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The evolving business of news
Can AI revive the local news industry? How will legacy media outlets compete with the increasingly crowded entertainment landscape? How should media executives be assessing the impact of their work?
In this episode of What's At Stake, Ylan Mui of Penta sits down with two media industry innovators, Sara Goo, Editor-in-Chief of Axios, and Paul Cheung, CEO of the Center for Public Integrity, to answer these questions and many more. With new developments in technology and as political tensions reach a fever pitch, journalists and media executives alike must think about the future of the industry. This episode is full of industry insights and thought-provoking discussions, including the potential role for AI in reviving local news and the importance of diversity in journalism.
Welcome to another episode of what's At Sake a PENTA podcast. I'm your host today, ilan Mui, a managing director here at PENTA, and today we're talking about the future of news. I'm joined by two special guests who are leading the way in charting that course Sarah Gu, editor-in-chief of Axios, and Paul Chung, ceo of the Center for Public Integrity, one of the nation's oldest nonprofit investigative news organizations. Welcome, guys, to what's At Sake.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having us. Great to be here.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I am so glad that both of you are here today, not just as guests but also as friends, paul, we've both been active in the Asian American Journalist Association. Shout out to AAJA and Sarah. You and I go back to our days as fledgling reporters at the Washington Post, so I wanted to start by asking you both to share a little bit about your backgrounds and your career history with our listeners, because one of the things that really struck me in thinking about this episode and having you guys on is that both of you started early on at sort of traditional legacy media publications, but now you're both kind of entrepreneurs, right, and working in maybe more creative outlets, and so I'd like to hear a little bit about that evolution. So, paul, if you want to kick us off, we can start there.
Speaker 3:Sure, thank you for having me. So, to be completely honest, I never thought about being a journalist when I was younger. I actually want to be a doctor. I did journalism because it was one of those major that I didn't have to memorize anything or study, which is more like writing articles and whatnot. And so I actually started my first job working in a hospital.
Speaker 3:But at that point, way, way back when, before website was even a thing, I remember that I helped the hospital design their first website ever Wow, and that was the Brooklyn hospital, and that sort of got me thinking about this modality of digital and how it going to impact all of us. And then so from there I started my journey at the Wall Street Journal, where I was their graphics editor, and at that point they hired me because of my science and math background. So it turns out, to do really good visual, you have to understand math. They really appreciate that I could do data. Data doesn't scare me and I'm able to do data analysis and really think about the story from a visual standpoint. And then, literally, I thought I would just work at the Wall Street Journal forever and ever, until I realized that when I turned 30 in New York.
Speaker 3:I'm just like well, I'm still not married. I live in New York most of my life and is this, it? Am I going to be one of those New Yorkers. And so at that point I decided to take a chance and move. So I moved out to Miami with the Miami Herald to run their visual department and at the Miami Herald I helped them redesign their website. So there's a theme of redesigning for digital, and then not just the website, but I also helped the Miami Herald launch their first mobile application. At that point we decided not to do a general news app but really to do an application around the Miami Dolphins, the football team, and we want to do that because sports fans are somewhat irrational and they would just spend money on things versus news, where we already seen that decline, where people feel like why should I pay for it?
Speaker 1:Lessons in the business of news already.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so there was something that I had a lot of fun doing and learning. And then that's what led me to the AP, where I helped the AP. We organized their visual department to go from analog to digital, to the new age. And at the AP I was the one who helped them launch the VRAR strategy. I helped them to think about what is it like to be mobile first, and then from there I sort of have other stints here and there before I joined the Knight Foundation, because at that point I really wanted to completely focus at the intersection of technology and journalism. And so at night I was managing a $50 million portfolio that do exactly that how does media apply technology and adopt technology in a way that's scalable and sustainable? And at night I was one of the early sort of advocates, for we got to know AI and we got to have a handle on AI. So I funded a $3 million initiative to AP Partnership for AI Columbia and others to really think about how local news in particular Cascale AI. So from there I am now run the Center for Public Integrity.
