Latest / Journalism 2050 / Jay Rosen: Where the Digital Revolution Went Wrong—and How Journalists Can Fight Back

Transcript

Jay Rosen: Where the Digital Revolution Went Wrong—and How Journalists Can Fight Back · Journalism 2050

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: Hello and welcome to Journalism 2050, the podcast about the next 25 years of journalism, and also about the last 25 years of journalism and how we got here.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Emily Bell, and my co-host is Heather Chaplin.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_03: This week we're going to look at the past of the future of news, and we're delighted to be joined by our friend and inspiration co-collaborator in some instances, Professor Jay Rosen.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: Jay is one of, I think, the voices defining the progress of journalism over the past 25-30 years.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_03: He's well known as the author of What Are Journalists For, 1999.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: And the people formerly known as the audience in 2006, also longtime professor at NYU, started Studio 20, which was a great program where students would figure out new models and ways of being as they might conceive and carry out the future of journalism themselves.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: Jay, great to see you and have you here.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for inviting me.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's a delight to be with you, especially with this riveting subject.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Jay, Emily and I were having a bit of a laugh, you might say, about the whole concept of how there was this future of journalism, like cottage industry, like a circuit you could get on to be like, hey, I have big ideas about how we can turn this ship around.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe, maybe a foundation will buy me a nice dinner if I if I do really well.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I have very definite memories of like coming into this as a not to rub in the age difference, but as a slightly younger member of this cottage industry and meeting both of you.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought it would be funny or interesting or uh entertaining to hear from you guys what your four sort of first memories of participating in this slightly absurd thing.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: I very much remember coming in for the first time in, I think it was 2012.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: So this whole thing had been going for a while.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And to tell you the truth, I hadn't been particularly interested.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mostly would hear about it from uh Oliver, who's now my husband, who was very interested.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And he'd be like, oh, there's this guy Jay Rosen, and he says this on Twitter, and oh, I remember Emily Bell from The Guardian, and he says this.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you got invited to Newsgeist, you should, you know, try to talk to this person and this person.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mostly remember, I've told Emily this, is showing up at Newsgeist, definitely being scared and intimidated because I was like, I don't really know what's going on here.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: But my first thought was why is Google sponsoring this?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Why are all of these future journalism people being brought together to talk about saving the free press, which, from my understanding, is this integral part of how a you know democracy works, and it's being sponsored by one of the companies that's dismantling it.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember kind of very hesitantly raising this with people and getting very blank stares until I met this German guy, and he was like, Oh yeah, I don't understand it either.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then feeling a little bit, a little bit better.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: I I think that that was actually a pivotal moment, Jay, because you had really been thinking about or my background was as reporting on cable companies and media companies.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: So, in a way, I had to actually do as my day job when I was a reporter at The Observer back in the UK, a kind of what is going on in the industry.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: And then I ended up running the digital uh outlet at the kind of developments at the Guardian for about 10 years, which is a very exciting time, where we got to implement some of the crazy ideas uh that were, but I also remember looking almost exclusively at the United States as the kind of beacon of progress.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's where I came across your work definitely first, our mutual friend Jeff Jarvis, uh various other people who wrote and talked about this.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_03: So when you were writing what are journalists for, what were you thinking at the time?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that was sort of like a completely a print portrait of journalism.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: So the last bit in the book says, Well, I've told you about the history of the idea of an informed public, but it kind of looks like it's gonna get completely upset by this new thing, the internet, which is really hard for me to understand at the moment, but you know, look out for it.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't have enough time or actually enough knowledge to alter what I was doing for this new train which was uh coming down the track.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: So the last uh chapter of the book is well, we'll see.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: There's this other thing, and it might change the picture entirely.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: What strikes me now is for a very long time, it's I would say it's between 1910s to the 1990s, American journalism worked with essentially the same model for 90 years, which is get the news, get the advertisers, make some money, cause a ruckus, have fun.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't until the internet that things started to change in a radical way.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: And for me, this begins with the humble figure of the blog.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because the blog gives everyone a printing press in a way, and that truly is different.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: So at The Guardian, I remember the blog, and also we we we did these quaint things in 2000, 1999.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: I think the first one called Newsletters that we put out.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know what happened to those things.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and the blog was the thing which I think really animated journalists who were in legacy media organizations to think wait a minute, there's this two-way uh possibility, and also there's a kind of a dynamic updating possibility here.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I think we just saw it as this incredible moment.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_03: Well, those of us who are excited about it saw it as an incredible opportunity for the reform of journalism.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I remember also it was in in other fields as well, this idea that the sort of mass democratization was going to take place.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And looking back, when I hear myself saying that, or I get a glimmer of what it felt like to be in that moment, it makes me feel really sad right now.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was wondering, Jay, can you talk a little bit about what do you feel?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: A deep sense of sadness in a lot of ways, the feeling that the world is coming apart, urgent need to redraw our picture of how things work, and a lot of pessimism about the future, not just the future of journalism, obviously, but the future of democracy and particular American democracy, which is the most important one to me.