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The Gateway to Trump: The Political Legacy of the Gawker Trial · Journalism 2050

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_04: Hello, uh welcome to Journalism 2050.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_04: This is our podcast about the future of journalism and to some extent about the past of the future of journalism.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_04: And I could not be more thrilled to be joined uh by my dear friend uh and brilliant woman Maria Bastios, who described you now describe yourself as an information activist, Maria, which is actually a pretty great description of what you do and what you're interested in.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_04: Uh people who read CJR regularly will know that one of Maria's interests is in archiving and preservation of intellectual uh properties online.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_04: She's also a brilliant editor and writer.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and in the last few years has been, I think, one of the pioneers of trying to figure out how to build and sustain owner-operated media entities.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_04: Is that the way is that the right way to describe Hydra and popular and brickhouse media, which is your your thing?
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the the general thrust of it is to make sure that people can continue to publish freely without corporate constraints or outside constraints or political constraints as much as we possibly can.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: There's I mean, you know, we live in the world and the world's full of constraints, but um in the media environment that we're in now, we've obviously seen even further made very powerful encroachments on people's ability to I'm I'm gonna stop you there because we could now just go straight into all the constraints.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_04: But I also want to welcome into the studio Sam Earle, who is um a TAW research fellow.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_04: Uh he's also in the PhD communications program here at Columbia, and he is a published author of a book called Tory Nation, uh, which is about the Tory Party, uh the Conservative Party in Britain.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and just earlier uh just earlier on, um I can't say when because we don't quite know when this is being uh published, but he's r had recent fame on the internet because he published a essay, guest essay in the New York Times about Nigel Farage and uh um reform.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_04: And what happened, Sam?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_04: Do you want to tell us what it was about and then uh what kind of reception it got?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well thank you uh for having me on, especially after the um the ignominy of the the past week.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: I I published uh an essay on the on Nigel Farage, as you said, about his rise within the UK, um, about what he's learnt from Trump, uh campaigning with him, and just how he's become such a dominant figure within Britain.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And some people liked it, some people didn't like it.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know what Anne Coulter thought of the actual piece, but she did share the headline with a photo of me in the caption why all Nigel Farage's enemies so ugly.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um anyway, I've been spending a bit more time in the morning getting ready when I leave the house.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_04: Just making yourself slightly less ugly.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Normally a podcast would be a perfect place to come, but now even video with even audio is video.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_04: I did say to our I did say to our producer, Amanda, are we sure that we want Sam on given the problem that he has with you for your bravery the aesthetics that's standing by me?
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_04: Not all heroes wear caves.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_04: Um but actually so so so in in in discussing this or in preparing for this episode and your arrival, Maria, because now you're you've exiled yourself to my homeland, or rather Scotland, which is almost my homeland.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_04: And Sam and I are both here in New York.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_04: So this is a very much a transatlantic um effort.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_04: What are you finding?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_04: Well what's what's your impression as you kind of come back and forwards?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: I have a lot of family in California.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm from California, and I hadn't been back to the States for a while.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: I think I expected things to look more different than they do.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: There's a uh a weird air of normalcy until you like have to produce a QR code to get into a building that I've walked into a million times without.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's these little hints of it about, you know.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, you read the newspaper.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I've been kind of a little bit off grid because I'm here for a conference.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: And just being away from the news for a while really altered my sense of and doom.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: Calm.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_03: A bit yes.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: I did feel a lot calmer because you're when you're putting all the pieces together, it really starts to look quite scary.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_04: Well, we took we d before we get into the scary stuff.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_04: Well, hopefully we're not gonna it's not just gonna be scary stuff, it's also gonna be about what we can do um and how we can lean in to the moment and build things and um emerge stronger.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_04: But we thought we'd go back, we'd do we're doing the back to the future part uh uh uh at the uh f first off, and we were discussing um Gorka media actually in preparation for this because we were wanting to talk uh about independent media ownership and resilience.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_04: And for this part of the podcast, uh this is why I've invited Sam in, because we were talking about political constraint, what Gorka Media was and and what happened to it.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_04: And Sam, you you as you said, you sent me an email saying I've fallen down the rabbit hole.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_04: So we do have some very young podcast listeners, because it's a medium.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_04: So some people might not even know what Gorka is.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_04: So it was a it was a new site set up by Nick Denton, um, who's a very talented journalist who came out of actually the Financial Times of all places, uh, and who wanted to do things differently.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_04: Is that fair, Maria?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: Is that how you how would you describe Gorka?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: He he wanted a gossip site originally.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: I I've heard him say many times that like the interesting conversations were taking place off the page, that what journalists were talking about among themselves was more interesting.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was a seed of it.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_04: He did actually use it, he said that about the Financial Times as well, which is you would write these very um straight stories about what was happening in banking, and then you'd go to the pub with all of your colleagues afterwards, and you would hear all the interesting stories, and he would think that's what needs to be on the page.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_04: And in some ways, um it was quite a sort of a vision a visionary idea of how journalism should work.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you could say, well, it's just traditional mutt raking.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's it I think it seemed to embody two separate forces.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: One was it very much felt like Nick Denton was importing a genre of journalism that's kind of more popular in Britain to the US, where uh in Britain the the tabloids are very influential, very irreverent.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: They're they're proudly creatures of the gutter, and they want to bring the rich and powerful and celebrities down into the gutter with them.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then the the second cultural force it really channelled was the rise of blogging and the kind of spirit, the horizontal spirit of the early internet, where uh, you know, it had a this kind of casual conversational, irreverent tone, and you know, it was often funny, sometimes cruel, very ironic.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the other like philosophy that underpinned it, which was also at the heart of Silicon Valley, was this idea that information should be free and that everything should be public, everything should be known.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the ironies, in a way, is that it it it turns that against Silicon Valley itself.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: One of the its favorite beats is uh on Silicon Valley, mocking Silicon Valley.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_04: Valley Whack, actually, which is where the the seeds of the end of Yorker.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_04: Maria, I hope we're not triggering you too much.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: No, I'm loving it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's like it's these are good memories for me.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: There there was a lot of wonderful writing there.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: I I always blame the whole entire mess on Sam Biddle myself because he was so mean and so funny about Peter Teal, like over and over and over, like the most vicious, hilarious barbs, you know.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's always been my suspicion that Peter Teal went after this organization because it they kind of got him, you know.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I I think he's he's basically on the record saying as much as slightly, you know, there's questions over whether it was like the most controversial piece they published about Teal was the one that disclosed to the public for the first time that he was gay.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um it wasn't his sexuality wasn't a secret in his circles, but it was the first time that it had been publicly announced.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the other thing that's interesting with that is that Teal said it wasn't the piece that really got under his skin, it was a comment underneath it from Nick Denton, who's also gay, and he commented on this piece outing Teal, saying, Now the only question that's left is why was Teal so paranoid about this coming out?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this idea of him becoming like his sort of character being questioned, really did uh yeah, eventually evolve into this incredible vendetta that lasted 10 years and was also a foreshadowing of the kind of rise of the tech mogul to clamp down on speech.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_04: I think Gorka is just that really interesting example because I think before the Gorka trial, and Maria, correct me if I'm wrong here, independence in the particularly in the American market, always seemed to only rely on your commercial viability.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_04: So, in other words, the idea that something would come along and shut you down, fit it feels as though McCarthyism was maybe an era where that wasn't true, but there was a kind of possibly completely false sense that you could publish very freely in the United States and be protected by the First Amendment, and as long as you were making money, everything would be alright.