Center for Strategic and International Studies

Bob Schieffer’s “About the News” with H. Andrew Schwartz Podcast

Subject: “‘Tweets Are the New Press Release’ with New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Elisabeth Bumiller”

Speaker: Elisabeth Bumiller, Washington Bureau Chief, The New York Times

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: Thursday, January 19, 2017

Transcript By Superior Transcriptions LLC www.superiortranscriptions.com

(Music plays.)

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.

(Music plays.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: Elisabeth Bumiller, the Washington Bureau chief for The New York Times joins us today. After college at Northwestern and graduate degree from Columbia, she started her career at the Miami Herald, came to Washington as a party reporter for The Washington Post style section, which is a great way, I must say, to learn Washington. She married New York Times foreign correspondent, Steve Weisman. She’s lived in India and Japan. While there, continued to work for the Post. Wrote her first book along the way. Came back to New York, where she joined the Times in 1995 and covered city hall. In 2001, she became the Times’ White House correspondent in Washington, went on to cover the McCain campaign, wrote a book about Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, covered the Pentagon from 2008 to 2013, became a new editor in the bureau, and then in 2015 was named the bureau chief. I have to take a breath, Elisabeth, just to run through all that. But you certainly haven’t slowed down anywhere along the way. And my guess is you’re not going to be slowing down anytime soon.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: No. (Laughs.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: (Laughs.) So what’s The New York Times doing to prepare to cover this very new and different president?

MS. BUMILLER: Well, we’ve greatly increased our White House correspondents, for starters. We went from four to six. It’s a fantastic lineup. It’s Peter Baker, Glenn Thrush, Julie Davis, Mike Shear, Mark Landler, Maggie Haberman – who’ve I left out? I think that’s it. Is that six? Anyway. They have – I think they have maybe 100 years of experience between all of them. Peter’s covered three different White Houses. Glenn Thrush we just hired from Politico.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Which is a real steal.

MS. BUMILLER: Yeah, it’s a – yeah, great. Landler has covered the Obama White House, has written a book about Obama and Hillary Clinton. Julie – they all have a lot of experience. They’re tough, fast, really smart reporters, great writers. And Maggie Haberman will be in New York at what we call White House north. We expect that Donald Trump will spend a fair amount of time at Trump Tower, even after becoming president. Many weekends there, we’re expecting. So it is – as I’m sure you’ve all seen, the scene in Trump Tower. You know, people come and go through that lobby. And a lot happens in that lobby and unfolds upstairs.

So we’re increasing – we’re at full mobilization, I would say, in the Washington Bureau. There’s about 80 people in the bureau, just a few blocks from the White House. About 50 of them report to the Washington Bureau as editors and reporters. And we’re adding reporters. This is a full-time, 24/7 White House and administration.

MR. SCHIEFFER: I was going to suggest that whoever you put on the lobster, the overnight beat –

MS. BUMILLER: (Laughs.) Yes.

MR. SCHIEFFER: May get the – that might be the prime thing, because they’ll get the tweets.

MS. BUMILLER: Well, what we’ve done is we now have an editor up at 6:00 a.m., you know, fully caffeinated, in the chair next to the computer – at home, to be honest, he doesn’t come to the office at that hour. And we have a reporter on duty starting at 6:00, a White House reporter, because as we’ve seen, the president-elect starts tweeting, usually about 6:15, if he feels like it, sometimes earlier. This morning there were five tweets between 6:00 and 7:00 – actually, five tweets between 6:00 and 6:30.

You know, our readers say why are you – why are you paying attention to these? Can’t you just ignore them? He’s the president-elect of the United States, is about to become president, and we look at the tweets just like we look at White House press releases, which are of another era, right? We evaluate them. Some of them we ignore. Some of them, we realized they’re news. And this morning, Donald Trump, you know, said Hillary Clinton was guilty as hell, revisiting a line from the campaign.