Speaker 3:Our mission is to expose inequality and hope power to account and to equip the public with the knowledge to drive change and I would say joining CPI is less about technology but really more about the mission. How do I make sure that we stay focused on the mission and create, you know, informed society and equip people who could drive change? To make sure that, you know, the investigations that we're doing are holding these people to account? But also, how do we innovate investigative journalism right? So a big part of what we do is data. A big part of what we do is develop applications on. How do we, you know, catch, you know, hold these power to account? So, again, you know, the technology lens is really important.
Speaker 1:I think that's so interesting. I mean, what you basically described, Paul, was sort of this evolution of technology adoption from just basic websites and the internet to mobile and now to AI. Sarah, did you ever think that you would dive deep into tech and sort of be on the cutting edge of the news biz?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's so funny listening to Paul because I feel like our time in the business, so to speak, really overlapped this major transition of, you know, reporting on and seeing the transformation of people's interest in news, how they were getting news, and the evolution of technology or that intersected and the struggles that, like, we had as employees of a company that was trying to adapt, in some cases failing, a lot of cases failing, and so for me, my experience is very similar to Paul. I won't go into all the details but basically I ended up covering technology for the Washington Post. I was covering Google and Facebook and YouTube when it was a little tiny company that was like on the top of a pizza shop in San Mateo, california, and it was like you know, we thought it was like you. What do we call it? We called it, like you know, web 2.0. Like this was the new internet was going to come around and transform our society or economy, and it did.
Speaker 2:It didn't maybe happen as fast as we thought it would, but I think that I found myself kind of living in these two worlds where I was covering on this trend, these business forces, the technology development and coming for the news business and I like saw this like holy crap, we have to get our shit together as a company and have a plan because, like, we are kind of sitting here on this monopoly business based on a print product and I knew that was changing minute by minute and I found at myself in this odd position where I was like writing about the forces of change but not really empowered to do anything about it.
Speaker 2:As a reporter. That's not like your job, you know. I remember like going there and you know, trying to teach people how to use Twitter inside the news way back then and educating our executive staff about things they needed to know or things they had questions about, and I think that that's where I saw my career changing. Like for a while I was like Paul. I was like, you know, I'd be happy to work at the Wall Street Journal I actually started my career there too or the Washington Post for the Rest of my Life is a reporter and that's a dream. It's like a real privilege to be a journalist and to, day in, day out, just report and write. That was really satisfying for a very long time. But I think at some point you kind of want to have your own agency and like understanding, like how can I? No one else is kind of solving this problem, so why don't I just solve it? Because no one else is and I understand it at least, and I at least can point out what things need to think about. So my career kind of took a similar path, Like I kind of just turned my career into like how do I figure out how to make this work, understanding how to like change the operation of the news company to focus more on serving a digital audience as opposed to the next day's news readers. And you know, a lot has changed in like 20 years. I think that we've been in this business, at least for me.
Speaker 2:I moved to NPR after the post and tried to learn audio and podcasting and how do you turn, you know, like you know, radio into something that you're reading online and social media? Like that was a fun challenge. And then I think you know I'm at Axios now, which is a six-year-old startup company. I guess it's not really a startup anymore but it's a digital company and in some ways it's you know where I think I always needed to be, which is like starting over.
Speaker 2:Like maybe it's too hard to like work within these large institutions that have been around for over 100 years and maybe just start a new model, start a different way of thinking about how do we reach our audience, engage our audience that is never going to read a print product, we're never going to produce one, and that's OK, because that's kind of where the audience is now. So that's. I guess the thing that I've enjoyed the most is finally getting to you know what? I think I can hear that from Paul too is like we both are in it, leading it, and we kind of saw that change evolve over the course of our careers.
Speaker 1:So and it's not over yet, right? Well, I mean. So you know to ask the what is it? $585 million? Question $525 million what was the sale price of?
Speaker 3:Axios here, Something like that yes, $500 million question.
