several times in her life. the murder of her son, murder of her brother. her experiences have made her a widely respected victims right advocate nationwide, ms. campbell, thank you. i know this is not an easy thing but i appreciate you being here. >> thank you. thank you so much. mr. chairman, senators, thank you for the opportunity to allow me to address you here today. you're right, it isn't easy but it's worth it if it helps.

the violence against woman's act has been very important -- a very important addition to help strengthen our nation's ability to assist women, the victims of terrible sexual acts and physical violence. however, that act standing alone does not provide enough necessary means to address the crimes and their victims. facing reality our criminal justice system lacks due process. and basic commonsense. we certainly acknowledge resources alone are not sufficient to bring true justice that they help. there are huge issues in our justice system that have and will continue to affect hundreds and thousands of families just like mine. the sad truth is, my family

members and many family members would be alive if our justice system worked like it was intended to, like we planned for it to, like it should. but instead, sadly, in our home, our only son, brother, and sister-in-law are all dead, all murdered. >> take your time. >> to adequately judge its importance for our nation's decision-makers, god dang me it makes me so bad because i'm a tough old broad and when i'm tough i'm not and i know my husband is watching and that makes me mad. [laughter] >> don't let it bother you a bit. >> god bless. thank you very much.

it's important for you our national decision-makers to try and personally, personally identify with a tragedy of crime and the truth and reality of what victims are forced to endure. it really stinks. you have taken on the huge responsibility of the most important job in our nation, the safety of our citizens. and it's critical to the american people that you fully understand the truth in what's going on. we must have predictable sentencing and keep dangerous criminals behind bars. it's critical to have rapid access to dna, to save lives and save precious time for law enforcement and our crowded courts. it is also important to have victims present and heard at all proceedings. they know too much to keep them out of the courtroom. i realize it is more than important and it is impossible

in just a few moments to bring to you the real world of being a victim of crime. it's not a great thing. and by gosh, we got to stop it. for a quarter of a century, without a break, my family has been through a living hell. the hell was delivered firsthand by the killers, the criminals who of should have remained in prison. then more hell was distributed bit justice system. if our justice system had worked properly, along with many others, my murdered family would be alive today. in 1982 our only son, psychologist, disappeared from the face of the earth. we frantically looked for him for 11 months. two parolees had stolen his expensive sports car and decided if both the car and our son were missing, they would never get caught. the killers statement to the undercover agent was, we took

him for an airplane ride, strangled and threw him in the pacific ocean where the sharks would eat him and he would never be found. senators, what if the killers had been given three indeterminate life sentences and was released in only four years. the other killer was out on work furlough after killing somebody else. you see, both of these criminals had been given another chance. they were given another chance. but senators, we never have another chance to see our son. but we're still going through the eight years of our son's murder's trial where we were excluded from the courtroom. my only sibling, auto racing legend mickey thompson and his wife, trudy, were also murdered.

it took another 19 years to get those killers convicted. from the very beginning, i was certain who had killed mickey and trudy. and naturally their attempts on my life so they wouldn't be brought to justice. however, let me tell you, senators, i'm the proud daughter of a wonderful man who is captain and chief of detectives on the el hambra california police department and at a young age, he taught my brother and me how to have courage and always do the right thing. and i'm a hell of a good shot, by the way. not too many victims have self-defense training and were able to survive a quarter of a

century of murderers wanting to take them out because they're trying to bring justice. i respectfully ask you to please place yourself in the position that many of us have been forced to endure. and then only then, only then, will you understand the best steps to stay. and i thank you for allowing me sit up here and slobber over myself and i guess it's 'cause i flew most of the night and i'm really tired but i wanted to be here because i never want other people to have to endure what some of us have endured. thank you, senators. >> well, miss campbell, i'm glad you took that flight. i'm sorry for what you endured that. you have four former prosecutors on this panel, senator sessions, myself, senator klobuchar, senator whitehouse.

the crime shouldn't have happened in the first place. the delays and everything else after that never should have happened. we're trying in every way possible to get the resources, the training -- the steps that miss burke has in her own -- with the law in rhode island. i mean, these are -- well, i think a murder case that i prosecuted 75, 80% of them had steps been taken earlier, they would have been avoided. there's nothing more tragedy to being in a murder scene at 3:00 in the morning, blue lights flashing, people sobbing and to have the if only or the what if or the other things and so thank you for what -- you put a human

face on what so many of us have seen in the past. thank you. sally wells is the chief assistant to the maricopa attorney in phoenix. she helps oversee an office of more than 350 attorneys, 900 support staff, supervises the operation of the civil and prosecution divisions within the office. she's been an attorney in maricopa county for 23 years. she has her bachelor degree from the university of virginia, her law degree from arizona state university. miss wells, please go ahead. >> thank you, mr. chairman, members of the committee. thank you very much for allowing me the opportunity to present the views of the maricopa county attorney's office concerning the continued importance of the violence against women act and more specifically, about the value of mandatory minimum

sentencing for sexual assault and sexual abuse, as well as prompt dna and hiv testing in cases of sexual assault and sexual abuse. the maricopa county attorney's office is located in phoenix, arizona. as you said, it employs more than 350 lawyers, prosecutors, who prosecute more than 40,000 felonies a year. as a 23-year veteran of the office and as chief assistant i've prosecuted domestic violence cases, sexual abuse cases, and i currently oversee the specialized bureaus who focus on prosecuting those crimes. sexual violence causes lasting trauma to victims beyond physical injury. in many cases, these crimes go unreported due to the fear and trauma associated with sexual violence. fear of retaliation from the offender and fear of public scrutiny.

in our experience, it's not uncommon for a sexual offender who's finally caught to admit to other sexual assaults that were never reported. in a 2004 statewide study in arizona, it was estimated that only 16% of all sexual assaults ever came to the attention of law enforcement. with respect to the fear of public scrutiny, the value of education cannot be underestimated. the dissemination of accurate information about sexual offenders and their victims is essential to change public attitudes about these crimes so the victims don't suffer humiliation when they report sexual abuse. one message that should be clear in any statutory scheme and that should be part of any educational effort is that sexual violence is one of the most serious of crimes.

the punishment associated with sexual violence should be commensurate with the damage that it inflicts. a mandatory minimum sentence of incarceration does send that message. with respect to the fear of retaliation, victims suffering the physical and emotional trauma of sexual abuse and sexual assault need to know that they're safe from the person who hurt them. they need a time to heal. for at least some period of time, victims need to know that the offender cannot return to inflict more pain or punish them for reporting the crime to authorities. a mandatory minimum sentence of incarceration sends that message. arizona's statute -- our statutory scheme does send that message. sexual assault is a class 2 felony. it's the second highest felony. a person who's convicted of

sexual assault in arizona is not eligible for probation. a person convicted of sexual assault is exposed too presumptive sentence of seven years in prison. if mitigating factors exist, the sentence may be reduced to a minimum of 5.25 years in prison and if aggravating factors may be found the sentence may be increased to 14 years in prison? in every case, a victim may expect the offender to be in prison for at least five years. and that five-year window of safety not only encourages reporting and participating in court proceedings, it also gives the victim time to heal without fear of retaliation. in 2005, arizona moved away from classifying sexual assault of a

spouse is a lesser crime as a sexual assault. as part of that debate i was asked by the legislature to provide some information about the affects such a change might have on reporting. some of our legislators were concerned that the higher penalties associated with sexual assault might discourage reporting. in looking at the past reported cases, the crime of sexual assault of a spouse was often accompanied by more serious offenses like kidnapping which is a class 2 felony or aggravated assault, a class 3 felony. the belief that a lower penalty would encourage reporting for sexual assault of a spouse or if you want, that a higher penalty would discourage reporting was not supported by the evidence. another important component in dealing with crimes of sexual assault and sexual abuse is biological testing.

along with the need to know that they are safe from any diseases that offenders may have transmitted to them, they need -- they need the assurance that they're safe from those diseases. there are several arguments for early biological testing of suspects. and although i'm not a medical expert, prosecutors generally accept that if a victim reports significant exposure during a sexual assault within 72 hours of the assault, doctors can prescribe a 28-day regiment that will help the victim and help prevent the contradiction of hiv. the sooner this regiment is begun, the more effective it is. the medication to prevent hiv infection is expensive and it may cause serious side effects. victims who do not know whether

the attacker had hiv are forced to choose between the risk of hiv infection or the risk of the side effects associated with the prophylactic treatment. those side affects could liver enlargement or bone marrow suppression. information from prompt offender testing would alleviate the uncertainty in making that choice. information that the offender did not have hiv would allow the victim to feel safe and begin to heal. in addition to biological testing, to ensure the safety of the victim, another kind of testing play as vital role in the investigation and prosecution of these crimes. dna testing of the suspects ensures the suspects are identified as early as possible. as i mentioned before, many sexual assaults by the same suspect go unreported.

