Latest / Journalism 2050 / Can the News Exist Without Big Tech? The Atlas Says Yes

Transcript

Can the News Exist Without Big Tech? The Atlas Says Yes · Journalism 2050

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: Hello and welcome back to Journalism 2050.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_04: Our listeners might have noticed an absence of new episodes, but we hope you didn't think we'd taken a break.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_04: We've actually been very busy.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_04: For us, discussing the past, present, and future of journalism is work that is never finished.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_04: Before we return with a whole new series of guests though, we wanted to share some of what we've been up to.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_04: Earlier this summer we traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia, to attend Zeg, a storytelling festival, and interviewed some incredible people fighting for journalism's future against all kinds of enemies, authoritarians, tech moguls, misogynists, you know, the usual.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_04: We speak to Lika Antadze and Nino Bakraza from Sinatlay Media about how independent news organizations joined forces in Georgia to fight back against attempts to cut off their funding and silence them.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_04: We host the inibitable Razia Iqbal, who spent three decades at the BBC and now teaches at Princeton University, to talk about how much journalism has changed over her career and her advice to young journalists today.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_04: We speak to Natalia Antilava and Simon Allison about building new networks for journalism in an age dominated by increasing concentrations of wealth and power.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_04: Natalia is the editor-in-chief of Coda Story and the co-founder of ZEG.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_04: And Simon is the co-founder of The Continent, Africa's most widely distributed digital newspaper.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_04: And finally, we interview our good friend, the formidable Julie Pazzetti, award-winning journalist and researcher on all threats confronting women journalists in the digital age.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_04: We hope you find these conversations as interesting as we did.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_04: And we look forward to resuming the series soon.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_04: Morning, everybody.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_04: So please see you here so early, 11 o'clock.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_04: Welcome to our live recording of Journalism 2050, which is a podcast between the Tau Centre for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Emily Bell, the director of the Tau Center at Columbia, and this is my co-host.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, I was jugging my coffee because it's only 11 a.m.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Heather Chaplin, the founding director of journalism and design at the New School University in New York City.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_04: And I have to say we're so thrilled to be here at Zeg, because it's been a long-held ambition of mine in Heather's to come and storm the stage at Zeg.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_04: And so we're particularly pleased to have the founder and inspirator of Zeg, Natalia Antilava.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_10: Antilava.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_10: Antilava.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_10: But I'm so pleased about being called a spiritor, which I've never been described as a spiriter.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_04: As an inspirator.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_04: Only 11 o'clock, it could get better.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_04: And Simon Allison.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_04: And together they have founded a new newspaper, The Atlas, which we're going to be talking about.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_04: Could you introduce yourselves in terms of your own careers so far?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_04: Because I think we want to hear about how you got into journalism, what Coda Story does, because we tried to describe it and we said, actually, it's better coming from you.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Toby, we said, look, we'll give you our introductions and you tell us if they're right.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: How's that?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Natalia Antalava.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: We said it's not only the maestro of Zeg, this amazing festival that we're at, but also is the co-founder of an editor of Coda Story, which for our listeners, if you haven't read it, you should.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: It is a really remarkable publication.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it is about the rise of authoritarianism and the tech powers that enable it.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: How's that?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's that's very good.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: Does that work for you?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it does work.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh Simon Allison is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Continent, which to me is super interesting, is a PDF distributed mostly on WhatsApp, and that it tells stories by Africans and for Africans.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_06: Close.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_06: Not editor-in-chief any longer.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay, sorry, former.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: Former editor-inch.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, great.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_04: And now you've been brought together on this new publication, The Atlas, which we have here.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_04: It's good for radio because it's physical, and you can see it.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we were just saying how much we enjoyed this this morning, partly because it's finite, it's interesting, it's relevant, and it's things that you might not read anywhere else.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_04: Do you want to tell us a story of how it came about and also what your aspirations are for it?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_10: Why are you publishing a newspaper?
