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Center for Strategic and International Studies Center for Strategic and International Studies Bob Schieffer’s “About the News” with H. Andrew Schwartz Podcast Subject: “Walt Mossberg and the End of News Websites” Speaker: Walt Mossberg, Executive Editor, The Verge; Editor-at-Large, Recode Hosts: H. Andrew Schwartz, Senior Vice President for External Relations, CSIS Bob Schieffer, CBS Political News Contributor; Former Host, “Face the Nation,” CBS News Date: Tuesday, August 16, 2016 Transcript By Superior Transcriptions LLC www.superiortranscriptions.com BOB SCHIEFFER: I’m Bob Schieffer. H. ANDREW SCHWARTZ: And I’m Andrew Schwartz. MR. SCHIEFFER: And these are conversations about the news. We are in the midst of a communications revolution. We have access to more information than any people in history. But are we more informed, or just overwhelmed by so much information we can’t process it? MR. SCHWARTZ: These conversations are a year-long collaboration of the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Now, everyone knows Bob Schieffer’s a newsman, but not everyone knows how he became an anchorman. He wrote a song about it. Let’s have a listen. (Music plays.) MR. SCHIEFFER: (Sings.) Well, I left this job that I just took, started practicing my sincere look, they said I had the face of a man with heart. They wrote me some lines, taught me a style, drew a happy face on the script where I should smile, and the key demographics went right off the charts. I have to say, they pay me good, a whole lot better than Stuckey’s ever would, and a cute little stage manager gives me all my cues. Selling tractor hats and pumping gas, that’s all part of my long-ago past; now I just sit there and read the news. CHORUS: (Sings.) He became a TV anchorman. MR. SCHIEFFER: (Sings.) A TV anchorman. CHORUS: (Sings.) He joined the Eyewitness team. MR. SCHIEFFER: (Sings.) Was that Channel 4 or Channel 9? CHORUS: (From video.) (Sings.) With razor cut hair, and with bells up to there, it’s the new American dream. (Music ends.) MR. SCHWARTZ: So now you know. And here’s Bob Schieffer. MR. SCHIEFFER: Today we’re pleased to have Walt Mossberg on the podcast with us. He is a lifelong journalist, commentator, editor. Began his career at The Wall Street Journal, where he covered national and international affairs for 18 years. In 1991 he pivoted to create and write the personal technology column for the Journal. Then in 2007, founded AllThingsD.com, a website devoted to tech coverage. In 2013, he left the Journal to found and run Recode, a tech website that has earned the reputation for breaking big stories out of Silicon Valley and having access to top technology executives. Recode was bought by Vox Media in 2015. He’s now an executive editor at The Verge, Vox Media’s tech site. He is also editor-at-large of Recode. Writes the weekly Mossberg column for both sides, often appears on television and radio to provide commentary, and has been awarded a prestigious Loeb Award for commentary, the first technology journalist to receive such an honor. Walt, we’re really glad to have you today. You were actually at the creation of the podcast, were you not? WALT MOSSBERG: Oddly, I was. One of the things that did with my partner, Kara Swisher, who you mentioned, was that we, at AllThingsD, in addition to having the website, we had a conference. It was called the D conference, and it attracted all the top leaders of technology and media, by the way. And among them was Steve Jobs. And one early year at our conference Steve Jobs introduced the idea of podcasts on iTunes on stage at our conference, instead of in his usual way of introducing things at his own events. And the funny thing was he wanted – he needed an example. So about a week or two before the conference, he called me and he said: This is what I’m going to do, if it’s OK with you. I said, great. He said, but I need some content. I would like you to just read one of your columns into a microphone, and we’ll use that to explain to the audience what a podcast is. And Steve Jobs being Steve Jobs, being a perfectionist, he sent essentially the guts of an entire radio station down to this hotel where we were doing the conference. And I sat in this room with five technicians – it was crazy – and I read my column. And he played it through iTunes on stage. And, yeah, that’s where podcasts came from. And there were some before that, but it really got solidified there. MR. SCHIEFFER: They are really a big deal now, though. MR. MOSSBERG: They are really a big deal. They were – started – a bunch of people started them around the time he introduced this. Then I think it went quiet. It never stopped, but it never – it never had much traction. And then in the last couple – three years it has just exploded again. MR. SCHIEFFER: Let’s talk about Silicon Valley first. What’s going on out there these days? What’s the big news? MR. MOSSBERG: I think the biggest thing – there are three big things – but by far the biggest is artificial intelligence, which is a scary term for a lot of people and may wind up being scary. We don’t know yet. We have very crude versions of it. Everybody who has an iPhone has Siri. That’s an – that’s a crude version of artificial intelligence. If you have Google, you have Google Now, that’s a crude version of artificial intelligence. Amazon has a device called the Echo that sits in your house, waits for you to ask it a question, and just tells you – you can say flash briefing and you get the NPR – short NPR newscast at any time you want all day long. You get a flash – I don’t know how many times NPR creates this for it, but it’s very up-to-date. You can ask for sports scores. You can ask for weather. You can ask for recipes. You can ask it to set a timer. This is – we’re in the very early batters of the first inning of this. But this is what everyone in Silicon Valley is working on, in every way you can think of. MR. SCHIEFFER: And basically what you’re talking about, where this is going, is teaching the machines to think. MR. MOSSBERG: You got it, Bob. That’s exactly right. It’s called machine learning. Facebook is deeply into it. Apple’s deeply into it. Google’s deeply into it. Amazon’s deeply into it. And Microsoft is. And then there are a bunch of startups that, as always in Silicon Valley, we probably have never heard of. And one or more of them may become even more successful at it than the big guys. MR. SCHIEFFER: You know, kind of the arc or the overriding question we’re trying to answer in our series of podcasts, and we’re talking to people in all parts of the communications landscape, is where is communications going? And I guess the overriding question we have is: Are we better informed now than we have ever been? Or are we so overwhelmed with information that we simply can’t process it? MR. MOSSBERG: I think the answer is – and I remember thinking this as long ago as 1982. That’s how long ago – that’s when this thought first occurred to me, because the very crude pre-web internet services were out there, like CompuServe. And I remember saying one day to my wife, oh my God, I can look something up in Poland from our basement. And of course, it’s vastly better than that now. But the point is, we have much more at our fingertips. We have much worse curation. What was a newspaper? What is a newspaper? What is a nightly news broadcast? What is a local news broadcast? They’re curated bunches of stories, of journalism. Encyclopedia Britannica was a curated attempt to capture most of the basic knowledge you would need about the world. Today we have way more journalists, way more information providers, and way less smart curation. MR. SCHIEFFER: I want to go back to your career. There was a time when people went to work at The Wall Street Journal. And they – that was the top for them. MR. MOSSBERG: That’s right. MR. SCHIEFFER: Or people went to work at The New York Times or they went to work at CBS News. MR. MOSSBERG: That’s right. MR. SCHIEFFER: I’m one of the few people around who stayed with a place where I went to work. I’d been a reporter before I got there, but that’s where I always wanted to work – MR. MOSSBERG: I followed your career and admired you, yeah. MR. SCHIEFFER: – and, you know, was there for basically 47 years. But I want to ask you: You pivoted from international affairs to writing your technology column in 1991. This was well-before the dot-com era and all of that. Did you have a feeling something big was going on, or what caused you to make such a big pivot? MR. MOSSBERG: I absolutely did. I had been a hobbyist. So while I was covering – while I was the chief Pentagon correspondent, the deputy bureau chief, the chief international economics guy, the national security guy – all these things – all these Washington things for The Wall Street Journal, my hobby was computers.
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