Speaker 1:Let's just make it a round number. So wait, how do you fix it? I mean, I feel like there's been a lot of experimentation in the news business and trying to find a model that's sustainable, and it seems like there's some consensus around premium, high quality content that users are willing to pay for. Delivery could be through the inbox. Delivery could be over text message. There's still some level of delivery on your doorstep. But what do you see as Axios, as the future of the business model?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for us, for a for-profit model I'm sure Paul could talk about the nonprofit model there's many of those but for us, I think we started to think about, like you know, how do we serve the audience, how do they appreciate the value of news when, you know, a lot of news is the same information coming from many places? So we could differentiate ourselves in terms of how we reach the audience. We develop something called smart brevity, which is an assumption that you, as a reader, don't have a lot of time.
Speaker 3:We don't assume you have time Good assumption.
Speaker 2:Right, like we don't have time to read, like I used to read the newspaper cover to cover because that was part of my job, but that's not most people's job. So like that's an assumption, and we tell you like we're only going to give you the information that really matters, like not everything that happens in the world today is something that you need to know. Let's just be honest about that and let's skim the top and tell you what matters. And that could be something that we're uniquely reporting. It could be something that everyone is reporting. It could be something that the New York Times was reported that we haven't. We're going to be agnostic about that, and I think journalists tend to be kind of very competitive. They don't want to showcase or give credit to other people who, like broke some other story. But let's just be honest, that doesn't serve the audience right. And so the idea that like news could be a combination of those things delivered in a different package, delivered to you at a reliable time of day on a platform in this case for Axios, it's email, kind of an old technology but actually very handy for trying to get people to actually be loyal and develop a habit. We went there and I think that was a starting value proposition. The other value proposition we can do in news, of course, is the content that we are giving you, the news we're giving you.
Speaker 2:So every news organization kind of needs to lean into what they do best. Do they do breaking news best? Do they scoop news best? I think we did, especially in the Trump administration. I think we still do, and I think that helped us grow and build a name for ourselves. So what does that mean? That means you hire journalists who are plugged in. They're not journalists who are going to show up and be stenographers every day and let's be honest, in DC there's a lot of people who do that.
Speaker 2:So, differentiating ourselves from the news we're delivering and I think other places, like Paul's a pivot over to him, but we don't do as much investigative reporting. So we will point to other people who do great work and I hope that people see that great work and we can amplify that and we can bring that to our audience. We do some investigative reporting, but Paul's organization has a different mission and I think people should pay for that too, and they do support that in other ways. So I think that we're experimenting all of us and how do we develop the business model? The one other thing I would say is we're super lean. We don't have a huge office buildings everywhere around the country OK, that saves a lot of money. And we don't hire. I think that too often newsrooms are, if we're honest, like hire too many people to do a simple thing. So we try to be as efficient as possible with the staff that we have.
Speaker 1:One of the challenges in the news business is that gathering news and spending the time to do that deep investigation is incredibly expensive, Paul. Some folks argue that the nonprofit route is maybe the way the forced estate is going to be functioning in the future.
Speaker 3:I actually have been thinking a lot about the question is what is the business of news? And I think there's a fundamental flaw assumption about that business. So, even though what Sarah and I do in many people's eyes are similar, we're producing news content, but what I will postulate is that our business is fundamentally different. So when you think about the business of New York Times and CNN, they use news as their product, but ultimately the way they make money is by increased reach, having people look right. So it's really an eyeball business. Right, like that is there. Ultimately, that's how they make money. They make money by either people subscribing or advertising paying right. So the more eyeballs they have, the more profitable the business is. That is that business. Their competitor is not us here at CPI as a nonprofit. Their competitor is anyone who gonna compete for that attention, for that eyeball ie, hulu, netflix, youtube. That to me, that's where the competitors are right In terms of like the times and CNN of the world, cpi and I would say for a lot of nonprofit.
Speaker 3:If they think of themself in the business of news, then they're in a wrong business because we would never have that scale or reach as an axiom as in New York Times. What we try to do is deliver impact, right. So then, if you sort of focus on that mission, what is it that we try to do? We try to expose inequality, hold people to account and catalyze people to drive change, then suddenly, do we need, like, millions and millions of eyeballs to look at our content to fulfill our mission? Maybe, maybe not. We just need to write people to look at our content and be able to do something about it.
