staff, the committee on the office of refugee resettlement. it helped basically broaden our partnerships. we have a much stronger partnership with the department of justice, fema, cdc, the office of civil rights. provide new approaches and programs to assist schools preparing for responding to emergencies. center for school preparedness was developed. programs such as provided funds for schools for emergency management were started. training documents such as the practical information on crisis planning was developed. or face all hazards approach to emergency management was adopted by schools goes of events of 9/11. the program which you basically start after columbine was expanded to incidents such as 9/11. and lastly, research into areas related to violent extremism was begun. 9/11 also help to focus our

efforts in ensuring that persons are not targeted, are not teased or not bullied or harassed because of the way their culture and customs, their religion they practice, or because of where they were born. it has led to partnerships with expanded partnership with her office of civil rights, as was with the office of refugee resettlement. this is a word cloud and finally i would say one of the things that 9/11 gave us was a whole new vernacular in akron -isms. have been made and the knock, national information coordination center and national operations center. we have a national disaster recovery framework and the national response framework. we have the art of f. and e. f. s., recovery support function and the emergency support function. we have the hs and hsi. we have ice and we have ics come

immigration and customs, and incident command system. finally, we have assess a and tsa, specific agency and the transportation security agency. while we think we have done quite a bit in regards to the events of 9/11, i would say much more needs to be done. consider that since 9/11 we look at major crises, major emergencies in this country, we got over 560 presidentially declared disasters, and over 392 school associated violent deaths. and over 3300 school days closed, school i should say closer one day or more because of the pandemic. over 20,000 expulsions for firearm possession of them. we had over 800,000 incidents of serious violent crime in school.

so we say stuff happens. so here today to help us think about the changes that have occurred from 9/11 at the school level and at the community level, and to help us look forward as to what to expect for the future, are for persons whose jobs, experiences are related, some directly, some interested to the events of 9/11. we will start off with brian rafferty, who will present a community perspective on 11, gregory thomas, then marleen wong, and daniel sutherland. i will provide a short introduction to all of them. let's have them come out first of all for a round of applause. guys, lady. [applause] >> i'm not going to go into law

by uzbek i just want a couple of interesting things about each of them. first of all, brian who will go first, i am every had the opportunity, were in here last night to quit a couple hundred people, and they started to flood in after the movie started, project rebirth. it was phenomenal. it was obsolete phenomenal. [applause] >> in looking at all of the background here, i asked staff to basically, let's see what we can dig up on these guys. i shouldn't say that three out of four i know for new wells we didn't have to do enough digging to get stuff on them. i didn't know brian that well. so we googled brian, and what we first of all discovered, there are a lot of brian rafferty's in this world. and one was an independent candidate for a consular and temporary. so if you're ever there you can run. i don't know whether he won the election or not.

the other interesting thing, more interesting things about bryant is he is the one panel member who has a financial background, a long financial background. most of the others are in the social sciences. bryant is in the nongovernmental private sector financial side. so a completely new and unique experience in the field. i would also say that brian is, he has his roots back to because he is a graduate, on the visiting board of georgetown university. and he is a world-class cyclist. so, he goes uphill like that. wonderful, wonderful, wonderful applet. sitting next to him is a friend and colleague of many years, gregory thomas. gregory is also a cyclist. by the way, both of them are from brooklyn. i know that gregory cycles in

prospect park. this morning i said that the guy that passed him three times around that oval was brian, although i don't know whether he knew that or not. gregory and i met before 9/11 because gregory was the head of the school safety for the new york city public schools at the time of 9/11. provided wonderful leadership at that point of time. i often say that gregory knows a great deal about the issues of school safety and violence in this country, and everything that he learned, he learned from his wife. right, gregory? true story. next to gregory is marleen wong. you know, marleen wong, i call marleen wong our office ghost buster. the reason for that is that

every time we have a crisis or an emergency it's sort of like who are you going call? with going to call marlene. marlene has been working with the office, with myself and with the office ever since the bombing of the moral office building, first time i met marlene it was in oakland city. since that point in time we were together on red lake, columbine, 9/11, greedy, katrina. omlt's every disaster and not only major disasters. marleen has often volunteer to work on school districts that you've never even heard of to provide our understanding, expertise in the areas of behavioral health. and lastly, the newest member of the team here is somebody that i got to meet about a year ago. daniel sutherland. dan, raise your hand. dan is an attorney, is a civil

rights attorney, a long background expense them both, i check his bio and found it interesting that in his bio he said he was a civil rights attorney at the department of justice and homeland security. and for some reason he leaves out of his formal bio that he was also an attorney at the department of education. we'll have to make that correction today. but he was also at the department of education for civil rights at the time when we didn't have much of a civil rights office. so maybe that's why he doesn't do that. but the interesting story about dan is we at the department of education were asked to join what's called an interagency policy committee on combating violent extremism over at the white house. so it's a meetings i've attended quite often, and sitting there is sort of like a fish out of water because as you look around the table we were the only, there were two or three agencies that were non-law-enforcement, or non-intelligence related.

there was a degree of feeling uncomfortable, and we felt uncomfortable until then came up and basically made a pitch about the importance of education. and some of the issues that we do with counterterrorism. so dan and is one of the guys that are in the field, the field is not education but gets it. and somebody that has been supportive of us for quite a bit of time. so thank you for all your help and all your support. so with that, brian, i'm going to turn it over to you. >> when i first got the invite to come here, i was sort of curious as to why somebody like me would be invited. and i realized they pulled it down -- they pulled the wrong guy off the google list. [laughter] spin i'm just making up as as i go along. thank you, bill. thank you very much for inviting me. i believe we have a film clip that we're going to play before

i spoke. so if that's available we could run that now. if not, i will march ahead. i think i'm going to march ahead. great. >> [background sounds] [background sounds] [background sounds] ♪ ♪ i still haven't cleaned out

the closets, his side, his drawers. i can't do it. once in a while i get some of my kind of looked and i saved remember that shirt? >> my heart hurts, a feeling right here. and i just think about my mom, and it hurts. >> every morning when i leave the house and that always go to talk mike rosen, i always think about michael every day. he missed out on that.

>> i would say, i think that's how i get by. i get very frustrated. i am learning to cope with everything i have. >> just like everybody else, i am here, they are not. survivor's guilt. >> i can't believe it. it must've been for years, you know, i've learned to live without her. i still miss her everyday. i still think about her every day, but i have learned to live without her.

>> i still am committed to the things i said the day i got there, that i was going to find my brother and rebuild this site and stay here until it is completely done. >> and asked, does as it was, coming to the realization that you can't open up your heart even more to allow a new love to come in, that takes -- right when you do, it is profound. ♪