others are reported but the suspects are unknown. sexual offenses are often repetitive crimes. the ability to link these crimes to specific individuals early and to specific geographic areas helps law enforcement put an end to serial offenses sooner. sexual offenders are often linked to other types of crimes, like burglary, criminal trespass, or other types of felonies. dna evidence is important to create an accurate criminal history for suspects. it also eliminates suspects so law enforcement resources are not wasted. dna sampling and testing also brings relief to victims -- >> miss wells, i'm sorry to interrupt. there's going to be a roll call vote and i want to make sure we have time for questions. incidentally when when you were talking about the hiv testing

you probably noticed senator sessions and i were wis peg something. this is something we both strongly believe in, not only for being able to go on the regime of medication he talked about but to be able to avoid it if it's unnecessary and for the peace of mind -- lord knows, there's enough things that are going through a victim's mind to begin with. but that's one that might be eliminated. miss union, your story -- i'm sure it's painful to tell, but it has -- it has an effect and it should be heard. go into a little bit more what you said in your statement that fortunately you were in a community that could afford to do right things.

how important is that -- not just the things on how to catch the perpetrator but i think you're referring also to the counseling that goes along with it. you want to elaborate on that a little bit. >> no, definitely. the main difference in a wealthy community like the one i was raped in is that the system kicks in immediately. the rain crisis center is well starved so that means whether it was me or someone who speaks spanish or cantonese the police would be there. rural communities also suffer from the same sort of thing. crimes that happen on native reservations, urban communities they don't have the same access to translators, to therapists to counselors, to -- a lot of states don't offer free hiv and std testing.

you know, that was covered. as much as i would love to test all the suspects, i'm a little bit more concerned about the victims. so i would rather prioritize that money to offer free testing for hiv and stds for victims immediately. that's what happened to me but i was also raped in a very wealthy community that could afford to do that. it's those kinds of differences that took me from rape victim to rape survivor and i was able to be an active participant in the criminal justice system that allowed me to help apprehend the suspect in a timely fashion. it wasn't within 48 hours. so that wouldn't have really helped in my case. but in a timely fashion. it happened, you know, get him off the streets. and without those -- the funding for rape crisis centers in all communities you create a parallel universe of justice. specifically, people who are raped in wealthier communities are going to get the justice and the treatment. so it's great to have somebody behind bars but if you can't get

on your path of recovery and reclaiming your dignity and your integrity and getting your mental health issues in check, you've been left as a shell of a person and it's incredibly important to have those rape crisis centers, you know, well staffed and well funded and properly trained. >> well, let me just follow that to you. i live in a town of 1500 people. identity rural enough i live on a dirt road. my nearest neighbors are a half mile away. not unusual in parts of vermont. not unusual in parts of california. rural california can make rural vermont look like a urban area. something happens in a very small town vermont or smalltown california, what is available? i would assume not what miss union had available to her. >> well, i would think that's a very accurate description of

rural vermont and probably rural areas throughout the country. you know, the reality of being a victim of domestic violence or sexual assault in a rural area is that help is sometimes miles and miles away. one of the things we love living in a small community. it's tightly knit people know know and they are often related to but it can create a situation where victims can't come forward because of their relationships that they have with the people living around them. i've talked to many victims who have been living in rural communities in both retirement in vermont and in ohio where the law enforcement person in their town was actually the brother of their perpetrator. and so there were real problems for victims living in rural areas. because of the nature of the towns and outlying areas where they live. the other factor, you know, is

that in domestic violence in particular, victims are often isolated by their perpetrators in many ways. they're isolated from their families and friends and economically from jobs and access to family assets. but in rural areas, they're isolated geographically. they may live in very, very rural circumstances. i've certainly had the experience of visiting victims of domestic violence and driven through creeks to get to the place where i was meeting them. so rural conditions are incredibly difficult for victims and offer -- the challenges are huge. >> thank you. my time is up. but i must say that lindsey ann burke -- i agree with senator whitehouse. it's a create achievement. the education is necessary. >> thank you, senator.

i appreciate that. >> it would have been very easy to just you and your husband say, that's it. we had a tragedy. we're shutting off the rest of the world. instead, you're helping. -- helping people and ms. campbell, you were married in 1951. i was married in 1962. it doesn't seem that long ago anymore. i also want to applaud the bravery of both you and your husband. again, these are all things it would be so easy to just run away and not refer to it anymore. instead, you've been very helpful to this community. that's extremely important. >> senator, i appreciate your thoughtfulness and your kindness. it means a lot. you're very special. you always have been. >> thank you very much. and miss wells, thank you for

being here. i want to turn over the questioning to senator sessions. i'm going to turn the gavel over to senator klobuchar. >> ms. wells, ms. campbell had described, individuals, murderers, who had previous records that she rightly believes should have been in jail and not able to commit these kind of crimes again. let's pursue that a little bit. you're a professional and you've been at this a long time. and i've come to believe that mathematics is a factor in all of this. that there are just not many people that sexually assault women. there are a certain number of

those are repeat offenders who are exceedingly dangerous. just from a purely public safety point of view, is it important we identify those persons early and that they be incarcerated in order to protect the people of this country from this kind of violence? >> well, senator, you said it as well as i could say it, yes, that is critical. and there are a lot of studies already that are helping us to identify those persons. and as soon as we can identify them, then our goal should be to incarcerate them for as long as possible. >> now, you represent a very sophisticated department. you've been at this a long time. you've personally tried these kinds of cases. i know you're really an expert in it. do you think there are other departments of district attorney offices, young prosecutors, maybe young police officers who deal with one of these cases and are not aware sufficiently to

identify a person who may be a highly dangerous offender that needs to be given as long as sentence as appropriate under the law? do you think we're missing some people and that's causing additional crimes that could have been avoided? >> i do. and i agree with one of my colleagues who said there's a new generation of police officers and prosecutors coming who haven't had the education that i have. and it's important to keep the continuity of that education and to keep doing the studies that help us identify those offenders. and, of course, i believe that dna testing is one of the tools we have to identify people early. >> tell me about the dna. how in a sexual assault case -- how important is it that dna be determined and maintained for potential future use?

how does that work to solve crimes and prevent crimes? >> well, anyone who watches television knows dna is a very useful term -- a tool in identifying suspects. and it can be preserved for a long time. arizona recently passed legislation that requires dna evidence to be held for at least 35 years. and that legislation was introduced by victim groups because as we heard today, many sexual assaults aren't reported or they're reported much later than they occurred. and the offenders may not be identified for many, many years. but the closure, the ability to find out who the culprit was, who the offender was and to find out maybe that they are in prison somewhere else because they've been doing this over the course of their offender career,

if you want to call it that, to the victims. >> the person that assaulted you, a sexually assaulted a person later that same day; is that correct? >> no a couple days later. >> a couple days later. if you didn't identify that person, the dna that obtained -- investigators would know it's the same rapist that's correct and if they had a previous arrest for rape and you had that on record, you would know exactly who that person was? >> that's correct. and as we heard today as well, it's important to have databases so that law enforcement agencys in different jurisdictions can identify a single offender. >> what is your opinion, miss wells, on what other departments are doing with regard to maintaining dna around the country? do you have any idea how well other departments are maintaining dna in these type of sexual assault cases? >> i do think more and more states are passing legislation

to make sure dna is collected early. it's collected from a broader range of suspects, not just suspects who commit sexual crimes. there are a number of crimes that seem to be precursors or associated with sexual crimes like burglary, petty theft, other kinds of felonies like that. many states are expanding their dna testing to those offenders as well so that like i said, if we can identify them early and stop any -- even one sexual assault, it's worth it. >> i couldn't agree more. miss campbell, thank you for your testimony. miss burke, thank you for your work. i wish we had more time to talk about it. but i think you're touching on an extremely important societal problem that we face and i'm glad that you're showing that leadership and all of you, thank you for speaking up and being effective on these issues. we have had -- miss campbell, you were part of the movement of

victims' rights and it has really changed the law enforcement mechanism. i think that's one reason murders are down substantially from what they were in the 1980s when you lost your family members. i do warn, however, that i sense about a movement that's beginning to go soft on the lessons we learned. and it's just simply is this. certain people are dangerous. the fact they attacked one person is indicative they may attack another person. we have to maintain tough sentences for certain dangerous offenders. thank you, madam. and it's a pleasure to work with you. >> well, thank you very much. >> and i also enjoyed your great leadership on our delegation to canada, with the united states canadian interparliamentary. it was a fabulous job and you did a great job --