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_10: We just felt, you know, running non-profit newsrooms is just such an easy thing.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_10: We didn't have enough work.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_10: We just felt that we need we need something else in our lives.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_10: Let's just do one more thing.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_06: I I was here last year, I'd say, and I watched Coda Live, which we saw this year's version last night, and I was so blown away.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_06: I I fell in love with what Coda were doing and the kind of journalism they were doing, and their approach felt fundamentally different.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_06: I go to a lot of journalism conferences.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_06: This one, they were doing something really different.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_06: And I I think similarly, Natalia, you were interested in what we were doing that was different.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I've been sort of a big fan of the continent for a long time.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_10: I think they're amazing.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_10: And the fact that I always want to read it, even though it is about the part of the world that I don't necessarily follow very closely.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_10: So I've been a big fan for a long time.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_04: One of the things that you wrote about it was although our reporting emerges from very different histories and geographies, we found ourselves arriving at remarkably similar conclusions about power, fragmentation, and the future of journalism in an age of informational instability.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_04: What were those conclusions?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_10: Do you remember what they were?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_10: When did you reach we're all screwed?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_10: So let's start a new spade.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_06: You know, I think the the big one was that any kind of bets on the future of journalism, and right now we are all making bets about the future of journalism.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_06: No one knows exactly where we're going.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_06: Any bet that is predicated on a big tech company's platform is going to fail.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_06: And so, what bets are we making that are predicated on a different foundation?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_06: And how can we make that happen?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_06: And that is what Coda is doing with Code Alive.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_06: It's what we are doing with a PDF, which is the least sexy technology application imaginable.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_06: But we're trying to find ways to get journalism to people that bypass the gatekeepers.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and one of the things that's so interesting about the Atlas, so we have it here as a print product, but your main means of distribution is going to be as a PDF on signal.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us about that.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_06: So the most powerful information sharing networks in the world, and I think this has always been true, are the networks that families use to talk to themselves and groups of friends use to talk to themselves.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_06: And you know what?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_06: No matter what the environment, no matter how authoritarian, families always find a way to talk to themselves.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_06: How can we put news into those networks?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_06: That was the kind of foundational question that we had when we started the continent.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_06: And our answer to that was WhatsApp.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_06: That's where, you know, friend groups, family groups across much of the world, not America, I know, but most of the rest of the world is using WhatsApp.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_06: So we designed a product that worked to be put into WhatsApp and then could be distributed through WhatsApp.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_06: Now we are trying a similar model, but we're not using WhatsApp anymore.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_06: And we can talk a little bit more about that, but the security issues, some of the strange things WhatsApp are starting to do about controlling where information goes and how it moves.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us about that, yeah.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: Does everyone here know what Signal is?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if that yeah, okay.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: Can you break down for us what were your concerns about WhatsApp and why was Signal your choice?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_06: So the continent distributes mainly on WhatsApp.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_06: We've got about 35,000 subscribers, 70% are on WhatsApp, and we have to work with a WhatsApp affiliated company to distribute the paper, which when you get to a certain number of users, you you have to pay WhatsApp to get your product across.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_06: That was working fine until about a year ago, when a few things happened that have left us deeply concerned.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_06: One is that we got a message saying uh you may no longer send any messages to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_06: This was about eight months ago.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_06: Now we only had two subscribers in Iran, um, but they were very important to us.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_06: But the point is suddenly we had Meta telling us which countries we could access, which countries we could not.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_06: The second thing that happened is a few old friends of mine, subscribers from the very beginning, because I made them, they came to me and said, We're no longer receiving the continent on WhatsApp.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_06: And I thought, that's strange.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_06: And so we ran a trace of the numbers and we got an error code.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_06: And the error code said, WhatsApp is running an experiment on this user.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_06: Whoa.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_06: And we figured out this applies to about 2% of our subscriber base.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_06: We've not been able to receive any clarity on what this experiment is.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: What sort of experiments are they creating?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: We would love to know.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and what it means is none of those people are receiving the paper.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_06: And we didn't know they were unless we had this sort of I had that happened to me.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_04: You're being experimenting.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_04: But I didn't realize that I was part of Mesa's experiment, but it does make sense given my background with them.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um but it's interesting because it's very reminiscent of an experiment that Facebook once ran with six countries where they turned off the algorithm for publishers in those countries, and these are small countries, and their traffic disappeared overnight, but they didn't tell anybody.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_04: They didn't say that they were conducting the experiment, and you can't get clarity from them.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_06: We we can't get clarity.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_06: And then the third reason, and this is also very troubling, is about six months ago, we got a message from Meta.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_06: So what we do every week is we send a standard message to everyone, and it's a front cover image, and it's a little button that says, Would you like to receive this week's edition?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_06: Inside the cover story is about political violence in the Sahel or whatever we are talking about that week.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_06: And we got a message from Meta saying, that's fine for the rest of the world, but for the United States, for any users with a United States dialing code, you can't have any political content in the message.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_06: So we now have to send a message to the US that says, would you like to download this week's edition?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_06: Full stop.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_04: Do you know if that's also true for American publishers?