♪ ♪ [applause] >> thanks. thanks for watching the ethics again to bill and his whole team for inviting me here. it's an honor to be up on this panel with a bunch of professionals. i was relieved when you mentioned me giving me the committee perspective because it's a little intimidating to be in a group of people who know exactly what they're doing to try to address something about their profession, not really knowing much about it. however, i'll tell you a little bit about my journey getting involved with project rebirth, and specifically what i found over the seven years that i've been involved might be of

interest to people in the educational field, and particularly in the area of preparation for psychological drama and grief. i met the filmmakers, jim whittaker, the director, some seven years ago when he was in the earlier stages of making the film that you see. and just as a quick aside, technically involved there in the film making process is 14 time lapse cameras that are certified melon their cameras positioned around the site that have been there since, six months after the attacks and are still filming today. and interviewing the nine people that you saw in our four minute clip over the course of eight years, basically following their progression from the attacks. they were effected in very different ways. the first thing that appealed to me being a parent and being somebody who's very involved involved in our community and in

our schools and rebuilding our town library was to find a way that younger generations could engage in this very important event in our nation's history, that they would be able to remember and learn. and some very hopeful fashion figure out how to make something good out of a horrific event. so my first instinct really in terms of getting involved in project rebirth was about teaching and passing on knowledge to younger generatio generations. as i became more deeply involved and may be applied some of my business instinct to what we had, which was quite obviously dumb and film content, i would show pieces similar to the one you just saw, the four minute piece and we did a 30 minute piece. as bill mentioned i'm involving georgetown university, and i showed our content to a wide range of people, first

responders, family members, survivors as a way to tell them what we're doing, as a way to get feedback. but i was also showing it to any number of educators across the spectrum, from teachers in our community, my wife is head of the pda for many years to show them what we had and say, well, what do you think. and the response across the board from all the people but particularly from educators as well from people are teaching at the elementary school level up two people who eventually became our partners in georgetown and columbia university was that what we had within the film was the word goldmine was used. and, of course, for me this is really an interesting why are they reacting this way? the reason was and i hope that you in the realm have the same reaction, and particularly those of you who watched the film last night, and thank you again to those who showed up and watched the film, was that apparently and sort of confirmed, there is

no record of a longitudinal record like we have in the film an r. film content of people going through the journey of recovering from psychological trauma and grief and displaying in a very intimate fashion in film and media, how civilian people can be. you saw from the ninth faces at the end of the clip, a very diverse group of people from diverse backgrounds that have diverse relationships to the attacks. each one of them, those were the only nine people that we interviewed. each one of them goes through trajectory would have some very dramatic ups and downs, but ultimately figure out how to cope and move on. and the message from educators was we could use this in a variety of fashions to help in our job. so from my perspective, there were two things. one was the original intention that i had was simply to pass on the story of having an accessible and easily

transferable narrative that would allow younger generations to engage in 9/11 and carry forward how they learn from and made things that -- major things like that didn't happen again. it can be used in a more active fashion to help first responders, educators and medical professionals and communities in particular learn how to be better prepared for the psychological trauma and grief that is inevitably a part of all of our lives, but particularly associate with disasters, whether they be man-made or natural. so that started me on the journey is getting more deeply involved in the project. and then we started, we started to take the pieces of film you saw and actually engage in some educational programming. i should recognize two of my colleagues are here, kaitlin olson was the executive director

of project rebirth, and franco then and viable to us, and to me as the head of the columbus in for new media teaching and learning. and he took the underlying film archives that we have, hundreds of hours of interviews and put them in a digital accessible format that allow teachers to go in and pull clips out. so i won't go in to the weeds. i will tell you all of that information might be important to you. what you see on the screen, what you saw last night in the film, and what is encapsulated in our archives of hundreds of hours of these films and interviews, it's yours. that's why we made it. we made it so that anybody who could find good use for it in a good way should have access to it. and what does that mean to you in the room? it means screening it in the community, it means using it in the classroom. it means using in school. it means using parts of it in

the school. so at the end what you see is up there now, is if you watch the clip, if anything that i am saying sounds of any interest, if you're kind enough to watch the film last night, please get in touch with us how to come to us with ideas of how you can use our content. that's the simplest and most powerful hopefully message i can put forward to you today. it turns out fortunately that whenever we do screenings or events like this, people do come forward and they bring us new ideas. the last thing i was sort of talk about on educational concept, because i'm conscious of time, is that it's fairly straightforward for you to get the film from us, to get the dvd. it will be shown on showtime on september 11. it will be in theaters. to get the film, the film is fairly straightforward to our long-term sort of 10 year vision

is about the way you as professionals and educators would use our content to help your schools and communities be better prepared for disasters, from psychological trauma and grief, our ultimate aim is to the good offices of our partners at georgetown and columbia, in particular, to find a way that that knowledge can be shared. and this is the last thing that i will say that led me into this journey of basically doing this as my full-time job for free, and giving an interesting career path, actually the cash flow goes in the other direction. it's what i found was that after each one of these episodes, whether it be 9/11, columbine, katrina, other countries, there's an astonishing amount that is learned in the community among professionals, first responders, educators, health care workers, that is learned

the most amazing cause because the cost is in lives destroyed, the cost is in death. and people figure out how to go. they figure out how to come back. they are indeed very resilient. but what amazed me was that this knowledge was not stored in a way that was accessible to similar, to other professionals. it was not made available and shared so that the wheel didn't need to be reinvented anytime. and that, if you're interested in what we're doing, and you're interested in using our content in your own, for your own professional objectives, ultimately is where we hope to get to come is that when people learn, and not just with our film, people who learn how to do these things under very difficult circumstances, are able to store and transfer that knowledge so that the next time things can maybe be a little bit quicker in terms of recovery, and a little bit easier in terms of recovery. so, i think that's all i'm going

to say. and bill, should i pass it onto gregor? >> has a right onto gregory. [applause] >> -- pass it right onto gregory. >> good morning. good to be here again. and just to say, in 10 years we have evolved, we used to have smaller chairs. why are we going the barstool at nine in the morning? because it was not easy. we've gotten to that point. is a challenge but it's good to be back you. it's good again, thank you bill and the staff for having me here, and to be a continuing part of the conversation, the conversation of planning, a conversation of learning to ensure that what we've learned across the country to what i've learned in particular in new york city does not just rest in the annals of history in dixie

but it gets around the country what we can to assure that every understand what happens on that day. i want to go back more. it's interesting as you called me, i said it's been 10 years already. it's been 10 years that i actually stood in a similar position at one of these conferences and gave the keynote speech on what happened on 9/11, and how i look back now to see how the federal government in particular and others around the country, state and local, have learned on that day and planned accordingly. i want to go back more and talk about what i call the untold story, if i can. as relates to what happened on that day. as i press the forward button, okay, great. what you will see there is an overhead map, a map that looks like lower manhattan on september 10, 2011 -- sorry, 2001, as opposed to 9/11 itself. and in that you will see the grid around the former towers, and you'll see exactly where we had eight schools, in the former

world trade center towers. in fact, we had one school that was located in a residential building which was a day care center. so of those nine schools, they were there from pre-k to 12. the schools were located as you can see on the map, but you also note that two of those schools are approximately 80 yards or so south from the south tower. so the store as i told it over the years has become what i labeled the untold story, because not knowing that you look at new york city and think that our schools like the little red schoolhouse with flags on them. but in this case because there in lower manhattan we had occupied buildings that were leased property from nyu or other locations. the buildings that were there in the lower manhattan area right in the wall street area where a lot of the business and conference goes on on a regular basis. as you heard the stories of those who were unfortunate killed in the disaster but also those who were rescued, the store that has been told to

often is we have schools that were affected in the lower manhattan area. so to go further, what i will call a day like no other, let's talk about that day. and again mention nine schools in grades pre-k-12 that were in close proximity to the world trade center towers, from the south tower. one of those high schools was a high school in a 13 story building. it was in leased property that was in lower manhattan. we also need to let you know that the approximate total student and staff population of these schools was 9000 students and staff. and that the disaster itself struck on the fourth day of school. so as educators you can imagine what the fourth day of school means no matter where you are in the country. if you're looking to script this in a weird way, you would want this to happen on april 9, jun

june 13, but not on the fourth day of school. because again it forced teachers and administrators to deal with others within the staff and also children and parents whom they hardly knew and they hardly knew the school environment. but to add to that script was the fact that between the schools and myself on my other colleagues, it was difficult because the cell phone traffic and two-way radio traffic. and to add to that, as the first tower collapse, unfortunately it also peers a cable and/or have -- in lower manhattan so took out the land lines to talk to those principles and the schools. so for those who are here corporate foes, you sometimes feel like you're on an island by herself, in this case they were. adding to it was also the fact that transportation in and out of the affected area was at a standstill. and because of the immediate suspension of bus and subway service, it was tough to get to the schools here you couldn't send staff and a lot of