>> you did a great job singing with the fiddler. there was a lot of negotiations with canada. senator whitehouse? >> thank you, chairman. miss burke, you've done such good work in this area. as we look to rhode island as a potential national model here, what further feedback would you give us on what elements of the lindsey ann burke programs have been best received, have been most effective. what are the lessons learned from what you've done that you think congress should focus on. >> i think the lessons learned have been the need for funding. the implementation of the law is working in rhode island mostly because our organization and the rhode island coalition against domestic violence from even before we had the law passed stepped up to the plate and said that we would be willing to

provide free training for school staff. so that there was no funding attached to the bill when it was passed in rhode island. however, the drawback in other states is, what we're finding, is that many states have good intentions but they're very concerned, especially in these hard economic times about the cost of training school personnel. in fact, i've gotten calls even this week from state of ohio, from new mexico asking, you know, how we implemented lindsey law, what was the specifics and what were the costs involved? i think for it to be successfully implemented in other states, we have to have funding. there's no way of getting around that. i also believe very strongly as an educator that we need to pass lindsey's law maintaining all the components of the law.

it would be a very severe drawback to educate the students and not have the staff educated at the same time. and also i think that we wouldn't want to leave our parents out of that equation either. i think that you need to educate all three at the same time. i don't think it takes a great deal of funding, not as much perhaps most people would imagine. because once your staff is educated and your health teachers or whatever teachers are designated in other states, not all states require health education, but what other teachers are designating other states to be the primary teachers of the students, once you have that training done, it only has to be done sporadically for new hires and that can be incorporated at the college level in their college education programs for student teachers. >> you least want enough funding for the program to be persistent. >> persistent, correct.

i think initially you'll probably need a substantial amount of funding and after that in time, that number should drop down. so that it could just be maintained. i've seen firsthand the access. two of my own former students have come back to me in different times -- one who went on to a private high school and one who went on to our public high school and after learning about it in the middle school, they did find themselves in those types of situations. due to the nature of an abusive relationship, they weren't aware at the beginning. in one case, the student themselves after a while recognized the warning signs and was able to get herself out. in the other case, it was the friends who also had the educational piece in eighth grade who recognized the signs and they worked with their friend to get them out. i know the education works. there's no doubt in my mind. and i think that all students have a right to that education. i think to deprive them of that

education is simply wrong. we can save lives. i think that -- i was talking to katherine pierce last evening. i think it's even going to be difficult to measure how many lives we're saving. many people won't come forward and tell us. long after they graduate -- they're learning when we teach this education, we're teaching them life skills. it's no different than anything else that we teach in health class. we teach them about heart disease prevention, chances of them becoming involved in an abusive relationship in high school is far greater than developing heart disease in high school. >> well, thank you for what you've done. i recall in 1999, i think it was, when i was attorney general, my juvenile justice did a high school and distributed it to all the high schools and all the police departments but it didn't meet the test of persistence and i'll take that lesson from you today. >> i was talking to raleigh and

i was trying to find that tape we could duplicate it and he handed it out again. >> for my last few seconds for ms. wells -- >> you can take your time, senator whitehouse. >> thank you, senator. >> when it comes time to check suspects and dna samples, what level of suspicion do you recommend be reached before the testing can take place do you require full probable cause or a clearly articulatable standards, terry stop, when would it be appropriate of dna testing in the spectrum of we have no idea, round up the usual suspects to we have a victim who has identified who their perpetrator was and we know who it is.

there's a wide band of suspicion? at what point should this kick in? >> in our state, and i agree with this, the standard is probable cause and that's the same standard that police use when they make an arrest. >> an arrest. >> and we also have a statute that allows dna testing for certain crimes, not every crime. upon arrest or charging by a prosecutor. >> so again, do a probable cause standard? >> there's probable cause that the offender did commit the offense. >> and that's adequate for your purpose. >> yes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. this is a wonderful panel of witnesses, i have to say. >> all right. thank you. and i just wanted to also give my thanks for the courage -- for you, ms. union, and the way you told that story, it's so clear you're now a survivor and how you told it and miss burke for the great work you're doing and miss campbell was proud of you

and you just showed him. i wanted to follow up on a few things that other senators asked. the first is ms. well, my colleague, senator sessions was asking about dna which is so incredibly important right now. one of the things that i found recently in the last 10 years we call it the csi effect. that juries are actually expecting to have dna. and sometimes you may have a sexual assault that doesn't have dna or you may have a domestic abuse case that most likely may not have dna. and we actually lost a case or two, some smaller cases, because the jurors actually said later, well, why wasn't there dna. they agreed with the defense lawyer on this and that's when we got the right to rebuttal and our state was the last word and we got that changed. but you want to comment on that? evidentiary changes that have allowed -- i know one of the big issues a few years back was allowing us to go forward with domestic abuse cases when the victim wouldn't even testify

because we had other evidence from the scene. and just what you've seen in the development of either laws or evidentiary techniques, technologies to help with those cases where you don't have dna? >> you're absolutely correct. juries expect forensic evidence and dna on a sexual crime. that's where the crime where the csi affect -- >> the csi effect is juries expect this and if they don't have it they may think the person is not guilty. >> that's correct. they think that there is a new threshold now. in the old days we could present a witness who would identify the defendant. there was no dna and we were able to obtain convictions for sexual assault. now and in our state, jurors are allowed to ask questions during the trial. we get pages of questions. was dna done? why wasn't it done.

and sometimes because dna is a complex chemical analysis, the questions get very detailed and some jurors ask very, very complex medical questions during the trial of a sexual assault case. so it is very important, though, not to lose sight of the fact that if you don't have dna, you still have to fall back on all the things we learned when we prosecuted sexual assaults before. interview as many people as possible. it's very useful to tape record interviewed. it's very useful to get other kinds of evidence that corroborate what the victim has to say. even if you get dna, you shouldn't stop there. you should continue to get all of that evidence because you don't know -- maybe the dna won't be admissible later on. but it is -- it's still critical

to investigate these crimes as thoroughly as possible. >> uh-huh. thank you. miss tronsgrard-scott, one of the things you talked about with kids at the scene and kids living in the home -- i remember the statistic i always used to use a kid growing up in a violent home where there was domestic abuse was something like 76 times more likely to commit crimes themselves. in fact, we had a picture in our office when you came in of a woman with a band-aid on her nose holding a baby, beat your wife and it's your son who will go to jail. do you want to talk about any advances that have been? i know there's been more interaction with child protection, bringing them in so that kids get help when they live in a home and also, obviously, kids can be witnesses, too. and what's been happening with that and as we look at the reauthorization we should be looking at this aspect of it as well. >> thank you, senator. thanks for the opportunity to talk about children living in violent homes. i agree with you. kids are at particular risk --

the statistic that i use is that kids living in violent homes are 300 times more likely to be abused themselves. >> uh-huh. >> which i think is incredibly distressing so kids growing up in violent homes not only are more likely to commit violent crimes as adults but it's likely they themselves have been abused and, of course, from my belief system, a child that's witnessing domestic violence is suffering from abuse. so there have been great strides made and i can talk about vermont and in vermont, i'm very proud of vermont in the work we've done working with children. our rural grant in vermont as i referred to in my testimony has created the opportunity for us to create a unique and innovative relationship with our children's protective services division of our state government and that -- what we did is we were able to provide intensive training for child abuse investigators in that understood and so now they are experts at working with victims of domestic violence and their kids. in many cases victims of

domestic violence in the past were almost held accountable the abuse the children were suffering at the hands of their abusers but this program allows investigators to go in and do an investigation and instead of blaming the victim for the abuse that the kids are suffering, they work with the victim to be able to provide them with the supports that they need to be able to make choices about living in a safe, peaceful-filled home. >> okay. very good. ms. union, you did such a good job of talking about how -- you said it so directly how the fact that you had been raped in an area that had the resources. it very much resonated with me. i've seen that in smaller counties that don't have the resources. they may not have the expertise in cases or you had like you said a rape crisis center that doesn't have the resources. i brought up earlier with miss pierce the rape kits and i wonder for anyone that has knowledge about that, that is what we've been hearing that there have been efforts to make victims pay for them or they are

