Center for Strategic and International Studies

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

Subject: “Alt-Facts and Journalism That Holds: NPR’s Editorial Director Michael Oreskes”

Speaker: Michael Oreskes, Editorial Director, National Public Radio

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: Wednesday, January 25, 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: We’re joined this time by veteran journalist Michael Oreskes, who runs the news operation at National Public Radio, a post he came to after running new organizations in the United States and overseas. His two big broadcasts now are “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” He joined NPR in March of 2015. He came from the Associated Press, where he was a top executive and managing editor of the wire service’s daily feed. Came to the AP in 2008 after many years as a reporter and editor and chief of the Washington Bureau of The New York Times. He was also editor of International Herald Tribune, based in Paris, which the Times owned.

Well, Michael, welcome. You’ve seen a lot in those various posts. And I’m guessing, now you’ll say you’ve seen a whole lot more, as you watched this campaign and the inauguration of Donald Trump. So just –

MICHAEL ORESKES: Bob, it’s great to be back together with you. And I think between us, we’ve seen a whole lot.

MR. SCHIEFFER: We have. (Laughs.) Well, what I want you to do here is just take a deep breath and tell us what you make of it all now – this inauguration, the campaign that came before. What do you think’s coming?

MR. ORESKES: Well, I mean, it’s – it is a remarkable moment. I know a lot of people say that. But I think what’s really striking is that we now have a president who came to office by attacking the key institutions of the society – both the government and us, the press. And I do think of us an important institution in a free society. And that’s a bit unnerving, frankly, because, you know, you can tear away at those things only so far, and at some point you’re left with nothing standing. And I do believe that an independent press is crucial. And I believe that, frankly, the key branches of government, the Congress and the courts are important. And you can talk about draining the swamp, and no doubt there’s all sorts of things that need repair and fixing, but at some point if your mission is to tear it all down you have to ask yourself, well, who’s there at the end?

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, what do you make of the inauguration – a very unusual inauguration?

MR. ORESKES: I must say that you and I between us have seen most inaugurations, certainly at least back, what, to Nixon, to – I’m not sure whether you were at Johnson.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Yes.

MR. ORESKES: But certainly, yes. There hasn’t been anything quite like this. It was remarkable for the way in which we got Trump. That’s who he is. You know, we didn’t get soaring rhetoric. OK, you can imagine that he wants to speak more like ordinary people. That’s part of the Trump thing. But the idea that he took almost no advantage of the moment to expand who he was speaking to, that it was really about this core that he – that brought him to where he is. And you got to respect that loyalty, in a sense. But presidents have to govern the whole country. And they need more than just the people who elected them. And that’s true of every president.

So why he chose not to do that in that speech, and why he painted such a dark picture of this country – I mean, you and I both have lived through some dark times in this country, but the principle that seems so established in this country – and, you know, who Reagan was obviously the great exemplar of – was this idea that ultimately hope and optimism are the thing that leads you forward. And he just tossed that out. I mean, when he got to that moment about American carnage I thought, wow, this really is a different president.

MR. SCHIEFFER: You said the other day that 2017 will be the year that journalism gets back to basics. Tell us what you mean by that.

MR. ORESKES: Well, I think the more under pressure we are – and we’re under pressure both in a – in a broad sense, the digital transition, the business crisis of so many news organizations, and now this struggle we clearly are going to be having with this new administration. We’re under a lot of pressure. And I think when you’re in that kind of situation, you really have to go back to your knitting. You have to figure out exactly who you are. And I think our key role is to provide reliable, authentic information to the public so they can be who they need to be. They can be citizens. They can be who they need to be in their lives – not all our work is about citizenship. It’s also about living your life. It’s about shopping. It’s about, you know, consumer protections.

So I think it’s really important for us to recognize that’s our role. That’s our key role. We’re not – you know, there is entertainment in the world. And obviously journalist has always had a certain entertainment quality that’s been relevant. But ultimately, we are the information that keeps the society moving. And we have to recognize that. And we have to be really good at it. And we have to recognize that our credibility hasn’t been great. And we have to rebuild that credibility. This was an issue before Donald Trump decided to take off after us. But we need to be authentic and reliable and believable. And we need to rebuild trust with a lot of people.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, you know, when the Nixon administration came to Washington, they began to attack the credibility of the press. We became their favorite target. Spiro Agnew was the – was the main attacker.

MR. ORESKES: Oh, yeah.

MR. SCHIEFFER: There are reminders of that in the approach that the Trump team seems to be taking.