So what we do with that is we – Jonathan Weisman, who’s our fabulous transition briefing editor, who will – you know, who will become the editor of the inaugural briefing and then the White House briefing. We have a running feature online. And Jonathan takes those from reporters, writes them very quickly, takes in other items from reporters, because things unfold very quickly. And we put that online. And we’ve found that it’s extremely popular with readers.

MR. SCHIEFFER: How many newsletters, as it were, are you now putting out? Because I know at The Washington Post that’s a big part. They’re not just a newspaper anymore, they’re a media company.

MS. BUMILLER: Right.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Certainly the Times is doing the same thing. Are you putting more emphasis now on your digital product than you are on the – what comes in the paper newspaper?

MS. BUMILLER: Well, we’re putting a lot of emphasis on both. The growth, of course, is in digital because right now our digital audience is daily 1.5/6 million. And this – the audience for print is about 6(00,00), 700,000. Those are more or less the right figures. So you can see the difference, right? I mean, together it’s a huge amount of readership. But, you know, in a very competitive environment. And we certainly put our huge amount of – we are putting enormous amounts of energy in digital, because that’s where the growth is. On the other hand, we do not want to abandon our print readers. They’re very loyal. They spend an enormous amount of money for the paper every year. And we are – we’re doing some special things for them. You’ll see some special sections.

MR. SCHIEFFER: I asked Jerry Seib, your opposite number at The Wall Street Journal, how many platforms is he now providing information for? And we counted it up and he said, maybe seven. Seven different platforms. And I would guess you’re somewhere in that neighborhood.

MS. BUMILLER: Well, right. Well, it depends what you mean by – you know, we provide for the website, for mobile, and for – mobile is the phone. Again, the huge growth is on the phone. And so, you know, we’ll write a story for the web, and it goes onto the homepage and it goes onto the phone, you know, it goes – plus, there is – there are newsletters. But we have found that the big growth is in – how do I – you know, these briefings. We call them briefings. But they’re basically running online updates on what is happening in Trump world that day, or this week, what’s happening on the Hill in the hearings, the confirmation hearings.

I mean, there was – what day was it – it was Wednesday? Wednesday was the Trump press conference in New York, right? So that day we had a running live chat, which is a chat with reporters. And they say, hey, that’s an interesting thing the president-elect just said. That is running live. We had a running transition briefing which was, you know, nuggets from the press conference. And we had a running live hearing briefing which was running updates from a number of confirmation hearings on the Hill. I mean, it was like a three-ring circus. This is a newspaper. It’s what used to be newspaper. (Laughs.) It’s now, as you point out, a media company. And it’s almost like you need a director in the middle of the newsroom when all this is going on. And then, at the end of the day, we take a big, deep breath, and we prepare for the print product.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Let’s bring in Andrew.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Thanks, Bob. And Elisabeth, it’s great to be here with you. I get to pal around with your husband, Steve Weisman, who’s one of my heroes and mentors all the time. And so –

MS. BUMILLER: And a former Times White House correspondent. (Laughs.)

MR. SCHWARTZ: And a former Times White House correspondent. And, you know, of course, I worked with both of you for years.

You mentioned before we even came on the podcast that people who used to cover the White House, you know, almost can’t believe that there’s now six people covering the White House now.

MS. BUMILLER: Right.

MR. SCHWARTZ: And what did you say to them?

MS. BUMILLER: Well, I sent out an announcement saying this is our new White House team. And it – you know, it – a number of the former White House correspondents from the Times – you go back to the Lyndon Johnson era – you know, I heard from some of them. One of them said: Six? In my day we had two, you know? (Laughs.) And I said – I responded. I said: Have you ever heard of something called the internet?

You know, in those days – and we all remember them – you would write once a day. You would, you know, roll into the office at 10:00, 10:30, 11:00. You know, see what was happening. There would be a noon meeting in New York with all the – noon – that the editors would meet for the first time, at noon that day, to discuss the upcoming stories. You’d start organizing. You’d do some reporting. You’d start organizing your thoughts about 4:00, 5:00. You’d start writing for a 6:00, 7:00 p.m. deadline. And that was it. And then you’d go out and have a drink with your colleagues and, you know, roll in the next day. Those days are way over.

