Let me know that was an experience that lets you feel like everything is now ok or like you have been awakened to needs and challenges you did not know existed before hand. We think we can show the world not justd funding is 1000 points of light of a feelgood onetoone connection, let people ask for stuff and never everybody feels warm and fuzzy. There are three ways we can help change the system itself. Donors choose. Work donorschoose. Org performance bonuses but one where the currency is not cash money, but funding credits. The second way is by letting inventors and entrepreneurs circumvent the Industrial Complex and introduce tools directly to teachers without having to hire salespeople and lobbyists. Openingd way is about our data so policy and budget makers can see what resources in brookland,need or what Louisiana High School teachers are thinking about, as expressed by the projects they are creating on our site. We can give voice to teachers at the policymaking table by opening up the data generated by the 1600 thousand classroom projects that a quarter million teachers have created on our site. What has been the Biggest Surprise . When i first met you, you are really naive. [laughter] really naive. And o inspired by your your naivete. Years, if i were to say, tell me your Biggest Surprise there are still district leaders who want to shut down our website because they do not like the idea of teachers getting funding for books they might not have approved of, or going on field trips that deviate from the curriculum, or getting any resource they are not personally authorized or controlling. Ins began in our first year the bronx and another teacher in the bronx got funding for a field trip up the river for a vessel. She had gotten oceanography training the year before. Taking water sandals, learning about the hudson river. Parents had signed off and the principal signed off. When the district administrator heard the field trip was funded through our site, he told the , a driver to turn around similar reaction to his School Principal in chicago early on who told the teacher she would be fired if she used our fight site again. Very respective of our school. We should not just be angry about inequality. We should also be angry about the system and bureaucracy. Question is, how do you navigate that politically . Is very are doing combustible politically and very disruptive. Comforte still taking in that naivete. Circumvented the powers that be and bureaucracy by going directly to teachers. We keep principles in the loop and tell them what materials are in route to the school but the teachers do not need to have first paid their dues or gotten to signnt higherups off. If citizen donors think it is worthy, it is coming to life. Ignorant is how to get the powers that be to Pay Attention to whatever teachers are trying to tell them. We know we can create killer infographics to show what both High School Teachers think are most effective. Do not know how to get policymakers to Pay Attention to those. You are also not just an innovation platform. You are innovating actually what the demand is by what you see. You see a lot of things i would imagine come in trend. That could certainly be aggregated with policy implications. And yet, you do not have a foot in the policymaking. That is right. Atthink we can be the best creating an amazingly vivid giving experience and liberating the worldrs to tell we will never be that great at lobbying and we will need a partner for that. Exampleive you just one of the trends we see. They show not just that policymakers should be paying , but so should schools of education that trained teachers. Lot ofced there were a special Education Teachers who would request books on our site for children to read to therapy dogs because they concluded special needs students are reluctant to read out loud in front of the classroom because they are afraid they will be taunted. If that student is given a book to read, they have now got a raptnonjudgmental audience. This student can blossom as an order and schools of education are not hip to this discovery. This is the kind of thing that Classroom Teachers on the front primary streetir expertise, only those folks come up with those insights. It would enrich the training of any special Education Teacher to know this is a knee a unique little trick to get a special student to come out of their shell. Lets switch to your friend you, i understand, have recently she has joined us, on the bandwagon. What is this who thing i keep hearing about . I was just noting in this that she has an incredible following and it is interesting for us to see which Media Outlets generate the most activity and awareness and inspire the most people to support projects on this site. I think we have had more people say they just supported a classroom project on our site because of this newsletter feature than were inspired by a National Network news stories. Most Education Advocacy stories do not have access to glenys and your friend, opera. How would you think about counseling them for effectiveness . They do not have all of the charles best charisma and storytelling capacity. But they are doing important work. To thosehe message organizations who are the 99. 