MR. ORESKES: Yeah. I even wonder at times whether they haven’t looked back at some of those nattering nabob of negativism attacks. I think one of the biggest differences is that we’re in a much less stable position today than we were back in that era.

MR. SCHIEFFER: You mean, we, the press?

MR. ORESKES: We, the journalists. We, media. You know, we’re much more fractured than we were then. I think there’s a lot more confusion among journalists about what we really represent and who we are. And that makes us, I think, more vulnerable. And just in terms of the resources of a president, this president has a much greater ability to go around us to the public than Richard Nixon had, frankly. And that’s a big difference. And it creates a different strain on us.

MR. SCHIEFFER: The whole business of fake news and alternative facts, as the new president’s aide Kellyanne Conway put it on television, is getting a lot of attention. I mean, what is a reporter to do? How are you telling your people to handle this?

MR. ORESKES: To stay calm and not to be provoked into feeling that we’re – have to retaliate against any of these things. What we have to do is create real news that’s believable. You know, to think – you know, journalism, as you well-know, Bob – journalism’s a process. It’s a way of gathering information and thinking about the world. And we have to stay steady in that – in that way. I mean, fake news is a bad phrase because it covers so many different things that it’s almost not helpful. There’s the kind of fake news that someone makes up because they want to produce a political result. Well, that’s propaganda. There was a good word for that, and that word’s still good. That’s propaganda.

And then there’s this other category, which is not entirely new, but which is more common, I think, and more accessible to more people, which is the fake news, the phony story that people can make up because they can make money by doing it. It’s a commercial thing. Well, that is pretty scary. But that’s where, I think, being a credible journalist and having a name that people recognize or a brand that they recognize, and having that name or that brand stand for something – I mean, to be honest, when I used to hear Bob Schieffer on CBS News, I knew that both Bob and CBS News stood for something, that they were trying to be honest and accurate and authentic about what they were covering. And that meant a lot. And it’s harder to do that today. It’s much harder, frankly, I think. But that doesn’t mean we have to – we give it up. We have to keep trying.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Let me just read something that you said recently? You said, “The scarcest resource in journalism right now is the attention span. We used to live in a world of journalism governed by the laws of physics. Time and space were our key constraints: space in a newspaper, time on the air. The really controlling force in the world right now is how long you can keep your audience, your followers, consuming the journalism you're creating. They have just so many other places to go, so many things pulling on them and so many demands on their time that our goal is to create journalism that holds them.”

MR. ORESKES: Right.

MR. SCHIEFFER: How do we do that?

MR. ORESKES: Well, that’s the challenge. I mean, I think first and foremost we have to make it significant. In other words, we have to do things that explain to people quickly why this story matters to you. And that’s challenging. I think a lot of us have been used to the idea that we had a captive audience. And so our generation of journalism, if I can say it that way, started out in a situation where, you know, people only had so many choices. And we were – maybe in a way it was laziness. But now we have to quickly make clear what it is about this that matters, why it’s new or why it’s different, and yet be as responsible as we ever were. In other words, there’s a tabloid way of doing that, that works. And, you know, there’s the clickbait way of doing it. If I put Kim Kardashian’s name in every story we can get a lot more people to click on it. But we’re not providing anything of value to them in the end.

And I do think that – I have enough faith in the public to believe that there will be people who really need this information, and they will come, and they will stick with us. I think the biggest challenge for us, as the producers of the journalism, and for the society is that there are lot of people who don’t put being informed very high on their list of priorities. And so for them, it’s not all that important to figure out whether the information is true or not, or whether it came from a credible independent source, or whether it was just some political leader’s perspective on the world, or parallel universe, or alternative fact. And I think that’s not just a journalism problem. I think that’s a problem the whole society has to face. And that’s going to take us all the way back into schools and all the way back to the basics of, you know, how do we get enough people interested enough in being informed that they’ll really do the work a citizen needs to do?

MR. SCHIEFFER: Let’s bring in Andrew.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Thank you, Bob. Michael, you know, along the lines of what you were just talking about, you know, some of us think that fake news is actually a weapon, that’s a national security issue. What do you think about that?

MR. ORESKES: I think that one of the categories of fake news is that. There clearly are external actors, governments – apparently the Russian government, for example – who create disinformation, if you want to call it that, phony information. And they’ve been doing this for quite some time in other parts of the world. Most of what happened here in the United States during the election in terms of, quote, unquote, “fake news,” was very recognizable to those people, for example, who followed information campaigns in the Baltics or in the Ukraine that were propagated by the Russians. They’re very good at this.

