It is really hard to publish news online in a viable form. That may sound strange given how easy it is to set up a one person and center for a small website. When i first started writing this, i sent on to get events of the challenges and competition. I was one of those people who was hand building the Washington Post website. It took me away from the journalism that i really wanted to do. The whole issue turned out to be a whole complex set of challenges. Lets think about what it is that this has to do to collect and publish the data, also to monetize it. It starts out when you are publishing a newsletter, there is brainstorming, the assigning, object budget line, deadlines, keeping track of deadlines, there is nagging. For the reporter, collecting information, writing, editors. These days theres also enormous amounts of multimedia tools available. Whether it is video or animations, different storytime formats. Then comes the easiest part, publishing. It is more challenging than you would think, especially given all of the different ways people are getting distracted, you want to get their attention. Then the complex task of ads. A lot of these innovations are moving to scription model. That means creating subscriptions. And a social media marketing. All of the steps individually are quite obligated. Collectively, they are a nightmare. There has been no Technological Solutions that works and is affordable. Unless you are a major player. That is how i ended up getting into this whole issue, who are the competitors. They are the dominant ones. It is jeff bezoss platform. Thanks, dan. Most people are familiar with the crisis in the news industry and the loss of journalistic enterprises, but do not think about the stats that support them. Lets focus on that. You say that there was no elegant solution until besos came along. There are competitors here and there has been efforts to deal with various pieces, including email and content Management System and add services. Can you talk about what there has been and why at least for the publishers are able to come in and take a large share of the market . Dan Newsroom Technology was. We realize we need to push out a website. A huge timeline. I often tell the story, news and technologist were trained by the fact that there was only one way to get fire in the newsroom, that is the system crashing on deadline. Every feature was like risking their job because it would make the system crash. We had a bunch of overcautious people. The fundamental thing that besos has done, he has put together an enormous team of talented people. That is what you need. You need somebody who is willing to throw a lot of money at it, see what works, when you do that, lets do this, lets do that. I was talking to newspaper production people just before they switch to art. So, the genius of besos, he came in and about the Washington Post. He found an incredibly talented guy he was already there, the Vice President of technology, he threw a ton of money at this guy. He said if you build something great. I do not know whether if he had in his mind or not, we could sell it to other people too. Then he started selling web services, which was built by besos. There are other advantage systems out there, none that are nearly as advanced. In telling the story of this elegant solution, by all accounts the customers are pleased with it, it works well. You are drawing an analogy to amazon. Amazon is also a product that works well. It provides an elegant solution through integrating lots of different components of the marketplace using data and investing in logistics. One big difference let me just quote from your piece. I think that is what we want to focus on, what are the risk here and the problem. You say besos gives him significant power over the news industry, that theres a suggestion, this backbone could result in a more sort of deeper and worrisome control over the news industry itself. They also allowed him to a large amount of cash from competitors. We want to talk about who are the competitors here. The competitors at the post, maybe the Competitive Landscape for this backbone service. Even as you make it increasingly dependent on has technology. How does that work here . You go on to say, we now based on past experience with amazon and aws, that being dependent on this Technology Comes with serious consequences, also including manipulation. So, we have a few things going on. Can we start with may be the last one, sort of the, what initially appears to be a solution becomes exploitation. Dan amazon are quite considerable. What happened with that and ended up destroying local businesses and basically making business is dependent on their technology. By forcing them to buy ads on amazon in the amazon search results. I doubt that it is a full layer of surveillance where people deliver in a basis. All of these things are potentially at play with jeff bezos infrastructure that major news infrastructures are using. Not a whole lot of this has come has happened. Except for the transfer of money. Bezos is sending 1 million a year to do something that would result in Public Infrastructure. It is really hard once you are in a system this obligated. Complicated. One of the things that are as interesting is interesting about your piece, you are sounding the warning bell that we did not have one we all started using amazon however many years ago. These practices do not seem to be happening yet. They do not seem to be surveillanced or data monetization on art, the way it is on a or amazon. We are talking about what might happen in the future, lets talk about what that might mean. What is the data that art can have on news publications that might be concerning . Dan i am certain that those news creations will allow art to look at its content, look at the news story that is working on. Theres still an awful lot of around that could be useful to anybody who is in the business of exploiting data. What are people reading . Who is watching what ads . What are they subscribed to . What kind of articles are they reading . You can easily look at this and say, i am hoping for another publication that does justice. We have this target group of people who we can figure