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_04: Because many people have news channels that go out on WhatsApp.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_04: Have you come across other publishers who have been told the same thing as you?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_06: No, we haven't.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_06: But the way that we use WhatsApp is a bit different to how others.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_06: So we don't use WhatsApp channels.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_06: We're not doing mass broadcasts, it's individual one-to-one relationships.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_06: And the rules that we kind of fall under are more the rules for advertisers.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_06: So if I want to use WhatsApp to advertise my business, I'm using the same platforms, and these are general rules for those platforms.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_06: It just points to a wider picture where the United States, without even realizing it, I think is getting a different version of the internet than anyone else.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_06: This has been true for a long time.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, Meta spent 90% of its content moderation budget on the US in the English language, which means whatever you were seeing in the US was a much healthier version of the internet than what the rest of us were seeing.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_06: And I think that from our perspective, being in South Africa, we see this earlier than a lot of other places in the world.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_06: And we've designed our products to try and respond to these changing circumstances.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's really interesting that something that Maria Ressa often says about the Philippines and says in her book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, which is we're getting a version, a test bed version of these platforms with no moderation, the worst version, if you like.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_04: And they know that we have high engagement audiences, and nobody ever sees it.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_04: And I think your point, Simon, that we in America get the best version of these platforms is a shock because they're not great.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_04: But it also poses this question to global publishers.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_04: And then Natalia, this is something that you've actually written about for a long time, which is don't trust the platforms.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_04: And yet, in a lot of the world that you serve, the platforms have also been the alternate route to market.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_04: So if you have people in Ukraine, you have people in Central Europe, often Facebook is seen as being the key platform.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_04: We heard this yesterday from Georgian journalists.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_04: So what's the message to get people to shift when actually getting information of any type is quite difficult?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_10: Georgia is a very good example of some of the experiments that Meta has run, so is Ukraine, and we have covered it a lot, primarily because KODA sort of has covered the authoritarian rise around the world and various patterns behind it.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_10: And this relationship between the platforms and authoritarian governments is definitely part of a big trend.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_10: I don't know if I have the answer to what do you do and how you reach people.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_10: I think what's important is to diversify the distribution channels as much as possible.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_10: And I think the industry, there was a period when we relied very heavily on distributing through the platforms.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_10: At the same time, I'm also, when I say that, I'm very aware that Coda would not exist if the internet didn't exist and if these tools didn't exist and if the platforms didn't exist.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_10: I think these two things can be true at the same time.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_10: And that's part of what we are, you know, trying to do here because that is the Atlas is our experiment.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_10: Simon and his co-founder and their team have done it very successfully in Africa, across the continent.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_10: It was, I think, in November in Vienna, we had coffee, having kind of watched each other for a long time and admired each other's work for a long time.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_10: Simon mentioned that they're trying to figure out how to go global with a similar publication.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_10: And I remember the first conversation we had about this was about WhatsApp, right?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_10: So I said, why don't you, because I also think that part of the answer to your question is that we just need to figure out new ways of collaborating, especially if you are a smaller newsroom and a smaller publisher.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_10: So we decided to do an experiment with Simon sort of coming in and embedding himself inside Coda and seeing whether he can use the reporting that we produce and turn it, repackage it into a paper similar to the continent.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_10: But from the very start, it was very clear that we would not be able to rely on WhatsApp as a sole distributor.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_10: Like that was not even the question.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_10: So one of the things that we're trying very hard to figure out is what are the alternatives.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_10: And I think if you're a little bit creative, there are actually a ton of other ways to do it as well that we will be trying.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_10: We'll let you know if it works.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, one of the things I was really, really interested in and excited to talk to you guys about is you written that this is the new SAMASDAT, which for people who don't know in the audience or listening, was the grassroots practice of copying, circulating, and publishing censored in underground literature in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, which you've written about as a kid growing up here, sort of seeing your parents involved in that.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us a little bit why you're calling it that.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: And to me, it feels like maybe the central question is is there a future for independent journalism that isn't that?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_10: I think when we were having that conversation about, especially on the distribution side, about how how do you do it?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_10: Like how do you get your journalism to people?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_10: The conversation itself very much reminded me, like for me, the parallel was very obvious, right?
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_10: I was born in a country, this country that wasn't this country at the time.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_10: It was part of the Soviet Union, and there was no free information at all.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_10: That was not an option.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_10: And yet there was a very thriving underground scene and information was being passed on.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_10: And I do remember my parents sort of click-clacking away at night, as they were like retyping banned literature mostly at the time.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_10: For me, for a long time, I've been like really obsessed with the question of so if the new censorship is the noise, because no one has to silence anyone anymore because the noise is so loud that it's deafening.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_10: So if that is the new censorship, like how do we punch through it?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_10: I'm equally interested.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_10: Like, what is the new equivalent of broadcasters like the Radio Free Europe or the BBC that provided alternative sources of information?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_10: And it's different now because like it's obviously different because there's so much information out there that people don't necessarily think that they need more information.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_10: So for me, the parallel is okay, we need to get through the barrier, and the barrier today is the noise, the platforms, and so on, because I still believe that people want to.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: Still, how do you get people independent news and information that they need, right?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_04: Could I sort of bring Simon in here as well?
