another case an online news organization that won’t be named but it rhymes with The Daily Beast, they ran with a story about the primary suspect and showed a picture of him holding a selfie of him in the mirror. And it didn’t take very long for us to find his Facebook page, his Linkedin page, stuff from college and all that; and, the more we looked at it, the more we thought they had the wrong guy and it turns out they did. It was his older brother – this poor guy was at work somewhere and had no idea what was going on – and so it was repeated over San Bernardino all over again where instead of Adam Lanza being named as the suspect, it was Ryan Lanza, his older brother, his face was plastered all over the place. And so there’s this strange dynamic where people see us as, they think we’re breaking news but, again, I actually try to be, to play with semantics there, we’re actually more like real-time news because breaking news implies that we want to be first on everything whereas we want to have a conversation about the news going on in real time including that we have no clue what’s going on.

When, you know, I come from my background, briefly, which was in public radio, and the whole notion of allowing dead air, you know – see, you can’t do that – if you look at CNN today, one of the reasons why there’s been so many mistakes in the newsroom during breaking news is that they can’t stop talking; they have to keep filling it up. They don’t want to go to commercial breaks; they just have to keep talking whereas I can afford going to our Twitter account and say, “We’re looking into something that doesn’t totally make sense. We’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” I mean actually saying we’re going to go dark for fifteen minutes, ah, you know, you couldn’t do that on other media but we can not only afford to do that sometimes our members, our followers will say, “Hey, maybe you guys should like go focus on this for a bit, we don’t get this either.” And so it’s very much a conversational form of producing journalism and we rarely use the word ‘confirmed’ unless we’re absolutely positively for sure it’s true because in so many cases it’s not. Ms. Phillips: Can I give you feedback on that? I’ve got a ton of questions. What Andy said, you know, at the very beginning of that was time on-site of traffic isn’t as important as filling in the blank. For him it’s engaging, you know, with these incredible reputable sources on the ground. I would argue that’s Andy’s bread-and-butter, that’s how he’s developed his career, how he’s, what reported.ly is known for and I think journalism is moving that way, the way of time on-site or traffic or ‘clickiness’ of stories isn’t as important as engaging readers in whatever way you can. You know, whether that be an authoritative voice on the bill-of-the-day in Congress or whether that’s using data to, as one of my colleagues would say, ‘to debunk polls’ or, you know, whether it’s like you’re really, really, great at making super cool Google Earth maps or bloggers at The Post are really good at finding . And, so, you know, I think journalism is moving towards the big bosses in the executive suite, are leaning towards recognizing time on-site is more important than how many people go and get out; and, how can you, you know, “Make that happen?” is the question, I think, we should all be asking ourselves.

Dr. Brookes: I think that’s good, it’s not so much about the thing itself but the kind of thinking that it represents. Something that I think would pay for a couple of more magazines or organizations is that I would want to tweet, live-tweet, things for a couple of different reasons: one they may require their subscribers to pay for content and they’re giving away a trip for free; it may lead to a breakout trail of independents and it may detract from reporting on the context, you know, reason. But I guess there’s something about that I just think a little bit is – I’m interested in your thoughts in the thinking behind that you need to be called, because once you have content, you’re going to charge for it and you’re not going to interact because you don’t have the time. What you think about that?

Mr. Carvin: Who’s going to want to wait for the local newspaper to share that headline when you’ve already seen it through a dozen other news sources? And also don’t forget – let’s take, for example, a news wire sending out an alert directly to their newspaper subscribers in order to give them the benefit of getting the story out there. All it takes is one of those subscribers to be faster than the others and they just undercut the rest of the subscriber base so whoever is ‘quickest-to- the-draw’ in those cases, it ends up not helping the rest of them and so it makes it competitive among those subscribers paying attention to the rolls that are coming in and staying on top of it. And even by that other wires have gone to their main feeds and half of the reporting world is already talking about it; that business model is dead but that doesn’t mean that they can’t continue to sell subscriptions like, you know, the AP has a very strong social media team. I should probably offer a bit of conflict of interest here: my brother actually runs social media for AP, it’s a weird confluence… but, you know, one of the things they really try to focus on is how to strike the right balance between maintaining value for their customers while at the same time recognizing that people are going to think the AP’s insane if they don’t use the AP twitter account to break news. And so it really is striking that right balance and not everyone has a solution to it yet but news organizations that basically say, “Don’t tweet anything until we have the official story” and then we’ll go into our official account not your personal account, whatever; it’s a recipe for disaster. Imagine if The Post insisted that The Fix couldn’t say anything publicly until it was ready to go to The Washington Post twitter account; that would completely defeat the point of The Fix existence.