MR. SCHWARTZ: So how many times is a White House correspondent writing, filing, per day?

MS. BUMILLER: Depends. We’re setting up a system where we’re going to have – if you’re on – if it’s your duty day – that’s how we’re going to organize this, because now with the Trump tweets at 6:00 a.m. and they could go until 11:00 or midnight we’re going to have two people on each day, because you can’t work 18 hours straight. We were doing that for a while in the beginning when we weren’t aware of how this was going to unfold. And we had poor Mike Shear – I think he worked from 6:00 to midnight or 1:00, and then began the next day. You can’t do that to anybody. (Laughs.)

So the idea is we’re going to have two people on each day, the morning shift and the evening shift. And then the other four will be – they’re not going to have to file every minute. They will be working on longer-range stories, the kind of distinctive stories that, you know, we hope to present to readers – deeper reporting. We’re going to have an investigative team, we have one already, that will go into all aspects of the new administration, looking at, you know, business ties of the administration, many other things.

MR. SCHWARTZ: The deeper reporting is interesting, but also you mentioned something I wanted to touch on. You talked about the Times now doing briefings. And briefings really – what are briefings? Explain to our readers what briefings are? They’re running –

MS. BUMILLER: Well, it’s the terminology now. But it’s basically – I hate to use the word blog, because we got away from blogs. So basically a briefing is a running story online that is updated as much as every five or 10 minutes, just, you know, like we did the Rex Tillerson confirmation hearing for secretary of state. And we had two reporters. We had David Sanger in the office and we had Matt Flegenheimer, one of our congressional correspondents, in the room.

And they were filing just updates. Whenever Mr. Tillerson said something that was newsworthy or of interest – that he would support the Iran deal which is what Trump has said he would not do, when he talked about Exxon lobbying, he’s the former CEO of ExxonMobil. You know, whenever there was a news nugget that was interesting, one of the – either David or Matt would write 100 words, 200, 300 words – actually 300’s a lot. Maybe 100, 200 words and send that to an editor to be quickly edited. And then it would be posted at the top of the briefing. So if you’re interested, you could check in and see how things were going in the hearing.

MR. SCHIEFFER: You know, I’m very pleased to hear you say they do this and send it to an editor.

MS. BUMILLER: Yes. No, no, no. Even David Sanger is edited, yes. (Laughs.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: But as you well know, Elisabeth, that is no longer the case at some publications.

MS. BUMILLER: No, we – no, but we – at the Times a number of eyes see each thing that – every piece of journalism that does up. It doesn’t go up – reporters do not post themselves.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Your late colleague, David Carr, wrote a column a few years ago about newsletters.

MS. BUMILLER: Right.

MR. SCHWARTZ: About how they were so old that they’re new, and that the busiest people out there –

MS. BUMILLER: These are – these are the ones that get emailed out.

MR. SCHWARTZ: These are the newsletters – the email newsletters that get emailed out, into your inbox, in the morning, periodically during the day. You sign up for them. And the Times and other places have made very effective use of these newsletters. Why do you think that form of delivering the news is so effective?

MS. BUMILLER: Well, we actually don’t have – to be honest with you – (laughs) – we don’t have a Washington newsletter that gets emailed. It’s not a huge audience, I’ll be honest with you. It’s called First Draft and people like it. But what we – but what we have found – I mean, I think it’s convenient to people. But what we have found is that there are so many Washington newsletters now in Washington – you know, Playbook, you know all of them – that we just find that we get – there’s a lot more readership on these live briefings that are on – you know, that you go to on the homepage or on your phone, and to check in.

But I think they’re very effective because they’re convenient. And you don’t have to think. It just comes to you and you open it up. But there’s a lot of competition right now with newsletters. We have – and so –

MR. SCHWARTZ: Do you see the briefings as the evolution of what newsletters were maybe a couple years ago?