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_04: Because I think it's interesting that you both worked for pretty established media in your careers, BBC, Mail and Guardian in South Africa.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_04: And Simon also, South Africa obviously had a tremendously different press environment and relationship to the free press in the course of your career.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_04: And we're talking about how those big institutions, in some ways, how those big institutions don't work anymore, and yet they were actually very important at a time of breaking down some of these authoritarian regimes of the past.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_04: What was your experience like in South Africa?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_04: And do you think what makes you think that this has sort of fundamentally changed where you now have scale journalism, which isn't necessarily working for people, for citizenry and democracy?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_06: I have worked for South African media outlets for my entire career.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_06: It's about 12 or 13 years.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_06: South Africa is an amazing place to practice journalism.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_06: It has some of the best press freedom laws anywhere in the world.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_06: Certainly when we're thinking about where to publish a newspaper from in the global south, South Africa really is one of the very few options.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_06: So it's kind of got everything going for it in a sort of legal capacity.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_06: What's happened is that we have experienced the collapse of the journalism industry.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_06: Witz University did a study a few years ago, something like there are 20% of the journalists left today as they were 10 years ago.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_06: So there are papers being published, there are websites, but underpinning those websites, underpinning those stories is nothing.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_06: It's interns, it's um increasingly AI-generated copy.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_06: It's hollow.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_06: It's totally hollowed out.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_06: So those institutions, as powerful and prestigious as they once were, are no longer able to exercise their function effectively.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_06: And so we have to be building new institutions that do that.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_06: And what I think about a lot, I don't know whether independent news outlets can only exist underground.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_06: But I think we have to presume that that is the case.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_06: We have to be planning for the worst case scenario.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_06: And the worst case scenario is the United States, which has been the single greatest supporter of independent press around the world for the last few decades, we have to assume or plan for the fact that they may not be doing that in a few years' time, that they go much more authoritarian.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_06: We have to plan for the potential that the far right takes power in places like France and Guts AFP.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_06: We have to be thinking that AI companies are looking at, you know, the way China uses the internet and those models are going to be coming in.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_06: If that happens, and these are all plausible outcomes, if that happens, what is our response?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_06: We can't respond then.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_06: We have to respond now.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_06: We have to build the audience now and the greatest single power.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_06: And the networks.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_06: The greatest power that a media outlet can have in this day and age is the power to move their audience from one platform to another.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_06: If your level of engagement is high enough to do that, you can survive pretty much anything.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_06: But you have to be able to do that.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: Can you go back and say that again?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: The the most important thing to do is that if you have an audience to move it from one platform to another.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: So the most important thing is not building new networks.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: The most important thing is moving to the proper platform.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Can you say more about that?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_06: The engine room of the Continent's distribution is about 15% of our subscribers.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_06: That's about 5,000 people.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_06: And every single week, those 5,000 people not only read the paper, but they then share it into their family networks, their friend groups, et cetera.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_06: And I don't know or care what platforms they use to do the sharing.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_06: I just know that I need to reach those 5,000 people.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_06: If WhatsApp collapses or changes its rules and means we can't use it, we know that we are able to tell that engine those five.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_06: 5,000 people move to Signal and they will do it.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_06: We might lose the rest, but we've got the engine.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_06: And we have to be able to be planning to for that.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_06: When we're building a new publication, we're not worried about getting enormous numbers.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_06: But if we get a thousand people who are actively engaged and who will move for us, we can survive anything.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_04: This is, I think this is such an important insight, and one which I first heard weirdly from an influencer.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_04: And they were telling me about their business, which just seemed mind-blowing for somebody again who's been in institutional media my whole life.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_04: And she was saying, we have to be able to plan for Instagram, turning off the algorithm and nobody seeing my posts.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_04: I was like, well, how do you do that?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_04: And it's like, well, you have TikTok and you have Substack.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_04: And I was like, but surely none of your no, no, none are on Substack.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_04: But if I tell them to go there and give me money, they will do it.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_04: And it's so interesting that I don't know how many major media organizations, maybe there are people in the audience who can discuss this with us, are actually really thinking that way.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_04: I think they're thinking, how do we get maximum reach?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_04: But that, how do we move people from one environment to the next?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_04: Not because it's a commercial imperative, but because we are going to have to do that to get our journalism out.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then how much also, or do you how much also just in-person?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like how do you guys think about that, like going really beneath underground?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_06: It was a big reason for the continent to want to join forces with Coda, because we've kind of got one end of the challenge, but we haven't cracked the in-person thing because we don't know how to organize events.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_06: But uh Coda does.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: But do you ever ask of your networks?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: Because I'm really struck by said, you know, there's 5,000 people who then and the work I do in the US is around trying to build grassroots news networks.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: And it's really interesting to hear your guys' perspective because Emily can testify, I've been yammering on about this.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I I yammer a lot.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: And in the US, you just get blank stares.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really interesting to talk to people who come from places where you actually are having to face the realities that the Samistat method might be the way to go.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: Because in the US, people still don't really, they're sort of like, what do you mean an informal network?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: Or what do you mean people?