paying for them or they pay for them and then they have to be paid back by the state. any comments on that? >> yeah. we've been having this discussion for the last few years. and i live in california and there's a backlog. and i work very closely with ucla rape crisis centers and as a rape survivor myself, i had -- basically when your dna is collected, your rape kit is collected it's stuck in a brown bag and it goes and sits on the counter and i go to ucla rape crisis center and i see the line of brown bags, that's children, women, men -- everyone -- you become this brown bag. and i know that some -- >> and this is dna that could connect people to a crime and identify a perpetrator. >> oh, yes. and you know after working in this business, everyone who deals with rape and domestic violence, you realize that there's a priority that is placed on certain brown bags. they call them sexy victims. and the victims that generally -- generally a sexy

victim is a white woman preferably young, preferably formally educated, if they're attractive even better cases that can get media attention and that are slam dunks. if that's african-americans, latinos, anyone who is not a white, educated attractive woman is not deemed a sexy victim. and those cases are the ones that make up the bulk of the backlog cases. and just the -- it's so transparent and when you sit there and you see the row of these brown bags, it breaks your heart. like i said, when i talk to rape victims in the united states, i have to give them the same spiel because the likelihood of justice that you think you're going to get because you watch csi, well, they took my dna and i was sort of revictimized again by having to do the rape kits so soon after. my rapist is going to be

apprehended and i'm going to get on justice and i'm going to get on this path of recovery and it just doesn't work like that for the majority of people. and when we start to prioritize certain people, we create a parallel universe of justice. and that has to stop. >> to end here, i noticed that -- and thank you for that point and as we look at this reauthorization and the tools we need in the criminal justice system, i think sometimes laws and funding were set back in a time before we had this extent of the technology we have and some of the state laws that we have now and that's why it's an opportunity to look at things that we should be doing differently. on a positive note, ms. tronsgrard-scott is that you had in your state it saved costs in the first six years alone. do you want to comment on that and where you see those -- those savings? >> i want to say -- i want to

say that back in 1984 when i was a young person living in cleveland, ohio, i lived next door to a family that was -- where the husband was violent and we had to tell the police officers that there was a burglar outside our house to get them to respond. they would not come to that house if we called the police. and so that family was left -- the victim was left. there was no supports. there was no prosecution. there was nothing. that family went on -- they were a family that was poor. they used social service system, and their lot was fairly hopeless. today, that same family would be embraced with a social services net that would in many ways, especially, with the new economic justice work that we're doing in our movement -- not only help them maintain safety but help them move forward in their economic goals. and so for me, it's money well spent.

>> thank you. well, i think part of the successes that we've had are a tribute to all of you and with the grassroots level with victims saying i'm not going to take it anymore and be willing to come forward and speak. so i want to thank you all for that. we're looking forward as a committee to working on this. as you can see, it's a bipartisan effort strongly supported by both sides of the aisle. so i just want to thank you and wish you well and just -- your courage is unbelievable and it's going to make a difference. thank you very much. this hearing's adjourned. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations]

>> coming this fall, tour the home to america's highest court, the supreme court on c-span. >> how is c-span funded? >> maybe >> there's some kind of sponsorships or something like that. >> taxpayer-funded possibly? >> through philanthropy? >> fundraising? >> government maybe? partly? >> how is c-span funded? 30 years ago, america's cable companies created c-span as a public service, a private business initiative, no government mandate, no government money. >> the future of news was a focus of a panel at the aspen of ideas festival. two bloggers spoke with jeff jarvis about the viability of

newspapers. this is an hour. >> so i'm jeff jarvis. i wrote a book what would google do. and i blog at buzz machine.com and i teach journalism. to my right is nick dent john a long time friend who founded gawker media and to my left is jesse almost a long time friend who founded web blogs, inc. which is -- we do? i normally bring around an accompaniment. jason found a web blogs, inc. and then went on to found a human power search engine but the real reason these two are here is because they go back and i happened to moderate a session with them in 2005 when they were at each other's throats competing at the start of web blogs. and they were competing heartily and i think it improved web blogs as a result.

so that was -- the whole thing. small w. as a business. so that's where they come from as a history. unfortunately, for you they're very friendly now. [laughter] >> and not as contentious and angry but we'll see what comes out of them. so why don't we actually start with yesterday. there was a session -- we were all part of the -- what is it call the collapse of media? no, the media crackup and so yesterday afternoon and last night there was a session with various luminaries trying to talk about trying to grasp for a future business model for media. what did you think of the thinking so far? >> this is my first time at the ideas festival and i understand at least it's a polite affair. one isn't supposed to speak ill of other panels.

i was surprised that it was pretty much the same kind of panel, same kind of conversation that one would have heard in 1999. maybe a little bit of the air of desperation now is a little more intense. but the same discussions about, you know, is the model for news and online content -- is it subscription. is it free add-supported. is it going to be micropayments or monthly subscriptions? i was trying to work out what is new about the conversation here on the stage with steven brill? >> i don't know if it was a conversation that occurred in '95, '96. they went from arrogantly dismiss live of the '95, '96, '97 time frame. nobody will trust it and people

are going to pay by the minute to read stuff and at the time people were paying over $5 an hour for aol and compuserve and then it went to this -- well, we're on the web and we've got some people using it and we're making a little bit of money in the '99 period. maybe it's an opportunity on so they went to dismissive to maybe an opportunity to now because of 10, 15 years of poor execution being terrified and when people are scared they take sort of two forms. some of them are defiant like we're going to go down with the ship which is very noble, i understand. but also stupid 'cause you're going to die. they're going to go down with the ship and we're seeing it happen as newspapers close. there are some literally frozen in the media business. they know it's over. they know the titanic is

sinking. they see the life rafts and they don't do anything. >> like katherine who i thought was i don't know -- were you there -- >> the publisher of "the washington post." >> i thought she was very smart. she's kind of savvy, sensible and she described herself as being open-minded. she was open-minded towards steven brill's idea of putting all the newspapers together in some -- behind everything and charging for herring >> they don't suggest all of their content behind the wall and he has predictions of the wealth of that cost. >> the idea of being open-minded i know you've actually recommended yourself that newspapers experiment. that they try everything. it's too late. it's 2009. the time for expertise was about a decade ago. i think it's reasonably clear what newspapers should do or what they can do. >> so what is that?

what should they do? >> i think they have to cut down on their political coverage. i think they have to hive off and create brands around the areas of content that actually attract readers and attract advertisers. like for instance sunday styles, the "new york times" sunday section. very popular. highly female audience, desirable for advertisers, that could very easily be an online brand and get -- and support itself entirely through online advertising. they don't do it. they're still whetted of the entire package that all these topics covered and at the very center of national, local and political coverage for which there is no ad-supported model. >> and, you know, if you look at what the internet is good at, it speeds things up and it lets you go deeper. so you can have, you know, all

of the possible information about cars or hybrid cars that you want or sports cars and you can just revel in your niche and if you look at what newspapers did, they were designed to give people a broad view, an inch deep of everything going on in the world which is very noble and it served a great purpose. but it's unnecessary now to give people such a shallow look at the world. and if you look at autos as an example, the new york timing has an auto section. they do two stories, too, every week. if you look at the blogs we created about cars, auto blog which are two of the largest car sites on the web, they cover 20 to 40 stories per day. per day. and in each of those stories, there are five to 150 comments. if you're a car enthusiast, by the time the sunday paper comes out, you know everything that's there already. there are no surprises.

and that's what's happening is people are looking at the newspaper and how many times have you had this experience. you get the newspaper in the morning and you go -- you look at the front page and you say i saw that on drudge, on the "new york times" and i saw this from an email from my friend and i got this in an email alert and this one twittered this. i try to go through something that i don't already know. >> the printing press since guttenberg, 570 years dictated what publishing could look like. you could do it once a day or week and you would package the world and they value the package that they make. it was going to have to be limited and one size fits all and it's going to have to be shallow, those assumptions come out of the necessity of paper. if you take away the necessity of paper, it necessarily changes how you do the job of journalism. >> people consume news now in a live cnn-like experience. you know, you hear somebody said

michael jackson died and you get little nuggets throughout your day. not only have they changed the distribution or experiment with the online, they're still taking the method of doing the journalism that they did in print and doing it online, which is wildly boring and ineffective when you have these little scrappy startups, you know, sending out lots and lots of little pieces of information and letting them debate them. ..