MS. BUMILLER: Yeah, I think that’s what we’ve found, that the briefings are – reach a lot more people. And we can tell who’s reading them. We can tell who reads what now. And the briefings have a much larger audience – these running stories on the web. And also, because of the graphics now and the design on the web they look really good. They’ve very inviting. We can do lots of – we can embed video with them, we can embed a lot of photos. I mean, it’s just – they look – they look really good, on top of everything else. Again, they pull you in. And it’s just a way for busy people in Washington – or anywhere in the world, actually – just to check in to see, OK, here’s what’s happening.

And then what we’ve done too is at the – as the day progresses, we’ve done 10 take- aways from three different confirmation hearings on the Hill. We now know that was, like, the most popular thing we did on Wednesday, which was the 10 take-aways from all these hearings. You know, at the end of the day we pull together a traditional newspaper story. People read that too. But during the day, you can check in this way. And by the way, we also know that one form of story – like the briefing – can be doing really well at the top of Google search at Google News, right? The other 10 take-aways can be doing really well on Facebook. So we spread it around everywhere.

MR. SCHWARTZ: I think one other thing that you learned in this last year is the power of transcripts.

MS. BUMILLER: Yes. The transcript of the Trump briefing – of the Trump press conference did really well. Now we –

MR. SCHWARTZ: And the transcript of David and Maggie’s interview.

MS. BUMILLER: Oh, right, of course. That did really well. Now what we’re starting to do is sort of annotate transcripts. You know, a reporter who knows something will weigh in, say, when he’s actually – here, this is interesting, what he’s saying here. I mean, there’s all these different things we can do with the design now. And again, some of it does run in print at the end of the day. It doesn’t – it doesn’t look quite the same. We’re trying to get it to look a little better in print. That’s another evolution, but anyway.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Let’s talk about Trump’s first news conference as president-elect, which I think was really kind of a curtain-raiser for all of us, kind of a preview, I would say, of what we’re going to expect. CNN had broken the story about this information that had been given to the – by the intelligence chiefs to Mr. Trump. The Times followed up on that, obviously. But the interesting thing was that when BuzzFeed decided to publish the documents in question. CNN was very, very careful not to go into detail about what some of the unsubstantiated allegations were. I guess the question I would ask you: Would the Times had published that story had CNN not broken it? Would you? Because I know you had the information.

MS. BUMILLER: What we didn’t have was the fact that it had been presented to the president and the president-elect. We did – that’s what we didn’t have. And once we – once CNN broke that, the thinking was that – we thought that, well, it’s now news. I mean, the fact that this substantiated – the summary of this unsubstantiated – these unsubstantiated memos made it into, as an appendix, into the briefing that was given to the president of the United States and the president-elect, we just – that changes things.

MR. SCHIEFFER: That’s what –

MS. BUMILLER: Yeah.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And it became a legitimate news story.

MS. BUMILLER: Right, right.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And I would certainly – would certainly agree. The interesting thing was that minutes after CNN, of course, broke that story, then BuzzFeed decided to go ahead and just publish the document itself – admitting that many of the allegations in it were unsubstantiated and might in fact be wrong. Ben Smith, who’s a good journalist and a lot of us respect Ben’s work, said, you know, we have always erred on the side of publishing when there’s a doubt. Margaret Sullivan, the media writer for The Washington Post said she follows a different standard, and that is when in doubt leave it out, which I would think is probably the Times’ philosophy.

MS. BUMILLER: Well, this was a decision made by Dean. This was above my paygrade. But Dean Baquet, the executive editor, said we’re not publishing the documents. What we did do was, after some discussion, we did very briefly summarize some of what was in the documents, because we felt that it was – it was leaving readers in the dark not even to address the general idea of what was in the them, which was, as we all know, reports of Trump with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel, and attempts – unsubstantiated attempts to try and entice him with business deals and so forth. And we did – Scott Shane is a marvelous writer who wrote the piece, and was very careful just to – just to summarize in sort of three short sentences what was in there.

