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 The Washington Post 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 Twitter 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 Boston. 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.