>> is it possible for the institutions we are talking about, but "the new york times" as i. you can even put the washington post aside and washington journal because they are national journals in some way. if you are at the bottom globe, $85 million a year, it's going to break down the times. what do you do with the "boston globe"? smack i already have to put my hands because i have no idea.

the only ones i really look at, the ones that seem to have a chance frankly is nuke papers like "the new york times" and washington post that have some franchise. the washington post could become, could be if it hadn't let politico come in and grab an edge, washington post could be the dominant on line. >> could be like the washington bureau. what do you do with the la times? >> interesting lee, i asked when somebody was trying to buy it, i didn't take the job of asking what what i would do. i said i think we should cancel the print edition except on sunday and the weekend. the weekends we should make it, we should take all the editorial investment, really put a large amount of it into that weekend edition that is really deep stories that some people can curl up with and keep that newspaper as a keepsake almost. you wouldn't want to throw it away because it's so valuable, almost like a magazine where you say there's too much great information in here for me to throw away.

>> the staff of the la times people produce that kind of newspaper? >> absolutely. they are basically doing some of that already. what happens when you have his printing press and daily deadlines, you are spending all of your time managing the machine of the printing and distribution just for the ceo and the management team. all of their focus is getting pulled on that and he can't focus on real opportunities, which is the niche market on line and maybe some real considerate stuff. they have to have a radically smaller footprint. it's very hard for people and light to go backwards i found and been able. if you look at companies and you see this throughout history, ibm, and credible business selling computers and hardware. they were able to adapt and let other people fight out the low margin business. i don't think the newspaper industry is largely capable of making a change. i think the local news business, almost all of those newspapers will be shut down and be on line additions only.

>> go ahead. >> i have one idea. for a long time i had no idea how a newspaper could -- i used to work at a financial plan, and it was a relatively newspaper. it had this great tradition of history, but it's very, very difficult. the one idea, everyone says, you have to pay attention to your readers. which is kind of a fine thing to say, but it doesn't allow you to prescribe any particular course of action. you say there are two things. they put page view numbers next to every single article which we do in our blog post. a measure of the popularity of every single thing that's written. and secondly, if they opened up the newspaper to read or comment

so that they can even moderator base say every single article should have at the end of a discussion involving the readers, may be the source of the story, maybe the reporter. something to expose what the readers think about a particular thing. i tell you what would happen. for someone like "the new york times," the newspaper which i read, within about six months they would have to give up a lot of the opening coverage, the local political coverage. actually, there's a very small class of people, political class that care about the stories. they would realize that sunday styles would be one of their most important franchises. it would become undeniable. >> they have all of that now. >> but by exposing it to the public, it becomes impossible to ignore. the readers see it. the writers see a. the readers complain less if you

cut some areas of coverage because you point and say, you see a thousand years compared with a million views of the story we did about the somali pirates. >> the argument about that is be the knit new york times and become the paris hilton times. >> that's probably true of. >> i think that's a very good idea. as an antidote, i woke up on a saturday where the poor woman was killed in iran, i'm not sure how to pronounce it. i just happen to be on twitter. and i saw the iranian collecti n and i click it. somebody said this lady has been shot. i clicked on it and i thought that's the worst thing i've ever seen in my life. it only had about 300 years at that point. so now, i jumped down that rabbit hole like many of you probably do and get obsessed with what's way on there. just a wonderful thing about the internet, the way to get ocd on something.

it is. think how extraordinary is how we learn everything about a subject so quickly and get up to speed. "the new york times," somehow i stumbled on it because someone twittered it or log it. there was a live blog coverage with something coming out of iran. it was brilliant. then i went and got a cup of coffee and i tried to find and i went to "the new york times." i couldn't find it. they had it buried like seven levels deep. >> on line? >> on my. there was somebody putting updates every 15 minutes about what was going in iran. there is a tweedy says there is a thing here and a video here. it was like why is this not the homepage right now. there are smart people in "the new york times." i know many of them. but there are institutional slots and greed and just madness and they can't move quick. >> but that's the tragedy. these newspapers have brilliant, brilliant people. they have brilliant readers. i remember there was an article about blogging, and with the

emily gould front cover of "the new york times" magazine about how to much blogging, how much over sharing, overexposure of your own life not be worth it. and they opened up that particular article to comment, and the first time ever i was actually terrified by "the new york times." as a competitor. because you read through the comment and they were smart, the grammar was perfect. dispelling. you should see the comment on our sites. we have probably better than average internet sites, and readership, readers are very smart about gadgets. but not all of them can write. >> that doesn't deter them. >> no, no. >> why couldn't "the new york times," if "the new york times" could capture the intelligence of their writers and these readers that do the twitter and live blog.

our readers based. >> "the new york times" and the economist, or i write, and the argument is you have an incredibly wise crowd. and the challenge is to bring about. in this new age, when i talk to companies that want their value is, they always are very focused whether it's me or other company that we have our brand, our this or are that. they hardly ever say their public. i will stop but we are in a smart crowd. a larger crowd but we are in a smart crowd. and so what are we doing up your just talking about ourselves. that's true with companies also and they need to find a way to capture the wisdom of the crowd. just in qualitative ways. they are missing that intelligent. >> i tried when we are doing weblogs and we had 500 bloggers at the peak working for us at the company, i tried to hire journalists because i was a former journalist and editor of

my own print magazine. every time i ran into the same kind of problems, specifically with the audience. they had no intent to mix it up with the auditor they didn't like the fact that comments were allowed to be wanted to moderate the comments because if somebody said you made a mistake, they would like to chat before it got posted, fix it, and this is writing journalism got a little bit off the rails and a little bit, the media companies got very fat and full of themselves. and a little high on their own supply of scarface, which is the number-one rule you just don't do that. actually thought that they were very important people and that they started think that their life is subject. when you're a journalist and you start to think your life is a big ceo or whatever important people you're covering you sort of lose something. and they couldn't handle the pressure of the public audience interacting with them. now, so that led us to the belief that we should look at the comments and hired the great

commentators. and some of the best writers that were found were people who would write a comment that was twice as long as the blog post with read insightful things. when a blog post that no insightful thinker that created intention with the existing bloggers and commentators that we are equal in some ways. yes, i'm writing the post but you are an intelligent person. we respect you, and we respect your knowledge. you might in fact know something more than a. i don't know if anybody here has been quoted in "the new york times" or before. has anybody been quoted in "the new york times"? anybody who has been quoted maybe felt that there was a perfectly as they said? exactly. we have all been manipulated that way and had the writer as to seven questions in a row to try to get you say it a certain way. you know, and it's insulting. and now that whole sort of process was flipped over. frankly, i think they deserve a lot of them. and i don't cry for them at all. i think that they made their bed and creative destruction is good.

i think there will be a whole group of new news sources that are going to be better. and they are going to be faster. going to be more accurate, and they will deliver a quality of news that i think is less pretentious and treats the audience with a little more respect. >> we should pass more accurate. letzig blogs are individually extremely inaccurate. we get stories wrong the whole damn time. getting back your sample of what it's like to be within your kind. "the new york times" is never going to screw you over. "the new york times" will always be roughly fair, even if the rider is inclined to be against you. the editor will stop it being a headpiece. "the new york times" really doesn't do a headpiece. on a blog, there is actually no, no would you call, no one to complain to. there is no ombudsman or anything like that. and in the key point is an

aggregate, the blogs get it right. eventually they get it right. they may stumble upon it. i think a great parallel here is such as the british press which as you very much more like blogs versus the american press. in the coverage of where were the weapons of mass distraction after the invasion of iraq. i think the lag between the british press getting hold of that story and the american press doing it was somewhere between six and 12 months. the british press got a individual stories, they got them wrong. , on leaks, misdirection, but in aggregate eventually they got it right. and i think that's the future of journalism is it will be messy and. >> journalism is not a product. we print once they. it had to be perfect. that was a myth. it is a process. and the process is necessarily

messy. we just tried to hide the mesh in. >> it's like an open kitchen versus a closed kitchen. some restaurants, a nice french restaurant and if you went in the kitchen you would be disgusted and say it's a mess. and unlike some shots, what we do back it is beautiful, it's not perfect, but you would get me to watch me cook your food. i think that's kind of cool. i think you, you are an intelligent reader, would anybody here like to have, when would you have liked to listen in on some of those conversations and have them put out in little pieces. things like watergate if it was occurring during a blog era would have come out much quicker. there would have been so many legs all along. and i'm a big boy. i can read something and say okay, this was a leak. the bloggers as we got this through a tip line. okay, buyer beware. probably false but it could be true. give me all the news and help me sort through it. that's a better process. we're going to collect it all for a couple of weeks in and lets them out, you know.