it out with all of the connections we have in our news. The potential is there. Amazon has a history of creating new products based on what it sees it people are doing with its clients. Ellen for example, subscription information, revenue information, some of this, or is it the data that you have mentioned. I get there is certainly precedent on this contractual language, which we talked about monetization, it excludes other kinds of sharing of data and other kinds of exploitation of data that fall short. It is that what you are concerned about, sort of in the ambiguity of the contract language, or is it also the contract will change once they lock into this technology . Dan its already specify what they cant do. I do not see any News Organizations. There is a risk. I think this is the same people who avoid amazon because they are afraid of the surveillance and and im being taken advantage of. The revenue information is going to be transparent. It has to do with the fact that this is owned by one man come on by one extremely rich all the man whose justice you will have to depend on. One of the people brought up in my research, if he dies, what happens then . All of those potential control in the hands of one guy. Ellen there is a larger team of your piece, which is about democracy. I think we certainly have there is a long tradition of regulating in ways, subsidizing in ways that promotes a diversity of voices in our news ecosystem. On the one hand, there is that. On the other hand, the News Business is our business and they rely on vendors. Sometimes those vendors can be concentrated. I want to spend some time in talking about the relationship between the democracy promotion we hope the news publications are doing, and the business side, which can be concentrated. For example, all of these News Organizations might be using Microsoft Office or google . They there were cases of news monopolization in the old days. Lets talk about why is this the backbone. Is it different from other kinds of services at the News Organization patronize . Dan it is really hard to do this. The other, it is a public good. Especially local journalism is a public good, especially for our democracy. We as a society and government should be keeping eye on it and making sure we are not creating a market system where they cannot survive. Historically, government has subsidized through cheaper postal mates and up buying official notices in newspapers and so on. The idea of the public good element is essential. When you have a clash between a public good and you have written brilliantly for some sort of infrastructure which allows public media to describe, on the other hand you have this other party who says oligarch who says he is trying to make the world a better place. The unique circumstance stresses obvious solution, which is the oligarch has fled on this to turn this thing over to nonprofit and allow it to become a open source option for any publication that wants to be there. Those are. Ellen we are going to talk about solutions and alternatives. Can you address if they should be a public good and different ways that it might be governed, whether it is open source or as a nonprofit. Why this . For example, let me just take you cite a very interesting report on the state of the News Business. You read that report, you can see all of the points that point to scarcity that are obstacles to inscribing news industries. A serious one, more than half of the publishers surveyed, saying that they cannot afford the text expertise that they need. Some of the Backbone Services. Why not have a why shouldnt it be a public good to provide News Organization to a thriving industry. One of them, i think a serious one is that more than half of the publishers surveyed say that they cannot afford the tech expertise that they need. Some of this Backbone Services so, why not have, why isnt why should it not be a public good to provide News Organizations. And expertise and other kinds of data analytics. There are many input that news publications cannot afford and that is reducing the quality and scope of journalism. Why the backbone . Of this particular we have jeff bezos in the mix and that is a piece of this. If we take him out of this it is owned by one person. But a lot of these things have concentration in that. Why is this different . Dan those are interesting areas for policy matters that we should discuss as a group. But this goes back to what i learned when i was working in the late 90s it was best summed up by a quote given by david kees. And he said content Management Systems and i was very proud of you the way i used to be this is you build what you can. Certain Online Services build whatever they can build. And so i think having the tools to make it monetize a bowl monetized product makes more sense. Ellen i will add to your answer and i think this is different possibly because of the data. Surveillance and monetization which are not currently being exploited but could be in the future, and also the integration of these services into the cloud and the vertical inspiration makes this different possibly. Although in some ways, quite similar to google suite. And i didnt want to point out, the competitors are expensive. And think it is 2000 customers right now. Dan 2000 sites. Ellen and they tend to be better off in larger organizations and small organizations are going elsewhere. And that feature i think distinguishes arc from the amazon model. It is not a loss leader it is an expensive product. You pointed out it could be made free at some point. And then it would look a lot more like the grab and grope model of amazon. But right now its a little bit different and there are competitors for the services that are not eloquently integrated and other organizations are using that. But the integration of data and art they make this different from other structural components. Now lets get to solutions. So i think you had you touched on this. Two different models that you thought we should be moving towards. What were they . Ellen i am not sure which two different models you are talking about. Ellen the nonprofit and the open source. Dan they are one in the same youve said more eloquently than i have