MR. SCHIEFFER: But I found it interesting today when your media writer, Jim Rutenberg, wrote. And he was talking about the way that Trump had conflated the BuzzFeed report and the CNN report. And more or less alleged that CNN was the one who had broken that. And Rutenberg said, “The news media remains an unwitting accomplice to its own diminishment, as it fails to get a handle on how to cover this new and wholly unprecedented president.” And I thought that pretty much hit the mark.

MS. BUMILLER: We’re in the – we’re actually – just before I came over here – we’re going to be having a conversation with Dean Baquet and the Washington Bureau. We’re going to all have a conversation next week about how we handle press conferences, because there was some talk – I’m sure – you know, I’m sure you’ve seen it around – that maybe the White House correspondents – and this is something the White House Correspondents Association should decide – is whether after something like that happened, should there be a general sense that the next reporter should ask the same question? You know, that there should be a banding together?

I don’t know. It’s very hard, as you know, to corral reporters together. But there’s been some talk about that. And, you know, what should the Times do in that situation. We haven’t – we haven’t come up with anything.

MR. SCHIEFFER: But to the basic question, did Ben Smith err in printing that?

MS. BUMILLER: You know, I’m not going to – he did what was right for BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed’s a different media organization than The New York Times.

MR. SCHIEFFER: But the Times would not have published it.

MS. BUMILLER: No. No, that was – no, because it was – again, we’re a different organization. And it’s just – we went as far as we were comfortable going.

MR. SCHIEFFER: How do you report the way Donald Trump handled this? I mean, you say that when he refused to take a question from the CNN reporter – I mean, the fact is, I guess the guy that’s holding the news conference has a right to call on who he wants to.

MS. BUMILLER: And all presidents have done that in different ways.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Yes.

MS. BUMILLER: Right, they’ve ignored – they’ve ignored various correspondents they were angry at, and been curt with others. This is just – this is just a new extreme. That’s what’s happening here. And there was the shouting – the shouting match at one point was – I have never seen that.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Do you think journalism in generally was damaged by that?

MS. BUMILLER: I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. I really wouldn’t. I think it’s a bad idea to get into a shouting match with whoever – for a journalist, whoever is the person at the press conference, getting into a shouting match with – (laughs) – the principal is bad idea, because we never look good doing that. You know how that is, just in interviews with somebody.

MR. SCHIEFFER: My general advice for reporters on this situation is just keep asking questions.

MS. BUMILLER: Yeah, yeah.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Yeah, I think the question is our greatest weapon and our greatest tool. And you keep asking. And after a while, sometimes a non-answer becomes an answer. I remember during the – during the previous campaign with Mitt Romney, I asked him five times to give his position on immigration. And that became – that’s what the Times led with when they wrote an account of that interview I had with him. And I think for reporters, we have to remember that when people don’t answer the question, the people who are reading these stories, who are watching it on television, they’re not stupid.

MS. BUMILLER: Right. Right, I mean, I remember this –

MR. SCHIEFFER: They know when they’re evading a question.

MS. BUMILLER: You know, it’s just – you know, you’ve been long in the television business, and I haven’t been. But I learned – you know, it’s really hard on live television to do that. I learned the hard way. I was a moderator – I was one of the questioners in the last Democratic primary debate in the presidential campaign in 2004, when it was John Kerry, John Edwards, and a whole group of people. And we had been told – it was Dan Rather was one of the – was one of the questioners. And we had been told – we did this run-through.