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_04: But uh Gorka seemed to change all of that.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_04: Is that am I am I overstating that?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there was one enemy, you know, there this guy spent a lot of money you know taking them down.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: It was one lawsuit after another.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: This you know, the the AJ Delario lawsuit was not the first one.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: And they kept winning and winning, and in fact they would have won if they had been permitted to appeal, uh even the one that they lost, you know.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: But it was like it was just gonna keep coming.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: It was just gonna this guy was gonna keep suing them until he shut it down and he did.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_04: So to go back to the specifics of the case, because again, it's actually quite a long time ago now.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_04: Um it's approaching ten years almost.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it's approaching ten years since the trial, but it's actually longer since the original.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_04: So the original story that triggered the triggered the trial was a weird kind of nothing piece of gossip, really, about Hulk Hogan.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_04: He was a wrestler.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: So so till he decides that he wants to uh he wants to take revenge on Gorkha, and with the help of an associate, they kind of come up with this plan that they're just gonna prowl the Gorka archive, but also be on the lookout for any news stories that might be able to become the the the substance for a case against Gorka that could then crush them.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it it takes almost five years for that moment to arrive in the form of a uh a leaked sex tape of Hulk Hogan, the WWE wrestler, and uh it was recorded without his consent.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: There had been rumors of it before, Gorka, it it can't it finds its way to Gorka and they they publish it.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hulk Hogan's not happy.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Peter Tittle's team see that and they decide this is perfect for us because it's not um about the First Amendment.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_04: They make it about privacy or privacy, privacy, as we're in America.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, they I mean even while they're still what even while they're pursuing that case, they're still pursuing other ones because they don't know that that's the one that will win for them.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_04: Uh but yeah, it it it and at the time, Maria, it wasn't known that um Peter Teel, who even then he was uh you know, he was wealthy uh as a founder of PayPal, part of what's known as the PayPal Mafia, which has a lot of the um original money, if you like, that has gone into other Silicon Valley companies, but now he's centre of the Trump advisory shadow cabinet in he's the founder of Palantir.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, lots of things now that we know about Peter Thiel.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_04: But he really wasn't known at the time at all, was he?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_04: In the outside, I would say, the Gorka circle.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_04: He wasn't like it's not like Elon Musk is now a media figure in his own right.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_04: This sort of was there any so so what happened in terms of him revealing himself?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_04: How did the trial because because at trial you didn't know that he was financing it, is that right?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: We all suspected that there was I mean it was pretty obvious that there were two teams of lawyers.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: There were these really sleek, well-dressed ones and like properly tailored suits, and then there were these like Florida wack-a-doodles who were just in a completely different league.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: It looked like like guys that you know you'd see on the back of a bus to, you know, call this number for your accident, you know.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: And we were like, These are what's happening, you know, and so it was like who who's involved?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: And there were many names mentioned and Teals was one of them, that somebody would be backing this whole thing, but there was not a proper understanding that it was possible that somebody was willing to spend that many, like tens of millions of dollars by the end to achieve this.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: And um so what happened was after the verdict and after the judge uh you know, through some shenanigans made it impossible for the appeal to happen because of filing dates and all these bizarre little twists and turns.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: About I th I want to say several weeks went by before we knew.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: And then I can't remember who revealed it first, but pretty soon after that, Teal himself wrote a an op-ed, I think, in the Times, saying that this was one of the the better philanthropic things that he'd done.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: He called it a philanthropic, you know, thing, and that these people, you know, were evil that they were going after people and damaging their lives, and it's like, you know, excuse me, you just put like however many hundreds of people out of work.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: You know.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, dude.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean anyway.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_04: And you were you managed to get into cover the trial every day.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_04: How did you achieve that?
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_04: Probably just turning up.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: I really I really wanted to do it, and so I I called a couple of editors and had a few conversations and then um a guy Brian Abrams, who was editing Death and Taxes in those days, was kind of affiliated with like Spin and um Billboard, that whole group, so I said, Yeah, let's do it, you know.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: And they spent they spent some money on it and like I went every day and filed every day.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then I had like a sort of wind up piece.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: But what I found really it it changed my whole trajectory professionally, that one experience is the the formative moment of my career.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_04: Explain explain that a bit.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, because we did not know what we were looking at and it had become evident that one person who didn't like what was being written about him for whatever reason could just spend a lot of money and deprive millions of people of whatever reading they wanted and and all these livelihoods.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: And this had been done through a particular sort of attack against the wealth of one guy, of Nick Denton.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: He was very much the owner of this thing, and it was his millions that were gone after personally.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't a question of like, you know, i the money wasn't spread out, it was just one guy's.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so that determined so much about what happened.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it was a it was a vulnerable spot.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so I determined right after that to do everything I could to increase and create opportunities for people to practice journalism in an atmosphere where that would not be possible to sort of fortify the sources of information for people.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's what I've done ever since.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: I like started cooperatives, I like you know, involved myself in the library world a certain amount, archiving.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um I have done work with the Internet Archive, and like practically everything I do is like a question of protecting information freedom.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_04: It's really interesting.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_04: We were talking to Jay Rosen uh for another episode of this, and Jay was talking about um his essay that he wrote in 2016 after the first Trump um victory, which was called Winter Is Coming, where he listed a lot of forces that were going to be difficult to navigate, and and he lays it out as um an attack on every part of the knowledge economy.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um and I it's an interesting is interesting to see politics as a force in that because again it felt as though a lot of the knowledge economy was already sort of under attack by just Silicon Valley's business model.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, a lot of our work at the Tower Centre is around how platforms are just essentially have for a long time been essentially hostile platforms for posting journalism, and yet we were all cleaving to Google and cleaving to Facebook, and you know, please kind of develop tools so we can put more of our stuff on your platforms.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_04: Um what's the kind of you know, again, sort of the it feels like this is a really important inflection.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well I think it what it illuminates is that social media and the internet it created two threats to journalism, and we often talk about one slightly the neglect of the other, and and the one that's well known is that it, you know, completely destroyed the financial basis for journalism, the old model of advertising and print um and the classified.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: But then the other threat is that the internet created some incredibly wealthy people that were completely unacco unaccountable democratically.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we see that now with Elon Musk.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: But Peter Thiel against Gorka was the first time I think that we s really saw that, where you had someone who had made their vast sums of wealth in tech, and he was going to use that wealth to literally crush the media, um, not through a backhanded way of their technologies undoing the foundations of journalism, like a full-on frontal assault on media.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so it created those two threats, and I think you know, we're still we're still in the in the wreckage of them.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I don't know that you want to say that it was a f you know, full-on, obvious he's very sneaky and very b bullying.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: And the that's the kind of character that um Silicon Valley or the VC sort of ethos and mentality of like you raise this money and you just rapaciously grab whatever is a tie-down.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna say so I'm gonna do something I'm gonna make myself very unpopular by being, if you like, devil's advocate here and say everything that you've both said I can strongly relate to.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_04: The implosion in the 2010s, of which Gorka was part, was preceded by a period in which there was a generalized feeling that uh the press or journalists who had any kind of power at all had gone too far because it ran parallel to the hacking trial in the UK.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_04: So Nick Um Davis's story actually wasn't really the trial, but Nick Davis's stories for The Guardian about phone hacking in the UK started to break in sort of 2006-2007.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody paid any attention to them.