Speaker 3:So when we think about that return investment, that business is fundamentally different. Right, we are in the mission of impact, right. So our competitors will be like your red cars, your ACLU, your local nonprofit. Right, because you have a choice Do I give money to, like, this local nonprofit that will solve a homeless issue, or do I give to a journalism nonprofit that will use investigative journalism or journalism as a way to solve the homeless issue? Right, two very different tactics, but at the end they do try to do the same thing solve a homeless issue or solve an inequality. So, when I think about the business between nonprofit and for-profit, there's a tax status, but we're very competing, fundamentally very different arenas.
Speaker 1:Paul. How do you measure impact, then, and how do you then show your contributors and your funders that return on investment?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so that's a great question, right? Because I think, for again, a lot of nonprofit tend to confuse a lot of news. Nonprofit will still use, like the metrics of legacy news, for-profit company as a way of success. Where, when we have to think about it, what is our intent of that piece of content that we are doing and are we actually driving that? So, for example, when we, with our recent investigation that looking at how many different states are failing in McKinley to count student homelessness and to offer resources, what we realize is when the school fail to do it and when we expose them, we've seen that local congressmen and people are spring to action. Right, they're holding schools accountable, and to me that's one form of impact is like did we actually inform a changemaker To do something about this flaw? You know this policy does not implement it Right. So that's one thread.
Speaker 3:The other thread that we heard back from, you know it was a professor, a policy professor, using our data to teach a policy class around unhosped students, and so to me, huh, that's another way that we think about impact and the way we will measure that next time is saying that Does CPS investigation get in the hands of all policy professors. And then because, if it does, then we could suddenly saying that the investigation we do are informing and educating future policy makers of America. Right, and how many professors did we reach and how many students have they taught? So to me, like we're still, we still need to be very specific in terms of our measurement. But what we are measuring is completely different. Right, we're not measuring like helmet general consumption, but we're really measuring like who is Consuming our content in a way that could catalyze that change for the future interesting.
Speaker 1:So there's a there's a targeting of the audience there and a targeting of the measurement. That's gonna be really important. One thing that that you mentioned earlier, paul, and I know, sarah obviously Axios has been very focused on this is how do you solve this equation for the local news business in particular? Axios has opened, I think, now 30 local news bureaus, sarah. Yeah, how how is that going? How, how do you see the approach to local news being different from the way things have been done in the past?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's something that I care a whole lot about personally and I know that having a CEO who's also a journalist he cares about Jim Vanhine, mike Allen care about it a lot and I think it's the hardest part probably of what we're trying to do right now from a business perspective, because we know that A lot of local news is failing, has been failing at least, especially in the newspaper sector. They're just fewer journalists. I mean there's tens of thousands of fewer journalists working in local news and there were when I started my career and that's just. I have to repeat that to people because I think that you kind of know that, but like hearing it is, it's scary and I think that I think we all know it contributes to a lack of trust in news overall. So for us we're trying to. I think we see local news as like a moonshot, like I, but I but I have to say that two years, two and a half years into it, since we first launched our first city, we have a lot of reasons for hope and a lot of reasons for optimism.
Speaker 2:We started super lean. We started with a handful of cities where we have just two reporters and they didn't have an office, they work from home or wherever they could. We hired. We were tried to hire the smartest, most wired, well sourced local reporters already living in those cities. So it often we did hire from the local newspaper or the local magazine, the local public radio station, whatever, whoever was the hottest reporter we wanted to hire at least like a business reporter and a political reporter. Why? Because a they already had a following and they already know how to break news. So if we did our hiring right like that would solve a lot.
Speaker 2:And then we built like a two-person, five day a week newsletter off of them and we knew from like what my gallon had built, that that was possible if you hire the right people.
Speaker 2:Like and I think it takes it, not every journalist could do this because it's a journalist who Kind of like how we started the conversation, like can own their own product and be like this is mine, it has my name on it, I'm writing to you, the audience, and like I'm accountable to you, you can just reply, and like we're in a conversation, it's like a kind of unique value proposition for that audience. And so they had to, you know, cover that community, reinvent how you cover a community five days a week. How many items in a newsletter, how many stories they would do every day. How many original stories they would do, versus aggregating the news that was out there done by other others in the community and other fun features. You know we leaned into a lot of light coverage, like some of the times what people want is like to know like the next hot restaurant in town, and that's okay, like we can deliver that.