And we’d been told that it was – we were very boring. You know, this was New York. We had to do something. It could not be another boring debate, you know. And so they encouraged us to interrupt and break in. And so when the real debate happened, what’s what I did. You know, I broke in. I interrupted the various candidates. And I was excoriated afterward for my – for being rude. And I realized then something that you know instinctively, being in television, that you just can’t do that, because it becomes about the journalist and not about the interview, you know? And it’s really hard in a – in a live interview to do that. You know, when you’re a print journalist you can actually interrupt people and say, wait a minute, and stuff. But on live television, bad idea.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Bob, when you were doing interviews every Sunday, you often made yourself disappear, in a way, because you were making the subject really the front and center.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, I always thought that the reason – a successful interview on television is not about what the moderator does, or the questioner does, it’s about the answers you get.

MS. BUMILLER: Right.

MR. SCHIEFFER: I mean, it’s no different than doing a newspaper interview. You’re trying to find some news. You’re trying to move the story forward. As Elisabeth said, you know, it goes all the way back to the Kennedy assassination, which I guess was one of my first big stories. That was the first time that the American people saw how news is gathered. You know, they were used to seeing journalism’s finished product, the edited story that appeared in the paper, the edited story that appeared on television.

And suddenly they discovered that, hey, this is not all that – it gets a little loud and people are pushing and shoving. And it probably hurt journalism and, to some extent, I think we’re still feeling the impact of that. But it took people a while – now, I mean, we – anything goes. And we see all of this stuff, as we saw at this Trump news conference and people have become used to it. But it was a little jarring for people to see the news actually being gathered. And you stop and think about it, that was the first time they’d actually seen it in real time, how we get to this.

MS. BUMILLER: You know, just to defend my fellow journalists, I thought there were really good, tough questions asked at that Trump news conference. Let’s not forget that. They were the right questions, and people followed up. And so I want to commend people for that. I mean, what’s going to be remembered is the shouting match and Trump wagging his finger and saying, you know, you don’t get a question and fake news and stuff. But look at the – look at the substance of the questions that were asked. They were good and they generated news.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Elisabeth, where do you come down on correcting false information at an interview? Gerard Baker, the editor at The Wall Street Journal, created a little comment recently when he said – when he was asked by Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” should we brand these statements as lies? Is it proper to call somebody a liar? What’s the red line for The New York Times on that?

MS. BUMILLER: Well, we did do that during the campaign. That was a decision by Dean Baquet to say it was a lie – you know, it was a lie. I mean, you can certainly say, without question, this was false. You know, lie – you know, using the word lie means that there was deliberate intent to tell you something wrong. And you know, in many cases you don’t actually know if the person is just uninformed or deliberately lying. So there is that.

But what we do is with the tweets – and we’re beginning to run a – we’re gearing up as quickly as we can a sort of tweet fact check, so with every tweet – we did this during the – we did this recently, where – during the press conference, where there was a fact check running. And we would put something up that Trump had said, and then we would have our experts weighing in and saying – which are reporters – saying, actually, that’s not true or actually, here’s the – it’s somewhat true, or actually it’s close but completely out of – in the wrong context.

And I was really – I mean, I was really impressed. We had an editor running it in New York who did a fantastic job. And we have all of our – you know, a lot of our people in the Washington Bureau who are experts in national security and domestic policy. And it was – I was really pleased with it.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And what about this whole business – this so-called post-truth era that we’re in now, and where, you know, some of the Trump surrogates said, you know, where we made our mistake during the campaign in the coverage was while Trump supporters took him seriously they didn’t always take him literally.

MS. BUMILLER: Yes, well –

MR. SCHIEFFER: And do – are we into an era now where we will quite a news source and then put in parentheses, but we don’t think he really meant that part of it?

MS. BUMILLER: Well, we are not. The New York Times deals with facts as much as we can. (Laughs.) I mean, as we know them. You know, of course we’re not going to – I remember that. And I thought, who – you know, that was a revelation to me, that nobody really took him seriously. But we’re obligated to. This is a serious newspaper. We are – you know, the president-elect says something, what are we – you know, we assume he means it. So, no, we took him seriously.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Let’s go back to the Times itself for a second. The Times has done a number of internal audits over the past couple years. How do you think the Times is adjusting to the new digital era?