>> basic, newspapers when they call up an official for comment, the officials lie the whole damn time. and if you are dependent on getting the on record comment from the official, you're not going to be able to print the truth because they're not going to give you the truth. you're going to rely on, you need to rely on official sources. maybe you need to rely on some crazy blogger who's going to print it anyway even without the official confirmation. and enforce the official or the company into making a denial or confirming some element of the story. and so that process, maybe at the end of the day, you need somebody like "the new york times" or on line equivalent openstep, you know, this is the 100% confirmed truth. for today. it may change to our. still processing in "the new york times." >> but we need people who will take risks with the story. >> finding what we call

half-baked blogs. years ago, he often forget things, i will call him, this is what window, this is what you don't know this is what you know. it's like google playing with beta. help us finish this. and journalists have to become good at saying what they don't know as they are at saying what they know. so even in "the new york times" is the fact that block them out at the new times is important for them. i'm sorry. [inaudible] >> the traditional media or the model of the traditional media was that you had credibility and you know where to find it, right. and i think we have all seen the talent drain in the traditional media quality over the last few years also, write to your point

about so at the same time we have the deep but unverified assertion of the bloggers so there is this bridge that is missing between, how do i group re-create in my on line media the same credibility and one of the things you're saying is does popularity, like trying to basically measure gravitons and that had its limitations. but then you had to inject on that the absence of a business model, right, that on line generates how do you get the robust business model that gives you -- >> there are business model. or may not be enough to support the 1200 people in "the new york times" newsroom. because the structure is different. the paper is not a monopoly anymore. >> we have 500 freelance, i would say if you put them in full-time positions, it would be 100, 150, something like that. >> yeah, we're hiring right now.

useful to aol. you are profitable with aol. >> very profitable. >> there is a model. >> it goes to your point. it may not need that kind of packaging that the industry that we were used to for hundreds of years. there's going to be chaos. glacier, he wrote a brilliant essay, google it, and the word unthinkable your think of unthinkable is the name. google that. i recommend it highly. he goes back and says we are now in a similar destruction now. we will end up with something. we're hopeful because we have been doing stuff. it is definitely going to be different. and our assumptions can't necessarily rise in say when w wax. [inaudible] >> shutting down our public libraries.

>> i met with the new york public library and by the way i'm a hypocrite for bringing out the book. i should have put it on line but they paid me. and they realized that i asked a question to them, what did you shut down the building. what are you? the same thing as a newspaper would if you shut down the press? a library, they realized that they are a repository for books. the internet can be a repository now for google. but they still have value and their value is both knowledge but it's the knowledge of how to do things. it's also a knowledge of how to connect people. it's also a smart crowd of people who know how to do things. if you reinvent alexandria today you probably would call it google. >> if you go to the new york public library and you see all of those computers in the waiting line, people to get in there and do homes untracked homework and research.

the library has a lot of purpose. maybe not to store books anymore like maybe don't need to have the facts as much because people can have instant access anywhere. so it's a huge opportunity. >> i work at the new york public library for eight years as a vice president for development. and i think what is missing here is the absolute joy of seeing the primary resource material. and we are talking about collections that are far beyond books. particularly in the new york public library, and there are special collections in libraries throughout the world, but in the united states we have a really, really viable resources that are not translated through digitization. you know, i don't care what anybody says. i work in museums. you cannot capture the beauty of a work of art on the internet. i mean, you can enjoy the visual image, but the aesthetic experience of being in front -- right, right. exactly. but the point is -- no, but you can't have an opportunity to see

actual manuscripts, actual books that have value beyond the content, the actual aesthetics of touching the book. i mean, when we would pull out the japanese girls at the new york public library for a potential donors, it was magic. it was just magic. now that doesn't mean that all of the information that you want about those japanese girls can't access via the internet, you know. >> people should have access to post. >> i don't think anybody on this panel is anti-library, museum. >> the aesthetic appeal, the same argument that people made for paper prints, newspaper. but my iphone will not have -- or scribes who beautifully decorated the page and google won't have that. >> hiker tightknit first of all to having guttenberg mentality. but i'm very interested in the

legal aspects of print versus you guys. and you have no incubation period. so you can, instantly. but press has to really sit back and say when am i going to be sued. you don't seem to enjoy lawsuit. i don't see any -- gets. but you're not bothered by the legality of lawsuits, are you? >> newspapers, its permanent. once it's written is committed. anything that is ashley published on line can be changed and can be updated. and that changes the circumstance is somewhat. >> and if there is disclosure and somebody says we've got, you know, this leaked memo in our anonymous e-mail box or yahoo e-mail address, take it for what it's worth. here it is. and the audience knows this is an anonymous death and they can judge it as such.

and that means you're not really going to get sued. with that being said, we got takedown letters all the time for different things that were leaked to us. everything from schematics for an iphone or a blackberry that were leaked to our journalists, you know, bloggers are sort of subsection. >> part of your success is you are free of lawyers. not free of lawyers, but have operations that have lawyers that spend half of their time dealing with matters from people who are threatening to sue us. but let's take an example, this is kind of a positive example. the church of scientology. very fearsome organization. and that intimidates most newspapers. i think "the new york times" ranson pieces and got sued pretty badly by the. but they pretty much scared off mainstream journalist. we rent a video of tom cruise,

secret, internal cold video of him mocking the religion. we got the usual scientology letters, cease-and-desist, threatened to sue. were not necessarily brave, but the internet collectively, the competitive pressures to get something out even if there is a legal risk and if you're not going to do it in something else is going to do it. and collectively, the internet is a more formidable foe for people like the church of scientology who want to keep information quiet. >> and we have, the law has to update to justice industries have to update. and we have to pay attention not to the mistake made, but what you do about it. i learned the ethic of corrections a blog if you don't you raise the error, you have to cross out the error. you have to show it was there. somebody comes along and googles

later and said yes, he did do that. but now it's corrected. >> the church of scientology spends $37 for a lawsuit. it has cost them their livelihood. >> arrest and factor is there, yes. but now they have given up. in the last year or two -- if they knock one internet site and then another internet site pops up with the same information. [inaudible] >> not personally. it would be somebody else. >> yesterday, there was a conversation, if any of you went to the content. the content. did anybody go to that yesterday? it was confident of the future, and it was a speaker who is talking about books. and your comment about the library. i mean, i love the internet of all the news but this was just balance, liking the book and

looking it up and reading. it was interesting where they were talking about -- tidal height you can order books sections or chapters are short stories, john f. kennedy speech, you know, the whole thing is ready to change. just the news. >> yes? >> the book of your initial discussion has to do with blogs versus newspapers, but where do magazines or sunday sections of newspapers like the week in review section of "the new york times" or say an article in newsweek magazine about anthropology or you know, people who really want to find out about something but don't have either the inclination or the time or the aesthetic to sit down in front of a computer screen as opposed to common

know, having something were you can turn back. >> he was a founding editor of weekly, so. >> were talking about this earlier. next goal in life at one point was to be the sign new house of blogs. is that still the case? >> i'm not sure whether that's a role model i'm looking for. >> if i can't it wouldn't be a magazine because it loses value of all people who are watching movies. it would be rotten tomatoes. it would be other things like that. notice also the cutting edge portfolio folded recently as reported investment of 120 million. ew had an investment of $200 million. not my fault. my theory is that magazines will come back with the economy to some measure of health, but we are never going to see that level of investment again. and so hug the ones you have.