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_04: There were three or four years of people trying to suppress them, other prep other outlets not covering them, and it sort of revolved around this privacy of like we're going into a surveillance age, and journalists are using the technologies of surveillance to do their own kind of bullying and squeezing.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_04: So there are a lot of people I know who probably don't feel quite the same as Maria and I do about Gorka, but we're like, well, good, they had it, they had it coming.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_04: They stepped over a line.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I wrote a um I wrote an op ed in the LA Times, you know, you're making a mistake, Accra is good, you know, uh and it's important that there should be mistakes and that you own up to them.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's been a lot of scandals at the New York Times.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: There's been, you know, glass scand there's millions of them.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: You know, stories that were WMDs.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Fabricated stories.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: And did you Shut the paper down because no, you didn't.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: You'd like own app, you correct, you print the correction.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: We had we know how this thing is supposed to work.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and but this is why Peter Teal's team was so delighted to find this case.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because they knew actually it's quite hard to defend the media on the grounds of publishing a sex tape.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's not what anyone's image of journalism is supposed to be.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean the irony that barely needs stating is that Peter Thiel makes a very unpersuasive advocate for privacy when he founded Palantir, um, which sells surveillance technologies to states.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, this was he he did cast this fight against Gorka as a fight for freedom.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: He he literally repeatedly referred to Gorka as a terrorist organization, as the Al-Qaeda of Silicon Valley, and someone went, Are you sure about that?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he went, Yes, because they instill a culture of fear and conformity in Silicon Valley, and we need everyone to be brave and fearless about what people are uh how people are judging us.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_04: It's so interesting because now we've got a time when the words terrorist organization are being appropriated by his proteges, um, Stephen Miller and JD Vance to describe other media organisations, including another one that we're Associated The Nation, um ran Elizabeth Spears uh article about Charlie Kirk.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_04: And the first thing was uh JD Vance and Stephen Miller said we uh this kind of coverage is um terrible and the organizations that support this kind of uh coverage are terrorist uh terroristic uh mentions, foundations, etc.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_04: And it's d that through line, as you say, sort of I completely forgotten that Te Teal had used.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: Free speech as long as you say what I want.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: Mm-hmm.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_04: Right, right.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_04: And and and then also the ex the extremity of if you don't if you don't do that, it's terrorism, which is it's if you don't do that, I will exert myself to shut you down.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so you should be scared to say what you think is tr true.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean we're seeing this everywhere.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: I just got back from this um conference about digital uh librarianship, and there is so much censorship and political pressure and b book bannings and the stories you're hearing from all over the US, you know, about how this effort has ramped up and failed most of the time but it has to be fought.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: And i I see it kind of as one sort of effort to crush everything that doesn't conform to their sort of view of the world.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: You're supposed to like if you like if you don't like Elon Musk, you're gonna be in trouble on Twitter.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's really strange to think about that.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: This man who actually went in a building carrying a porcelain sink demands admiration every day in in the most incomprehensibly childish manner.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: And yet we all used to go on Twitter and be able to talk to people all over the world, and now you kind of can't.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's like truly been ruined.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well I think that's like another thing that I just the Gorka felt so resonant right now is this idea that something about social media means that it's it's not enough just to be really rich.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: You also want to be liked.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so Elon Musk, he doesn't want to just be the richest man in the world.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: He also wants people to find him funny.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: He's desperate for the thing that he'll never ever ever achieve.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's incredible to watch the most profoundly unfunny man trying so hard to post.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: He wants to be a poster in the worst way, the one thing that you can't buy.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: And these like really roguish lunatics at Gawker, who are like the posters of all time and are all broke as church mice, but like post like crazy.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's an incredible and are funny.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: And are hilarious.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, barbs that sting every time.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's like it's an incredible uh battle to watch.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_04: So as you say, Maria, this changed the trajectory of your work and what you think about um putting together.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so tell us a little bit about how from your perspective, you know, the po the post-Gork world.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_04: So I kind of feel like this is the this is the J.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_04: Rose and Winter is coming moment of 2016.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_04: And they were again, it's so easy to forget or be ahistoric about these things, which is that I had to remind myself that the conclusion of the Gorkha trial, the closure of Gorkha, first Trump presidency, the Russian advertising that was spread all over Facebook and targeted at American voters during 2015, 2016, that revealed in 2017.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_04: All of these things were happening in actually a very compressed period of time, all coming to a head at a very compressed period of time.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_04: And now, here we are, ten years on.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_04: Um what's happened?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_04: Well like what's happened that should make us feel better or or worse?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: Well, a lot of things have happened on both sides of that ledger.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, in twenty sixteen-seventeen, by then I had already been covering cryptocurrency and Bitcoin for a couple of years.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: At um first at the New Yorker.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I knew this was going to be a really cool thing because it is to me uh a a method of creating uh tamper-proof records.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it still is that.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's been overtaken by the worst people uh in the universe.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_02: But I was really thinking it would be a great thing to be able to harness this to create um bulletproof uh records of archives.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I had been, you know, I started to write down, talk to people, and I got this phone call in like late two twenty sixteen, early twenty seventeen, I guess.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, these guys were trying to make a a blockchain-based publishing platform.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: And a bunch of us got together.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's called Civil, and it was funded by Joe Lubin, the uh founder of Ethereum.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: And in those days, like Ethereum, it was a very big deal, they had a lot of money, you know, and all of this, but the regulatory uh frameworks were very wobbly.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so the price of Ethereum went from about fifteen hundred bucks, it didn't quite reach, to down to sixty-seven.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so the money dried up for a lot of these like really interesting experiments.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, we founded this um publishing platform at a time when I could see that legacy media was going to be crippled by these same kinds of efforts.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: The pressure was increasing.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: It you know, the there were the guys who went after Gawker were emboldened by the ability to sort of weaponize lawsuits like the law fair became insane and it is obviously going to continue.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: But I thought if we created our own organizations with uh sort of novel forms of ownership that were proof against this type of attack and and kind of like batten down the hatches a bit, you know, at least we could demonstrate better ways of of protecting press freedom.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think in a lot of ways we've been successful.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_04: Because we 'cause we actually met because of Syphil, because we it was it was a failed it was a failed project that we were both involved in on the other side because I was kind of part of a group of people who were not doing anything interesting or revolutionary like you were, but we were the nerds who were asked to figure out what does it look like to have a constitution that people can sign up to.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_04: It was great actually.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_04: You did really interesting work.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_04: But so so so it always sort of strikes me that it was kind of this far.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_04: Like it was a really great idea or instinct, just as you say, not at the wrong time, run in maybe not quite the right way, with the wrong underpinnings in it.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_04: But in the way that people say, well, you know, failure is actually great in innovation.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, publishing is not great.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_04: People are very judgmental about failure.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_04: But it was, I sort of feel that as you say, that there was something I mean, it interested you to hear you say, in some ways we really succeeded.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_04: So unpack that a bit for us.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: We made a cooperative, um, and it was nine publishers to start with, and it was called the Brick House Cooperative, and there were people all over the world because I always felt like, okay, here's these people giving me money, not enough to have I didn't have the kind of editorial experience to make a big publication anyway, but they were all, you know, they wanted guinea pigs for this, and I was like, great, I'll do that.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: So what was I gonna do that would be interesting that would add to the conversation?