MS. BUMILLER: We’re adjusting as fast as we can, rapidly. There was the – there was the report a few years ago by A.G. Sulzberger that we were behind. I would like to tell you first hand we have much to do, but we have really moved fast. And I feel like we are leading the way in a number of cases. I can’t tell you the changes happened in my life and in the life of the Washington Bureau in the last year or two. It’s been very, very rapid. And you know, one thing we see is the big growth in digital readership and digital subscriptions. I think we’re doing quite well. MR. SCHWARTZ: What are some of the ways that reporters who have covered – you know, worked for the Times for a long time, and they’ve been primarily print, and they’ve been primarily oriented towards page one – how are they adjusting their mindset in this new digital landscape?

MS. BUMILLER: Well, it’s – now that we know how many people – we can – you can click on your story now in the office and see how many people have read it. It’s a pretty powerful motivator. On one hand, you know, it’s – you don’t want to focus too much on audience and hits and stuff, because we publish a lot of very serious journalism and it doesn’t – if it doesn’t get the same amount of attention that the video on Marilyn Monroe gets this morning, that doesn’t mean it’s – you know, we value it less. And the good news is that a lot of our really serious journalism, that is 6(,000), 7(,000), 8,000 words long, people are reading it. Some of our biggest audience members are for that kind of journalism – 2 million, for example.

MR. SCHWARTZ: And they’re even reading it on their phones.

MS. BUMILLER: They’re reading it on their phones, which is amazing. You know, we just – the big investigation we did a few years ago into SEAL Team Six, that was one that you saw that was about 2 million, and people read it on their phone. And, you know, we didn’t know before how many people read each story. Now we know. So people are adjusting.

I would say that every reporter in the Washington Bureau – I can’t speak for New York but I’m sure it’s the case in New York as well – is completely with the program on digital, because we just know the readership now. You know, I mean, there’s still people who – of course, reporters still want A1 stories. It matters. I’ll tell you, it matters internally a lot, you know, if your story is one of the five or six that gets on the front page every day. But it is just so much less important than it used to be internally. You know, people still like to be on page one on Sunday. It’s our biggest day. They like to be – the reporters like to be on page one for big, historic days, because those are the big pages that last – you know, the Trump inaugural and so forth. But it’s really changed.

MR. SCHIEFFER: I think –

MS. BUMILLER: Oh, and I have another – you know, you know it’s changed when David Sanger will call me, you know, from his desk and say, you know, I need a story – we got to get this story on the homepage. You know, it’s not getting enough – get it on the homepage. You know, or it has to be at the top of the phone. So now there’s lobbying for getting on the homepage. And actually, that’s kind of – we’re also finding out that it doesn’t even matter as much as we once thought about being on the homepage, because now if you get promoted through our social teams, our audience teams that push the stories out. If you get it on Facebook, that is sometimes as power – that is actually far more powerful than being on page one.

MR. SCHIEFFER: All of the new things that are happening are great, but, you know, I think the most important stories that the Times did last year were the two long interviews that Sanger and Maggie Haberman did –

MS. BUMILLER: Those were great. Those were great.

MR. SCHIEFFER: – on Trump’s foreign policy. I felt we got – we found out more about Donald Trump in those two interviews. And that’s just old-fashioned New York Times kind of reporting, the kind of stuff that we’ve always expected from the Times over the years. And then, I must say, I thought David’s behind the scenes story – and how many words was it – when he did the – how the hacking came about?

MS. BUMILLER: The hacking. That was Eric Lipton and Scott Shane and David. That was 6(,000) to 7,000 words. And we did that very – I mean, we, I should – they wrote that very, very quickly because we were nervous – we had planned it for, like, a week or two later, at least two weeks later, but we got nervous, it started leaking out. And those guys worked around the clock that weekend to get it – you know, to get it in.

MR. SCHIEFFER: We knew there was something going on, because we were trying to get David over to do a podcast with us.