9 of the Education Advocacy establishment . Yes i will tell you how opera came to learn about our site. A lot of teachers of the schools were creating projects to recover from the attacks on the world trade center. One whose students were saved by a group of firemen and they wanted to thank them by doing a musical performance in front of company, for which they needed instruments. I thought the media would jump on this tory. I called a hundred reporters and they all hung up on me. My100th call was during lunch hour and he was the first reporter not to hang up on me. He wrote a piece arguing this little experiment going on in the pot in the classroom might change philanthropy. When i met you over a decade you were naive in many ways but what i saw was a determination and righteousness in this country. [applause] it is going great. Read amany of you have buzzfeed article today . Today . How about in the past week . Has been evolving. What is buzz feed today . Tarte i started thinking about the history of media. Other companies that are much eager that we can aspire to be like and when weaker up. We are hiring journalists, we have journalist in the ukraine, we have people doing stuff that none of the Tech Companies are doing. When you look at time warner or disney or viacom they are these giant companies with multibilliondollar billions in profit that are using cable and broadcast, they are very different from what is feet is doing. The companies that i signed that are the most similar are Media Companies in their first 10 or 20 years and you look back at newspapers and magazines at hollywood studios. Buzzfeed. Milar to people see buzzfeed or listsy list or cute pictures of puppies or kittens. That asarted as a site a lab. Was cutele cared about kittens, whether friends had for lunch, things like that. Entertainment content. To the point where people were sharing longform journalism and news and entertainment. And smith about three years ago and he started building out a new same. We have investigative and investigative team. Ofhas been hiring a lot oppression of reporters. Longertermng investigations. We have two reporters in the ukraine. Lote have been expending a in the last year or two years. Of readerscentage are engaged in journalism as andsed to the cute lists frivolous content . It depends on the time so on the boston bombings happened there was the most popular content was all hard news and we had reporters covering the bombings and people in new york who are using their knowledge of twitter and instagram to figure out what was going on in the web. We were the first site to authenticate twitter accounts because we noticed that the avatar predated the pictures that was in the news. We looked at who was following the account and they all went to the same high school. We were able to figure out what was happening and followup with reporters making phone calls. During those moments most popular content is news content. During slow news the most popular content is things like 23 animals who are extremely disappointed in you. What city should you actually live in, things like that. People discovering the Journalism Fund thing . As you look at facebook you hard news next to cute see thatnd when you max. We decided why not do that because people like to move between different types of content. It is hard to put things in terms of percentage. Back to looking at the history of media. One of the things i found interesting looking at the early history of newspapers was there was limited space. You had to make these decisions because of limited space about how much news and advertising youre going to put. How much serious and how much frivolous stuff. The New York Times and the Herald Tribune were in the battle to be the number one paper in new york and to be the number one paper in the country. There was newspaper rationing, paper rationing. There was limited space. There was less stuff to print on. The Herald Tribune shrunk the size of the noose of the could keep their advertisers happy and the timesprofits and had limited space to cover news. And so they lost money during the war but when the war was over their circulation was higher in all the advertisers came back to the New York Times. The decision of how much do you use your limited resources for ads or, to use for news really meant something. What is different about the internet is would you not have to make that choice. We can say were going to do all the news we can possibly do because the internet never runs out of space. Cutell do all of the animals and quizzes and lists because we are not going to run out of space and we will do all and all thosetent things can exist in their track without scarce resources. That has created a really interesting opportunity to build the Media Company that does not have the normal constraints. Other times when there is different focuses come into conflict with one another . We have a tremendous food and food section and the test kitchen where we are making [inaudible] and it is awesome stuff. Many people are discovering it through pinterest. So there is not this conflict. Not so much media is a less about adjacency. And that is why there is conflict. There is a lingering legacy of print where people think that if you do one thing image you cannot do something else. That is not true. People who are used to the newspaper dropped on your doorstep and you can count the pages that are in sports and foreign news and how much ads, if you take that calculus, buzzfeed is a weird site. There is no constraint on what you can do and there is no adjacency is things are spread on different platforms. The new start understand then you start understanding what we