Speaker 2:You know, you need your dessert with your, with your broccoli. So we try to create an intentional mix and I think on the revenue side, we we wanted to build like both an opportunity to diversify our Avertiser base. So a lot of local advertisers, bringing in regional advertisers like banks, you know, that may be in several cities and want to sell across those cities, and also national advertisers. We, if we are reaching the most influential, you know, business decision maker type audience In nationally, then we should be able to do that locally as well. And and so you take that model and then you replicate it against 30 cities. Now you have a pretty impressive, you know two, two million additional subscriber audience there across that you can sell to. That we couldn't sell to before. So, um, it's been great to learn from it.
Speaker 2:Experiment We've done a lot of we're doing a lot of experimentation. We've done a lot already to figure out like what's the right model in that ratio Between, you know, advertisers and what kinds of advertisers We've. You know we're adding more this year around social media and local markets to kind of grow the awareness of axios. That's one thing we're trying to address. So it's, but I would say, like there's Signs of hope. What do I see in that One is we have a growing subscriber base. Of these newsletters they in several the newest, um, sorry, the the markets we started the earliest, the six cities, for its first six cities we started with. We have over 100,000 subscribers. That's more than the local newspapers in each of those communities. And we're not talking about small committees, I'm talking about communities like Denver, tampa Bay, twin cities. I mean that's impressive and so I mean I don't. It's always sad because you see how the like even the washington post is less than 200,000 subscribers for the print product.
Speaker 1:Now, Really, yeah, oh my gosh, I know you and I worked. There was like 800,000. Yeah, it was a million on sunday.
Speaker 2:Yes, um, anyway, but I think, like therein speaks the opportunity, right, there lies the opportunity. Rather so, um, I think that, a we're finding you know that. I guess my point too is like um, first, we see there's uh subscriber growth and b, there's reader interest and loyalty. So, like, people are opening those emails every day and the majority of them are, which is amazing. That's in an email. For those In the email marketing business, that's uh, we're, we're, we're 50% uh open rate, um, and they're connected, see, they're connected to these reporters. They love, they love axios. People tell me all the time I read Denver, I read chicago, um, I love what you're doing in san Antonio, and those things are just the kind of things I love to hear, because it means that we're providing something that they're not getting anywhere Else, and it was. It's something we uniquely can give them and we can build on it. And there's more cities to come and you know 30 is is great, but we're just getting started.
Speaker 1:We have a lot of confidence in what we've built so far to know that we can grow further one of the parts of the local newspapers that have suffered perhaps one of the biggest cutbacks, I think, is around local investigative reporting and, paul you mentioned that's an area where cpi is really trying to lean in and provide reporters with more tools. What are, what are you guys doing in that space?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So again, I'm very different than you know a large place like axios, and you know the times. The way we sort of think about you know why we want to get into the local space is we don't want to scale Like we were never going to have a cpi cleveland or cpi, you know, a lanta. That's where, not, that's where not the strategy for us is going. What we see is there are already many established sort of non-profits and players out in the local space, but what happened nowadays is there's no more structure, transfer of knowledge. Right, you know one thing people forget that journalism is a craft. Right, you could learn it, but you could only get really good at doing it, like when you are just doing it. And when we talk about investigative journalism, like, you can't go out and get a degree in investigative journalism. Right, you might sort of know, like, all the sort of different technical tricks and what it work, but you actually don't know how it all play out until you start doing it, right. So one you know really little example is when you do a confrontational interview, there's nothing that you could do to prepare yourself for that confrontational interview. There's nothing you could do to prepare yourself when you try to foyer data from an official and they just say no or they just lie to you, right, like all of that come from experience. It's experience that you have to learn from somebody, and when we think about sort of local journalism now is, who is it that people could learn from? Very far in view in between, like all the veterans had exited the industry, right, they sort of like living the best lives now maybe.