Ms. Phillips: I think because of the proliferation of what Andy just said, the information, I think readers, I know, for consumer news are less concerned where I get my what – I don’t care if its Reuters or AP when it happens. I don’t care. I just want to know the ‘what’ from an informative source and then I do care where I get the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ and so I just think like it’s an old- business model to think that people still care about where they get their ‘what’ from.

Audience member: Something that was mentioned a couple days before… using social media during a crisis, in particular, is obviously that’s something that you come across, how do you think that will affect maybe even like policymaking or governors using it in a sense that in dealing with it, especially something as major as like a revolution or, you know, like the Paris attacks and, you know, I guess, the government’s response to those conditions like hearing about them on social media and kind of addressing the nation.

Mr. Carvin: I think it varies. I think there’s more potential for influence when you get the governments that are trying to censor what’s happening around and so live-tweeting revolutions in parts like Libya or Egypt there’s more likelihood, if not a direct, but indirect impact covering the story and not just immediately. Anyone, any citizen journalist on the ground, by the very nature of sharing the truth of what they’re experiencing, that’s a revolutionary act, if the government’s policy is to censor that information and control the message. And then so in that case social media in real-time reporting is very disruptive to government policies. I say it’s less so in the U.S., I think what’s much more likely is that spin-cycles and whatever we call conventional wisdom now is more likely to begin on social platforms and spread from there; that’s what the influences are having conversations on Twitter and Facebook and Reddit before they’re copied then on TV or the like and so I don’t think social media necessarily negatively or positively impacts the way, for example, the way San Bernardino gets covered. I’m actually much more concerned about reckless live coverage that’s ‘jumping to conclusions’ and anyone who goes on there and says, “I don’t want to speculate, but” you know, if that’s how they’re reporting you know it’s not going to go well whereas there are plenty of online news sources that are working very rapidly but being much more of a certain spectacle and being more responsible, however, and so it’s not about the sphere of the platform, it’s first the context in what we’re talking in outlining revolutions, the situation, because if we’re not, it’s really about the tone and coverage.

Audience member: I kind of wanted to follow-up on what you said about was the ‘changing business model’ and one thing that’s become really obvious is that you have such a proliferation of sources out there that you can get into and they all have new names; not like newspaper names, right? not like the New York Times or The Washington Post, they now have names like reported.ly or The Fix or Monkey Cage or 538 or, you know, all these things that are amazing sources but it requires this really like you almost have to have a master’s degree to be able to navigate these sources and so it requires this additional level of media literacy to be able to know where to go and so I wonder, would you think like ‘how is that shaping – well, I’ll preface it with what I’m thinking about – is that’s potentially leading to this echo-chamber effect that, you know, people talk about, that those who are in the know, know where to go and get these really great things and they have really great opinions but if you don’t, you’re all over the map and you’re just, you know, picking and choosing things that reinforce your own, you know, opinions; then, I kind of wondered, how you all see your work in light of that kind of landscape?

Ms. Phillips: Yeah, you’re so right. I think you’re absolutely right about that. Diane Rehm is retiring, of course, long-time, you know – yes, so sad – NPR’s talk-show host, where she tried to skip the facts. I woke up this morning and turning on my coffee and turning on NPR and Steve Inskeep, host of the morning edition, goes, “You’ve been taking callers’ questions for years, decades, now. Because of the proliferation of information, have callers gotten more informed?” Her answer, “Absolutely, not.”

And I think you’re absolutely right that people will pick, you know, what they view as the facts – because that’s what Diane’s argument was – and so how do we get our news out there? We don’t, I don’t, The Washington Post, doesn’t have an answer for that because we don’t have control over the dissemination of our product, right? Like, if it shows up on Facebook, that’s awesome; if we could share it and goes viral, great. I don’t have control over that anymore and so I’m just trying to do creative stories and hope that the contents speak for itself. I have the newsletter where I have tiers of audiences: the first one is an informed person in DC, who doesn’t work in politics but might go to a cocktail party and want to “Oh, yeah, Jeb Bush, yeah, did this” and the next one is much, you know, my sister in Texas, who like doesn’t go to politics, you know, not even in DC, but I want her to get engaged, and then the last one are people who are absolutely disengaged from politics altogether and I’m just trying every day struggling to figure out how to do that.