gridlock, as you probably saw in a lot of video and people were trying to get there and off the bridge and into lower manhattan whether the emergency vehicles or other. the traffic there was a virtual gridlock. here to work to pick up their children could not get there. some were stuck at their jobs. again, that day became a challenge for all of us. but the good news is, and out in an aside, we were successful in rescuing all 9000 students and staff from those buildings with nobody missing, killed or injured. because of fire drills -- [applause] >> thank you. and that applause really is, really should be detailed yourselves as educators, because on that day my staff and myself in particular, we were miles away doing what you should be doing and not responding to a

disaster. the command response miles away. but the principals and staff in the building did exactly what they were trained to do, which is respond to disaster in the way they do everyday, whether a problem in the cafeteria or fire that breaks out. we were able to successfully rescue all those staffing children because of fire drills. now because of any drug i was in place or because of this potential disaster or for that matter any law in place now because a disaster could occur like that. after i left the city schools i went to columbia universities national center for disaster preparedness and co-authored a study called uncommon sense, uncommon courage. if you want to google that, under club university you will find the pdf version. it is an oral history where we interviewed hundreds of people from different walks of life whether it be teachers, parents, administers, custodians, food service workers, everybody involved on that day to act -- ask exactly what to do, what was their mindset when they did

certain things. as i mentioned on a couple of occasions when you have these disasters, you have to learn from them, keep it fresh and not a person as a scribe to keep this information for learning in front of you. because if it does happen again others can learn from it. go to that report, uncommon sense, uncommon courage and you can google it and find it on the web. moving forward to what i will call, what have we learned from this disaster was happened since then. as bill mentioned in his opening remarks, because of this event under his leadership and his staff, they convened a meeting in the spring of 2002 where we brought together about 40 people from different walks of life into a room and we were on literal lockdown where he said we have a problem. we have a new paradigm now about disasters. we need to move for it being a response to a size because we know that hurricanes happen certain parts of the country we

know certain parts of the country are more vulnerable than others, and for man-made disasters. what are we doing to make sure that schools will not do a knee-jerk reaction about what they heard, about what we know the difficult things that, in fact, works. so with that, it was put together for schools, preparedness, response and recovery but as bill mentioned, this document you can get like that to help you prepare for disasters. i have traveled to tennessee often that you see how they threw out the state have challenges come one part is that it could be tornadoes or earthquakes in jackson, but the question is how you responded are you responding the way others do? in your state are you responding as you should do the issues that happen in your area, rather than what may not happen in your area. again, moving on, we have also provided on site during.

basically ensures that somebody is in control or in charge of virtue of their background as opposed to a principle, you may know them, who think they are fire chief or would love to be police chief. but when disaster strikes, a certain nature they should just got back and allow these people that are trained in certain areas to handle that, and then when the function is finished they will transfer control back to the principal when the disaster is over. we've also added certain responses that happened over the years since 9/11, have tested the preparedness, metal as i call it. for example, after hurricane katrina in august 2005 many schools were destroyed and thousands of classrooms were flooded so many students were forced to be a backward to other parts of the country. so that response kind of tested the ability of schools around the country to receive of the students as was transferring and making sure students are inoculated in a proper to make sure they don't -- we also know

that from events that happened in 2006, referred earlier by bill as well, we forced schools to focus on the event schools are closed at many schools now are billion dollar operations. you are affecting a corporation that needs to function in the business of learning. we've also moved to unfortunate events like virginia tech where there was a shooting as you know on a higher education site in 2006. that forced educators around the country to test their ability to contact stakeholders in a timely fashion. are you telling students in a timely fashion to have them go on lockdown, or in some cases a backward. those processes were also tested last week when he was an armed gunman on the same campus and it worked well, so i'm told. but also more recently in joplin, missouri, we've had an

unfortunate event that happened there in may of this year. killed over 100 people and destroyed homes, local hospitals, several schools. that's an opportunity for again schools to test their ability to respond to disaster but all pashtun also recovery as brian mentioned what are we doing to ensure that families going through trauma know how to deal with that and learning from past experiences. as i close, i want to make sure we focus on learning from the lessons learned here and i found this quote which basically says, written in chinese, the word crisis, one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity. and the person who said that was president john fitzgerald kennedy. so as i look at that as an opportunity to talk about lessons that were done for me in general, what we can learn as a group when it comes to responding in disaster this first volume to make sure you don't plan for the modicum you plan for the consequences. and the motive being terrorism

in this case on 9/11 is one you couldn't plan for. but the event has a consequence. we've had things happen to earthquakes or anything struggle often your mind, all happened on 9/11. we also know you need to use what i've been told on the five-piece, proper planning, prevent or performance. well, on that day those principles at the school had planned beforehand, years beforehand and actually must beforehand for fire drills. the ability to organize a timely fashion have him respond to your call for the beginning line to evacuate was based on proper planning before the disaster strikes. we need to continue to empower educators as yourselves, to do what you do best, which is older with emergencies everyday. because no matter the skill you do it everyday so well. and keep empower you and trust that you do the right thing. because at the end of the day you will. i believe this with the goal.

where one teacher in the school that was down, she learned very important lesson that day. she can only run as fast as the smallest child. only run as fast as the smallest child. thank you. [applause] >> well, good morning, everyone. and thank you so much for inviting me to be here today. when i was doing the work in new york city, i was actually in the superintendents level, and at that time governor roemer was our superintendent. and we're in the midst of writing letters to parents, because parents were calling in frightened about whether or not

they should let their children go to school. so even 3000 miles away, we were all glued to our television sets. i'm sure all of you work, trying to figure out what we should do in los angeles, and whether or not there was going to be a subsequent attack. you know, bill talked about the last 20 years, and in the last 20 years these are the events that changed the culture of education. in 1990, in earnest the school shootings began. and i wonder if you can remember back when you opened up your newspaper or turn on your television and you wondered, is this going to stop? can there be another shooting like this? but think about it any generational sense, that before, if you were born before 1985, you may not have gone to school

ever thinking that such a thing could happen. but children and our families are born after 1985 were born with the reality of all of these events. that there could indeed be a school shooting, and there were foundation studies of children, and they were asked, could something like this happen in your school. and over 50% of those children said yes, it could. and 35% of those young people said, and i'll tell you the boy or girl that i'm afraid of. 1995 the oakland city bombing occurred, and that even showed us that children could be intended targets of terrorism. just seemed unbelievable, but tim mcveigh and his co-conspirators chose the murder of building because there was a preschool and a nursery in the basement of the building. they wanted to cause maximum

damage. and then we have the terrorist attacks in new york city. and on that day in the superintendents office, somehow if the feds want to find you, they will track you down. and on that morning i got a phone call on my cell, and it was from the organization of great city schools, followed by bill modzeleski, followed by office of the chances of new york board of education schools asking if i would please come to new york and help to look at the situation and see what needed to be done next. so let me just jump to the case. at that time i was director of mental health and in charge of the crisis teams. and in los angeles with about 2500, 3000 incidents per year of crises and went about 258 members of a crisis teams. but i never confronted a

situation like this. the most complex, diverse, urban school district, probably in the world. the one of the things i first recommended, and i remember gregory and bill sitting right there at the table, and i said, strongly, strongly i recommend that you do an assessment of the impact. think about this. 1100 schools, over 1 million children, how is this affecting them? and columbia university followed us with a study that showed six months after the impact of 9/11, that over 26% of the children had some sort of anxiety disorder. many of them had ptsd, as you can imagine. but 10% of them, interestingly enough, had a chlorophyll b. you can call it a chlorophyll b. if you want to, the fear of leaving your house, but if you're in a city where that is on alert, and watching for the

next event, there are major hitches did not which lead to families or those. the second important thing was coronation of community partnerships. and what we learned and we always knew that was underscored by our experience in new york city was that those schools who have existing partnerships did much better than the schools that did not. those schools were starting, that did not have partnerships that were starting at step one, who are you? do you know about our school? and those schools would partnerships which is ready to get those programs out of the ground. the third is that the organization had to be centralized for the disaster. if it's too dispersed, and, of course, there are five boroughs and although the politics that go with five boroughs, you don't have a centralized system of response. you don't have a centralized system of training.