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, there's another reaction I have, and that is my whole career has been about a single idea, which is journalism is improved when people outside the newsroom participate in it, and that with all of its problems is coming true.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's why we have to draw our attention as we discuss this subject to these moments when things repeat themselves but on a higher plane.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think it's really interesting to describe some of them.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like 1999 is when the first blogging software comes on the market.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um and now, many decades later, it seems like we have uh Substack, which is basically blogging with more tech, with more flexibility, more linkage to revenue.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: There's some kind of cycle there, but we shouldn't get caught in it in assuming that it comes right back to where it was.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's almost hard today to convey to somebody who wasn't there the enthusiasm, the optimism, the sense that the world was go was genuinely going to be more interconnected and a free flow of ideas and more people getting to participate.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna jump the gun a little bit and ask, looking back, and this is for both of you, Emily and Jay, like going from that moment of like, oh my God, the blog, democratization of the flow of information to 2025, are there a few things that you can look back on and say, this is where things started to not pan out the way we thought it was gonna pan out?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Are there forks in the road that looking back you realize we took the wrong road?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm I'm gonna start with two.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: So in I think 2006 or 2007, I went with some Guardian colleagues to a meeting of execs uh and funders who had all been to the Saeed Business School in Oxford, and they used to run this little conference called Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, and we had been given a kind of a private round table with them, and there were a couple of really big investors there.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_03: A couple of them are now billionaires whose names you'll see all the time, and several of them had been in Google in the early stages, one of them was an early seed funder into Facebook.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: There was a point at which one of the investors in Google said, Here's the thing.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: You people, referring to us the Guardian journalists, you have screwed your business model because we have understood what connects advertisers to the audience much better than you have.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: And now we're doing it, and that's it for you guys.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_03: And it was a bit of a sobering moment when we got out of the room.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: One of my colleagues turned to me and said, Yeah, this is all very well, but they're really not in the same business as us.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that I had a kind of a almost pit drop moment in my stomach because I was like, they're not, but yet they absolutely 100% are.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that a lot of my work and approach then was really thinking we are trapped in a business model created by non-journalistic entities who don't really respect what we do, and they don't really value it in the same way.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: We we thought that we were somehow equal partners in this, and now we're absolutely not.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that happened to me in about sort of 2007, 2008, and that's when I went from being somebody who was absolutely delighted to see all of the engineers at Google who used to come and tell us how to optimize our pages, and all of the people from Facebook.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, I don't think that this is a good force that's going to be applied to it.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: So that's one.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_03: And then the second one is uh June 2007, so it's about the same time where you had on the same day, and I turned this up doing some book research recently, on the same day you had the launch, the product launch of the iPhone, and you also had the sort of the triple threat statement put out by three federal agencies dealing with the economy in the states saying the subprime mortgage market to us is a five-alarm fire.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: And what was interesting with hindsight, obviously I didn't know at the time, about that moment was that you had one part of society absolutely eating up and transformed by a$500 handset, and another part of society losing their homes.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, in the cycle of the Great Recession, um, you had an industry that emerged much stronger, which was you know, the apples or the googles, the Facebooks of this world, and and a set of people who emerged financially ruined and very much in the in the box.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: So they might they're they're not neither of them very upbeat.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: Those are those are my two moments that I remember from around then.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_03: Jay.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: Mine is from the same period, is 2006, I think.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: At first I was aglow with coming true of a dream that I had, which was that publics could participate with journalists and get a stronger crop.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I was also struck by how the internet was erasing something about mass communication, and that was how TV especially left everybody in their living rooms watching the same thing, but isolated from one another.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: So they were vertically connected to power, to the NFL, to elected leaders, right, to big brands, but disconnected horizontally from each other.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, one could see that for after that long interval where the masses were considered sort of objects of politics, could now participate in a real way because they had their own printing press and derivatives thereof.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: And that's great, right?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I spent a few years thinking how good that is and participating in it myself.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like I wanted to understand it.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's why I started to blog because I didn't want to talk about it from the sidelines.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: That didn't fit with where we were at that time.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember thinking in 2006, uh, uh-oh, I think I overlooked something.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: And that is that this that this horizontal effect was real and it could lead to like really interesting and important work and change journalism.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: But people with ill intent also now find it easier to get in touch with one another, and the horizontal effect works for them as well.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and it's interesting because isn't this go back to like what Plato was worried about?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, didn't he worry about that if you have these open systems that a democracy requires, some asshole is gonna come along and take advantage of it?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't think that was quite his term exactly, but you know, the tyrant that that bad actors would come in and take advantage.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe the question then is it's a paradox that we want to live in the kind of the kind of society that has these open systems, yet can a system be built that is resilient enough to thwart the attempts of bad actors to exploit them?