there has to be some sort of structure that does this. The obvious answer in the Technology World is to have open sources. The code is available readily and they can improve upon it and widely shared. And not have it in the hands of somebody thats take off the market but there are wonderful do give a shout out to princesss pack which is a nonprofit open source Management System. But they have not had the money like bezos has. So its a work in progress. What i would imagine is that all of these entities open source. If they all open source they could create something exciting. Ellen might another solution be to put more money into news or create an alternative assuming bezos is not going to donate this. You had a very nice speech that was a call back to carnegie. In the century to mozilla. And there are president s for preparations for oligarchs donating their works into public domain. But as an alternative, if that does not happen, do we not have a good start with news pack and we have other for profit pieces like Constant Contact or salesforce putting more Energy Behind them so we have an ecosystem of competitors . Dan absolutely i could not agree with you more. The estimating system out there was the perfect solution and what carnegie did was to give this to the business. That said, there is a place to be skeptical. And there are absolutely other ways to do it. And there are people out there working really hard to do it. As a group, the tiny news collectors put together a very limited, but very effective way of publishing small news. And Kinsey Wilson runs it yes, i think that as a society, we need to look at what is going on and apply it in a way that can help. And there are proposals different funding and spending proposals. To me, someone that has been so focused in technology, i see this as a win. But there needs to be a broader solution. And nearly public media. Ellen so before we leave the Solutions Space and i want to call on your experience as an operator, do you imagine if this is open source, and i heard from customer of arc that they are happy with customer service. And they are happy that they are stretched and have very few Staff Resources to deal with problems. Do you imagine that an open Source Solution would be as userfriendly . Dan if it wasnt it would be a failure. Yet it has to be. I think that Customer Support is very important. I am talking about basically taking this thing they have created the company within a company and keeping it intact. Basically you still have Customer Support and possibilities there are lots of people who are still making a lot of money off of certain products by and in this case, potentially, arc is trying to expand in the nonmeat newspaper nonnewspaper nonjournalism and having some success. And they can organize Customer Care and support. This is also an endowment of setting up with some sort of money. The people i talked to in the businesses were into this idea but very skeptical because they do not want something dumping giving them technology. This happens too often for people to build something they thought it would be and it does not get used because it is not what they needed or they cannot mitigate what they have. So you need to have a Technical Expertise to actually make it work. So absolutely, it needs to be a full company that supports it and develops it. That is a challenge. Ellen it is. The survey publishers were about the fortunes of their own publication and they see a big take and a turn and they are climbing out of the doldrums of their digital ad fiasco. They are focused on subscriptions. They feel like theyve got their see legs in terms of social media and reaching out on tiktok and instagram. On the one hand, they are saying what about that . On the other hand they are pessimistic about the news industry as a whole because of in part polarization and distrust. And i would like to connect that point to what we are talking about. The open markets focuses on competition and independence and resiliency on the one hand, as the substrate for a vibrant democracy and pretty. And also focuses on, i think a transparency and knowledge and openness about how data is being used and the economy is functioning. One of the reasons i think your piece has such force is because it is jeff bezos and we have reason to be suspicious. About how his companies have operated on the competition front and on the opacity front. So i want to ask you in your vision and solution space. One of the things that would seem to be affordable not just that its functional and solves the publication needs and that it is some sort of Public Infrastructure, but also that it provides and gives people a reason to trust how News Organizations are using their data and also gives News Organizations trust how the backbone is using their data. And hacking into their data. And safeguarding their data. Ive thrown a lot at you but to point on it my question is, how do you imagine a Public Infrastructure when you deal with the question of rampant distrust of data abuses both from the publics perspective and consumers of news products and the customers perspective of news publications themselves. Dan great question. Let me talk about first the competition. Even if bezos is not going to start a nonprofit, is there not competition in that space . And so far we are seeing arc running 24 newspapers. And folks like it may continue. What is the limit . People need to have choices. That is one of the ways they decide i did not trust this anymore. But if you have no other place to go what you do in this instance . On the other hand, i think that the answer to trust is transparency. And that clearly, transparency is not something that comes naturally to jeff bezos and amazon i think if you put it in amazon profit they would not have financial motive to keep information from people. And so they could be transparent. And this Public Infrastructure model data and responsibility. You tell me. How do you see this . Ellen i think, there was a little bit of attention here between what kinds of values and methods and commitments this nonprofit might have in a way that is in the Public Interest or transparency against surveillance and data tatian area and