and you don't have a systemized way of dispersing funding so that you have some kind of flexibility for search capacity of those schools that might be more affected than others. now, surprisingly the things that i did that i'd never done in any other situation was i worked for several weeks with a chief financial officer of the new board of education schools. because they had not received enough funding our federal funding, state or even private funding for services that were going to be rendered at the school. and so the whole idea was what would be the funding formula, how much do you charge for an individual session for your social workers, for your counselors that will be providing this. and half one that had to be in place before they could draw down any kind of funding. i want to also mention that bill and a team of us trained in

schools. in new york city, the catholic archdiocese has a very large school district, about 200,000 children in the five boroughs. and it really underscored for me the way that a disaster, that an act of terrorism, that in a situation with loss of life, there's not only a crisis psychologically, mentally and emotionally, but often there's a crisis crisis of faith. and the question that the children asked us as we are working with them was, why would god allow this to happen? that was a question many people had come and that's where our faith leaders come in and really are a part of our crisis teams. at this conference there was a session that was provided by my colleague, and what we learned is that school staffs,

educators, administrators, education aides, becomes the emotional rescue workers for children impacted by crisis. and as a result, they become part of the most susceptible list for secondary trauma. if you think that secondary smoke can affect you, in such a thing as secondary trauma. now the most susceptible list are those who are affected by trauma our children, parents of young children, educators and administrators, and all of those who respond to the children and their families. and this was provided in an analysis of over 400 large -- well, masked scale disasters -- massive scale disasters. so the more you care about what you do the more likely because you will will experience what is called compassion fatigue, or secondary trauma. and that is very much a part of crisis team training.

not only what we do in the immediate response period and during the long recovery period, but also care for those who care for the children. here's a quote from the leading expert in fatigue, and he's written a great deal about it. there's a cost to caring. we professionals who are paid to listen to the stories of fear, pain and the suffering of others may feel ourselves similar fear, pain and suffering because we care. compassion fatigue is the emotional residue of exposure to working with the suffering, particularly those suffering from the consequences of traumatic events. and i leave you with this one thought. i discovered that every single person in this school plays an important role in the support, care and psychological first aid of children.

from one of my colleagues at columbine, she put this on the end of every one of her e-mails. to the world you may be just one person, but to one person you just may be the world. thank you so much for all that you do it every day. [applause] >> i think i would just speak from your if that's all right? bill and i first met about two years ago at a meeting in the situation room. we were at a meeting, talking about trying to come up with some strategies to undercut al qaeda's efforts to recruit americans to join their cause. and it was an unusual setting for us to be in the same room,

and certainly in this situation room and talking about that topic. and we decided we needed to put our heads together, and we ended up working on a number of projects that i'm going to talk to you a bit about. first, a quick overview of where i come from. i worked for a government agency called the national counterterrorism center. as bill said after 9/11 there were a lot of new acronyms and letters that were added to the federal family and the national counterterrorism center is one of those. it's interesting experiment in public administration for those of you who study in that field. counterterrorism is a cross cutting issue. counterterrorism doesn't belong to any one department or agency, and so congress decided to create a place where small, less than 1000 people, whose job it is to coordinate all the different government departments as they work on counterterrorism issues. in that respect it's an issue simmered to maybe poverty our health care, an issue that cuts

across all departments and agencies, but congress has to such great is one small center whose job it is to try to coordinate work with regard to counterterrorism. we do a lot of intelligence analysis, a lot of what our organization is people the right intelligence products. on counterterrorism issues. and then there are a group of us who do policy and planning. we pulled together strategic plans for people across the government to focus on counterterrorism issues. and that job, my boss, drug of national counterterrorism center reports to the president, and we are really a support to the national secure the staff as they worked through a lot of these issues. my particular job within the national counterterrorism center is to lead the countering violent extremism group. what does that actually mean? i would find just a bit. our job is to try to look at ways to undercut al qaeda's efforts to try to recruit and

radicalized people to join their cause. or how do we prevent people from being interested in joining international terrorism, or being drawn are recruited by that narrative. so we look at the preventative side of counterterrorism. as bill mentioned in the introduction, i'm a civil rights lawyer by training. it's a cross-cultural experien experience, but the reason why they ask a civil rights lawyer to come and lead this work is because it is what we call whole of government work. trying to undercut al qaeda's ability, or al qaeda or the affiliates, people of like minds ability to recruit and radicalized really is a whole of government project. it's not arresting our way to the problem, or shooting our way to the problem. it's trying to win the hearts and minds of people both here and around the world just to try to do with some of these issues.

so this means that traditional law enforcement and security agencies are very intricately evolved, department of homeland security, fbi, justice department. but it's also true that we must include what we call in our world nontraditional partners, and nontraditional partners certainly includes the department of education, department of commerce and a number of others that we work with, mayors around the country. so we try to look at, if we look at a domestic a we try to look at how can civil rights enforcement programs, how can anti-bullying education, how can immigrant integration programs all play a secondary role of helping us in terms of the mission that we have as well. so, i hope you begin to see some of the connection that we have to the school context. my boss is a three-star lieutenant general, an army ranger, one of the most decorated and successful military leaders our country has

had. and he has this phrase. he says, you get the military flavor of the discussion. he says who has the most time on target with the people who we are concerned about, young people in our country and around the world. and that's in the school setting. so i will give you a couple of examples to show how our work is interconnected. bill and i after that first meeting in the situation room, i went over to his office and research talk about some of the issues we see in a counterterrorism world and one issue we talked about that day, one of many but one we talked about is the issue of somali, the somali al qaeda affiliate called al-shabaab and now they're trying to recruit kids from a variety of diaspora communities across europe and in the united states to come back and fight for them. and you could see the light bulbs go off in bill's mind. he's a brilliant guy, and he began to see the connections. so he brought us to a conference that he did in minneapolis with

five different school districts that have a lot of somali refugee kids within the school district. and the purpose of the conference, what are the integration challenges of refugee children, particularly somali refugee children, how do we make them more successful in the educational setting. and he allowed me to take one small section to talk about this issue in particular. before we ever got to my session, the very first thing that happened was the school district from burlington vermont made a presentation about issues that they see with somali kids. one of the issues that those kids encounter and how to make them more effective, and they played a video from a school psychologist who had done a really in depth look at the issues affecting somali kids. and she said that there were three issues that most impacted the ability of somali children to effectively integrate into this country. i only heard the first one

because as soon as she said the first one, we were off and running. she said the first issue that affects somali kids and their ability to integrate here is bullying and harassment in schools. and i don't know if they'll stop looking at that point, but i turned to look at him because we know now where to go on a really critical issue. we need to begin talking about bullying and harassing in school and helping kids and school districts around the country were dealing with somali kids to really get a handle on that issue. that's a critical issue as far as those kids. after that presentation, there was an educator from a particular school district who wasn't completely sure she figured out that i was on track of some of the things i was talking about how al-shabaab was grieving. so she went back to her school district and convened a little roundtable of 10 or 126 graders who were somali american kids. so six graders to 11 and 12 years old. we talk to her again a couple months later and she told us

that she was really blown away by the discussion amongst those children in the school library that afternoon. they told her all yet, they knew about the recruiting efforts of al-shabaab if one of them told her he got on three clicks on his computer to see the recruiting efforts. she wasn't sure she understood. she said let's go to the computer in the library and you show me. well, of course the school library system had a filtering system and you couldn't get to those pages. so they went down the street to a community center, and the kids turned on the computer, click, click, click and it was the al-shabaab recruiting effort. and she was very struck by an issue that was affecting come impacting children enter school district. she had no idea about. one last example i will give you is after that roundtable, one of the participants their way back to the school district and really had no understanding of the issues impacting muslim kids

and families in his school. in his community. and he told us later that he went around and realize that there were three very large mosques right next door to a variety of schools. and he went into the mosque and introduced himself. and he found that there were issues. he found that all of these mosques told their children that they could not play on the school playground when they were there for services. you know how the kids always find something to do. they told him they could not go to the school grounds to play on the playground while they were there for services or other events, or the weekend at the mosque because they felt the school district did not want the children there and they need to stay on their own proper and not go into the school district. and he just realize, he told us the level of communication or lack thereof and trust and confidence between school systems and religious institutions, particularly in this case, these mosques, and he began working on building find indication and trust.