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I think this is something we have learned is should be centered place.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's my favorite analogy, which is that of Gresham's Law, which is an old law quoted by economists which goes back to uh the days of silver coinage.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: And Gresham's law says that uh over time in an unregulated market, bad money drives out good.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: And it was really about how if you didn't weigh and measure your coins, people would start putting nickel into them, and then over time they would just be nickel coins, they would not be silver coins.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: And that always strikes me as we're in a speech market.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, this communication that Jay and I and you, Heather, were all very excited about actually was highly monetizable in ways that we hadn't really thought about because you needed surveillance technology attached to our faces the whole time or in our pockets uh for that really to come true.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: And then if you don't have a regulate, if you don't have regulation, you don't have robustness, then bad actors, the grifters, the people with kind of crappy supplements to sell, they're always gonna win over the people who have to take more time, spend more money, have more resources.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: You know, what about you, Heather?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_03: We haven't heard about your your wake-up moments.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_03: Sounds like you arrived thinking this is all a very bad idea.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say, in some ways, my wake-up moment was like my fourth birthday.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I I've always been very pessimistic.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: I was raised in part by Holocaust survivors and in part by communists.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm I'm not I'm neither.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: I neither escaped the Holocaust nor am I a communist, but I only came to articulate it more recently.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I I really believe that like this the central problem facing humanity is there are 99% of us just want to live our lives.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: And there's 1% who want to dominate and control everybody else.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: And by default, that kind of person is gonna be the one who takes power and then builds the world in his own image.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it is usually a him.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like quite a masculine form of being.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's always something I'm thinking about.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, how do you manage that?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it feels to me that the world not perfectly, but had been basically moving in a pendulum swing away from that 1% or that 0.009% having power and beginning to share and give other people opportunities, and that we're in the middle of a vast pendulum swing back.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of now to be more specific, um I was covering the video game industry in the 2000s when you guys were doing the stuff you were talking about.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a moment I always think about, even though I wasn't, future of journalism was not on my radar.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas I was, I was writing a book and I was covering e-athletes, you know, guys who would play, I can't even remember what the game was now.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it was these first-person shooter military games, and it was like walking into a culture that I had never experienced before and and learning their language.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember the two highest forms of praise were to have owned somebody and to have raped somebody.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: That meant you had just got them.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I find myself coming back to that moment in this basement of a Hyatt in like Dallas, Texas, during these other conversations because it seems to imbue the spirit that we're talking about.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it also was LOL and uh what was it, away from keyboard, a double.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I remember going on national public radio and explaining what these acronyms meant.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that that culture was going to take over the whole culture as well as journalism.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I do think, Heather, that this is something where Jay and I were thinking about blogs as a subversive form of journalism, and there was a lot of debate, particularly in America, actually, about are bloggers journalists?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_03: Can they ever be journalists?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, there was a parallel culture that you were engaged in, which was producing the Gamergate um controversy.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_03: Can you can you explain for younger listeners, Heather, what Gamergate?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: Because again, I just feel like we're now 15 plus years on from Gamergate, so there'll be a lot of people who don't remember it, and yet it seems to be the origin story of, as you say, a culture that was going to dominate the communications industry and politics that was growing in a way that most journalists were completely unaware of.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I can explain Gamergate, except in the broadest brush strokes of that it was the geyser of that uh personality bursting forth into the rest of ours consciousness.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Jay, I actually just reread your piece on it, which I thought was very good, about how at first it was branded in a way as it's about ethics and games journalism, but that really it was kind of a front for just a culture that wants to own and rape, to to to not to put too fine a point on it.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so it's essentially it was the bullying, essentially it was the bullying of female journalists.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: I I was out by that point, and I actually didn't follow it very closely because it made me nauseous, but I definitely remember like I writing a story about game or culture for details or something back in the day, and this very high-level game designer, you know, with the six Porsches and millions of dollars that I was going around with, he was introducing me to everybody as a prostitute working the party.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he thought that was a joke.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, dude, I'm a reporter.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how stupid can you be?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, it's not even like I'm not even that you think it's funny, but you think it's that the rest of the world will think it's funny.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: But on hindsight, the joke's on me because the rest of the world does think it's funny.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: It was definitely a moment um that started me to think that we have to rethink some of what we've said from.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: 1999 to 2006.