Mr. Carvin: Speaking as someone who runs a niche within a niche within a niche, yeah, there are no shortages of news start-ups out there or news brands out there coming at us from all different angles. One of the things we try to do is cultivate a reputation among our peers in the news industry and so having them sharing their work through their personal accounts or their official accounts helps build our credibility over time. Also, we actually consider media literacy part of our overall mission even though we don’t use those terms directly. We spend a lot of time explaining to people why we think something is bullsh*t rather than just ignore it in a room or waiting until all the facts are handed in to say yes. And so one of the reasons we do that is because traditionally news organizations are very uncomfortable when it comes to dealing with rumors. They don’t want to do anything that might propagate it and, historically, that made sense because if you only had three TV channels and your local newspaper, well, then anything one of those entities did could theoretically amplify the rumor. But, now, by the time a news organization hears about a rumor, it’s already all over the place on Reddit; it’s already all over the place on Twitter and Facebook and so we either choose to ignore it and say, “Oh, those aren’t our platforms, it’s not our problem” or we can say, “Well, we’re in the truth business, the debunking business, so we’re actually going to look into this” and so even if a rumor hasn’t spread to a major news network, we will say, “There’s a conversation going on Reddit, stay away from it because they don’t know what they’re talking about and here’s why.” And by trying to tell, to report on things that way, I think it helps, it improves the media literacy of our followers but we also encourage people to read other sources. We share with them almost every day, here’s what we’re reading and where, and some things that are counterintuitive and we’ll take a look at. And on those occasions where we have a few bucks available to promote a story on Facebook, we just don’t clutter… our page. We try to think, “Who’s the least likely to see this?” and we send it to them. Or, who’s most likely to want to get into a debate about this online and so Facebook is still one of those places…

Audience member: …what do you think about these digital platforms?

Mr. Carvin: Twitter being the fastest, it often is, and it’s not the first source to detect people on it and not the first source to amplify it. I think Twitter amplifies what’s happening very, very, quickly more than other places but you could also argue, it’s even faster on Reddit because it’s more of a close community or less than a community of Twitter, who doesn’t amplify… not in a sense that it doesn’t go viral... and so that’s good and bad because I mean I’ve lost track of the number of times George Clooney has died, thanks to Twitter, and things like that. And so it’s a mix of good and bad either way that’s pretty fast and that’s why media literacy and having the skills to build your career is extremely important because if all you’re going to do is stare at your own Twitter feed, you’ll get overwhelmed. But if you start thinking about using searches in clever ways like whenever there’s breaking news somewhere with a potential bunch of eye witnesses, I tend to g-locate search in profanity because people use the expletives on Twitter when they’re surprised just as they do in real life – “They’re full of sh*t.” – people would say that and it works.

Regarding ethics, I mean, there’s a whole range of stuff whether it’s using, not understanding your sources, you find that your social media or taking eye-witness reports from private citizens who don’t realize they’re being amplified; some will throw them to the wolves by sharing their tweets on air to not understanding the true meaning of ‘fair use’ and taking advantage of other people’s content on air in five forums. Yes, they’re all legal issues and won’t be sorted out any time soon; some will require lawsuits going to high courts and others will be sorted out.

Audience member: I was thinking about… how can you be objective in a digital platform or how could an organization be objective and treated right?

Mr. Carvin: I think objectivity is overrated to begin with. I think that taking… ‘the view from nowhere’ where you pretend that there’s always two sides to a story – that there’s potential truth on both sides when that’s absolutely not the case – a whole lot of different stories. Like you’re beginning to see pushback against Donald Trump because, I mean, the man lies so often, he’s extraordinary. But, even in those cases, you’ll see news organizations talking about, you know, “The accuracy of Donald Trump” or “Does he have all the facts?” whereas, in reality, he’s just blatantly lying or just doesn’t care what he’s saying. And you’re starting to see with more news organizations often starting from more of the commentator side like Dana Novak – I’ve talked about this since the beginning – but other news organizations are starting to put on their front pages calling bullsh*t on this side. Like when I was at NPR, we changed our ethics policy to say, “We will not take two sides to a story if one side is patent false.” So when it came to things such as climate change, for example, and we decided that we were not going to put climate change deniers on the air simply to have “a balance” when our science reporters all of whom, or most of whom, are former scientists believed there is zero tribute to it, whatsoever, and the small things that are worth debating on it. And so I think especially when it comes to stories that don’t truly have two sides, where people are bullying their way into politics, trying to be fair and balanced is actually, can actually be, more damaging to the public interest than not.