the last example i will give you is we're thinking about the 10th commemoration of 9/11, it's important for us from a counterterrorism perspective that the dialogue in our country the one that undercuts al qaeda's us versus them narrative. that's what they're all about. us versus them. you can't trust them, they are with us. step away from them. join us. it's all us versus them. so the more that we promote a narrative in our country and around the world around 9/11, that emphasizes community resilience and a kind of things you have been hearing people talk about, all of these families, the better off we're going to be as we promote that, it's all about us and not us versus them. bill got out and begin working with some school districts around the country to talk to some organizations around the country, to talk of how do we put curriculum in that we could 9/11 that emphasizes character, civic education and other things, which to you is old hat.

to us it's fantastic. it is a great development and makes us feel better about the likelihood that the narrative during that really critical time period will be one that is very positive and constructive. so i will just say this. we were in the situation room that day. i've been there other days in which very senior national security officials in this country have been talking about the roles that you play in the counterterrorism field. they get it intrinsically, and with some passion. they feel it. and so it makes that connection, and i think people recognize and understand how important your role is in all of this and try to make those connections. i think that's one thing there's a new paradigm after 9/11. >> thank you, dan. that was great. give him a round of applause. [applause]

>> i will take the prerogative of asking a few questions, and if there any questions out there, there are some might max out there. let me just tell you, i appreciate -- is read here? i can't see out. really is on our staff that has done the yeoman's work on our 9/11 activity. we hope to have something posted within a couple of weeks for everybody. we will send that message out. u..

we are in a position where funds are decreasing, not increasing. the school districts that wanted to come to this conference couldn't because they couldn't afford to fly and they couldn't afford to get here. school districts were jettisoning programs left and right that don't pertain directly to teaching and learning, so let me go down and i will start with you brian and go one down. one thing that you think schools could do to makes schools able to deal with the disparities that exist in schools that cost little or no money. >> i'm not sure i'm qualified to answer that question specifically, but one of the things you mentioned, i have a financial background and one of the things that is very much

encouraging me with regard to some of the new media teaching and learning capabilities that are available in the connectivity of our society is the way that information can be gathered and transferred at a relatively low cost. so, also the emerging power of narrative and multimedia in schools, none of which i know anything about that i've had the privilege of being with people who do understand that. so, i think i would go back to mike message which is things like our film that are viewed and seen as a tool that can be used to teach or to discuss the importance or issues of importance. it is really not a very expensive thing to do. my personal experience, is actually the resistance and indeed this sort of bureaucratic difficulty of bringing new ideas

and relatively inexpensive ideas in our school. i live in suburban new york and obviously we lost people in our community. amazingly, there has been nothing in the school the local high school that commemorates the event with the exception of a moment of silence. so one of the things that drove me again to get more involved in this was actually having kids and parents come to me when i would talk about how i was involved to say we need something, we need something. my message is, the film would go on too long. we have a number of educational experts who are figuring out how how to use our content so some ways, it is sort of simpler and some of the powerful comments and ideas that i see as an outsider i have heard today. it is a little bit in my mind to just do it. that there is in the huge amount of money involved in viewing narrative in having discussions towards goals that we can all

agree are very important for a variety of things. >> thank you. gregory. >> another lesson i've learned from 9/11 is that when disaster strikes it affects a school or school district. here comes the calvary and we have a lot of volunteers have helped us in a lot of people like marleen and yourself who came in from around the country to help us out with this one particular issue but i would say schools need to raise their hand before something happens and reach out to your first responders who by the way may have the money may not come your way for this on the education side but it may be going somewhere else. so all hands on deck approach that daniel mentioned about how the federal government is more involved now. if you ever challenge you need to express and you can't do it because keeping in mind schools are built for teaching and learning, not for disasters, you need to reach out to your local emergency management officials, police officials fire officials and ask them to help develop a plan where the e4 response to a major disaster that could occur like a hurricane or a tornado but also things that are more

localized. at the end of the day money may not come your way but the money is out there somewhere. he'd have to go back to people who are initially charged with this function every everyday and atom for your help and simply raising your hand. you'd be surprised what you would get in response to that. >> thank you. marleen. >> one of the things i'm concerned about is the knowledge about crisis or disaster response and recovery is sitting right here in this room and that it is in your hands. but if you think about your entire school district and you know i was responsible for an entire school district around crisis response. it is not just the people on the team but it is every teacher and that math teacher way off in the corner, the people in the computer rooms, educational aids and secretary in the office, the custodian. what are their roles in the event of a crisis? and you know there was a study that was done by i believe the cdc and they went to the superintendent and they said, do you have a safe school plan?

of the 9000 superintendents they asked, everyone of them said yes, we do. and they went down to the principal, yes, we do. then they went to the teachers and the teachers said, what? do you know what that plan is? what? and that is my concern, because if in fact there is something around the corner and there are so many things in our communities we can't control. the important thing is right now at this very minute, does everyone in your school district and everyone of your buildings understand what their role is to preserve the lives of children? so that does not take any money. >> daniel? >> al qaeda's narrative is us versus them. our country's motto is out of many, one.

and it is the key narrative. it undercuts everything bad is being sent around the world. who is better to effectively drive that discussion then local schools? you do that every day for many years, generations and bill your question is what do i think schools should do to continue to drive an understanding of it. it absolutely is a central issue and you are the right people to do it. you have been doing it and you will continue to do it successfully and the more you can do it the better off we will all be. >> thank you very much. i have one challenge for everybody before we leave here this morning and that challenge is not to let that week that begins with 9/11 and ends with constitution day, don't let it pass without doing anything.

sometime during that week is an opportunity to have a discussion within your school about a friday of issues and there is a whole lot of issues out there that relate to governance. so, jack? >> should reopen it for questions, bill? >> let me see. do we have time for one? yes, we have time for one. >> a terrific panel. wonderful panel. i would like the panelist to comment a bit. i didn't really hear it, of all the protections, the therapy, the legitimate external and internal caring, what about dan balz manta of youth themselves, because to me one of the vaguest anecdotes to fear is saying look, you have got a part in this healing. and so i would like to panelist to comment on the role of youth

as positive actors in this. >> if i can go first. one thing i didn't mention was we had success in that we had zero hate crimes in the days after the event and we were concerned about having certain pockets of our schools where we knew there was a lot of muslim americans attending and we were concerned about them being unfairly targeted via their students because of what they saw on tv and what they heard in the media or elsewhere but again to the credit of students who stepped to the plate and didn't let that happen on their turf in their territory, we had again zero hate crimes in the days after 9/11. so i know the personal value of educating students before the event. as daniel mentioned you can't wait to get into it and meet the fertile ground before things happen so that when things happen and they will happen, you can just push the button and you know it is going to work. >> you know, i think it is a