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let me let me back up for a second.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: I used to have a little uh uh a sentence near my desk that was uh expressing what I'm about as a writer in collar, and it was from Raymond Williams where he says, There are no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses, which to me was like a motto to live up to.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I didn't realize that seeing people as masses goes away and then it comes back, and it goes away and it comes back, and you you never get rid of it, no matter how enlightened your intellectual class is.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: And now it seems like it's completely won in a way.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and people are for profit and for power are seen as masses and they act as masses, and uh they are construed as that by people in power.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and journalism at its highest interrupts that process, and therefore its mission is not seeing people as masses, but as publics, which sounds good, but it's a lot harder.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: We know now a lot harder than we thought it was.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: When you look at people as masses, you're interested in them only in their connection to others.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: Crowds is a big part of it.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: People who are seen that way are being treated by formulas, the way that the internet now discovers things and controls things by realizing what the masses uh are clicking on.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, that's what I mean by coming back.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: It comes back in into a world changed by the technology that is going to re-release masses again.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and then what what once you see highly educated people talking to each other about masses, you know you're in trouble.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: They're cooking up a way to see people as masses.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: As you were talking, Jay, I was actually thinking about AI, which is something that I have to think about all the time now.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that idea of a mass aggregation of knowledge into a piece of synthetic media, which may or may not be true, which then becomes the default option for everybody who has asked Google a certain question, or everybody who sees a particular type of video.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: And again, just the fact that it's a technology which is changing and challenging journalism right now, uh, and it's but but its power lies in that aggregation of the whole of human knowledge and individualism and the ironing out of any kind of nuance or difference, and the representing it as something which only really works when it becomes I hate the word viral, but when it becomes something that you know everybody is is is looking for, that one and it, you know, and it's been designed this way, it's been released this way, it's not something that there's you know, it feels as though we've we've actually kind of come to the point where there's a flattening of creativity rather than uh uh a burst of creativity.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: The visual language of it is very similar and it's dictated by the platforms.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_03: The answers that it renders are uniform and close the semantic gap.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: And again, I don't want to be too pessimistic because I'm sure there are well, there are a million uses for AI, but your point, I think, Jay, is so well made.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: We think about these things as individual empowerment, but the path has been to this incredible concentration, not just of power, but of knowledge and perception and creativity, which means that individuals have to really work against that system in some way, which is something which I think, you know, in journalism and teaching journalism, we're at a really interesting point.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: Because I think we can inspire students and we can have people out there doing really great work.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_03: But the idea that it will be part of a mass system, that to me feels very difficult to imagine how that's going to work in the next five to ten years.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know what you both think about that.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm piss I'm pessimistic, uh, maybe because I'm coming to the end of my own career.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: When I hear people talking about AI, I just I find myself these days wanting to say, what are we talking about?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't mean to always pull back or or evade.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: I just I honestly feel like I don't know what we're talking about.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what do we mean?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like honestly, Emily, what when you talk about A, do you talk about this most recent machine learning, uh the jobs getting taken?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Are we talking about all artificial intelligence?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what's what's the thing that we're talking about?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I was thinking really about LLM's large language models because they are the manifestation of it, which I guess has shown to the public and to our profession, every other profession, what kind of leaps of simulation and synthesis can be made.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_03: So when you say AI now, most people think about Chat GPT or Claude.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: If you talk to my colleagues in computer science, they would say AI is a branding term, it's a marketing term, everything is really um, it's really just machine learning and data and compute, and you put those together at scale and then you get this thing called artificial intelligence.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so but but again, a bit like fake news, which is a term we're all told not to use, AI is a useful, it it's a shorthand now being used by everybody.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_03: So it brings people into the conversation that would probably not be in the conversation if you were just talking about machine learning and data sets and compute.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's something that people understand, does something for them.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_03: I always think about uh computer science as being, in some ways, a very creative industry, uh, but also it has um a real narrowness of how it views things, which uh I think you know the rest of the world brings more to that conversation about humanity.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_03: And so I, you know, I I kind of feel frustrated that there are a handful of companies that dictate the language and the deployment and the understanding of all of this.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's a reflection of the fact that journalism used to be a lens through which we viewed all of this, and it's not that lens any longer.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_03: And for for for for for for a while we thought that lens would be much broader and that we would be looking at information and society through many people's views.