Ms. Phillips: And I would like to add to that objectivity and analysis aren’t necessarily either or. I think I can call Paul, the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, out on something on Monday and then call, you know, the Senate Minority Leader who’s a Democrat, the opposite side and hear a read out on the other day and it’s okay, you know, I’m not saying who you should vote for or not being any less objective on traditional journalism standards.

Audience member: Trusting the media especially in the U.S. context, do you think projects, well, like, I mean, as our ‘watchdog’ people aren’t trusting the media by viewing journalism in the media as ‘watchdog’ anymore. Do you think projects like yours where you take individuals in the social media aspect and combine them with that analysis? I mean, do you think projects like that have the ability to change for people at least in the U.S.? New journalism and new media to start trusting them more?

Mr. Carvin: Ah, it’s an up-hill battle, I would say. We have to accept the fact that low-income issue voters are a sizable percentage of the population and on top of that are people who are monitoring their news and that’s why there are Fox fans and MSNBC news fans or, whatever, is that they believe in a certain political gospel and are not concerned with the issue from the other side. I think that’s more dangerous than anything else and I think we’re living in a world right now just, basically, given the fact that someone like Donald Trump could actually be in the position that he’s in right now. I’ve gone to a couple of Trump events, right now, just hanging outside, standing there, and there are utter disconnections of facts, which is extraordinary. I mean, there are a number of things, of course, that they believe in very, for great personal political reasons, and people can agree or disagree on them… how he would deal with Iran… there is no one single truth to that thing, particular event, but for people to be going around claiming that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey were cheering at the collapse of The Towers and things like that – that not only are the basis of non-truths but are flat out lies that they circulate and any dissent, any argument against that, is claimed be harried, that’s when things start to get a bit scary.

Ms. Phillips: That was a really interesting question, thank you for that and I want to add that in addition to the rise of analysis as a news storytelling tool in journalism in America, there’s been a proliferation of fact-checkers, right? Like The Washington Post has the only dedicated full- time fact-checking team, two people, they do great work. But there’s PolitiFact, you know, I think they started in , right? And there’s a ton of that that’s been really awesome for journalism, I don’t think we’ve seen an impact on it in the public sphere and, I think, Donald Trump’s the best example.

Mr. Carvin: Because they’re often targeted, they’re targeted as being tools of political media, whatever.

Ms. Phillips: Yeah.

Mr. Carvin: And some of them get to ‘play the game’ and sort of blow it up in their faces in some terms like, at some point, if you want a really good laugh, google FactCheck Egypt. FactCheck Egypt is a quote unquote independent media project that’s funded by the Egyptian government and they use the formatting of FactCheck.org and PolitiFact and others to protect their regime and to identify journalists in Egypt that should be rounded-up for questioning. And so even the terminology that journalists have embraced to really stand their ground in a way and no longer decide Truth, Democracy, and the American Way – all of this can be gamed now – and whether the game is being done by flooding the zone online with lots of trolls essentially dominating the conversation distracting away from The Washington Post and PolitiFacts of the world – or they think of their own versions of it will influx them in some way. It’s a scary time because, you know, I think, it’s on the one hand we’re experiencing a renaissance of really thoughtful investigative journalism; the scary part is that it’s being drowned out by all these other panels.

Audience member: So both of you mentioned social media and we know that more and more people are getting their news from social media and like Facebook and all the social media that introduced an alga rhythm to calculate mostly content, the most irrelevant content, to the users and that’s to track their marketing them so it depends on who you interacted with most recently and what kind of posts you used to lie to come back. So, in this case, maybe like a page of The Washington Post back in the 90s is more diverse than a page of news read on Facebook. So, in this light, what do you think about this alga rhythm? Would you say the news, social media, is actually manipulated by software and engineering behind the screen of the computer? And we know there’s a backward of saying, “If the news is important enough, it will find myself; it will find me.” So, I don’t know, in your opinion, do you think there is news that should be customer- driven or do you think there is news that should seen by the masses?