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_10: I think it depends who you ask in the US, because I think actually it had been done very successfully in the US by far right, right?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: No, and that's the point I always give.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_04: And then people say, oh, that's and and also other communities.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_04: And other communities as well.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: There are very, very successful reforms.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: So let me let me reframe that.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: When I try to get funding from major funders to build these grassroots networks, they say no, we have to fund journalism.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: Don't get me started on that.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_09: I share your frustration.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_04: Um but to that point, if we can just go back to how are people thinking about the future, we were just having a conversation before the panel, which I know strictly speaking, Heather disallows, but we we performed samostat and had a minor side conversation.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you said something, Natalia, which I think is I said it's very profound, and you were, is it?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_04: Which is the end of big media organizations.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_04: And you just said a very casual, well, there isn't going to be another BBC, or there isn't going to be another Reuters.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_04: There isn't gonna, you know, these are things of the past, that sort of idea of building a scaled institution, that's over.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_04: Let's talk about that a bit.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_04: Because I think to your point, Heather, that's the thing that people get really have real difficulty with, which is we're not going back to that model.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_04: That's over.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_04: People don't accept that, they see that as a sort of thing.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, people in England and the United States, where things have been pretty good for a while, if you were white and upper middle class, struggle with it.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: Because if it is true, if you go into poor neighborhoods in America or black neighborhoods, they're like, Yeah, that's how we get our news.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: What do you we wouldn't pay any more?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_10: You know, I'm hyper aware that we have the head of news for AFP sitting in the audience.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_10: Um and I'd like to know how you're preparing for the far-right takeover of France.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_10: Um but I also think, you know, I I think it's it's not a simple, a straightforward answer.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_10: First of all, we don't know what will happen to the existing big institutions.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_10: It depends where they are, obviously.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_10: Um, I think AI may be good news for big players um like AP and AFP and others.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_10: And the New York Times, well, the New York Times is a little bit in its own category because they are kind of a tech platform as well.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_10: Um I'm sure they'll be delighted to hear that.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_10: And you should tell their shareholders because it would be very good for them.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_10: Um so I wouldn't I wouldn't completely dismiss a big institution.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_10: Especially, you know, especially as we see the traffic completely collapse.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_10: Who suffers from the collapse of traffic?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_10: It's the smaller players, right?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_10: Rather than the big media companies with existing audiences.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_10: But at the same time, I have a very hard time imagining new big institutions being built because the consumption habits have changed so much.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_10: And because we are all consuming a very bespoke products now, and we're used to it.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_10: And there is a benefit to it for us as well, right?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_10: But there is a danger to this society because if news is tailored to you, then we're all getting this individualized tailored version of the news.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_04: Just to be the very unpopular person and stand up for big institutions and say, isn't it going to really suit power of whichever extreme and however authoritarian to actually have fragmented and small and underground?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think anyone's saying it's good if these things collapse or there aren't more of them.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: It just might be the reality, right?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think the question is different.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_10: I think to have a healthy information ecosystem, you need both.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_10: Well, this I I don't think you can have just big institutions.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_10: I think you have to you have to have a diversity of uses.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_10: Yes.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_10: That's what creates a healthy environment.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_10: Because if we do end up with five big players and they are in charge of all the information, uh well, right.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_10: I was born in a country where that was the case.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: So then we are in a more how do we build the networks?
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: This this seems to me maybe really, really key is how do we build these networks so that the your 5,000 people are working with the remaining institutions and the remaining institutions understand the power of your network of 5,000 people, and that at all the different levels of scale in the ecosystem are working together with the shared goal of really robust flow of independent news and information.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: How does that happen?
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_06: I think it starts by these big institutions taking non-Western audiences seriously, which does not happen.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_06: Um I can give you a couple of very concrete examples from publications that we all know very well, The Economist.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_06: It's uh Africa coverage, and it does some very good Africa coverage.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_06: I've contributed in the past.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_06: It's under a section called The Middle East and Africa.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_06: Now that doesn't make sense alphabetically, it doesn't make sense by uh what population size.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_06: It cannot be clearer in conveying to an African audience that you are an afterthought.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_06: Similarly, the the FT has a wonderful um digital edition and there's a special app for it.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_06: And when you open the app, it says, which region would you like your digital edition from?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_06: You know, North America, Europe, Asia.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_06: Yes?
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_06: I'm waiting.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_06: Um of course there's no South America, of course there's no Africa.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_06: But yet these audiences, especially in the case of Africa, these are going to be the biggest consumers of news in the world.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_06: Africa is the the fastest growing population.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_06: It is going to be setting all the terms in culture, movies, music in the next 10, 20, 30 years.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_06: And nobody of the big players is investing in that audience.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_06: The BBC World Service, which had the most astonishingly loyal fan base across Africa, is cutting, cutting, cutting, um, retreating from providing reliable information to these audiences.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_06: Now, that's a huge problem, of course, but it is also an enormous opportunity.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_06: So I'm going to disagree with you a little bit, Natalia, and say I think there is room for another major institution at scale, based and centered around audiences in the global south.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_06: Giving news from that perspective, and it is fundamentally different.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_06: The facts can be the same, but the way you present them, that's different.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's very exciting to hear journalists talking about there is real possibility and opportunity because particularly if you spent the last two years in the United States, to your point, Simon, you have what was the greatest free press market in history if essentially coming apart right in front of our eyes and a population, I think, of journalists and civil society organizations, that it's not that they don't know it's happening, but it's they don't have any of the sort of the muscle tone to be able to resist it.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_04: And it takes a while to build that.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_04: And we're sort of seeing it now.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: They're still sort of in like this can't be happening.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: They don't have your experience as a kid watching your mother copy out things.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: There is that American ahistorical, what is it, delusional optimism?
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's going to be a happy ending, right?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_04: But I think also the sort of the question that comes with that then is where are the global centers that we can hope for that kind of help from?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_04: So we endlessly hear journalists say the problem with the United States retreating from supporting the free press and complaining when journalists are murdered or put in prison is that it does actually really have an effect.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_04: It does have an effect elsewhere in the world.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_04: So what's the apart from hoping for the best, what are the other things that we can do just internationally, where do you see that hope that you've just articulated so well, Simon, in terms of resilience?
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_04: Natalia's looking like she doesn't see much hope.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_04: She's like she's quite, she's not a hopeful face.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_10: No, I'm thinking about um, you know, Simon disagreeing, as well as the question, you're right, you're right.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_10: There is a space for one big new institution.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_10: He's right, yeah.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and everyone should subscribe to the Atlas.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_10: Um it's too late.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_10: I think I think it's just a matter of perspective.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_10: Like even this conversation is very Western and US centered, right?