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I always felt that the weakness, the most profound weakness in US journalism was its insularity and its refusal to sort of um h hire people who understood things as residents, you know, the whole tendency to parachute in and m you know, create all kinds of misunderstandings about things that were happening in distant countries.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_02: So the first thing I did was get all my colleagues to go looking for the most interesting blogs that they could find that were anglophone blogs but written outside.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: And we are still publishing, like I've just I've been publishing Brian Yu, who is in Taiwan since then, since 2018.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean he's like, you know, a big deal now.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: And he's you know, we've helped create like some opportunities for people.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Kolato Basun is a um Nigerian linguist, really freaking gifted.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Yemisi Ari Bisala, you know, we've we've given a space for people to publish what they want.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: And it's been incredible.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it's tiny, you know, it's this little petri dish.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: But I think when people come and read Flaming Hydra, which is what it eventually became, um, and it's now like about 60 people.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, they all share the revenues, it's very little revenues, but like it's it's a really fun hobby.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's a light lift for everybody, and they're able to write whatever they want.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: And the results are profoundly different from the sort of like deracinated, you know, bloodless, kind of boring AI slop type nonsense, chum-filled.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's like when there's real people talking.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: I kind of want to go back to one thing that you said, Sam, about like what was missing, you know, and I think that that's there's a bit tension, and Jay Rosen has written about this too, about the view from nowhere, and how the idea in uh like the idealized journalist was the one who was completely dispassionate.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: This is what the blogging era changed.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: The blogging era was like all voice, and it was you knew exactly, you could triangulate, like if I say something and you know who I am and where I live and what I think, then you can figure out what I'm saying better.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very different approach, but it's also really valuable.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that the real strength of these years since has been to rehumanize or to give people the sense that we want to be talking to people, we want to know people, and we want to know what they think.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that's just an unbeatable, unsilenceable, powerful way of approaching informing the public.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_04: So Maria's painting this very, I think, optimistic picture that I would like to buy into.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_04: As you know, we don't like just to have optimism.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_04: So do you do from your perspective as a scholar of of these kinds of things, do you think that there is reason to be hopeful about these things on the fringes, or are you a bit worried about the yeah?
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: I am I am more worried than hopeful, is how I describe my you know internal balance.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that you know, in my research, I'm interested in the idea that optimism that came with the early internet, and then what happened in the next decades.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the way we under I I I'm trying to look at it through the angle of the concept of crowds, and with the rise of the internet and the rise of social media, you had more optimism around what crowds can do than than ever before.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: There was all this talk about uh smart mobs, the wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, organizing without organizations, and then something happened over the course of five to ten years that really does span the Gorka trial, I think, about 2007 to 2016, where that optimism about the internet disappears, and we still talk about the internet in crowds, but we've kind of reverted to the more familiar perception of crowds as easy to manipulate, emotional, the social media mob, witch hunts, sort of destructive rather than constructive, which is not how it would be viewed across the political spectrum.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_04: So there'll be lots of people who are not sitting in this studio who would say, but it has been a hugely positive force, people are getting their voices heard, etc.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: But that I d I don't know, that feel that that feeling of manipulation or the higher power, I think, is and and I think I think what's really tricky now is how like I I think you know I don't want to overstate my thesis that Gorka opened the gates of hell and now we're in on the other side and kind of stuck there.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there was something in the Gorka trial where you had this Gorka represented East Coast elites, and Hulk Hogan represented Real America, and Real America won, and it was only later that you realized that Real America was being funded and sponsored and really weaponized by a tech billionaire for his own personal vendetta.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that coalition between Thiel and Hogan really does capture Trumpism, and it is really powerful.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it is a really h difficult thing to unseat.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: You don't even have to Teal doesn't even have to enter into it.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: One of the pieces that I wrote for Death and Taxes actually blew my own mind when I went and looked back.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: You wrote a piece.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: At the time.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's like h I I think it was called like Hulk.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_02: Hogan is the Donald Trump of sports or something like this.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like, here are these two people who were just want to be in the public eye at any price, you know, incredibly vulgar, misogynistic men who make a virtue of their own barbarity.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a very similar flavor.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: And it somehow around that time, Hulk Hogan had been asked, and he said, I'd like to be his running mate.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, Oh, that'll be great.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_04: We'll probably be better than some of the other people he could have picked, but also but also but also the whole K-fabe and professional wrestling.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, there's a lot to be said for that.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_04: And and the confusion that that caused, which is these are not really this person seems aggressive and menacing, but actually it's a bit of a laugh, it's a joke, um, it's not real.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_04: And it was Teal who said about Donald Trump, take him seriously, but not literally, I think.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_04: Is that right?
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, exactly.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's like that the the Hogan case, it showed it's not and like Hogan can't win on his own, and Trump couldn't win on his own.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: They need these other financial interests to be entangled with them for real America, quote unquote, to win.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, even according to to Teal's close friends, without the Gorka trial and what it showed him about this resentment towards smug East Coast liberals, he wouldn't have gotten behind Trump so early.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, fast forward to Trump being president, Thiel's then at the conference that same year giving uh giving a speech, and then fast forward another eight years, and Hulk Hogan is giving a speech to the RNC in in 2024, wearing a real American shirt with a picture of himself, which he then rips off to reveal a to reveal the Trump advance t-shirt.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean with that image alone, it's it's hard to be optimistic about the future.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_02: I think these are not mutually exclusive positions, and I definitely am ping-ponging between mine and yours all the time.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's terrible watching the people who I some of the people who I think are really are the worst people in the world, literally, you know, kind of getting their way and silencing everybody, and it's horri horrible.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: But then, you know, no kings.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, a lot of people were afraid to go out, you know, and but once they got out there, and there was a lot about this at Flaming Hydra, our our cooperative publication, where people were like, I don't know what it's gonna be like, and we might get attacked or tear gassed or crazy stuff might happen.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: And we got out and they were like, Everyone's out here.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: We're all together.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: This is so incredible.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_02: We all feel the same, you know, there's there's a huge number of people who want things to be better and have maybe the means to, you know, start making it so.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it's I think these things are happening simultaneously.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: I yeah, I agree with that.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to be a complete doomonger, because I also think that when you look back at the optimism of the early internet, it was filled with illusions and all this innocence.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: And at least now I think we know what we're up against, we know where we stand, and I think that has allowed us a greater clarity of mind for going forward.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_04: Sam, thanks so much.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um I was gonna say back to your research duties, but it was uh it was uh that was a great conversation.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_04: Um and now we're gonna bring in uh Maureen Du, our uh friend, who's also uh at the town centre at the moment, and just to talk about the nitty-gritty of um business ownership and development and independence in a slightly different form.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um but thanks very much indeed.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sam, you're very handsome.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_04: Handsome Sam Earl, as we like to say.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_04: So we've lost Sam, but we've gained another member of the uh well, a visiting member of the Town Centre, which is our visiting scholar, Marine Du.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_04: Marine, welcome.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_04: Welcome to America.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_04: Not as well, apparently, because we were allowed in for now.