i don't think there will be many new ones coming out. >> if we were talking about longform journalism, longform journalism in a physical magazine, but they're actually probably is a future for a long term journalism on line as we get better and screen the definition of iphone's get better. one of the things we've done, when we started, and jason can confirm this, there was a shortage pointers to good information on line. and so we provided pointers, blogs were basically short paragraphs with a joke or a bit of attitude and a link pointing usually to a newspaper article. and one of the things we discovered in the last few years is that the returns. this is not a moral imperative for us. but the return is producing original and sometimes even longform journalism. the return has improved. because now, you know, twitter

account, and there are all these blogs and/or all these people linking, people desperately looking for something original on line. and so whereas before an original piece might have gotten 10 times the page views. you know, 10 times the audience of a throwaway, one paragraph joke and a link. now probably the ratio is more like 100 to one. so the market is sort of starting to correct itself. anyone who is it bemoaning the fate of longform journalism should be reassured about that. >> also, you know, people have, it's part of our culture to move from things quickly. but after consuming information that way for a while i think people start to desire something longer and some wisdom and it's just a natural sort of, if you have been watching shortenings for a long time to want to watch

longform. and so it too many people distracted on line but there is some longform journalism. magazines. i had a magazine and sold it. it's a horrible business to be in. if you think about news, the news function of a magazine, what we are talking about the new suction of a daily newspaper being taken away from that. forget about a magazine. magazines at just 10 or 15 15 minutes you'll use to break news or they were like there is a story coming out in vanity fair that is unbelievable. it's going to be on the news and people used to cover magazine new stories on news, on tv or whatever. and that doesn't happen anymore. it's just impossible to keep the story you're working on for three months under wraps. it will leak out on the blog. . . words.

and 10 words goes better with 800 words than 200 words. if you look at a twitter feed and you click on a clink and you go through a short blog post, you kind of feel cheated, to be honest if whereas if it's a newspaper article 20 words seems like a pretty good introduction to 800 words. so actually the latest innovation in blogging is bad

news for the early blogs and good news for those ancient newspapers that now have another way to pitch their stories. >> i think a large portion of the traffic referred to newspapers will be twitter. maybe it won't be google level, but it could be for a niche publication if they cover something about, you know, something going on in aspen, some controversy, and 10 people from aspen tweeted, well, they each have 50 followers, it's 500 people and it would follow that people who are from aspen and have homes here have other twitter followers it's going to spread very quickly if it's newsworthy. it's a pretty radical change. it's accelerated the virality of stories. the word of mouth, it instantly spreads >> and it makes it so social. it makes it more important than the lended or the medium. it becomes a means of choosing where to go as search to that and you have the trends and you

have a whole new layer of news. >> they said this is good enough for me to take the time to share it to you. it would be like you telling somebody about a tv show. you're validating it. it means the chance of somebody clicking on it or interacting with it it goes up. >> it's surprised that twitter is so popular of people you would have thought would have been dinosaurs. there are newspaper journalists who never got into any form or phase of technology and they take to twitter like -- very, very enthusiastically. i think they like broadcast and twitter is a broadcast model whereas facebook if you're writing on something facebook you're writing for your friends. you are their equal. on twitter, there are no equals on twitter. jason has how many followers do you have now? [inaudible] >> and how many people do you follow? >> 300, 400. >> so asymmetric which actually works quite well if you're a newspaper person and you're used

to lecturing people and you don't think you want to listen too much. >> you're preaching to the converted, obviously, but there's a lot of concern about investigative journalism sort of disappearing but it seems to me just on that point twitter given the iran experience and so forth, ironically, someone we see here and appreciate, tom friedman is glad his twitter account has languished but many have not. to what extent and how ironic that something that is as brief and short snippets as may make up that difference for the funded investigative journalism which i always thought was underfunded and overhyped and never had enough funding from the newspapers. are we able to make up with that with twitter and people tweet something >> i think the blogs will do a

better job of investigative journalism than twitter. journalists, whether they're on blogs or whether they are on newspapers will use twitter as a source of ideas. >> distribution and input. >> but i think the impact of twitter, though, is also that by -- by providing all that attitude and those quick links, they can force everybody else to up their game. so it's not enough for us to do quick blog posts. we actually have to do original stories that will get linked by twitter so the -- we're being kind of pushed into doing good despite all our best intentions. >> i am feeling older and older the longer i sit in this class. [inaudible] >> how does twitter make money? and who owns twitter? >> it doesn't. it was created, though, by the

guy -- one of the cofounders is evans williams who created blogs and blogs changed the world. i would underestimate evan and the company at one's peril. it has investors including fred wilson who's a top investor. they're looking for the business model but, you know, google when it started had no business model. it's an ad company. they didn't know that at the beginning. skype when it started was giving away everything. it was bought for a large amount of money by ebay. you could go through all these networks in a network economy you grow to that size you will find benefit, i think. >> they'll make money from advertising. [inaudible] >> text ads so you'll do a search on twitter and you do a search for starbucks or aspen and there's an ad go to here, $100 and you click that and they pay 50 cents or you type aspen rentals into or aspen ski conditions into twitter and see what people are tweeting about the ski conditions here and

there will be some ski resort for some special for you to click on. >> i too don't want to sound like a dinosaur but what is a tumblr? >> it's blog software. it's a lightweight blog software. >> it's a real easy way to click. >> thank you. hi, i'm nancy riland. what do you say to the argument why -- why beyond these social sites, beyond connecting, okay, following someone he can barely be uberproductive in my own life rather than watching everyone else be productive. so this argument -- my father has been asking since the '70s why would i do it i can barely get through my day in choosing what i accomplish. why would i watch people do it? it's like watching tv all day or something. about other people doing great things. why don't i do something great

today? you know, i'm not saying that it's not a good place to get news. that's one thing. but this social networking bit. >> it's probably a waste of time. i agree. >> it saves me time. reporters i know who use it go out and ask the public questions and the answers come back. it's pretty magical that way. my book -- my readers wrote an entire chapter 'cause i had no ideas and they said oh, you're wrong, jarvis, here's what's going on and they wrote the chapter. [inaudible] >> it's a generous world if you enable it to be. [inaudible]

>> have all your friends and your family and don't -- >> i don't need to know where -- i don't even know where my husband is. >> there's a reason to get twitter. you might need to have him start tweeting. >> i'm going to change the subject -- how do you see blogging in the future of education? i'm a teacher at the middle school here. i've started to do some blogs, but i see a lot of potential that i can't really envision. >> it's obviously a great way to communicate. i know a lot of schools have blogs and it's a way to build community and for people to discuss issues around the school. i think it's probably a great way for students to learn how to communicate. i mean, writing blog posts you have to be, you know, pretty succinct. but i don't know if they're necessarily the best tools for education. there might be other tools that might be better. >> yes, sort of follow-up comments and i know you're not

dealing with this but i'm wondering if you know any good psychological studies on the impact of all of this because recently i spent way too many hours in the denver airport and a mother -- a young mother was there with a maybe 3 or 4-year-old and i was there for four hours and she was on her blackberry the entire time. not paying any attention to her child. i also -- i'm a professor and i worry about the lack of direct communication with people. i think it's great to reach out to others. but i also worry about personal interaction, eye to eye contact, conversation in the middle of talking to somebody, suddenly they are on their iphone and you're not nearly as important as that message coming in from someplace else. and what are we saving time for? what is the purpose of saving so much time? what are you then using that time for in order to get -- doing more blogging? i'm just curious.

>> there's an comment movie called "we live in public." it won an award at sundance about this very issue. people online can lose a little bit of their humanity and you have to balance it. most bloggers, the good ones, suffer from blogger burnout. they get too obsessed like anything and there's people who run too much and some people who ski too much and read too many books and don't socialize too much. everything in balance. you know, you might have, you know, some terrible disease that you can't relate to anybody because nobody has this particular disease but you go online and you meet 20 people instantly who have that and you can immediately start talking to them, you know, that's an incredible advantage to the online world you can go meet people and socialize with them and that's very powerful. but you are correct. that there's no substitute for real world communication. i think we're evolving as a species to include this new layer of communication, this new

layer of, you know, interacting. but if people told you 100 years ago we would be watching 50 hours of tv a week or whatever it is that the average american watches, you would think that's incredibly, you know, science fiction and not possible. >> i think we will learn eventually how to deal with these technologies but we certainly haven't yet. and one of the -- the lack of attention that people pay to people that are actually speaking to at the time is definitely an hirsch -- issue. often writers, even news writers, will realize -- they'll get so much response from anything they expose about themselves that they'll expose more. it feeds into narcissism. you actually -- we had a writer -- i can say who she is because she wrote a big "new york times" magazine piece about this whole phenomenon.