Speaker 3:But what does it mean for local journalism, local accountability journalism? So what we try to do here is how do we partner with local organization that already has this trust and has that audience? But what they don't have is some of the skills and capability, and so that's where CPI come in. So when we think about a local initiative, there's really about capacity building, and it's good for us because, again, if we don't see ourselves scaling to all these different places, we still have a way for our journalism to get into local space through our partners, right, and by creating this healthy feedback loop. Sometimes the partner might be sitting on a great stories that we could then uplift and nationalize. So in that way, I would say I pretty much took some of the TV, own an operated model and saying that, how do we do this? In a way, that's about capacity building and about increasing our collective sort of strength, and also like forge a new kind of business model ahead with collaborations.
Speaker 1:I think that's fascinating, and the issue that you've brought up before, paul, is not just about who can you learn from, who are the veterans? Who is that person who is able to share the knowledge, but also about do you have the tools to carry out the type of data and research and analysis that you wanna do as a reporter? I know that you guys have been experimenting a lot with AI in the ways that they can help reporters. Tell me a little bit about what you see as the potential for this technology, both in the local new space and then just sort of generally.
Speaker 3:I would say, first, it's huge. So when I think about AI so, like in the beginning, when you sort of asked me and Sarah to go through our journey one thing that's really unique about where Sarah and I sit we literally are old enough to see the transition of sort of like analog to web one technology, which is like your blogs and the website, and then we also see what that shift look like from web one to web two technology, which is the era of social media platform and sort of robust search engine right, so entered, like the Googos and the Instagrams and the YouTubes and like the Spotify's of the world. And so now what I'm seeing is really is this beginning of the end of web two and really now the launch of web three technology, which is generative AI, blockchain and sort of those are the primary tech, decentralized tech that's coming down the pipeline, and so the question with AI is really not about a matter of if. It's just really a matter of what and when. And so when I think about how AI intersects from part of journalism, what we need to start thinking about is what is AI really good at doing at the moment and how do we adopt different components of AI to the job that we have today.
Speaker 3:So, for example, in the live example today, you're doing a podcast now and so you wanna edit the podcast. So let's say there's a lot of m's and um's, right. Or I give you an outdated fact and you're producing this podcast and you realize that you need to edit that. But with the AI software you could actually edit the um's and um's. That might be, seems trivial and is probably acceptable. What happened? If you asked me a question that I gave you a fact that's outdated, but you have a copy of my voice and I give you permission to use this copy of voice to update the podcast using a synthetic version of my voice. Is that acceptable? Is very much doable at the moment, but is that acceptable?
Speaker 3:So I would say, when we think about AI, what we have to think about is how does the AI actually work in the work that we're currently doing, whether it's writing, reporting, production, audio video, right. And then the second question to ask is what are some of these ethical guard routes that we need to build so that, universally, we understand how do we use this technology? Because time and time again that we see from web one and web two, we as a community, whether it's media and I would also argue to say government and other sectors we really sort of expected technology company to come up with this guard rail and I would say they haven't done it in web one, they haven't really done it in web two, so I don't see that being an expectation in web three. What is a realistic expectation is for each sector to basically develop what is that industry-wide, god-wrapped, industry-wide standards and practice to adopt and use AI in a way that makes sense for our industry and no one else's.
Speaker 1:Your example literally just blew my mind. I didn't even know that technology existed today, and I think it speaks to the ways we need to sort of reorient our thinking around the potential uses of AI in the news industry. Sarah, what is Axios doing here? Maybe Paul's example was not news to you at all?
Speaker 2:It wasn't. But I think, first of all, paulie, just make me feel old talking about all the phases we've lived through and where we have more to go. What's different about this one is it's scary. I think the others were super, just exciting.