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_04: Um and uh Maureen uh actually it turns out that Maureen and I knew each other anyway, uh, but I knew Marine's work through um I know that I'm gonna get the pronunciation of it wrong so you can pronounce it.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: Median.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, I was gonna say medien.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, median.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Median, yes.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_04: Median, there we go.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and which which is uh it's an agency, right, which supports and looks for new ways of finding sort of sustainable models for the kind of thing that Maria was talking about, really sort of independent media.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_04: Can you can you talk a bit about but you're you're you're in France but also looking across Europe.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_04: Um so I thought it'd be fun in this segment of fun in a vertical commerce just to talk about some of the sort of the challenges in those models.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_04: I think Maria's framed it really well as being, you know, this is actually now really super important that we get these kind of sustainable things.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_04: I think you know, for a lot of my recent career, people were like, we have to find a new business model for journalism.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_04: And I was like, well, there are business models, but they're not the business models which are gonna make you cajillions of dollars, etc.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_04: So tell me tell me what's going on at Median and um how the picture is different maybe in Europe to America.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, we launched five years ago now, like we are both like a media outlet, an agency, and a peer network because we wanted to help the media leaders, uh, new media or like establish legacy media to be more independent, but not only as you say, like on the financial side or on the editorial side, but also like on the technical side, like how you can really be independent.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we created this in France because like in France there is like a super concentrated media ecosystem, like 10 billionaires like clearly on like the news.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: So there was something that we really wanted to help like the media leaders like to think like not only on the business model but also how they can be really independent on the long run.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think independence is something that you build, it's not like something that is a stage that you can go like one day and it's great.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: And what is really interesting is since like some years now we are like more operating in Europe because we have I think we actually acknowledge that uh media leaders in Europe share the same like issues, problematic, and especially I think compared to America or like sometimes we were talking about Silicon Valley, like we have the same issues, but we have like sometimes a different kind of different view, different point of view of what we want, especially on things on privacy and what kind of like tools we want to use.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like a special moment right now in Europe.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: So well, so that is interesting.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_04: There's something that we talk about a little bit in our work um at Columbia, which is this media, in some ways we've catastrophized for so long about the consolidation of power, and particularly in distribution and technical power, um, that I think when all the things that we were predicting, so so if you're an academic or a media columnist, I've been a bit of both, when you predict Facebook is going to be really terrible for journalism, and it turns out to actually be true, you sometimes slightly surprise yourself, and you're like, Oh, I didn't realise that before I knew it was going to be terrible, I didn't know it was going to be this terrible.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_04: And as you say, you're at you're you're at a sort of an inflection point in Europe, and Europe sort of got there a bit earlier, I think, because it doesn't have the same financial interest in being dominated by American companies that America has in dominating Europe.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_04: Um and it is there, is there the same, I would say, Maria, that there's a kind of an existential crisis here right now about ownership and independence, and we've seen it with the purchase of Paramount by Skydance, which is ultimately owned by David Ellison.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_04: Larry Ellison is the founder of Oracle, and just recently bought uh the Free Press, a blogging platform, blogging, I don't know, the it's like the Huffington Page, yes, exactly.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_04: Who knows?
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um Barry Weiss, uh who uh late of this parish is now the editor-in-chief of CBS News, it's all being sort of brought under this one um under this one entity.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_04: In Europe, is there a is there any you know this has happened so so the playbook for a lot of this consolidation comes from parts of Europe, right?
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_04: It comes from Hungary.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_04: You know, Rupert Murdoch had a lock on a lot of UK media a long time, like in way in excess in terms of market share to anything that's currently happening in in the US.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_04: But it does Europe feel that existential threat in the same way that America does at the moment, do we think?
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think we feel like the threat because uh like there's been like a kind of uh I think a big moment, especially last year in France, because of like the electoral, like the new local and municipal elections that have been like the far right, again uh super high in France.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think like media started to realize that uh we were like only two years before like the next presidential election and that something could happen again in France.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: And uh what is not funny, because I will say what is funny is like people also realize in France that they were we weren't only alone like in this kind of situation with like big like individuals, super rich individuals like coming up like on national TV, like radio, but also like book publishing house, like just coming and coming and coming.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: And um we confund in like a European network named Sfera, and we have like Italian partners, Hungarian partners, and uh also partners in France, and right now what's happening in Hungary, what's happening in Italy, we actually able to share this kind of story, like oh, this coming this way, or like from the private sector or from the public sector.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: And what you can see is like there's already like some kind of like sound, like a slow censorship because people starting to, I think, to be afraid, but also because France always look up like like from like the other side of the Atlantic and we see what's coming and we can see like what could happen in France.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I think like people are already like in a more um building mode, like what can we do?
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: So people are actually starting to talk between like other newsrooms, but not only in France, also like in in Europe.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm like more on the optimist side right now, but I think that the path is so long, we need to like create so much things, especially more on the legal like side of things and like more cooperative models.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: So people are starting to yeah, build something, but it's taking so much time.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_04: So so this is where we go from looking at the last 25 years to looking at the next.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_04: 25 years is a long time.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_04: I'm fairly confident um you're still gonna be around, Marine.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_04: I'm fairly sure that I'd be very surprised if I was still around at that point.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_02: We'll still be croaking out our upper seo.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_02: We will.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_04: We'll still be we will still be still be complaining about things from somewhere.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_04: Um but but but I think that's the point about building and what's needed and the length of the road is such a good one.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_04: So, what are the things that we're gonna need for the next 25 years, or what would you ideally like?
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: I like my uh my Christmas, uh my Christmas list for the media.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: Christmas list for the media.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: Or the day list.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think um we have to think like the independence on like editorial, financial, and um technical kind of view.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I think first like it's audience-led model.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like I truly believe in like subscription, donation, membership.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's like plenty of ways like to implement this, but also I think it's a better way to also to work with the audience, like to think about the audience every day.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: Secondly, I think it's like uh like to cooperative model.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: I truly believe like in this.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was listening to you, I was like, yes, this is actually what we need.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's a common mistake to think that it can only be used or like implement for small newsrooms.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: It is not, uh like one of our partners like uh in Spain, like El Salto, that's a big newsroom right now, and I think it's truly like that needs some like organization and some rules, but it can really work.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think like the the last part would be like to to have like more mutual infrastructures, like more mutual, like to share more resources between newsroom, NGOs, sometimes institutions, because if we if you try something, the first time you're not going to succeed.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: So if you can hear from others, like you were talking about Seville, like just before, like for me, like it's normal to fail at first, like it's like the whole entrepreneurial thing, but when you already fail, you can help like someone else.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: So in the newsroom industry, I think if we talk like a little more, that is like something that we can be proud of.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: And especially I think in this moment, like the real opponents are not like in the media industry most of the time, it's like outside the media industry.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: So even if you're like Le Monde is talking to the New York Times and the New York Times is talking to MediaPart, like I think it's gonna be like easier for us to find ways, especially like more on the legal terms, sometimes like to think of ways to be more independent, like poorly.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_04: What about you, Maria?
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_04: What's the uh what are the things, the pre-existing conditions for where we want to get to?