And that’s – when I said earlier that there was a name for it, because it’s propaganda. When other governments in earlier eras did this it was called propaganda. And it really isn’t that different. And you’re right, their purpose is not making money. Their purpose is shifting politics. And I think the Russian goal in all of this is destabilizing Western democracy.

MR. SCHWARTZ: So is this something that the United States government and the media are going to have to work on together to understand better? I mean, the lines are truly blurred between what’s fake and what’s real.

MR. ORESKES: Right. And there’s some complicated issues here. There’s, you know, a Russian-supported television network, Russia – what used to be called Russia Today, what’s now just RT. And yet, how do we distinguish that from government-supported television networks, like the French or even in a sense the BBC, and even public media in the U.S., for that matter. Where are the lines here? And of course, also, the U.S. supported agencies that produced the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

And in my mind, they’re quite different. I mean, in my mind the people who create the Voice of America, for example, are authentic and credible people. And they, you know, try to represent the truth. And these other organizations are clearly trying to create a parallel view. And what’s a little scary is to hear the Trump people talk in the same way.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Let’s talk about NPR as an organization. Today’s NPR’s much more than radio broadcasting. It’s a media company that produces everything from podcasts to music videos.

MR. ORESKES: We’re not your grandma’s NPR anymore.

MR. SCHWARTZ: It’s amazing. And, you know, I’m a huge fan of “All Songs Considered” and “Tiny Desk Concerts” and things like that. How does NPR stay relevant and innovative and accessible in this modern digital landscape?

MR. ORESKES: Well, I’ll tell you a story, because I think it actually captures the thing. So I have two wonderful kids – Ben, who’s now 23, and Louisa, who’s 20. And Louisa is a wonderful young woman, but she’s never been all that interested in my career or what I was doing. We dragged her to a number of different corners of the world over her lifetime. But a couple of years ago I went to her and I said: So, Louisa, I’m thinking of taking a new job. And she said, oh, really, dad? What’s that going to be? And I said, well, I might be the head of news at NPR. And her eyes opened wide. And she got all excited. And she says, dad, that’s so cool. And I said, what? (Laughter.) My daughter has said many loving things, but she’s never actually called me cool. And then she went on and she said, dad, will you be in charge of “Tiny Desk Concerts”? Sure. She was 18 at the time.

The things we are doing to make sure that the work we do reaches a new generation of Americans is incredibly important. In fact, it’s to me, in a way, the most important thing we’re doing. And some of it is about the way we do it. So obviously we’re doing a lot of work in podcasting. We are doing a lot of work to reach people on mobile phones. We have a wonderful app called NPR One, which allows you to hear both news from NPR, national and international news, and news from your community, from your local public radio station. And you can get it on your phone, so you don’t have to own a radio, if you don’t care to. And many younger people don’t own radios, but they still have an easy to get audio. So we’re doing a lot of that kind of thing.

And another thing, which I think has been very important, is NPR’s place in the music world. We think that is very important in reaching younger people. And we hope that some of them will also come, in the same way that I and maybe you two as well, came to news possibly through the sports pages. That was what a lot of guys did. We think there are a lot of people, young men and women, who come to us first off through music and then think, oh, NPR also does news. Well, maybe I’ll listen to that.

MR. SCHWARTZ: I mean, having an NPR t-shirt or NPR shocks, which I’m really –

MR. ORESKES: Yes, I wore those intentionally today, particularly for the podcast.

MR. SCHWARTZ: I love your NPR socks, and I want to figure out how to get a pair of those, but –

MR. ORESKES: I can arrange that.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Excellent. Excellent. Wearing an NPR t-shirt these days, it’s the hipster t-shirt. It’s one of the hipster t-shirts. Do you think part of that comes from, you know, innovations like podcasting?

MR. ORESKES: I think so. I think so. We are the biggest producer of podcasts in the world, I believe. Certainly in the United States, and I think that makes us the biggest in the world.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Yes.

MR. ORESKES: And, you know, some of our podcasts reach people, you know, much younger than the people listening on the radio. Some are a little more like the radio audiences. But by creating these other ways of reaching people, in the way that they want to get their information. I mean, Bob, going back to the question you asked before, I think one of the biggest changes is that we used to reach people the way we, the media companies, wanted to reach them. We printed a newspaper. We organized a broadcast. Well, we still do those things. And that is still – you know, I still like reading a printed newspaper, I confess. But we can’t survive just doing that. We have to be where they are. And that means doing things in different ways.