point well taken. i worked in japan after the earthquake there and went back every year for about 10 days to do some training and also to go around japan and meet with children and educators of schools and they did a lot more with their kids than we do. i saw high schools where they were training kids. they literally split them up into teams so we had one team of kids that were cooking for the schools and one team of kids who were shown how to lift children who might have been trapped in buildings with the core supervision of an adult. we have one group who were taught how to do cpr. they did a lot more in response because they lived in that ring of fire a volcano, the volcanoes that still a rapid and caused earthquakes. i don't think we have addressed that issue sufficiently here and i think they also spoke more directly with the kids. you know, i don't know, in some

school districts, not to be named, if a crisis happens, you have kids jumping over the fence. and running off into the community are going home especially in high schools where they have a little more autonomy. but in japan, they have those kids down and they said, you are responsible for your own life. these adults are here to care for you and it was part of the training that they had in terms of earthquake response. i just don't know that we cover all of those areas as well as the japanese have done. >> i would just make two observations. one is that, in our local community, the resistance to engage in sensitive issues around 9/11 associated terrorism comes from the older people, not from the kids are good comes from the principal. comes from people who are afraid of making a mess that. is to get to come to me and say

can we show the school? second of all as gregory knows, we have been working for some time with the nypd, the executive training unit, and i am proud to say for the first time this fall they are going to put in the police academy resilience training curriculum built around project rebirth. and i was meeting with a mutual friend of ours and his colleagues at the police department. i've been working with them for six years and i said, how would things change here in the department and at the academy in the time that we have been working together? and he said, you know, the older generation is extremely resistant to some of the things we are talking about particularly as far as emotional resilience and stress management etc. but the younger cadets are actually acting and they actually see that is something we should be providing to them as part of their professional and life skills. so as an outsider my observatios

how can youngsters be involved? i think there's a tremendous opportunity as an outsider watching the younger generation that is much more receptive to these kinds of discussions and dealing with some of these very important issues of emotional resiliency and stress management training. >> and our world, i think the project involving young people are absolutely critical. we discussed this issue with the mayor of a large city here in this country, and he has realized or he decided, i am going to get the young people in my community interest may come into religious involved in a major humanitarian effort and they have been working for the past year and they are really involved to try to deal with the famine in somalia and are beginning work there. is coming from the young people in his community. in london there is a grouping of people that the embassy pulled together there, young people trying to go on line to counter some of the nonsense that you see in terms of violent

extremism on line. in pakistan there's a movement, an emerging movement among university students to try to deal with the ideology that is taught and spread in certain places. their movements of young people in our world that are absolutely critical and i thank you for asking the question. i think particularly in our perspective of counterterrorism bad young people, teenagers and college students play a key here. >> thank you very much. the panel will be around for a while so if anybody has any questions, feel free to come up and ask questions. let's give them a round of applause. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] our live coverage of the conference will rescind this afternoon on c-span. education secretary arne duncan will be the luncheon speaker and he will continue on the overall school safety considering state

and federal budget constraints. again that is live this afternoon at 1:30 eastern on our companion network, c-span. with the senate adjourned for the august recess, you can watch booktv all this month in prime-time here on c-span2.

student should be able to possess concealed weapons on school campuses. he spoke for about dirty minutes. be thank you. i just want to start naysaying the second amendment foundation is proud to fund this conference extremely important event and we are proud to have done it and work with students who can carry out campus to help ring this

off. let me say that introducing our next speaker, i've gotten to know him over the last several years both personally and professionally and well he is a great attorney, he is also a great person. despite all of that, here in the nation's capital winning the landmark supreme court case d.c. versus heller for the supreme court affirmed the second amendment of individual right and knocking out the washington d.c. handgun ban. he also has a lot of friends sitting in the attorney's offices for the city of chicago where he won a second landmark united states supreme court in mcdonnell versus the city of chicago, a suit that -- is a plane about and we funded that case. in that case they incorporated the second amendment and the 14th amendment making it applicable to all 50 states.

to extremely important landmark cases and he just recently won what i'm calling a third landmark case known as -- which probably earned two more friends in the chicago's attorney's office. it knocked out the new chicago law that banned ranges in the city of chicago but more importantly it established the fact that the second amendment right does not stop your front door and in fact it extends outside your home. that is really the important ruling which is affecting a lot of cases that are filed by allen on the second amendment foundation from coast to coast in a number of states. i will leave it to him to talk about and i'm not going to waste any of his time because it is an extremely important time. allen, let me just say one last thing. for all his work in the gun rights committee he has gotten this monitor attached to him, and the monitor is rock star so the stage is yours. [applause]

>> thank you so much for coming out and thank you allen. the second amendment and nation continues to be the nation's preeminent gun rights litigating organization. we continue to file an pursuit of a variety of cases throughout the country that seek to expand recognition and protection of the second amendment right and we are doing this in a thoughtful and strategic ross us. we are not simply throwing things up against the wall to see what sticks. we do have a plan and we are sticking to it and we are very happy to see some results are finally being borne out. and number of months ago i was speaking at a law school and i was heckled by a professor who raised his hand and said well, can you provide a list of the number of courts since heller in mcdonnell that have struck down gun regulations as being violations of the second amendment? and my response was the court simply don't move that fast.

mcdonald at the time was only a few months old. prior to mcdonald's we did not have a green light from the supreme court to file lawsuits against state and local governments where the majority of gun regulations in the united states exists at the state and local level. obviously there are some federal laws that we know about, but for the most part, the most pervasive forms of gun control are local, and you know courts don't work at internet speed, not surprisingly. those decisions we got an immediate aftermath of heller were whereby a large criminal cases, because those do move much faster along the docket. people who are accused of crimes have a right under the constitution to a speedy trial and by and large, many of those criminal defendants and their attorneys who have a duty to develop -- to present them made second amendment arguments, perhaps not of the best and most persuasive types.

heller and mcdonald do not grant the right to have a gun in the post office or protect your drug trade and things of that nature. so of course they're -- it wasn't surprising we didn't have a whole lot of decisions that affect professor were to ask me that question again today i would have course point out to the ezell opinion we got from the seventh circuit last month i would point out that other cases where defendants have chosen to settle with us in the face of our litigation rather than face the inevitable outcomes. we are very proud of the fact that people who reside and work in sacramento county california today can actually of pain a permit to carry a handgun because former sheriff mcginnis at sacramento county chose not to fight us forever in that litigation. so when people do settle, we are able to liberate some of our plaintiffs and their neighbors but that doesn't necessarily yield immediate precedent. all the same i encouraged everyone to be patient as we proceed with some of these cases

which i will now describe to you because there is far more coming down the road and soon. the other thing to of course keep in mind as we go forward litigating the second amendment is that there is not one person in america and certainly not one judge or justice in the united states who believes that the supreme court and the lower federal courts have gotten every single first amendment case correct. the fourth amendment is a perfect state of interpretation and likewise in the second amendment area we should not expect a utopian outcome. they're going to be some cases that do not yet decided correctly as that is the case oftentimes, so litigation is not going to be a 100% cure for everything that is wrong with gun regulation in america but if we can made it 80% cure or 90% cure that would be fairly good for many of the people today who do not get to enjoy the sorts of rights that they are entitled to and by that i don't mean we are

necessarily going to win 80% or 90% of all cases going forward but early on if we can win enough of the important cases that establish the foundational residents, the basics of the right, then we will see more relatively more, greater percentage of the problems solved. this conference is one that addresses primarily big carrying of guns on campuses, and before we litigate it is important to remember, before we litigate the issue of sensitive places that is what is assent to the place we know those things exist because heller told us as much. the supreme court said you can be prohibited from carrying a gun. they didn't say what that is but we know it is out there. before we even get to that question we still have to litigate the issue of whether or not you have a right to carry a gun outside the home at all. it does not make any sense to litigate the place question