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think the most important thing is to get people to realize that journalism can't be just a business.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_02: It is a public trust.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it needs to be protected and understood in that way.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_02: And when people spend money on it, I mean this is a terrible weapon that's been used against the media by uh moneyed interests and corporate interests that want to control what's being said or what can be said.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_02: But I think people are seeing with the deterioration, like people my age for sure are seeing the deterioration of like what's available to them to be able to find out or learn about the quality of libraries and archiving, everything from that to like what the news looks like.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I looked at the AP news this morning and it was just weird, you know?
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_02: It looked like a cereal box.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's like there's no um imperative to educate the public as like that would be the first, you know, value for a healthy society to have an educated, informed public.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_02: It seems like the most obvious thing, but that's not what anybody leads with.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_02: So that would be like my first thing.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_02: The second one is we need to communicate to people that digital ownership rights are paramount, of paramount importance, and there's not enough uh emphasis being put on this because so much has disappeared that I published, you know, which is very important, obviously, that that should be all found and restored.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_02: But like so much, all my colleagues, you know, so many people.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_02: You look and it's like it's gone.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_02: How are how are we gonna learn that we you can't build a future without the past?
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_02: And there is a they're concerted, it's much easier to manipulate dumb people.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's not an imperative to teach them.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's my other thing.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's so interesting, and we leave it behind when we talk about definitions of journalism or the future of journalism, and when you have to write down or describe or talk to students about what is your essential job.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um archiving preservation of what happened even like five minutes ago or ten minutes ago, and who actually keeps records of what's going on now.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_04: I I think a lot of us um didn't exactly grow up, but again, it was a delusion of the first round of the internet that this would be uh something where you'd be able to find everything forever, and it wasn't until I had a car ride.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_04: So again, terrible name dropping.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I was going to a book festival and we picked up from the airport, and my car ride mate was the historian Anthony Beaver, who is a great kind of figure in British history, history historian writer, historical writing.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_04: And I it's one of those things where I say to him, What are you doing?
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_04: He says, I'm working on a history of the Second World War, and what are you doing?
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, Well, I don't I'm I I'm doing some podcasting of the Guardian.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_04: And but we got into very interesting conversation about, and he said, Oh, the internet is the worst thing that ever happened to historians.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_04: And I was like, But that can't be right because actually there's so much social history, there's so much and he said, No, but there's nothing, nothing's reliable, everything is fungible, everything can be erased or manipulated or whatever.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_04: And like, you know, if you're a historian and you go to a certain place at a certain time and you find, you know, the artifact, you know, if you're an archaeologist, you find the artifact, you're a historian, you find the papers, you know where you are.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_04: And it was the first time that I had that oh shit moment of, yeah, of course, it's completely right.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, on the other hand, there's Rooster Kale and the Internet Archive.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_04: Rooster Kale, the yes, the Internet Archive.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you you've been very involved with that, and and that's an interesting thing to look forward to, because almost like Wikipedia as well, we've seen some of these collective and almost cooperative enterprises.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_02: Wikipedia is so important.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, Wikipedia is better than any encyclopedia that ever existed previously because you can see the history of a dispute.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_02: And that is in that too, is can it's incorruptible.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's an incorruptible record of every single thing that's happened, and you could record it and download it and look at it and prove to yourself to your own satisfaction that something really did happen.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_04: And the Internet Archive is something we use literally all the time, both in our classroom and in our research, because the only place that you can find things, and yet it's actually largely uh it's it's I think held together as somebody once said by you know, kind of good wits, prayers and string, you know, it's it's sort of it's not funded in the same way that lots of uh corporate entities might be funded, um, and yet it's so important.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_04: And we see now, I mean, I think there was a piece the other day in Neiman Lab about how there were holes opening up because of the way that AI crawlers now work on the web, and blocking has become something that you need to do sometimes to stop people from stealing everything that you own, but at the same time it's also kind of detrimental to things like archives.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_02: I was in uh Canada when there was a terrible DDOS attack against the archive.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_02: I happened to be interviewing Brewster Cale right then because I'm very interested in his approach to these things, and I'm working on a little chat book about his views.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_02: And watching that team work on that attack was really instructive to me.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like you don't actually really think about who is fortifying the wall, but there's guys like, you know, up at every corner of the globe in the middle of the night, all like pouring water on that fire, and it was really fascinating to watch the a dedication, you know, of these people that a lot of people working on it who understand very well what the importance of it is.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_04: And this kind of sort of relates to your point, Maureen, about the infrastructure that we need is not necessarily within each media company.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_04: What can we do about that?
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_04: Because I I sort of feel like when it's four people or five people and getting going with the newsroom, we've seen some amazing successes, I think, with that.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_04: Uh what about the bigger infrastructure picture?
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_04: So sort of archive is one part.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_04: What's what are other things that you and and how do you do you see any good things happening?
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's like a good moment in Europe right now, like on this kind of like we need to not think only on a newsroom level, but like multiple newsrooms, because like even sometimes when you want to create like a new infrastructure infrastructure infrastructure, it's hard what to say.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's always easy for you to say like okay, I cannot buy this new tool or like this new CMS.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes it's like when you think you can be like multiple on a different project, it's easier.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: And what is interesting right now, for example, in France, like there's like new kind of um portals for news, like the kind of Google News or Netflix, but for news, but on a like small or medium level, like several news loans coming out together saying like, hey, if you want to have like multiple subscriptions, maybe you can have just one, but you have like multiple access.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you have also like um another another project uh named like uh portail des media independents, so the independent media portails.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: And they are like you, it's like a Google news, but only with like more social justice, ecological, like independent media news, and you can have all of it on the same webpage.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this couldn't have happened like years ago, but now it's like common sense, like yes, obviously we need this kind of like uh project.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: And right now, what is interesting is like I think we already passed the the moment that we realize that we need to cooperate on, for example, investigative journalists.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like we you have like great examples of like investigative investigative pace or like uh kind of like network that's going to work on the same um on the same editorial work.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: So this is okay.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I think now journalists um they are acknowledged that the they can share value, that they share vision, editorial vision.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I think if you have this, that's the common ground.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: What is more difficult, and it's when you're going to talk about like marketing and data and uh even administrative stuff.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: So usually like it's easier because it's non-editorial.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: So people sometimes in the newsroom are like, okay, this we can share.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, fine, news.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, when you go to the marketing team, they're like, no, this is we're not going to share that because this is like the core of the like newsroom, so the core of the model.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: But what we can see now, like in Europe, like there are more and more people that want to share some kind of tools, some kind of even people that can work between two newsrooms just to be in the neo non-editorial thing.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, I think it's pretty new.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: People are still trying to say, hey, how we can like build something different.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: And um and for me, what is interesting is like the cooperative model, I think, is the solution because when it's like when you know that you have a part of like a common project, it's more easy to say, like, oh, I'm not going to get, I don't know, like to have issues, or I'm not going to be the one left in the room without nothing.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: So if everyone has a place at the same table, I think it's easier to think that.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_02: This goes back to what Emily did at Civil.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I think one of the things that I learned that I have had the most occasion to remember since those days, is there were a bunch of people that came in at the end because they were trying to save it at all costs, and they were like letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry, like, you know, and breaking their own rules to let um completely unproven newsrooms full of people who we didn't know.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_02: There were like all these um anyway, it was a mess.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_02: And the rules were really good.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I think those should be published on an open source basis.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_04: When you say me, that was not actually just me.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_04: There was like really small lawyers who and and other kind of but it was that thing of collective thinking around what does it take to create a constitution or a set of standards that everybody can sign up to that you have to meet to participate.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_04: You know, like what are the what is the price of entry to participation?