MS. BUMILLER: I think we had him – we wouldn’t let him out – (laughs) – to leave the office.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And Andrew said: I don’t know what he’s going over there, but they’re doing something big.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Well, and CSIS had photos of China weaponizing the islands in the South China Sea.

MS. BUMILLER: Right.

MR. SCHWARTZ: And I kept calling David. And I said, hey, you know, I think this is a pretty interesting story. And he said, trust me, I’m working on something big right now. You’ll understand. If you could just wait another day. And that was – you know, it became apparent that it was a very big story he was working on. By the way, you have no idea how excited I am to know that he’s calling you to lobby to get on the homepage. That is a very important thing for Bob Schieffer and I to know. (Laughter.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: It certainly is. Elisabeth, I know you’re very, very busy. And we appreciate you coming to talk with us. But just as kind of a windup part of this, what do you see as the biggest challenges in this coming year? And what do you see as the challenges for journalism overall?

MS. BUMILLER: Well, I think for the coming year for Washington, covering the Trump administration, is just going to be aggressive, fair – aggressive – you know, fair, but really aggressive coverage of all aspects of the administration beat. And it’s such a big story now. It’s not just – it’s the White House, of course. But look at all the agencies and how much is going to change at the agencies – we think at EPA and Education, you know, at the Pentagon – I mean, these are agencies that we haven’t always paid a huge amount of attention to in the past. There’s just – it’s going to be – if we take them at their word, it’s going to be a complete turning upside down of what the Obama administration did. So that – just keeping track of that.

Also keeping abreast of President Trump’s businesses and his presidency. He said at the press conference he’s going to be able to do both, you know? And keeping track of his – of his family’s business ties. That is a big deal. And then, of course, we’re going to – you know, there’s a lot of unanswered questions about the Russian hacking. And those – that committee will continue on the Hill. There’s been calls for a select committee. I don’t know – but that is not going to go away. So we need to keep an eye on that.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Can you recall an atmosphere as a new president and a new administration came to Washington quite like the atmosphere that I sense right now?

MS. BUMILLER: No. I think – first of all, there was a Pew poll recently that said – there’s two things here. One is that – you know, a Pew poll recently showed that he had a 37 percent approval rating, which I believe is among the lowest if not the lowest since the polling started in the ’30s – 1930s for a new president coming in. Normally presidents come in on a wave of popularity. So that – and he is – his popularity has certainly declined, according to that poll, among independents.

MR. SCHIEFFER: It sort of peaked after the election, but now it seems to be going back down.

MS. BUMILLER: Right. So that – so that’s a very – (laughs) – interesting dynamic. And the – and President Obama is leaving with a 60 percent approval rating. So that’s a dynamic we’ll have to deal with. And then – but again, it’s just we don’t know what’s going to happen. I mean, all of us who – you know, we all – everyone, including the Trump campaign apparently, thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win. And, you know, everything that we thought was proven wrong. So I am – now when I think this is going to happen on the Hill with the Affordable Care Act, I have no idea what’s going to happen. I mean, we were so wrong before. But this sense of, you know, all norms being gone, everything that we’ve been used to in Washington is over, and there’s – we just don’t know. I mean, that’s why his supporters love him? You know, he’s going to blow the place up, right? That’s what they want? So we’re here to cover the explosions.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, Elisabeth Bumiller, we thank you. And we’re depending on you to get the answers to all of these things.

MS. BUMILLER: (Laughs.) Thank you. Thank you for having me.

MR. SCHIEFFER: As quickly as you can, by the way.

MS. BUMILLER: Right, right. (Laughter.) Thanks.

MR. SCHIEFFER: For Andrew Schwartz, this is Bob Schieffer. Thanks for listening.

MR. SCHWARTZ: But that’s not all, Bob. At the top of this podcast we gave you just a tease of the great music from my friend Aaron Neville’s new record, Apache. Let’s hear some more from Aaron Neville.

(Music plays.)

(END)