before we get definitive rulings on the basic right itself. it is important that we file these cases in the correct order so that we have narrow cases going first that establish basic principles upon which we can build. if you go for cases at the outset that are the most difficult, that are the closest, the most controversial than you are likely to bend get actually nothing at all. so we tried to start with a more basic questions and the basic question of course here is, do you have a right to carry a gun outside the home or self-defense? now, i do not agree that the heller opinion limited the second amendment to the home. while it is true that is all that was requested by mr. heller, that case did not involve questions of bringing a gun into the home. the opinion is far broader than the actual point of the holding. in our system, cases are valued

for their reasoning that they offer, not merely for the literal outcome of the judgment. it is the reasoning that the court uses which guides lower courts and future courts as they resolve questions that come before them. and in the heller case, one of the things that the court was required to do and the supreme court was required to do by the circumstances before it, to decide the issue of what it means to bear arms because after all, the district of columbia in his litigation plan had an argument that airing arms has a unique militaristic idiomatic meaning. if you are bearing arms you are going forth into battle, you were soldiering and therefore the district argued bearing arms tells you the second amendment is limited to a militia of military purpose and you can only their arms at the direction of state authorities. outside outside the home of

course because you were not going to be engaging in military activity inside of your home. that doesn't make much sense. the supreme court addressing that issue rejected that interpretation and the supreme court held that at the time of the ratification then as now to bear meant to carry and the supreme court spoke at length about the right to keep and carry arms. it spoke as we mentioned about sensitive places which is of course the exception that proves the rule, if you cannot carry a gun into a sensitive place you must be able to carry a gun into a nonsense in a place in the supreme court then even went further and it referenced a variety of cases from the 19th century claire state high courts had to wrestle with both the second amendment as well as state constitutional analogues dealing with the right to keep and bear arms and in those cases, a conditional rule came about which the supreme court and heller endorsed and the rule is as follows. you can ban perhaps all

concealed carrying of handguns so long as you than if you choose to do that, allow all open carrying of guns. the reverse would have course be true as well. you can ban the open carrying of firearms so long as you allow the concealed carrying of firearms and if you read the cases with the logic that comes out is, the state may regulate the manner in which you carry arms so long as it does not abolish the right entirely altogether. in the 19th century, it was thought that only a sneaky dastardly people would conceal their arms, virtuous people would wear their arms openly and so open carrying was generally not disturbed while concealed carrying was often precipitate. we can discuss that perhaps today, societal preferences may have change for open carrying is often seen by people as provocative.

licenses to carry concealed weapons. as lawyers arguing for the second amendment right, we can't really take a position as to which is a preferable policy. we all have our own preferences personally, but this is really something that is in the legislatures cords so to speak. if they wish to ban one load of caring they must allow the other. of course they can allow both but we don't read the concealed carry bans from the 19th century so broadly as to restrict the right to bear arms completely. another case that is not frequently discussed when it comes to the question of caring arms in public is of course the supreme court's first foray into the second amendment and that of course is the miller case from 1939. we all know that mr. miller had a sawed off shotgun. he was prosecuted for that under the national firearms act because he didn't pay the tax on

it and in a very murky opinion that people have debated ever since the supreme court remanded the case back to the district court for determination as to whether or not a sawed off shotgun was arms protected by the second amendment. but where was mr. miller carrying that sawed off shotgun? if we read the court's opinion we see that the case arose on the highways of arkansas and oklahoma as mr. miller was transporting that firearm publicly on the highways and interstate commerce. clearly as the second amendment has no application outside the home, that case has been decided very differently. would have been a much shorter opinion. the supreme court would have said mr. miller was not inside his home. he does not have a second amendment right, but of course that is not the approach of the supreme court talk, so i think that is also something that should be providing some structure for people.

.. >> if bearing arms doesn't mean carrying a gun, then what does it mean? and here the other sides offers nothing. they offer a lot of emotional stories and appeals to public safety arguments, but i have yet to see in the any of the cases that i'm litigating any kind of definition for the constitutional language that is being offered as an originalist matter by the other side for

what bearing arms means, and at some point they're going to have to supply that definition. what are some of the cases now where that definition may come into view? well, the second amendment foundation is litigating a variety of cases where we are challenging the may issue laws, that is the idea that you may have a license to carry a firearm for self-defense, but only if your chief of police or sheriff or other official has determined that you have a good need for that license and that your moral character, whatever that means, is sufficiently adequate that you can have a gun. it is very well established by the supreme court that when you're dealing with fundamental constitutional rights if there's going to be a prior strength, if there's going to be a licensing law, the licensing standards must be objective, they must be narrowly defined, they must

issue no room for discretion to the licensing authority. and that way courts can evaluate each, each licensing standard and each requirement on its own merit to see whether it passes constitutional muster. the idea that you only have those rights that the police believe you have a good reason for wishing to exercise defeats the whole concept of rights entirely. so now that we know the second amendment is a fundamental right, if there is a right to carry a gun, then however the state might wish to license that activity, that license cannot depend upon the whims and personal feelings and ideas of your local officials. we have a variety of cases throughout the country challenging that. we have a case in new york which is currently pending in the district court, we have a case in maryland, woolard v. sheridan that was argued in july, at the district court in baltimore we're waiting for that.

we have a case in california that's currently on appeal. we're supporting a case that i'm litigating in boston. we have a virty of cases on that -- variety of cases on that issue, and we believe that issue is going to be resolved as a matter of the traditional prior strength doctrine that the supreme court applies to fundamental rights. we have another case that deals with the carrying of arms in public arising out of north carolina. that case has been pending before the court now for some time. we're waiting for a decision. in the case of bateman v. perdue, and this is a case that we filed the day mcdonald came out, a challenge to north carolina's prohibition on the carrying of guns during so-called states of emergency. the idea is that when the government has declared that there's an emergency afoot because the weather forecast says hurricane or there might be a riot breaking out somewhere and be the police resources are not going to be there for you, then you somehow lose your second amendment rightses.

we disagree. we believe that second amendment rights are most important at a time when public order has broken down. after all, when everything is peaceful and happy and there are lots of cops around, your need for exercising your second amendment rights might be reduced. it's only when there's real trouble out there that law-abiding people need to be able to defend themselves. as blackstone said, the second amendment is definitely there. he didn't talk about the second amendment, but the right to self-defense, the right to arms is there to secure against public and private violence. and we believe that riots, dangerous situations, of course, would qualify. so we're looking forward to a decision there. in the immediate term, some of these carrying cases are filtering their way up to the supreme court be. there are currently two petitions before the supreme court that may yet get granted or denied when the court comes back from its summer vacation. i will go over those very briefly. first, there's a case called

williams v. maryland. this case arises out of the conviction of a gentleman in maryland for carrying a gun without a license. the conviction was affirmed and a cert of petition has been filed. i am not super optimistic about the petition being granted in that place although there is an okay chance of it being granted, and i suppose that if that petition were granted and mr. williams' case were heard that the supreme court would at least instruct the lower court in this case, the maryland court of appeals, that there is, indeed, a right to carry a firearm outside one's home which seemed to be the basis upon which mr. williams' conviction was affirmed. however, the problem with that case is mr. williams never actually applied for a license and, in fact, raised no challenge to maryland may-issue

licensing standards. i do not believe that the supreme court will come out with an opinion that says that the right to bear arms can be or should be totally unregulated such that no license can ever be required of a person before they carry a handgun. and so the prospects for mr. williams' personal situation whatever the ultimate nice language that surrounds the decision might be i don't think are all that high. of course, i wish him luck in that event. a more interesting case from our perspective, one in which we filed an amicus brief in support of the petition for serb car ri comes also from this neighborhood, so to speak, and this is a case called the united states v. mar schoen darrow. he's a businessman that travels a lot, and like many people in that type of life, pulled over by the side of the road and took a nap one night. unfortunately, he did so in an area that fell under the jurisdiction of the national parks service. crossed the river here in