a writer called emily gould and she used to campaign she had writers block. she was a very good writer but a pretty infrequently published writer. she started writing for us. she started writing news but then also talking about her relationship with this guy called joshua who was also a writer on the site. and then he would write about his relationship with her and pretty rapidly the thing -- it got out of control. she exposed more than i think she actually wanted to. it was addicting because she would get -- the more she would expose the more response she would get, emails, comments. but i don't think people have learned to dial that down. they haven't actually learned the price yet of that kind of exposure. >> certainly, young people don't think about the price of exposure like that. they think oh, my god, i'm drunk and i took my clothes off and i'm going to take a picture of that and put that on facebook and they get older and somebody

is google has their name and they're hiring them and it's like hello. >> we talk about privacy as the issue and there's benefits to publicness. i live in public i found help for a medical condition i have. i got a book contract. i came here. living in public has their benefits and i think we're more social than ever and i think it's a good thing. a quick quiz. how many of you have searched google for your high school or college or former boyfriends or girlfriends? a pretty honest crowd. the rest of you aren't but that's all right. [inaudible] >> you wish you hadn't. but you think of how you would never have found those people again. if not for google. and think how young people will be connected to people for the rest of their lives. and they can't run away and they can't hide. somebody is going after nick right now. and so i think these are

profound changes in society we're only beginning to find out. they are what they are. we can resist them. we can do what the newspaper industry has done and try to resist them and hold off that change is coming. and we figure out what to do about it and what cautions to take and where to go you see three optimists in the world and you have the final word. >> in my generation you were taught -- [inaudible] >> you only have one reputation and you all have the ability -- or whatever to ruin one's reputation oh, this is something i got anonymously but once you say it, it is so hard for a person to ever take that away from themselves. i hope you have a great sense of responsibility. >> i wouldn't worry that much about the younger generation whose reputations are being trashed online. >> good solid people can be ruined. >> i think the general public

standards have changed, too. the whole concept of what ruin means. you can have paris hilton. paris hilton who has sex -- who has sex on camera, a sex video which is viewed by tens if not hundreds of millions of people who actually has had no -- there's been no adverse consequence. i think the key is to -- the shame is only is the shame that you allow yourself to feel. >> the president inhaled. this president inhaled and he got in. you could say that means the lowering of our standards or eric shamitts said that we at the age of 21 to be able to change your names so we can start over. there's a series of mass humiliation. jason has done embarrassing things. i've din embarrassing things. why go after him because he'll go after me. >> it will make us more tolerant

people. everybody has flaws and scandals, everyone has sex tapes and blogs. >> it's great blogs. >> i missed the drugs and the sex at the aspen institute. >> and none of it matters. [inaudible] >> not if somebody has taken a screen shot of it. >> on this note i think we've hit our time. thank you very much. [inaudible conversations] >> coming this fall, tour the

home to america's highest court, the supreme court court, on c-span. >> how is c-span funded? >> maybe >> there's some kind of sponsorships or something like that. >> taxpayer-funded, possibly. >> through philanthropy. >> fundraising. >> government maybe? partly? >> how is c-span funded? 30 years ago, america's cable companies created c-span as a public service. a private business initiative. no government mandate, no government money. >> apollo astronauts gathered to share their thoughts about the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. they also discussed the legacy

of nasa's apollo program and the future of space exploration. among the astronauts buzz aldrin, a member of the first 1969 lunar landing and the second man to walk on the moon. this is an hour and 10 minutes. >> good afternoon. i'm ken paulson. i'm here to present today's program to commemorate the 40th anniversary of mankind's very first steps on the moon. today we take a look back at that extraordinary mission and take a look ahead at nasa's future. today's discussion will also include questions from young people who will call into the broadcast from science centers and museums all across the country. and i also like -- [inaudible] >> nasa at 50 which is playing continuously and robert h. and colires theater. i invite you to take a look at this extraordinary film at the conclusion of this program.

the museum at nasa have a long partner to present special events and present an apollo events 10 years ago and a life interview of john glenn during his return to space aboard the space shuttle discovery. while putting this program together we worked with several members of the nasa staff and i would like to personally acknowledge bob jacobs, michael green, fred brown and all the dedicated nasa staffers who are here today. i'd also like to welcome, of course, our newsum members. i want to introduce nick clooney. it comes with its very own soundtrack. [laughter] >> ♪

[inaudible] >> currently playing on our big screen theater. please join me in welcoming nick clooney. [applause] >> what a great day. what an exciting time. the newseum is very pleased to partner as you've just heard to partner with nasa with the discussion commemorating the apollo 11 mission and the future of space exploration. i'm pleased to be joined by science centers all across the country. we are going to have questions from them, some of them as young as eight years old. they're going to be very tough questions. you can count on it. they'll be submitted all over. also, we're going to be asking

those in our studio audience to ask questions and be part of the program as well. now, this event, of course, that we're going to show you right now, this very brief film -- this is now a very brief -- i think just 2 minutes long and it, of course, shows the interpiece of the event which is the reason we are here celebrating today. take a look. e reason we ♪ ing today. take a look. ♪ ♪ >> i believe that this nation should commit i itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. >> 15 seconds. guidance is internal. 12, 11, 10, 9, ignition sequence starts, 6 --

♪ >> how far out are we out, charlie. >> stand by. i'll give you an exact figure. you are now 177,000 miles out, over. over. ♪ >> the eagle has landed. >> rocket tran quilt we copy you on the ground. you got a bunch of guys to turn blue. we're breathing again. thanks a lot. >> we're getting a picture on

the tv. there's a great deal of contrast in it. and currently it's upside down on our monitor but we can make out a fair amount of detail. >> okay, neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now. >> that's one small step for man, one giant leap mankind. ♪ ♪ [applause] >> how wonderful.

>> okay. let's take a look at our panelists first of all. let me introduce to you buzz aldrin lunar module pilot. [applause] >> charles m. duke, jr. lunar module pilot apollo 16. [applause] >> laurie lessen deputy director for science and technology at the famous goddard space flight center. [applause] >> and closest to me john grunfeld mission specialist, atlantis. he was the lead space walker as you may remember during the hubble space telescope repair mission. had our hearts beating. [applause] >> i just wanted to let you know where these youngsters are going to be talking to us from. there will be science centers all over the country.

for instance, the museum of science in boston, the american museum of natural history, that's new york. the california academy of sciences, a museum of science and industry in chicago. and the denver museum of nature and science and one more, the st. louis science center. now, let's begin talking to our panelists. we're going to begin with you, buzz, and i'll tell you why, because if i understand correctly you are going to -- you might have to leave us before the end of this program. there's something about 10 blocks away. is it late lunches. >> 1600 pennsylvania avenue. [applause] >> and you would desert us? [applause] >> that's great. now, you did a commentary for cnn just a couple of months ago. it was darn interesting. you thought that we would need to inspire youngsters more than we're doing now. and you thought the way to do that was with the mission to mars, manned mission to mars but more than that you used the word, and not just to make a

mission but to homestead mars. what do you mean by that? >> well, it's not going to happen within a decade. and it's not going to require breaking the bank right now. we can maybe save some money by realigning what we're doing and then a gradual course. how about the moon? well, we got a lot of experience on the moon. 40 years ago and we have an awful lot of experience on the moon in the last four years 'cause we've been planning on going there ourselves. so we can take that experience and communicate it -- help work with the international nations. will they come together for the moon? i don't know. but they have an umbrella organization that's over and above the international space station. so we need to start there and bring in china, bring in india, south korea, the other space-touring nations into the

space station and based on that, we have an international lunar economic development authority corporation, whatever it is, and the u.s. says we're going to help you people all you want because -- your nations and your international groups want to land on the moon. we do too but we'll ride with you in your rockets and your spacecraft 'cause we're going to take our resources, our resources that we put into the international space station to the tune of $100 billion, okay? we're going to take our resources and establish a pathway, a pathway that may take a little more than two decades, but it is a pathway that will achieve more things than dedicating a return to the moon right away. >> that's a pretty aggressive plan, isn't it? >> yes, it is. but there's no reason at the end international space station we can't put a test module of the

long duration life support equipment that we've sort of been hopefully developing all these times but in the same time, we develop an exploration module that can accompany orion on one or two missions. you won't put one or two men in an orion capsule. but how about going a much longer distance. you got to have more room, you've got to have the equipment that can support these people with the redundancy that doesn't require you cramp it all together for a launch you. make it larger and as a matter of fact, you can model this sort of thing after a mars habitat and a mars lander so that we're looking at those vehicles and we're using those soon to begin to plan outward movements. >> you know, thursday night in dayton -- pardon me, friday night in da