Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion On Jeff Bezos The News Ind

Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion On Jeff Bezos The News Industry 20220825

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. D

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