somebody to fund you. you re not going to convince a consumer to buy it. that s why basos does what he does. you describe it right. he begins all senior strategy meetings the way you describe. 20 to 30-minute period of quiet because in effect he s saying i don t want people to pretend they read the memo. i want to force you to actually read the memo. think about a the pressure on the memo writer. everybody is sitting there reading. it makes these memos really well written. his argument is if you can t write it clearly, logically, cleanly, you don t have a good idea. how much trouble, then are we in? when you look at statistics the trend is not toward liberal arts education. it s terrible. i mean if you look at majors like language history, philosophy they are plummeting down to 20 30% of what they used to be. it s not like we re becoming mechanical engineers or biologist because people s aptitude for science is limited.
self-imposed deadline and delivers a website they say is working for the vast majority of consumers. new enrollment numbers out show 100,000 people successfully signed up through the federal exchange last month. four times more than what we saw in october. plus, the latest from the scene of that deadly train accident in new york city. the new technology that congress wants to consider that could make accidents like this one a thing of the past. and later, with cyber monday upon us, amazon ceo jeff basos says we can expect a drone delivery soon. some privacy experts are pretty concerned about this one. it s our gut check. the day we rescued riley was a truly amazing day. he was a matted mess in a small cage. so that was our first task, was getting him to wellness. without angie s list, i don t know if we could have found all the services we needed for our riley. from contractors and doctors to dog sitters and landscapers,
they have expertise and they have a very special expertise. they know how to get people on your site, on your plat form, and they know how to walk them around and make money. they actually get people to spend money. we just want them to be there long enough to look at the ads. i spec d a cynical no, no, no. here is where i m optimistic about that. these guys can do it. but i m worried that we talk about them as if we can save us. the other thing we have to learn is we re the poor cousins now and they re the rich guys. and we need to be careful not to throw our values away in this process. i m very excited about wanting to do public service journalism and understanding that it s not a big moneymaker. that s an interesting point because people like jeff basos who is the founder and ceo of amazon, they have big companies to run. they clash with the government. they have their own special interests and now basos is part
that s always plagued news. and there have been various ways to address that over the years. one of the reasons that the new york times sunday paper is so big is because people want a lot of different kinds of things. people, you know, advertisers pay for the movies section, advertisers pay for the fashion section and the new york times can take all that money and use it to save for the pure in iraq which not many people read, but it s important journalism that they have to do. so there s that sort of tradeoff, right? i think that s a provide stuff for the masses and then you fund serious journalism with it. i think that s a very good analogy. do you see jeff basos and others as potential saviors here? i think that s the danger. if we stay away from the savior language, it s easy because these guys have money, we need money.
of the special interests. so i wonder, do you think that s a potential problem that they, you know, are sort of part of corporate america? and also could basos use his experience in amazon to get people to stay on a news site longer or to be repeat customers? i think that s always a danger, but that s a danger ever present in the media today. the washington post company before bas oo s bought it, you know, they ran capllan, this huge education company and that had a lot of dealings in washington and a lot of controversy and the washington post, the newspaper, had to steer around it and report on it. that happens in all big media companies. so i don t think it s very different in this case. so i think jeff basos expertise, i think that s one. the other thing, though, one of the things he s shown with amazon is that he s willing to try a lot of different business models and wait, even if they fail for a while, wait for them to pay off opinion we saw this