what might be an interest of news publications. And i think one problem here is that news publications what to do targeted advertising. They need many of them need to develop relationships between users and sometimes that can be ill exploited if the users for the users and it is in the interest of the News Organization and in the interests of the democracy because it keeps the publications going. There is a tension between commitment of social privacy protected values and the needs of the news publications. I think one answer is arc. The nonprofit might be another answer or response. But i am not sure how you balance the tension. Dan i want to push back and say the News Organizations have a history of having relationships with their readers. We see how can this information serve you better. And nobody is seeing how the information can serve them better but it could be better. They could say we will help people see note news that is closer to you or sales that are close to you if you tell us the stores you like we will tell you what is going on there. So something is inherently wrong with the News Organization if they can say heres the information you would find helpful. So i hope dont think that we should swear off personally identified information i just think that people have gotten very against them rather than for them. Ellen im not sure if we have ok, i am looking at the time. Dan, is there anything we have not covered that you want to cover from your piece about arc . And i do not think you have mentioned zeus. Dan zeus is the app technology. And it is in flux right now. The original plan was to make a market that was distinct from google and facebook and then it adds it over very fast and effective way. Those were the things i think they are working on as well. As for what else is left, there is so much complexity here. I am hopeful that bezos is active by the Washington Post. Which back in 2013 was seen as an act of generosity to save them and other things. If that ended up being something undeniably a good thing. And in writing these right now about the post in general and how bezos started getting political in his tweets. And now he has hired all three positions of leadership there. Entirely from bezos and whether the entire organization is a nonprofit to actually fulfill what bezos said he was going to do when he first engaged in this business. Ellen when we talk about a Public Infrastructure and we talk about journalism, theres another client which is public entities. One of the things, a year ago, when this are aliens passed a when the passed they passed down Health Information coming from Government Election information. It highlighted the fact that commercial platforms are gatekeepers for municipalities and for governmental sources of information. Would they they need contact Management Systems as well. And they also need to do to optimize their content for their audiences to cultivate relationships with their audiences. Do you imagine that a public arc would serve mr. Valdez served municipalities and libraries . Dan i was taken by the public media that extends all the way down to local institutions. That would be part of the that is also serving the needs of the community. I cannot answer your question but i can say, it is something worth thinking about. It is stuff that we should be alarmed at when somebody is taking over too large of a chuck of the market. And the newspapers die and the cities and towns that do not have newspapers running they are in the dark about everything. There are realistic questions here. And i do not think we have decided. We need to do thinking and investing in what we call the digital Public Infrastructure. Ellen now i am going to questions, some people did not realize that in public media one of the things that is funded and it is less contribution less controversial are some of the backoff events. And theres question that theres been legislative initiatives to Fund Journalism and debt level the Playing Field competing for ad dollars. Should we consider helping newsrooms content management as well. Another way to put it is, in the digital world, can we do what the public broadcasting did for some of functions . Dan theres so many different ways to approach this problem and there are many different problems. That may be an answer. Ellen how much money do they invest in the content Management Systems . Dan ultimately distinguished arc and bezos is that he put a lot of money into it. He said it will pay off in the long term and that is all the way most people work these days. Especially ones that are owned by public stock, they cannot make huge longterm investment that bezos did. I was struck one of the people i talked to was a content manager and trying to build a system. And then they realize bezos that a hundred Million Dollars in his was wildly better. So they bought into arc. It is hard a hard sell to tell any individual you want to spend an enormous amount of money when somebody else already has and when you should not have to because ideally this would be a public thing. The newsrooms is a cheap plate we know that. Ellen a question about data and targeted advertising, so, you gave the example of newsrooms having benign attempts to develop relationships with their users. One could imagine, as there is more regulation about thirdParty Collection of data, there is corresponding the power of Party Collection of data between the News Organization and their customer. It grows and becomes a valuable asset. The data that the News Organization can gather from its users and to serve up better content. But it may be also to personalize political ads or view targeted advertising. So, what would you think . Would you support a constriction for example of publishers that made the First Party Data available to add services or political campaigns or otherwise exploited First Party Data that they were in a position to collect . Dan we that market and industry but what strikes me is no matter how much data somewhat leaves it is nothing compared to what google already knows about you and amazon already knows about you. Your Location Tracking and all of that. I am not sure that is marketable. Ellen another question. How do we