are doing. A how many times do people come across a serious article and doubt the credibility because there is the buzzfeed brand . The classic network television, you had edward armour road during the evening news but you had soap operas in andmorning and comedy shows variety shows treaty had Alfred Hitchcock on the same network and people are used to having that mix. I think the bundle is something that has always been so important to media. A lot of the journalism wars were between papers fighting over the comics. The Washington Post when it saidob are the family, he to his deputies, do comments matter comics matter, he had to fight to get the comics in the paper and it was a big protected anymore because fewer people would read the journalism if the comics were not there. Readershipto of more of the journalism. It is something that our news content reaches a much larger audience than it would if we didnt also have under 200 million video views a month and massive amount of viewership on quizzes and lists. There has been a lot of new media startups that have been launching recently. Are soyou think there many media startups happening . Are more of aups thing now than they have an in a long time. There have been a lot of tech startups. The history of media, new technology emerges that is a distribution technology. The technology starts to get dealt out and people start creating content companies that take advantage that did not exist before. Do not know the story at cnn. Was ear owned by ted turner. Could, ted turner localed i could beam my station by satellite and then it seemed like he will was an exciting new thing. People thought why would anybody want to watch the local television station. In phoenix or new york or somewhere else but he started licensing Television Shows and movies and lots of other kinds of entertainment. In started to be a distributor of this kind of entertainment. When he saw the adhesive event there is going to be someone to dominate news on cable and he started cnn. It was interesting he started with entertainment and moved into news. At the time, the networks were spending 200 million year to do half an hour of news on the evening news and the plane was just made 20 to 30 million to do news 24 hours a day. Everyone thought it was impossible. You could cover things in ways that you could not if you only had a half hour. He had this else in advantage to that make content fit with. Istribution it has grown into a jane company. Or with time,at this papers were exploding. Time said lets aggregate the. Ewspapers people would listen on the radio and they would hear someones voice. Magazine let people see what people liked. When you look across or even radio. People thought he would go back to cigars because cigars are much Better Business than radio. No one would stand for ads that interrupted the flow of audio and radio. The key is the reason there are so many media startups is because there is an explosion of distribution technology. Newher it is radio or Printing Presses or Cable Television there follows close kind an explosion of new kinds of Media Companies. With smartphones and social media youre saying the ability to distribute media internationally more quickly than ever before in history. Lots of companies have started to form to take advantage of that map of distribution that did not exist five years ago. Buzzfeed started the iphone did not exist. That is has enabled distribution that people do not. Hink was possible is there a point of saturation where there is only so much that media startups can grow in room for only so many unlimited distribution acceptability . There used to be what people called natural monopolies. If you are the biggest newspaper in philadelphia you would have a natural monopoly. You had the big Printing Press and had the trucks to drive the papers around and who else can start something to compete with you and the argument was on the web we would never see that happen. Blogger can start a site. There is no limitation of space. Likewise with radio. There is limitation. If you get a slot on the dial you have an advantage. Sayinge what youre is the competitive advantage is having to come from technology. It is the ability for editors to make content more quickly. Faster and better data to optimize your site. The way that you build competitive advantage is in technology. That is why we have a focus on building technology. That is why companies are focused on that. What is the future or roll of tape elegy in media . You cannot tell a good Media Company unless you have great technology. Is that limited to the platform or is it beyond the lab form moving forward in terms of . Iring data scientists we build a lot of the tools we use everything that allows us to make a better product because all the pieces fit together. Everything is powered by some other start up and they are stapling them altogether. That is a better approach. I think there will be some modifying theinto layers. Used bynalytics will be people because no one wants to build their own platform from scratch or Something Like that. It is still up for grabs which players will end up eating outsourced to other Tech Companies in which one should will polacek publishers build themselves. I think there will be several when you look at cable or newspapers and you see that there is this cycle where people who build a better platform and of attracting better talent and that talent ends up improving the platform