And so podcasting is clearly one of those. Streaming audio I think will become a more and more important conversation. I actually think – and you could have a whole podcast just on this subject – but I think that the thing we call a podcast and the thing we call streaming audio are actually going to become more and more like each other. And ultimately there’ll be a thing you can go to that will basically just give you a menu of things to get. And some of them will more like what you used to get on the radio. And some of them will be more like what we now call podcasts. But it’ll all be in one place on your phone. And we’re all going to get more and more used to that.

MR. SCHIEFFER: What I find interesting about all this is how listening habits are changing, just like our reading habits are changing.

MR. ORESKES: Absolutely.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Like you, I still – my morning wouldn’t be off to a good start if I didn’t have a paper newspaper that I could look through. It’s generational, to be sure. But you know, when we started these podcasts, I was under the impression – and still operating under rules that people said to me – if you’re going to do something on the web, it’s got to be short because people are not going to listen for very long. Now they’re telling us, people want long. They want 30 minutes. They want something workout-length, which is what we try to aim these podcasts for. Why do you suppose that is?

MR. ORESKES: (Laughs.) I think the truth is that it’s all true. That is, there are people who want – it depends when in the day it is. It depends who you’re talking about. It depends what their lifestyle is. You know, one of the things that we love about this NPR One app is it actually gives us information about how people listen. And we’ve found that at different times of day, the listening is different. And it’s actually common sense but you can actually see it in data now.

In the morning, people tend to want more updates on what’s happening. Is the world still there? What’s going on today? So we tend to see them listening to shorter, more newsy things in the morning. But by afternoon, a lot of people are starting to listen to longer things. So maybe they’re finally heading to the gym, or they’re driving in their car. I mean, listening in this country still is heavily related to driving. There’s still a lot of listening in cars, but not all of it is a radio anymore. Some of it is plugging your phone into the car speakers.

So those habits – and I think one of the things that’s happened is that people are so busy now. There’s so much less just leisure time. Sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper open in front of you is a super-luxury these days. And we all know that. And I think fitting what we do, the journalism we do, into the moments and cracks and crevices in people’s lives, so they can still hear us and read us and know what we’re doing, is very important.

And it’s true, though. For those people who are ready to listen to a 30-minute podcast, you know, we did a podcast during the election about politics. And we reached a lot of people with political news that way. But other people wanted to hear “All Things Considered,” in the afternoon. I think the real challenge is we used to be in a world where we really basically could make one great version of what we did, you know? The CBS Evening News. And you could watch it and millions of people would tune in, and that could be the perfected version of what you’d do, or the front page of The New York Times. And now there is no one version of you anymore. There’s 50 versions and you have to make them all good. And it’s harder and it means more different ways of doing things. But in the end we can still reach the same number of people, we just have to be willing to go find them.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Let me shift back just a little bit to some of the new rules here and some of the new challenges we’re facing. President Trump had the congressional leaders over to the White House, first meeting over there. And amongst other things he apparently, according to the people who were there, was bragging about how we won and claimed, once again, that 3 to 5 million unauthorized immigrants voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton, an assertion that has been fact checked by numerous people. No one can find any evidence to support that.

But here was the interesting thing to me. When I looked at my – at my phone this morning, the headline that The New York Times put on that was: Trump repeats lie about popular vote in meeting with lawmakers. This is twice now. I know once in the paper newspaper they have actually used the word “lie” to describe one of his statements. A lot of people in journalism are debating on this. When do we call something a lie? When do we call it a falsehood? How do we handle that? What are your people – what are you telling them?

MR. ORESKES: Well, as you know, it’s been a – there’s a big argument going on these days. And I have two thoughts about this. The first is, to remember that this is – it’s not that this is not an important discussion, but it’s less important than the fundamental issue, which is do we have the reporting strength and skill to find out what the truth is, right? So that’s our first job, get the facts. So the first task of journalism in this situation is to establish that, no, there are not 3 to 5 million illegals who voted in these elections.

And we should never forget that role, because that’s the role that we singularly are capable of doing and must continue to be able to do, because otherwise there’s no way to know what’s true or false, because you’d be completely dependent on government information. Where else would one get that, except for – at least in this case, the governments would be 50 states, not the federal government. But nevertheless.