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: This is sort of Jay's optimistic Jay in 2006.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_03: And now I'm like, we're not only we're not looking at it through that lens, but we're having it imposed on us by a mixture of the American government, the Chinese government, and four companies.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_03: Not ideal.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I and so I shared some of Jay's pessimism, but I also saw Anna Applebaum talking only yesterday, actually saying uh she's the uh writer who uh is so good on authoritarianism and her work, particularly recently on what's happening with Russia and uh looking at Poland and Ukraine.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_03: Anne Applebaum was saying pessimism is just something, uh it's something we've heard before, which is a luxury that we can't afford.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_03: Pessimism is is is a luxury good.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_03: Because if you're just going there's nothing we can do, that's not good enough.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: And and that actually wants to bring me back to something we sort of started before that, okay, so we're with Jay, it's it's 2000, he's starting to blog, the future looks bright.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: What happened between then and now?
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Was Jay just a hopelessly naive guy roaming the streets, or was were did things happen that we couldn't have foreseen, should we have foreseen?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: What happened?
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm saying this because moving forward, we need to understand our mistakes so that we don't remake them.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: What are the three things that happened between 2000 and 2025 that had we handled them differently, we might be in a different place?
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'll give you one of them.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um I consider 1995 to be the beginning of this uh question you're asking.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: 94, 95, maybe 96, when all the major news providers started to have just digital editions.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: Almost all of them, if not all of them, proceeded in the same way, which is reuse of the work that they had already published through print media.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: Take that, put it online, give it a headline, now you've got a digital product.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: And that was a mistake in one sense, it was totally understandable.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: In another, you've already paid all the cost for this content, now you have a new place you could post it, maybe you could get a little debt uh ad revenue that's like icing on the cake.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: It makes sense, right?
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: But in doing that, um, the major news organizations did not as a whole ask themselves a critical question, which is how is this going to change my work?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: And what becomes possible in journalism that was never possible before?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: And how do we change the product we're giving people to match the opportunity that the rep internet represents?
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: Instead of reflection on that, journalists and news companies allow themselves to get sucked into a surprising world where right off the bat they had huge audiences.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: The New York Times went from uh hundreds of thousands to way beyond that, that like doubled, tripled their market.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: And for a while, what they thought is this is great.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: We had bigger audiences, we can charge more for our advertising, and if we just start shifting our content to the web, we'll have a bright future.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then then none of that actually happened that way because they didn't realize that the revenue model was gonna fall and split underneath them, and that first cluster of years, uh from 1995 to like around 2003, that's where they stepped into that problem.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I would say uh defensively tooting one's own horn that actually The Guardian did not go down that path, but that's why we went from being the seventh largest newspaper in the UK to being one of the larger and more influential English language news publishers.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_03: And that's because we said, well, we can't just repurpose it.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_03: But that was not my brilliance, that was the brilliance of a lot of the technology strategists who worked at The Guardian at the time.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that they kept pushing and saying this is a completely different form, and we have to be of the web, not just on the web.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: That was kind of our mantra of the web.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_03: And and again, you know, but there was a lot of naivety, I think, baked into that.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: And I and and we made money.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, there's always strange accounting in news companies, but we certainly saw higher revenues in 2005-2006, and then they and then they started to curl over a little bit.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_03: That's when the Google executive in the boardroom in Oxford going, you people have fundamentally misunderstood what this model is about, really hit home.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry, you essentially saying it was a failure of imagination was the first big mistake.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because I mostly remember getting, I was gonna say getting yelled at, but that might be a little bit hyperbolic, but being met with very heated resistance to use of the word product, because I only came in in 2013, but that was kind of my whole shtick, is like we need to be developing products that people who understand news as something they get from the web that they will want to consume.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm I'm sympathetic to those guys' hostility because product is business speak, but they also were wrong.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that is true.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: The number of defensive replies uh were a big part of my blogging in the in that interval of uh 99 to 2006 or so.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: You had the the uh you can do a really amusing history there of the curmudgeon, the newsroom curmudgeon, is a figure that appears in newsroom after newsroom.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's the impulse to dismiss all these new things that are happening as completely unimportant because the world is fill of people who hype what they're doing, and most of it doesn't matter.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I've seen everything, like this idea that we've seen everything, that whole culture, and it is a culture, it spans different newsrooms, was a product of the stability of the environment for publishing news, as I said earlier today, over almost 90 years, right?