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_10: That is not and perspective is a thing that you cannot fake.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_10: You've got the perspective and the frame that you've got, and that's what you use to look at the world.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_10: And I think part of the opportunity, a very exciting opportunity, is that, you know, in part because of all the investment that the United States has made into independent journalism and media around the world, and because of the advances in the internet and technology, there are whole new generations of journalists around the world who are completely capable of producing incredible journalists.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_10: There's more good journalism today than there's ever been.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_10: That is not the problem.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_10: The problem is the problem is the distribution and getting the good information to people in the environment where there is so much, like you don't no one even quite fully understands the problem.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_10: That's right.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_10: I know it's a controversial opinion, but I think organizations like USAID, in some ways, and it's horrible what happened, and I know people pay the real price, but millions and millions were spent on various media programs that also didn't work anymore because they were designed for the 1990s, which was a completely different environment.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_10: You know, that is also part of the talent out that's out there is the talent pool is amazing, and these people can be put put to work.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_10: So I think that's both in terms of the audience and in terms of the people who can't produce, which wasn't the case before, you know.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_10: I think we're in a pretty good place.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_04: I think we've got a very healthy level of disagreement.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_04: So we should add it to the audience now just to increase the disagreement.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_04: Um, it's good people already got a lot of people.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: And can we make sure that everyone who asks a question has a mic so that we can record?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, thanks.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: Hi.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm struck by how little reference there's been to the individuals who make up the various audiences.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, Simon, you you did talk about the audience, the very loyal audience that the BBC had that it's now relinquishing by retreating.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: You referred, Natalia, to the the uh market for sumizdot in Georgia uh during the Soviet period.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but of course, uh, the interests and perspectives of the people, potential audience members are central to the future of journalism.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and of course, it's not just a logistical problem when we talk about distribution, it's also a demand problem.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: I guess the the question I have is whether you think thinking about audiences in Africa, thinking about the audience of Samosdat and potentially other places, how much identity and wanting to identify with a more informed group or as being part of a more informed group and not drinking the Kool-Aid, which I think was the case for, say, the Samosdat audience, um, will play, how big a role that might play in growing an audience for more discerning journalism?
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_10: I always have a little bit of a problem with the way that we in the media industry talk about audiences and talk about their audience because we talk about the audience as this like a set single thing, and it's the same way you know, people talk about electorates, like women voters.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_10: Like, what does it even mean?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_10: Like, what does it mean, Latino voters?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_10: You know, and then we're surprised when these groups vote for someone else entirely, because I think ultimately the starting point for a journalist, a publisher should should be respect for the fact that whoever my reader or viewer is is a busy person with a busy life.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_10: And it's my responsibility to give that person something that that person needs.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_10: And that really I just don't believe in this like monolithic big chunks of audience, which is how we tend to think about them.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_10: And so I'm not answering your question.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: Am I again with the sumizdot audience?
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_10: And I'm thinking of saying that that's what I don't think there is a sumizdat audience audience.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, there had there had been there had been a certain uh uh group of people in the Soviet Union who were willing to take the risks associated with producing and consuming sumizdot, and other people who weren't making the choice.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that and those people who did were people who, for a variety of personal reasons, wanted not only to read things that they considered to be more truthful and factual, but they also, I think, identified themselves as people who wanted to be in the know and not just drink the Kool-Aid as uh, you know, uh listen to Radio Moskva and so forth.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh similarly, there were audiences in Asia for the Forest and Economic Review, Asia Week magazine, I'm sure, for discerning publications in Africa.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, the the idea of wanting to be among the cognizenti, the the non-kool-aid drinkers, it seems to me plays a big role in people wanting to consume that kind of.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: So are you saying how do we cultivate?
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: How do you cultivate it?
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, and and and exactly.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, how big a role do you think it plays?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and how how could that sort of identification with quality journalism be encouraged?
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, it's I think it is it is a good question.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_10: So I didn't fully understand the question before.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_10: I think it plays a huge role, but again, I don't think that audience, it's Simon's 5,000 people, right?
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_10: I don't think that audience necessarily needs to be, and that's where we get to scale.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_10: Like, I don't think it needs to be a huge scale.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_10: If if there is even a small market for a certain kind of information, and if you provide this information, we know from plenty of historical examples of how much difference it makes to the development of that society if even that core small group is fed the not fed is not the right word, but is provided with the information that is nourished with the information that they they want.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_06: Um in terms of cultivating the audience, just be honest with them.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_06: So one of our taglines at the continent is reading is resistance.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_06: And I get that quoted back at me when I meet readers in unexpected places.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_06: It's kind of signaling what kind of publication we are, where we stand, and that makes it goes a long way.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: So hi.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I was uh thinking about uh so I mean this um uh your publication is more for uh well-informed people who are seeking for the uh news, right, and uh truth, truthful information.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: But what about those, especially young people who are, you know, it's already well evidenced that you know there is a huge news avoidance, right, among the young people.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so, I mean, what is this?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: What would be the strategy to uh reaching these audiences, younger people?