Ms. Phillips: Take it away! Mr. Carvin: Yeah, there’s – you guys visited the Tow Center, right? A Tow fellow, a recent graduate Tow fellow, who’s now a professor at the university of Brown, who went there from here, and his name is Nick Diakopoulos and his specialty is utterly bias; and what he does is reverse engineering alga rhythms to identify political bias in the software. And one of the scary things that you find is when you look at alga rhythms and Facebook and elsewhere; it’s not particularly intentional. I mean you don’t, people don’t purposely, secretly, put in a conservative engine, a liberal engine, in these things one way or another; it’s they make assumptions about what people are interested in and how they engage with their friends and what they share and it causes the capacity lives to rise to the top and PolitiFacts lives to the bottom. Of course, it’s hard to experience it, when if you’re a news junky and your friends are news junkies because, of course, you’re seeing important stuff. In that sense, the alga rhythm is working. But if you’re someone who’s not really plugged into that, you’re going to keep seeing these cat videos and stories about ‘how Robert gets eaten by an alligator by hiding in the swamp’ – it happened in my home town this week.

Ms. Phillips: That was your hometown?

Mr. Carvin: Yes, Florida man! If you really want to entertain yourself, watch #FloridaMan because we have all sorts of Darwinian failures there. Anyway, so, it’s one of the reasons why I think Twitter is still a much better tool than Facebook when it comes to business discovery because it’s all based on how you set up your own filters – who you choose to follow – whether you use Twitter – what type of search engines you decide to use – you may not find what you’re looking for but at least you’re the one determining the fate of your media diet whereas I don’t know why the hell I get the stuff I get on Facebook half the time and, you know, I follow a pretty decent crowd of people when it comes to news junkies, and the stuff I get is still really bizarre at times especially when you look at like Facebook trending. I still see more stuff about the Kardashians and Kanye West’s new baby than I do about the latest on the climate talks in Paris. And so people like Nick and (a friend of mine), she teaches at the University of Carolina, she also writes, she’s a commentator for The New York Times; they both publicly advocated a lot for making as many alga rhythms that are sourced so we all have the right – not as average citizens, you know, average citizens don’t know what to do with an alga rhythm – but for the geeks out there who know how to investigate an alga rhythm and identify alliances, it’s becoming more important than ever because we just don’t know what’s causing us to see what we’re seeing.

Ms. Phillips: So, I think, Andy, by way of life experience, just answered your question and I think that consumers need to see alga rhythms; but people aren’t doing that; they’re seeking out, specifically, as you pointed out.

Mr. Carvin: And one thing that I would add to that is that I think it is common among news organizations that when they have a story that they know is of public interest, that they need to put pressure on whatever platforms they’re using to get it out there and doing whatever optimization tricks there are when they know it’s important for people to see it as otherwise possible.

Audience member: So I guess it’s the perfect segway into like more of an ambiguous sphere, I suppose, in terms of the international arena, so like in terms of the alga rhythms of the news media, there’s a lot of government-controlled spheres all around the world, especially in developing countries and you have initiatives like Internet.org, you know, Facebook’s Internet.org, that has recently been re-branded. But, initially, you know, giving free internet access to people but only had like the small portion of the things to access, i.e., Facebook and its affiliates and Wikipedia. So, how do you feel about that, I guess, upcoming media sphere in which people are having trouble with actually gaining access, and when they do gain access, it’s kind of manipulated by the individuals who are giving them that access and that shapes just like a completely different narrative and to further – like your company focuses predominately on global news – are you working with local media initiatives, like I dig some digging on human rights watch… are you working with local media?

Mr. Carvin: Whenever we can, we do it. Like the work we’ve done on Saudi Arabia was translated into a dozen different languages and republished on a dozen different platforms including national newspapers in Italy and Germany, which were tremendous. We also freelanced the rest of the work and indigenous rights groups in the Amazon to prove that an amiable route had been built in the Amazon by a partnership between the government and the state… despite the fact that the government for oil insisted that it was our imagination so we had this person who traipsed through the jungle for five days and got footage of trucks going by… Stop signs and things… and so things like that it’s hard to do without local partnerships and it’s hard to disseminate without publishing partners and all that but, you know, good intentions can be very troubling, at times, and I think Internet.org is a great example of it. In many ways it’s a repeat of one, AOL, SetUp, it’s what they call power-up centers for Internet use all over the country. Basically, they’re piggy-backing on our Internet centers… millennials have access… or when Microsoft and Bill Gates has funded library internet access around the world. You can guess what type of computers and operating systems… there’s an inherent bias in philanthropy, nowadays, that it’s sometimes just the result of business and other times potentially restraints on what people are accessing and on top of that you’ve got major players out there dictating how we should be publishing, too. And so Facebook is making it easier for pages to load in real time; you’re one of their initiatives and The Washington Post’s been among the best in doing that and a lot of others are interested in doing it but it’s an ‘invite only’ for a large part of this, which means only select news organizations are able to do it. And then Google is launching this initiative called The-M-Project, which will allow you when you’re looking at news stories on your mobile phone, especially if you google search, it will allow stories to load almost instantly – the speed differences are extraordinary – inside all of that. So, on the one hand, it’s progress in some ways, but it’s also beginning to fabricate the web again because some sites will be able to afford and figure out how to influence, protocol, and will get better at placing google-search results and those that can’t, well, their stories get lost in the balance and so there’s a reason why the web started as an open web because it’s a better infrastructure; it’s a more democratic infrastructure.