Speaker 2:And I think AI is both exciting and scary, at least for news creators, because we see that we don't control the end product or the messaging even of the factual product that we spend so much time creating guardrails around. Why? Because once it goes out into the world, it can be distorted, it can be misrepresented, it could be amplified in ways we didn't intend, it can be weaponized against us. It could be used to attack us as a person, as people for what we do, and we just don't know how it would be manipulated, other than we know that things can be manipulated. We do know that we have to be ready for it, and we have seen already what we have learned from the bad actors on Web 2.0 about what that has meant, and I think we have to have. I guess the way I think about it is we have to have a good offense and a good defense. We have to be prepared for the benefits of AI, and I think that, as people whose job it is to work with large data sets, whose job it is to go through lots of transcripts to find facts, to do research, we can see benefits and efficiency of how AI can be applied to what we do and how efficient that could be in our workflow, our production of our work, the publication of our work, the dissemination of our work, creation of even things that help us do things faster. We already use AI. If you use Gmail, you can see how it makes you write quicker emails, faster, and that's great. I don't think anybody has a problem with that. But, like Paul said quickly, we're going to enter a minefield of how do we use things that are created by AI, whether those are ill-os or illustrations or podcasting or video. How do we be transparent about that to the audience? I think some of these things will be simple. They'll just translate some of our ethical guidelines into new applications.
Speaker 2:But I think we also have to have a good defense, which is to understand where are we not going to go? Where do we feel like is crossing the line? I think people think the media operates as some kind of model of the group that kind of decides things together. Of course it doesn't happen that way. Every news organization makes its own decisions, but we do have Align says, we do have organizations within the profession that try to create some standards.
Speaker 2:So that will be a thing, and I think that we have to be ready for, frankly, what a hot mess it's going to be just for the public to understand what information is true and what's not true. That's already so challenging. It really is, and I think it has already created so many other mini echo chambers where people don't really care, they just kind of like to hear the message and reinforce whatever they believe, especially in the political sphere, maybe the science sphere, maybe the conspiracy sphere. So I do think, if you zoom out quite a bit, you have to look at what. It's not just news. It's like. What does this mean for how we consume information? Whom do we trust? How do we know how to trust it?
Speaker 3:So, again, with Web 1 and 2, the industry media sort of mostly stays silent in the sense in terms of like OK, this is how we need to work with this technology, I think, with AI and some of the future technology is, what did we learn from our past to actually change that outcome? Because I think, if the given is that this technology is here to stay and let's not quiver about the technology, what we should focus on is the adoption of this technology for our sector, and this is a challenge that we've been through before. And another very concrete example let's say Photoshop. How does journalism use Photoshop differently than content creators, than creatives? Same tool, right. But the way we will use Photoshop to edit the photo has a set of standards and practices that we universally agree. Doesn't create sort of confusion with our audience. What is sort of the realistic expectations? Right.
Speaker 3:And when you think about a different industry, like whether you are in the creative, you use Photoshop to create things that is not real and that is acceptable, right? So in some scenario, the technology itself is designed for your imagination. So really, the advice here is, whichever sector you are, do not see that expectation for the technology company to develop. We as a sector, have to figure out what does this technology mean for us and what kind of guardrail do we need to develop as an industry? Right, same with all the other sectors, right, and so there's no difference. So I know, with a lot of conversation it's easy to shift that burden to the tech company, and what I'm saying is do not even give them that chance of burden, right, because once you give that away, you give that away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a good point. And just to kind of add a small detail which I think is very telling about how norms change, paul, maybe think about it. Just the photo, just think about photographs. So we have this conversation in our newsroom about how would we imagine, if ever, adapting generative AI to our illustrations that go with our story. So, for example, we commonly will mash up a photo of Trump hugging a cactus or something and that will be like oh, it's an Arizona story of Trump going to Arizona. Whatever, that's a bad example.
Speaker 1:I'm giving that for that end, one that we actually did. Axios Phoenix, that's right.
Speaker 2:That's exactly what it was for. But anyway, and I remember our photo team, our illustration team, was like we would never, ever use AI. It's just so ineffable. I'm thinking like you have no idea. The photographers at the Washington Post that I used to work with would be horrified to see what we are putting out in the world every day because it's messing with a beautiful photograph that was just meant to be a photograph, and so how dare you mash that up into an illustrated like a Photoshop or whatever those things?