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are thinking about that, thank you.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, one thing I was gonna say is that I just want to challenge the idea of news avoidance.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_04: There's a lot of research out there about news avoiders, and there's a lot of research out there about trust in news.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_04: Nearly all of it is actually funded at some level by Google or some of the uh technology platforms that it suits.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_04: Are young people avoiding the news?
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't seem to me if you're on campuses in America that or the United States that that people are avoiding the news.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't seem that young people are avoiding the news in the Middle East.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_04: It seems that I don't know, I I what's your view of like I don't know that people switch off.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_04: I think maybe they're not in what we would expect to be news audiences, but something that annoys me.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_06: It's certainly been our experience that young people are just as likely to be subscribers to the continent as older people.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_06: In fact, the sort of decade-by-decade breakdown is roughly equivalent from 20s, 30s, 40s.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_06: And what it tells us is that uh young people want the same thing that everyone else wants, which is well edited, well curated, interesting news, great headlines, beautiful pictures, um, in a way that they can consume, that they can finish.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_06: And if we can give it to them in that sort of format, it's gonna work.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_03: Hi there.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um sorry, I'm not in the communications business.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_03: I know that this is a it's a different business, but um I'm I'm just you know, hearing this panel isn't a bigger problem.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's the subscription model platform, right?
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_03: Because the subscription model, uh I'm looking at this from the perspective of what happened with the Washington Post and the New York Times.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_03: If you have$10 to spend a month, it this this subscription model naturally consolidates platforms and it naturally knocks off others because it has a tendency to consolidate into fewer and fewer platforms.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, how is the how are we planning to, you know, create more platforms if this is such a huge problem that we're facing?
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_06: It's a really good question.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_06: At the beginning of the Iran-US war, there were some great articles in Bloomberg and the FT and The Economist um about the impacts of the war on global energy prices and what this was going to mean.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_06: And every time I clicked on one of those links, I hit a paywall that was so hard and so expensive that I couldn't read those stories.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_06: So, in terms of the subscription model is a future for global journalism, I think it's impossible.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_06: There has to be a source of reliable, free news that can reach audiences that cannot afford huge subscriptions.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_06: That's part one.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_06: Part two is that as much as the journalism industry is being totally disrupted by new technologies coming in, so too is the online advertising industry.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_06: And that's the industry that's taken all journalism's money.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_06: Now that is going through its own chaos, its own crises, and that means opportunities, opportunities to take some of that money back.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_06: And if you are able to prove to advertisers that you have a loyal, engaged, high net worth audience across borders, I think that that will be a very compelling proposition to reignite the old-fashioned advertising and quality newspapers model of funding journalism.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_06: I think there will be lots of different models that we try, but I think it's certainly the one that we are aiming towards.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_08: Uh Phil Cherwind.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_08: So, yes, as Natalia said, I run uh the AFP News Agency.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_08: Um thank you for your concern for our future health.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_08: Um so I and I just want to say that we're um the only region I've added staff in the last two, three years is Africa.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_08: So we're I've added 10 to 12 journalists in Africa last year because we believe in the future of that and they're all African staff, not French people sent from Paris.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_08: But one of the ways we are looking at changing, modernizing, thinking of the way we do is a lot more with collaborations.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_08: Uh in Africa, we have programs with Code for Africa, we have MongoBay, we're working with environmental journalism in Asia, done stuff with Bellingkat in Ukraine and stuff like that.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_08: So just to turn it around the other way, have you, you know, you're looking at these big monoliths that we're talking about as we uh which wouldn't be wouldn't be created again.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_08: We have that conversation a lot.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_08: We we would never make ourselves now if we had three hundred million euros, we wouldn't do what we've done.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_08: But how do you think about how you taking what you've got, do you not think how you can work with those organizations to distribute better, to reach different audiences to Get a bigger audience to get have more impact.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, absolutely.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_06: One of the huge problems that independent media faces is the fragmentation of its own landscape.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and one example I think about a lot, there's an investigative outlet called Project Brazen, and they do some really interesting work on in Southeast Asia on money laundering, exposing some huge networks.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_06: I didn't know about them until I read one of their stories, and I thought, wow, this is a great story.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_06: Who the hell are these guys?
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_06: It took me three weeks to verify to my own satisfaction that they were real, that they were not compromised, that they were not a Russian front, that they that I could then republish their journalism.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_06: And that's me as uh an editor with all my contacts, and that was the only way I could verify.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_06: I phoned up some investigators and were like, okay, tell me.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_06: Now, what the hell do ordinary people do in that landscape?
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_06: All those names you mentioned, no one outside of journalism knows who they are.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_06: So what they all need is to come together to create publications where their work can be featured that act as kind of like stamps of approval.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_06: Where if you know, if you read something, let's say in the Atlas, you know that we've done the vetting for you.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and that is the real value add that publications can bring that the outlets, individual outlets themselves cannot.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_08: Well, yeah, then that's certainly the way we would see it.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_08: Would say, I'd never heard of Monga Bai before we started working with them.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_08: It's this huge environmental network of journalists, and then suddenly by us doing all the due diligence on them and then distributing joint investigations or joint work together, we're bringing that brand, you know, much more widely around the world.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and Okoda's whole model is based on partnership distribution as well.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_10: We never focused very much, even though we were often pushed by funders to focus on the scale of traffic for ourselves.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_10: I have a real thing about, you know, how this created a real problem, you know, counting likes and shares and forgetting like what impact is and why we're doing it.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, so for us, it's always always how do we find life for a story that we do in another shape or form?