Professor Bode: I have a question on behalf of all the aspiring journalists in the room. So both of you in your personal stories talked about, a lot about, kind of developing networks and how much that was key in kind of developing your career path and story. So how much of that is serendipitous of just like, “Oh, I just happen to know this guy” – not much of that is diligent in kind of developing those networks – and how do you do the latter?

Ms. Phillips: I would say like 50-50, though; obviously, your skills are going to matter but in DC, specifically, we know matters, CT40, we know what matters more. And so I have a lot of tips on that if you all want to reach out to me. I’ve had three jobs in the past year, yeah, year and a half, so, you really have to be diligent in keeping up with people. I think that answers your question, though, but one quick thing is like in America in the new year I will send a short email to everyone important in my network and just say, “Hi, how are you?” No apps, no apps for people in my network. “How are you doing?” that through way of lunch, through passing out resumes at dinner, through way of the hiring process, where my then current skills got me my current job so I think networking is hugely important.

Mr. Carvin: Yeah, and for me, just doing the nature of the work I do involves a lot of online networking and so my last two or three jobs were all gotten through online one or another. I think because it’s built into the way I work, I don’t it as actively as you do but almost everyone else I know does; it’s definitely an investment in your career and it’s an insurance policy as well because let’s face it in journalism, there are buyouts, there are layoffs, and all sorts of terrible things that happen and it’s good to have friends that protect your work when the situation arrives. But, you do have to be careful about it, you can’t just go around asking for favors every two weeks; that’s really annoying… and so I think a big part is being willing to give back to everyone else, share your knowledge, share your time, and be as willing to be a mentor to others as others have been to you.

Ms. Phillips: That last part, can I add one more point? Working in journalism makes me so happy. I look at The Washington Post when it was called The North Wall – a wall – which is all our editors and they’re all men and I think it’s so fascinating that Tina’s a young woman, who would love to start a family but my career’s rolling, I really don’t have a mentor at this high executive level and how do I make that happen? And so I just try as much as I can – the same for you all – because I think we all really need that right now.

Mr. Carvin: And, unfortunately, there’s also been a cycle in this country of, I mean, executives in this business always getting ousted but I can say that even female executives get ousted and so even maintaining those mentor relationships can be hard when you’re very talented, whether it’s the times we live in, like at NPR, they leave well before their prime, unfortunately. But, also at reported.ly, I try to take very seriously – even though it’s six people – it’s hard to have that, it’s sort of a reasonable size. We’re split 50-50, men and women, split 50-50 in terms of people of color; almost everyone on my team is an immigrant or somewhat foreign, whatever, and that’s not just because it makes for political correctness, it makes for better journalism and I think that’s one thing so many legacy news organizations don’t understand is that having diversity journalism… they go about changing the hard way... they should start changing soon.

Audience member: There are so many men in the executive positions than women at The Washington Post, specifically. How does that affect news agenda?

Ms. Phillips: I don’t know about the specific news we cover but I think The Post is willing to try to think about, at my level, the peon level, to get diversity in there. But there’s a terrible work- life balance; what else, that’s number one. You know it’s interesting, there can’t be the most informed decisions made when you have a big breaking news story, and you see this so many times that these editors have commented on it, like five white men, circling, going “How is The Washington Post going to cover this?” by just the nature of having such an ominous group, I think, in ways that are tough to pinpoint, specifically, which is good, you know, it changes the coverage or changes our approach. But I don’t have a specific way of how we cover the news to show you an example.

Mr. Carvin: I think one of the reasons we knew early on, when covering the refugee crisis, was that four of the six of us are either refugees or first second generation immigrants among the four of us… and I think it’s allowed us to have a certain empathy as well as to be considered a good source of news.

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