So I don’t want to lose the focus on the reporting, the importance of reporting, because especially in an age when so many journalists have lost their jobs, when so many newspapers in particular, but television as well, has cut back on its staff, it’s important that we focus on continuing to maintain that strength of journalism.

Having said that, I think there is a disagreement in journalism about – so we have no question among us, I think, that it is untrue to say that 3 to 5 million false votes were cast, illegal votes were cast, however you want to word it. I’ve told our people to avoid the word lie. We haven’t banned it. There may come a moment when it would be appropriate. But I think in most situations, including this current one you cited, Bob, I think it distracts, actually. It gets between the audience and the fact.

The fact is this statement is false. I don’t know why Trump keeps making it. I have to assume he knows that he’s doing it, but I don’t actually know that. But in the end, what matters is that the audience can make up its own mind about his motives and whether he’s right or wrong to do it. Our job is to give them this information and to make sure they receive it. And I worry most about the fact that if we start with the word “lie,” those people who don’t believe us to begin with just tune out. They just stop.

MR. SCHIEFFER: They won’t read this?

MR. ORESKES: They won’t even read it. So I’d rather reach some more people with a slightly more temperate tone and the facts as they’re established. And I don’t – I think if you look at the difference between, say, a New York Times story with the word “lie” in the headline and a Wall Street Journal with the same set of facts, you can debate whether you should put lie in the headline – and it’s a fair debate. And I’m – I have enough trouble with running NPR, I’m not going to try to run The New York Times too. But you know, the real issue is, have we got the facts out there so everybody can know them?

MR. SCHIEFFER: There’s another kind of sub-issue under this. And Trump supporters, before the election and after the election, said to me: We don’t always take him literally. And I think the press was accused of not taking him seriously, but always taking him literally. If he said something, we printed it. But now I’m wondering, after hearing Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski and other people who said, you know, you took him literally too much – how do we structure our stories now? Do we say: President Trump said X, Y, and Z, and then in the second graph we put a parentheses, but I don’t think he really meant it that way?

MR. ORESKES: (Laughs.)

MR. SCHWARTZ: Can you imagine what the White House stenographer is going to be doing? I mean, his presidential papers are going to be annotated. He didn’t mean that. He said that, but he didn’t mean that. I mean, it’s just –

MR. SCHIEFFER: But I still wonder. When we’re reporting the story, how do we handle that?

MR. SCHWARTZ: I do think there’ll be a number of situations where the context of his art of the deal is going to become very relevant. I mean, clearly some of these things that he says are negotiations, certainly in the trade area. On the other hand, in some situations we can’t tell. You know, we don’t know what he means. And we just have to, you know, report out what he says, say whether it’s false or not false, and offer whatever context.

You know, there’s a wonderful scene in the movie “Patton” which, as you know, General Patton is one of Trump’s heroes, and I have to assume he’s seen this movie. There’s a wonderful scene where Patton is talking to his leadership team. And he’s not talking. He’s yelling. And he’s hollering at them. And he’s scaring them. And as he walks away from the group, his adjutant whispers in his ear: General, you know, they can’t tell if you’re serious or not. And Patton looks back at him and says: It’s not important whether they know. It’s only important whether I know. And I see that some of the time in that. I really do.

MR. SCHWARTZ: That’s absolutely fascinating. I mean, but so how does the media – how do you tell your reporters or how do you equip them to cover this?

MR. ORESKES: Well, we’re, first of all, stressing the reporting. It’s very important to be accurate and deeply reported. Let’s find out what happened. You know, we created a set of B-teams on the themes that are likely to be major issues in this administration – obviously health care, trade, you know, some other obvious ones. And the reason we did that was so that we would have immediate access to our best experts on these subjects because it’s – you know, Bob, you know what covering the White House is like. You need to be an instant expert on 50 topics. And nobody can ever really know enough to be that expert on any topic at a given moment.

So we want to be able to very swiftly turn the coverage over to someone who really knows the foundational facts of a situation, so that our White House people are a little freer, they can cover Trump the man, they can cover Trump and the politics with Congress, which will be fascinating. But the substantive work we want to get into the hands of experts as quickly as we can, because I think that’s going to be very important here.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Do you think it matters if the Trump people should decide to remove the reporters from the White House grounds? I mean, there’s some talk about moving the briefings to a larger auditorium in the old executive office building. I mean, that’s been done many times in the past, when I was covering President Carter, President Ford, if you had, you know, a big, important issue there they’d move it over because they’d have a lot of people. But the idea of stopping this tradition that I think started back with McKinley, maybe, of having reporters’ workspace within the White House, does it really matter?