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_10: We really look at publication as just the first step, you know.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_10: So the story has to live beyond it.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_10: So a lot of us stories are then turned, like we're working, we did a story last year that is now being turned into a podcast for the BBC, right?
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_10: So we work with The Economist and so on.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_10: And you know, it's always a great compliment when the New York Times goes and does the same story you had just done, um which happens quite a lot, too.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_10: So yeah, there is we can't, I don't think anyone can do it alone.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_10: Um, it would be very hard to have a collaboration like you know, as radical as the one that we are testing out, where we're literally sort of embedding into each other's workflows and processes, but I think various levels of uh collaboration is part what you are talking about, Heather.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_10: Like that is building networks.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and that's what I was gonna ask you, Phil.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: And you said you brought in this environmental, this network of environmental reporters.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: Do you make efforts or have you had any success bringing in or working with coordinating with smaller networks, the the one-person practitioner or the the family that's sharing information on a hyper-local level?
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: How do big institutions work with the really grassroots?
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_08: It's harder just because of the resources involved and the sort of value we can get back.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_08: Um so unless it's a sort of funded project, it's hard to fit into our kind of news flows.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh does it feel like a valuable thing if money or does that not feel I think it could, but I think we have to sort of slightly pick our battles.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_08: Uh and at the moment, this is an interesting terrain of literally, you know, we've had no history really of collaborating with other media at all.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_08: That's not really our DNA at all.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_08: So what I'm just discovering is the amount of organizations that just exist out there.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_08: There's so much good journalism that exists.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_08: I mean, I'm the one thing that's really encouraged me at the last sort of year is really how much good journalism there is.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_08: And so therefore, the point is how do we get that?
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: The problem is how do you get it?
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: How do we get it to the right place?
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_02: Also, how do people digest it?
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_02: This is one of the things I think about too is that in this environment of constant onslaught, how does it be a problem?
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_02: How do we process it?
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_10: PDF is like a really digestible form.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_10: But that's fine.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_10: I think the point that Phil makes is exactly the point about these big institutions.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_10: When I first set up Coda, I was at the BBC.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_10: And when I first started started thinking about Coda, I was at the BBC.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_10: And I did think and wonder whether it would have been possible to create it as a unit within the BBC.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_10: Because what we were looking at was really doing a kind of journalism that looks at the emerging patterns and trends and sort of looks beyond the headlines and tries to identify what will be a story in six to twelve months' time.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_10: It could have and should have been possible to do it, uh, but it it just the inertia of a big institution, a big organization, it's not an agile thing.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_10: It's hard to move it and change it.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_10: So cute is the field for doing collaborations.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_10: I think many people in big institutions really at least.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_04: The most exciting newsrooms are actually four five-person startups at the moment.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_04: If you look at 404 media, my favorites in the United States, et cetera.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_05: Uh I am so happy to see uh newsrooms that are using WhatsApp and Signal as distribution platforms.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_05: When I think about the quality of media that my own family group chat forwards to me, it's a very mixed bag uh from reputable sources down to AI slop and clickbait.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_05: You know, AI tools have obviously accelerated the rate at which people can churn out very low quality content and often and disinformation.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_05: I'm curious how you think about competing with that, especially on these distribution networks.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_05: And if there are, especially as we start a new publication, uh techniques that you use beyond collaborating with existing reputable um agencies and partners, uh techniques that you use to signal and build credibility as you start out and create that audience?
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_06: That's a really great question.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_06: And there are a few answers, but I'm gonna just give you one, which is aesthetics.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_06: It's the quality of design, it's the quality of illustrations.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_06: We put a lot of effort into illustrations, um, it's the quality of photographs, and I'm gonna give another shout out here to AFP.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_06: Um the consument uses a lot of AFP photos from around Africa, and they are wonderful.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_06: And that really makes a big, big difference.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_06: We've had quite a few copycat publications, people who've tried to do what we do, and they may get some of the elements right, but that's often where they fall down.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_06: And it's things like font choice and um headlines.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_06: It is so liberating to be freed from search engine optimization in the writing of headlines.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_06: And that is also a way to signal the kind of quality of editorial that that lies behind the news itself.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_06: And so all of those accessories to the main news story are incredibly important, and we put a huge amount of resources into those.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_10: Very similarly, um, innovation, storytelling innovation is part of our mission, a written out, like formal mission, uh, which is why we created Zec Storytelling Festival as well, because I think partially like it was a selfish thing because we have so much to learn from other industries in terms of how they get information to people and how they craft narratives and tell their stories.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_10: You know, the quality of packaging cannot be underestimated.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_04: And now we really do have to end.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_04: But thank you so much, Simon, Natalia.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you, audience.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_07: I'm a cracking disability.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_07: And um, I believe it's reduced.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_07: Structure medium is the use of AI language model, soul, soul, soul, soul, soul, soul, soul.