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's the only way you could have this confidence that every new thing that came on was not going to amount to anything really, because the world is sort of the same every and we do our work and it's the same.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh uh and so a succession of terms and dismissals, like citizen journalism, ha ha, we don't have citizen dentistry, and it's a for good reason, right?
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: These are the kinds of things I was writing about in those years, trying to say to people, look, that's really stupid.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like you that, you know, just your blanket statements are are hurting you.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, let's calm it down a little bit.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but eventually the you we don't talk about those guys anymore because they're all gone from the newsroom.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_03: So but so Jay, you said there was a second um part to this.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_03: So you said the first part in terms of that change or that that turning.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I I covered regulation uh as a journalist in the 90s in the 90s and became very interested in you know broadcast regulation and actually sort of technological regulation, you know, handing out of licenses to people who would dig up the roads and put in fiber cable.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_03: And then we had, in you know, obviously, I was not aware of it at the time, but you had uh the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and 23 Words That Changed the Internet, which basically gave broad uh liability um protection to anyone who's running a platform.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, we can dip right back into Reagan era getting rid of the fairness doctrine, which I know is your big thing, Heather.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: And there has to be an accountability, and this is not just of one political stripe, it is right the way across the board of saying, you know, these uh this moment deserves no regulation.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_03: These people are the smartest people in the world.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_03: We want these companies that can do no wrong because they're giving connectivity to everybody to essentially be allowed to grow in a way that um we've never had communications technologies grow before, right?
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_03: Because there's always been a moment whether it was after the radio hams in the early 20th century, you then had the BBC, which is we're not gonna have that anymore, we're gonna license anyone who touches the spectrum, has to have a license.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_03: You had that.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_03: Then you had broadcasts come in, and it was like even more regulation.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_03: It was like you can't operate something that goes into somebody's home without actually being licensed.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_03: And then it was like, well, this is everywhere, it's the ether.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: There doesn't, there needs to be no, these are just carriage companies.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_03: And so to me, there was also just a catastrophic failure of imagination, or possibly just a willful ignorance of governments and regulators saying, you know, we don't really need to touch this stuff.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: Also, they were lot, I mean, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, like Rupert Murdoch was lobbying very hard.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to own TV stations and newspapers, and that was Clinton, and Obama kept the deregulation going.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it's interesting because those are things that happened before this period that I we set up for Jay, the 1999 to 2025.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: So are we saying that the seeds to our destruction were already in place and it was inevitable?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or did more things happen in the last 25 years where we could have perhaps halted?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_03: We could have done more regulation earlier, I guess.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_03: Like in like not to be at all reflective in the last 25 years, to think that there was no regulation post-1996 now seems absolutely astonishing to me.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_03: But I do think allowing in the last 15 years, the platform companies that are intrinsically do not care about journalism and don't really care about informing communities, and we can now see that very plainly.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_03: And some of us would suspected it a long time ago, and now it has fully revealed itself.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_03: That we just allowed ourselves to not even to be hoodwin to I think to be complicit to say we like being close to power.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's a huge mistake of journalists, it's access journalism and politics, but also in technology as well.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_03: We like being friends with these companies, we like getting invited to their ridiculous parties at Davos, we like being close to the idea that this is changing the world in a positive way.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: And we will go to Newsgeist and we will accept their sponsorship of our news conferences because we think they're a force for good.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I think we continue to pretend that that was the case a long time after it was very clear.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I would say 2016 is the hard reveal for that, but plenty of evidence before that which says they were not, in fact, a force for good.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_03: Not your friends.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: Jay, thank you so much.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's really been a pleasure.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's so great to see you and speak to you, Jay.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_03: Journalism 2050 is a co-production of the Town Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, the Columbia Journalism Review, with help from our friends at the Journalism and Design Lab at the New School.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_03: Our producer is Amanda Derrick, our production coordinator is Hannah Joy, and our researcher is Sam Earl.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_03: Find us wherever you get your podcasts.