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_04: And it's really fascinating to me how that is going to look in ten years' time.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think that that document is going to be one of those things that you look back at and think that was prescient, and we needed to I I think we should look into doing that more.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, look at it.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_04: I love this when this sort of thing happens, but but I do well that this comes to back to something else about you know the future, which is um I was with a bunch of people yesterday talking about AI, current agentic AI, I have lots of feelings about AI, and talking about open source.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm of a generation which slightly rolls my eyes at open source because I'm like, open source is great, but we did open source for a decade, and then either the good stuff was bought up by people who are not vested in democ democratic commons, or it didn't work and wasn't supported, and etc.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_04: And now I'm having having people who are much smarter than me and much younger than me saying, no, no, no, but this time round we actually think that open source can really work for these things.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_04: It's not just repetition.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_04: I think that and your point about having a um constitution of publishing rules and identifying what it what what makes us similar and what how we can kind of collectivise around that does feel like one of those ideas that was a bit kind of idealistic or before its time or whatever, but now it's actually just genuinely needed.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_02: Practical frameworks for doing this trade, you know.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_02: Because there's been so much uh betrayal of the most simplest values in this industry.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_02: But the thing is, if the people don't believe in it, the ethical sort of substrate, like the foundation of it is flawed, you know, you can't even have it.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like look what's happening to the Constitution in the United States.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of like the simplest things that are so obvious that are being like, you know, just sort of like set figure terra kerosene and a match, you know.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of um a a community-wide decision-making and valuing of things that I think is coming and is sort of snowballing and be coming into existence.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_02: But it's gonna take a long time.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the other key thing is, you know, somebody comes and buys something because they think they make a lot of money, strip it for parts, you know, like what Elon Musk did with Twitter.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like it we have to start thinking that something is a success even if it doesn't make anyone rich.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's so so I think that that point about I remember when Musk took over Twitter thinking about it in terms of infrastructure and uh the idea that if you had physical infrastructure that somebody did that to, civic infrastructure, said, I've bought all the highways in your country and now I'm just gonna put potholes in them, or although certain people will not be able to drive down them in the way that they could, or all those people we banned from driving because they were drunk or they were dangerous, they're gonna come back onto the roads because come on down, and and uh we think of uh speech mechanisms not as infrastructure, but communications infrastructure is it is infrastructure.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's sort of interesting actually as well, Maureen, for the people that you are uh working with and encouraging, because I've heard from uh journalists in the United States that the big overlooked community of journalists when big platforms like Twitter essentially fail for the purposes of journalism is actually the kind of the local and the small are the people who benefited most from instant access to experts, being able to make community across space.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but because they didn't have the big followings, because they weren't the kind of like famous voices on it, people didn't really sort of focus on that as being a loss.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_04: Um was it sort of you know the platform we we get very platform obsessed in the States?
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_04: I know the French liked you built your own internet with Minitel.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, we're really proud of this.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly, it was great, and and now we're all you're laughing now.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_04: We're all we're all like, oh yeah, it was actually a great idea to have your own internet.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm just wondering, so with those those big platform players, how does that feel in Europe now?
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_04: Are people kind of do they see them as infrastructures that they can't trust?
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_04: Or that and is that an important part of making all of these new networks work?
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, yes, it's it's funny because we just published a piece actually, like rethinking the open source or creating like the in-house kind of like CMS or just like publishing tools because they're starting to realize that with what's happening in the US, uh infrastructures or tools that we used to use and without even thinking about this, like uh oh, it's like social media.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_01: We just like it's something nice, it's great.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_01: And now it's not only like, oh, are we going to be like on I don't know, Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook anymore.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's also are we still like allowed?
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like, is it like still like like smart to use Google Docs or is it like great to use like uh Chat GPT?
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like people are starting to realize that we not we need to think on the long term because for now this is still working.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_01: But when you're a big independent political newsroom and you're focusing on like a uh corporation or institutions such like uh context in France, like you cannot like trust sometimes the the tools you're going to use.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: So there's like a More sometimes it's like independent newsroom that's starting to be like the first people to think about that, but it's already like something that is coming back in France and Europe.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it can be also more like on an ecological or sustainable like point of view, like because of AI, but also in a way that you want to be coherent, not only like oh, I don't trust the values, or like I'm not uh I don't respect this kind of platform, so we need to do like our own, or we're going to leave, for example, like Meta and everything.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_01: And this coherence like goes also on like in infrastructure infrastructures, like how tools we're going to use.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_01: But also, I think right now it's not only for the practical ways, it's also because we don't trust like these platforms anymore.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_01: And what's happening right now between like uh the European Union and like the US, like there's a big fight on privacy and consent.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that's always surprised me when I'm here.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's like people like uh some kind of like marketing teams ask me like how the newsroom uh are like thriving in Europe because you need to like ask for the consent of everyone.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, yeah, like I want like yeah, asking for consent, great, yeah.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's something that's that should be like I don't know, like shared like everywhere, and like even like you're not going to like uh like force someone to read your newsletter because you need to ask the consent.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, like it's also like we don't know what's going to happen in the near future.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: So people are starting to build new infrastructure because we don't believe in them anymore, especially the US ones.
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_02: This is a paradigm shift that has to happen in so many areas.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like I was at this conference yesterday, and a librarian told me, well, you know, when we tell somebody that a book could go away because it we can't afford the license anymore, and they're kind of like don't understand that this is a dire state of affairs.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_02: They're kind of like, oh, well, you know, it's just like Netflix or it's just like Spotify and they're used to it.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, yeah, but they're not gonna be used to it if somebody breaks in their house and takes their coffee pot.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what's happening.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_02: They've paid for the thing, and then they can't have it.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_02: And it's sort of like I I just saw this sort of huh, that's true.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like people don't really they just get herded into the pen in this sort of unconscious way, and suddenly they realize they're in the pen only later when the guy comes in the door with a sink.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_04: Back to the Elon Musk and his and his sink.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_04: It's uh I'm gonna ask you both um two questions.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_04: Uh which is first of all, um, I should have done this at the beginning, but actually it's quite fun to do it after we've talked about it for some ways, which is if you have to define if Heather was here, she would say, define that Heather Chaplin, our co-host, it define the problem and then describe the best outcome.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_04: So, like the problem that we have, like right now.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_04: So, Maria, you were saying this actually eg exists on there are many different planes of of problem, and you were talking about curtailment earlier on.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_04: How how would you define is that how you would define the current problem of of of curtailment?
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_04: And because I think kind of maybe ten years ago or twenty years ago we'd have said resource or access to resource.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that's right.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh suppression, I would maybe say.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_02: Because when something becomes popular or um interesting, like you you see forces coalescing around it to silence, like particularly free or exciting or interesting, or uncon ungovernable voices.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_04: Ungovernable voices.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_04: That's what we should call this podcast.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_04: Ungovernable voices.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_04: So that's the that's your definition of the problem.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_04: And what's your best guess?
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_04: What's your best outcome?
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_02: I think that the forces that are trying to shut everything down are sterile.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_02: They're not rights originators, they're rights purchasers and exploiters.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_02: So the people who originate the rights have gotta take back the knife.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_04: Right, how do we do that?