Speaker 2:just so, all to say, things change over time and people's understanding of what is real and expectations for how literally to take things like an image, a meme, a video clip, et cetera are changing really rapidly, and so I think that with AI, we should just expect to hold on tight, because that's going to change too.
Speaker 1:I want to end on this final topic. There is so much discussion about the declining numbers of journalists in this country. There's just not the outlets for them to write, for report, for photograph, for film, video, for that there used to be, and that has an impact on diversity and the media. What do you guys see as the future of employment in journalism, especially for communities that have been, or groups that have been traditionally underrepresented? There's been a lot of progress made in diversity within newsroom over the past generation. Do you worry that the changes that we're seeing within the business model of the news industry mean that some of those gains will be lost?
Speaker 2:Well, Paul, you were president of AAJA. Do you want to talk about this one first?
Speaker 3:Here's the thing is I never see that there was much gain to begin with, Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we didn't have.
Speaker 3:Exactly. I mean, the thing is, with journalism in particular, it's always up and down and so until we actually shift the fundamental of journalism, I don't see a whole lot of improvement in that sense, and I would say that's very much in anyone that's thinking about very institution journalism. So that's a pessimistic point of view. From an optimistic point of view, I looked at people like me and Sarah and many other, like Julie Beachhan at the 19th, sue Chan at Texas Chobin to like Peter Bhattia now as the CEO of the Houston Landing. What I see is journalism had also gotten a lot bigger and broader and so not only do you have for-profit journalism, you have non-profit journalism, you also have startups and you also have sort of the individual contributor, whether a sub-stack or the social media channel. So I think this is really the time for us to say that institutional journalism is still very much a hostile environment for DEI, but everything else that is not institutional is an opportunity for all of us.
Speaker 3:When I first entered the Wall Street Journal, I would never imagine that I actually would become a CEO for a non-profit running my own shop. At best I thought I would be like a graphics editor department head, or maybe I would be a DME of visual. My dreams were so small and it wasn't until I left institution journalism to know that, oh, you could be a funder funding journalism, you could be a product person in journalism. So I think the jobs in journalism have gotten a lot broader and for a lot of folks like us who are different, this is a time to actually leverage that difference and you could come in and do something that's completely different and refreshing and revolutionary in ways that most of these institutional places have not envisioned yet. So I do think there is a really strong path forward. But my advice is don't look at the success of institutions, sort of like traditional journalism, and think that is the path that you have to emulate, because that is the path often that doesn't work for us.
Speaker 1:Sarah, final thoughts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess Paul is so inspiring. I also relate to that feeling, I think. Entering journalism in a big newsroom and being told that progress was having more women bylines in the newspaper, I was like, oh boy, we have a lot of work to do.
Speaker 2:I think that I have seen a ton of progress over my career and I do see a lot of progress, like Paul says, at the top, which gives me a lot of hope, because when you're at the top, you make decisions and should have an impact on the people you hire, the people you put in charge, the culture that you lead, the values that you share and that you kind of imbue in the whole organization, and I think that Paul is just talking about the Asians. We're running half the newsrooms already and that's just us. So no, I'm all joking, but truly I see more women running news organizations than ever before. I see people of color, I see LGBTQ presence in the newsroom in a vocal way. That I think is good and I think we're having the conversation.
Speaker 2:The other side is that the people coming into the business, the youngest people coming into the business, are a diverse set and they are not shy about what their expectations are about in the workplace, as their generation tends to be, and that's good too. I think that's pushing the culture to be better, even at big institutions, and I think that you're right, paul, there are more opportunities and just the paths are just less conventional, and I don't think you need to necessarily start out journalism either to end up as a journalist, and so all that's really great. So I'm going to end on the optimist side here, just because we're fewer in number, but I don't think that that's the end of the story.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's a good place to leave it. Dream big, I think. Maybe the message of that final, those final comments. We'll wrap it up here for today, sarah Paul. Thank you, bill, so much for joining us For more episodes of what's At Stake. You can subscribe to the Penta Podcast channel. Wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter at PentaGRP, or on our website at PentaGroupco. I'm Elan Moyne. Thanks for listening to what's At Stake.