MR. ORESKES: Well, I think it would be a terrible message. And I don’t think they should do it. And as far as I can tell from the most recent things that Sean Spicer said, that’s not their plan. But I think in your question is sort of another point, which is we get – whatever we get at the White House briefings, whatever we get by being in the building, is only part of our job. You know, if he threw us out completely I guess it would liberate us from even worrying about that part of the job.

But it’s up to us – and a lot of this falls to the organization, not to any one individual reporter, but even each individual reporter it’s very important that your sources not only be at the White House. I mean, most good White House reporters have a lot of good sources in Congress. They have sources at agencies. They know –

MR. SCHIEFFER: Sure.

MR. ORESKES: So it is important not to get locked into the – and this was always true. This isn’t new to Trump. But I think it may be a little more pronounced with this administration. So I don’t think they should throw the press out. I think that would – that would really be an unfortunate symbol of something. But in the end, if they did, it wouldn’t change our job. We would still have to cover it.

MR. SCHIEFFER: You know, I agree with you completely. If they think that moving the reporters out of the White House is going to reduce the intensity that journalism is going to focus on this presidency, that just simply isn’t going to happen. And I would just add this: Bob Woodward, the famous Watergate reporter, pointed out to me the other day that through the entire Watergate story neither he nor Carl Bernstein attended one single White House briefing. The Post had a White House correspondent, Carroll Kilpatrick. But neither of the two lead reporters on that story that brought down the Nixon presidency ever set foot in the White House Briefing Room. So it’s not going to make any difference where the reporters are. They’ll find a way to cover this story.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Well, now you can visit the White House press room by Skype.

MR. ORESKES: Sure. I actually thought that was interesting.

MR. SCHWARTZ: It was very interesting.

MR. ORESKES: Why not? Why not have reporters from other places Skype in like that?

MR. SCHWARTZ: It’s an innovation.

MR. ORESKES: I think it’s fine. I think it’s great.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Back to innovation for a second, on – you know, from NPR, you mentioned segmenting into – expertise into issues, you know, TPP for trade or Obamacare, health care, what’s going to happen. Is this why you’ve made such big bets on podcasts, because they go longer and into more depth?

MR. ORESKES: It’s part of it. They are a wonderful way to get a deeper discussion. Obviously the other reason is because there’s a whole new generation that’s consuming their news in this new form. So it’s both. I mean, it is a – it’s a way to reach people and it’s a way to deliver longer-form journalism. So we like it for both reasons. And one thing that’s really been terrific about podcasting is it’s really a very new medium. I mean, it’s like television in the late ’40s and early ’50s.

And we don’t even know yet what the potential things to invent around it are. And we have podcasts that are, you know, an individual deeply reporting something. Kelly McEvers, who does her podcast Embedded, which is, you know, intense investigative-style reporting. And then we have podcasts where three or four of us sit around, much like this, and hopefully we’re smart enough to say interesting things and deliver interesting information. But they’re really completely different kinds of journalism, all produced under the name podcast.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Well, you know, it is a new medium. And how had NPR decided what makes for a good podcast?

MR. ORESKES: Well, frankly, trial and error. We try things. And we see what works. Interesting anecdote, for those who like this kind of stuff, you know, the politics podcast we began, you know, early in the campaign season, during the primary season. And we actually tested it out by putting on NPR One.

And the first couple, frankly, weren’t all that great. And people didn’t like it all that much. And they kind of listened to the first few minutes of it and they sort of tuned out. And so we tinkered and changed and we made it, I think, more engaging at the beginning, we kind of headlined – some of these are such obvious, old-school lessons. But you know, we gave a better sense of what was coming up in the podcast. You know, basic things that, quite frankly, television and radio have known for years, but you have to learn it. So we see what works with people.

And we – you know, sometimes it’s about how you message that the podcast exists. You know, one of the big things that’s changed in media is that we really have to reach out to the audience and say: Hey, we’re here. It’s not like the old days, where the paper was on the newsstand or the broadcast was on at 6:30 and you knew where to go. It’s the opposite now. We have to go out and find audience and bring them to us. And you use Twitter and you use Facebook and you can use other kinds of marketing. So there’s that whole element of this, which has become much more intense.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Michael Oreskes, the top man at NPR. Want to wish you the best of luck.

MR. ORESKES: Thank you, Bob.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Thank you for coming here. It’s going to be an interesting one, we know that for sure.

MR. ORESKES: Amen to that.

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

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)