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'm trying.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_04: Build and bring together.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_02: Publish, you know, find the people who want to inform the public in an honest way, put them all in or let 'em wind them up and let them go and try to raise some money to keep it going.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I really think that sustainability, like if you have enough I know so many writers, they're not looking to get rich.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they make a decent salary, raise their family, just want the basic thing.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't have to support the salary of a bunch of billionaires or create all kinds of insane growth or artificial traffic that you buy to start with to make it look like something that's not what's necessary.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_02: What's needed is enough money to pay the people who are making the thing.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_04: And then and then you need something to stop anybody else shutting those people down.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_04: Which seems so simple when you say it that way.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's it it's not so difficult as it is.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_02: People are so accustomed to the paradigm that like my project, it doesn't make very much money, it's small, but it's safe for the moment, you know, and I that's the most important thing to me.
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_02: So but it looks sort of like, oh, it doesn't count because it's not this big growing thing.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like I'm sure you remember a few weeks ago, like the publication came out called The Argument.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_02: And there's all this money that was put in millions put into this brand new publication that you never hear a word about.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_02: I never did I don't have any idea what they're up to.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_02: But it's kind of like they made it look it's like a Potemkin facade for a thing that there's nothing that, you know, whereas it's possible, I don't know if it will totally succeed, but my sort of approach has been just plant a seed.
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna just be a little sprout to start with, you know, eventually a tree.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_04: Well also you're a great convener and very you I'm I hear you're not successful at getting copy out of all of your writers, but most of them you're pretty good at getting copy out of, but we'll leave that there.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um Maureen, define the problem as we have it right now.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think the problem right now is that we all think that um the real problem is like uh financial economical independence.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a that's the first place, you need that.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the the awful truth is even when you get like financially independence, that's not the end because you wouldn't have like any like we were talking about the gold cluster.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_01: For me, it's like you can have like all the independence in the world, but when you have like these kind of people in front of you, like you need to have like something stronger.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why for me, like the real thing we need to tackle is like how like these structures are like protected, like it's like the cooperative model can be an answer, like the part like um even like sometimes like it's you need to think out of the box for the legal framework.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's what uh MediaParts did, like I think it was in 2019, like they create like this uh free-found press.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and uh it's like nobody can buy MediaParts anymore.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I re when you say like you need to plan a seal, that's exactly what we're trying to do at Media, like I think for five years, because we clearly focus on niche publication and small media.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_01: And MediaPart 15 ago, like I think a lot of people were like, Oh yeah, go go go for it, you'll see.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's like one of the most preeminent publications in France.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it has like yeah, and now like uh even Nicolas Sarkozy is in prison right now, and I think a lot of people know that it's partly because Media Parts did this amazing job on investigative journalists, and they were like protected in a way, even if when the state and some people trying to, yeah, maybe be in the way.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, like um I think the to think about the framework and like you were talking about think about infrastructures, I think it's like the best way to tackle the problem.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's not only like having the money, we need the money, but as you say, like I think journalists and media, like some of the people, they don't get in this, like it's fair to get rich.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like um, we don't do that for that.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_04: But if they did, the vast majority would now be very disappointed.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly, right?
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_01: So for me it's not you need that because if you are not secure, economically secure, you cannot write.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_01: But if you have this base, like the second base, like how are you going to protect yourself and the journalist to be able to work in a not in a nice way, just in a protective way that you don't feel like uh threatened on an everyday basis.
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_01: So for me it's like more like on the ownership, how you're going to be really independent.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that's there's like a great model right now that uh it's very it's very pleasing for somebody who spent the vast majority of their working life involved with or at working out the Guardian, and was told consistently, particularly because I used to cover media business for them in the past, that I've been told by so many people who worked in the city or were VCs, etc.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_04: But the thing with the Guardian is it doesn't have a business model.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_04: And I would say it does have a business model, it just doesn't have a model which is uh profit profit driven driven.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_04: We would like to make a profit so we could reinvest it in the business, but it is not that is not why we get up in the morning.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_04: It is like, you know, we have to make sure we don't lose too much money and we have to and we're seeking and I think it was so difficult in that you know sort of 10-20 year period uh for anybody to get their heads around the idea that in fact that model is bad for you at some level if you're doing journalism, I think.
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think now everyone's looking at the Guardian like wow, they were like so smart to think this way.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_01: And even right now in France, I remember like five years ago when we were talking about donation models.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_01: In France that was like, we're not the US, like it's gonna work here.
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_01: And now you have like plenty of publication that are like completely funded by the public, for the public, and even like all the news is accessible, you don't need to pay for it.
• 1:15:47
  SPEAKER_01: You don't there is even not like membership thing, like you if if you think that this can be like sort of business model, it can actually work.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like you have to think about like non-profit news because again, we don't want to some some kind of the media can be for profit, like when you're B2B like publication, like you know that you need to have like a super strong paywall, hard paywall to have this.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_01: But a lot of news, there's like this democratic value.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_01: We need for the people to have access to this kind of news because if not, like I think it's what's for some people in Europe right now, like if everything goes behind a paywall, like we know that it's always going to be the same person that can have the great access to the best news, and especially with AI, like we are we're going to be like like entering in like a dark circle if like every great news is behind a paywall, and in some countries you have like public, great public media, but and actually if it's intermediated by an AI, it's a different kind of paywall, right?
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_04: It's something that you're going through which is enriching a mechanism that is actually not helping.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I have an interesting thing to share with you that is part of the reason that I came to Boston.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_02: There's another aspect of this.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_02: You could sell your news to a library and they can own it and then people could borrow it and look at it.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_02: And we're gonna do that, like soon.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_01: I love that in France that's it's some always something that is big, but it's hard sometimes to get in the especially like in the public school.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but I think it's the best way because it's a weight for like a lot of people to just get access to this news.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_02: And they're and they're also paying.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_02: But like the way that I figured out how to do this is through newsletters in the United States.
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_02: This is a huge body of very rich journalism information is just pouring into the commons every day and it's not being archived.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_02: There's nobody like you know, SlipStack or Ghost, they're not bothering to, you know.
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_02: So these people actually own all their rights, and we can sell a packaged EPAB to a library and they can loan it to their patrons.
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_02: So you have archiving, you've got a new revenue stream for writers that's direct, you know, and you have like an a solution to the problem of like too much closed.
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is amazing.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's so useful.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, it's practical like things like to just implement.
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's that's a great that that's maybe a great point to end it because we've come together with ideas that have made people hopeful.
• 1:18:24
  SPEAKER_04: And that was quite optimistic.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_04: That's quite an optimistic session.
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_04: So I want to thank both of you from pulling me out of the slough of Despond.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and I think it's got something to do with the fact that Heather Chaplin is not here.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_04: But uh it's thank you so much, um Marine Du and Marie Bustill.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_04: It was great women.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_02: My pleasure.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's such such a pleasure to meet you.
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really excited to learn more about what you could do.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_01: Lovely to meet you.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for this great conversation.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_04: We're here to bring people together.
• 1:18:57
  SPEAKER_04: Journalism 2050 is a co-production of the Town Centre 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.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_04: Our producer is Amanda Derrick, our production coordinator is Hannah Joy, and our researcher is Sam Earle.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_04: Find us wherever you get your podcasts.