incentivize bezos what incentives would there be to get him to participate . Dan this state is that he is starting to get a reputation that is not exactly what he wants. There are some people even within arc who are aware of what is going on. And other Companies Like avoid him. There is the possibility that is regulation. And should there be a limit to how much Market Administration one person can have. Should it be split up. Obviously, amazon has somewhat relevant here. In the second he could get a lot of good pr from the News Community and the general community. I realize this is really important. I realize this is something ive built and research a lot of. For him it is chump change. So he needs a good friend to go up and say hey this is pretty good. You have made the rich wealthier. Ellen ok audience, that is your call to arc. But i think the customers here are Foundation Supported nonprofit divisions. They are public media client. Are you surprised that they are customers of art . Do you think they should be taking and leave this push for sticks to throw into a nonprofit . Should they be patronizing some of the competitors . Dan that is a provocative question. I dont know i think they are entitled to do what they think is best to get by. I think hes been doing a fantastic job of managing the resource. I think they chose arc because they thought it would serve the needs the best. I do not think, until then i did not think it was a big moral decision. Ellen thanks a lot. Back to you jody. You both made remarkable comments that have my mind spinning. I can imagine given the threads that you have touched on that our audience is also have an opportunity for a lot of followup but maybe ive toss it back to you for a minute of Closing Remarks or a main take away even like our audience to think about. First you dan. Dan i think that we should appreciate how hard it is to do news online and journalism is a ministry. And i want to say that markets are helping they find the story in life. Jody i was going to say we put you through the ringer on that dan and you turned out ok. Ellen, what are your takeaways . Ellen i appreciate being here i love the peace. In still not totally command that arc is the next amazon in this context. But i do think but it raises is the importance of infrastructure and a hidden infrastructure and how important the infrastructure to be decentralized and resilient and not to be reliant on a single solution. And certainly a single solution that is integrated with a lot of other we are at risk of losing valuable voice if that happens. Dan i agree it is not amazon yet. But moving forwards, what if we had a chance to the if amazon is serving national interest. We have no idea what it might turn into. Jody as far as what it might turn into may be able to turn to fill now with Closing Remarks on big picture and open market analysis. Phil . Thank you jody, thank you alan and dan for a very stimulating conversation. I will briefly observe how much does conversation underscores the importance of public policy. And the rules of markets. Public policy in the form of regulation, subsidy, and competition policy and antitrust and such. Is worth pausing in the center if this were 1975 amazon itself would be illegal under the trust regimes that were in place that time. There is no way that a single entity and all the adjacent markets in amazon in the realm of media markets at the rug examining. When the telegraph came along in the print business, no newspaper could compete. They had a telegraph. And naturally certain people robert aaron types try to get control of telegram companies and newspapers because bone because owning both was incredible. And we put an end to that end we said that telegraph companies are an essential infrastructure they can be privately owned but they cannot discriminate against different users. At whether telephone came along and eventually supply the telegraph we applied the same rules to that. It did not mean socializing or nationalizing the infrastructures, it did mean subsidizing them, but it meant straining the rules of competition of which they can operate. At t for most of the 20th century try to get desperately into electronic publishing because they understood the incredible advantage they would have in Central Information infrastructure and we said no until the late 70s where we started regulation and competition policy. Anyway, thank you so much and i think as we go forward, it is useful to bear in mind how much these dilemmas of the media and moxie are related to competition policy. Thank you so much. Jody thank you phil. We will be closing our hours today. I want to thank dan and alan for being alan ellen for being so insightful. And we will send a link out to all of you who registered the league will be on youtube and our website an cspan network. The whole conversation reminds me of we announcer today Naval Operations chief admiral Michael Gilder talks about his penta modernize defeat, hosted by the heritage foundation. Live coverage begins at 5 15 p. M. Eastern on cspan and also on our free mobile video at, cspan now app, cspan now, or online at cspan. Org. Announcer over the past few months, the january 6 committee has conducted a series of hearings, revealing the findings from its investigation. All week, watch cspan, as we look back at the committees eight hearings featuring previously undisclosed evidence, depositions, and the witness testimony into the attack on the u. S. Capitol. Tonight at 8 p. M. Eastern, the committee looks at president trumps actions and response to the assault with testimony from the former debiting National Security advisor, matthew pottinger, and former White House Deputy press secretary sarah matthews. Watch tonight on cspan, or anytime on demand at cspan. Org. Host our focus on the irs now with a Senior Reporter with Bloomberg Tax and with the news that the irs is conducting a major safety and security review at facilities across the country. Guest the irs announced it is going to be conducting a review of security measures in light of some messages that are seen as concerning and president bidens inflation reduction act. The irs is getting an additional 80 billion and that is going