virginia, and had a gun in his car and this is during a time in which the national park service had a ban on people having firearms in their cars. he was prosecuted and convicted and has raised the second amendment challenge to that law which, of course, has since been repealed. in any event, that opinion was somewhat disturbing. the fourth circuit u.s. court of appeals not only held that it is unlikely that there is a second amendment right outside the home, well, they didn't quite say it that way. they said we don't want to go there, we're not sure we need to resolve this. under any event, however, the court held regardless of whether there is or is not a right to carry arms outside the home, the fact is that there are people who go to the parks and, therefore, guns can be banned

because, you know, if there's an accident or misuse of a firearm, it could hurt people. so to speak, that was the essence of the decision. they didn't quite say, they wouldn't say that the parks are in total a sensitive place. they simply said that it was inappropriate to place restriction because there's danger if guns are misused in a park. we don't believe that this is an appropriate way the address the second amendment. obviously, the court merely rubber stamped the assertion that guns are per se dangerous and, therefore, can be excluded from some place where other human beings might be. we think that's probably a little bit too broad. and so we hope that the supreme court be, um, takes a look at that. it's important to note, however, that given the way that the opinion is written, it does not actually call for a negative

outcome in any other fourth circuit carrying case. for the most part, it's a case of proposition, the court should avoid the second amendment question more than anything else. and we believe that the second amendment is a normal part of the bill of rights that can't simply be avoided because judges are unwilling to go there. the reason we have federal judges is so they resolve constitutional controversies and tell us what our rights are and what they are not. so we hope that case gets a look as well. it is, of course, entirely possible -- one never knows what's going on up there at the supreme court -- that both of these petitions in williams and masciandaro are denied. that simply means the court for whatever reason is going to be looking forward to a different case in which to address the issue again. i suppose that we will know in these cases come the beginning of october, and by then, of course, we are have probably seen more developments in the many other right to carry cases

that are being litigated. thank you so much. [applause] >> [inaudible] >> okay. how much time do i have? >> you've got ten minutes. >> ten minutes, okay. >> going into ezell, and we may take some questions. ezell, i think, is really important, and there was some things that came out in that ruling that were great language. >> that's right. ezell is a fantastic victory for second amendment rights. we're really very pleased with the way that the seventh circuit's opinion came out. in the wake of the decision in mcdonald v. the city of chicago, the city of chicago enacted a new firearms ordnance that had all kinds of interesting features to it. and one of the things they did was ban all gun ranges within the city of chicago. previously, gun ranges were allowed, at least on paper. there was a provision that said you may not discharge a firearm in the city limits except if you are at a dually licensed gun range or gun club. but that was struck out, and in

its place, of course, we had a complete prohibition on all gun ranges. so we sued. another interesting feature of chicago's law, by the way, which was another angle in our lawsuit was that chicago required range training in order to qualify to register a firearm in the first place. so that is if you wanted to exercise your second amendment right to have a gun, you needed to obtain range training, however, ranges were banned. [laughter] so our arguments, we had three arguments, essentially. first of all, using a gun range to practice, to engage in sport, to maintain your proficiency is inherently part and parcel of the second amendment right to have a gun. if you have a gun, what else would you do with it if not shoot it once in a while, even if you're keeping it for just for self-defense if you have no interest in the shooting sport. you would still probably at least occasionally go to the range, hopefully, and practice with your firearm so you know what you're doing so that you're safe, so that you're effective. and, in fact, the city has

recognized the value of range training by going so far as to require it. so you have the right to operate and use a gun range. and secondly, even if you didn't have a right to operate or use a gun range, you have a right to the gun. and if city's going to require you to get range training to keep your firearm, then they can't ban that, the exercise, the fulfillment of that requirement. you should have the right to fulfill the city's requirements. we do not have under our laws a rule, in fact, the supreme court has rejected many times the notion that a constitutional right can be denied to someone on the grounds that, well, you can take it somewhere else, you know? yes, you have the right to purchase these books, but why don't you go buy them somewhere else. you have the right to worship, but, you know, we can ban your church here. go take it across the border. that doesn't work in our city.

chicago is actually a part of the united states, the bill of rights applies there in full, and whatever happens somewhere else, the fact is people enjoy their rights in that city. a third argument which we made the courts never got to dealt with the first amendment, and that is courts have held that gun training is like other kinds of education and training, and those kinds of activities have first amendment protection. we never got a resolution on that, but that's okay because the second amendment holding was terrific. first of all, the seventh circuit held that the denial of second amendment rights causes people irreparable harm for the purposes of getting preliminary injunctive relief. what does that mean? it means that when you file a lawsuit and you're claiming that your second amendment rights are being violated, you can ask for an immediate grant of relief which if it's denied, you can immediately take to the court of appeals. you don't have to suffer through it, slog through endless

procedures and the ordinary delays that afflict civil cases. the courts have always recognized that in the first amendment context, for example, if you're being denied your rights, you're being irreparably harm inside a way that money damages won't compensate for you later, and you can go ahead and take that dispute to court immediately. obviously, if you don't have your second amendment rights which obtain to personal self-defense, the consequences could be quite tragic and not ones that could be compensated for with money damages. so, number one, we have access to a preliminary injunction. number two, the court did find that, in fact, range training is protected by the second amendment and, of course, the second amendment extends beyond the home because most people don't have a range inside their house. that should seem obvious. there are some people who do, typically wealthier individuals with extra space in the basement or penthouse. but for most people going to a range means going outside your

home with your firearm. that's for, you know, most people. so, yes, of course, the idea that the second amendment is limited to the home is no longer operative, i think, in the seventh circuit. beyond that to the extent that, um, we have issues of overbreadth type challenges work in the second amendment. now, what do i mean by that? there is a doctrine out there that says you can't challenge the constitutionality of a law unless it is unconstitutional in all of its applications. so so long as the government can point the at least one person to whom the law would be applied validly, you don't have the ability to challenge the law on its face. you need to come up with a particular application which is personal to you, and the law might remain on the books for a long time. that's not really the way the courts approach the first example, and at least in the

seventh circuit, it is no longer the way the second amendment is applied either. in fact, we can see this just from the logic of the heller case and mcdonald case, right? there are still people in chicago and washington, d.c. who should not and can be barred from if having guns, right? we have felons in the washington, we have bad, dangerous people in chicago. i've met a few of them. [laughter] and, but just because there's a bad guy out there who can be denied the right to have a gun doesn't mean that, therefore, all people can be denied the right to have a gun. and so, yes, you can challenge the law on its face even if there's some people in chicago who shouldn't be hanging around a gun range, it doesn't mean we can ban them entirely. next, the court held that to the extent there might be regulations of gun ranges, and, of course they can be regulated. you can zone them the way you would any other commercial establishment for the normal types of issues that impact properties' considerations. the city needs actual evidence,

they need proof. simply hyperbole and a bunch of fear mongering and nonsense, vague concerns about gun ranges leading to an epidemic of murder and violent crime are not going to cut it. the city took the position that gun ranges could be banned because people shoot guns there. well, yes. [laughter] they do. but they don't shoot each other. not very often. and the bullets don't travel outside the gun range. gun ranges are safe. we don't hear of crimes occurring at gun ranges. so, of course, again, to the extent they're going to be regulated, the city's going to have to have real evidence, the standards are going to be tough. basically, ezell is a wonderful case that has a lot of goodies. >> we're tight on time, but can we take two quick questions? >> do you know of any cases that are coming down the road that would pertain to the capital doctrine for students living on campus? >> no. the castle doctrine is more an

area of state criminal law and be what your rights are as a matter of state criminal laws, self-defense doctrines. there have been discussions by people as to whether or not the second amendment provides an additional, an additional font of self-defense privileges because it's constitutional recognition of an interest in self-defense. but i haven't seen any litigation that specifically addresses that right now. >> any other questions? yes, sir. >> yeah. concerning the maryland case, is there anything -- [inaudible] concerning shall-issue? >> that's what that case is about. we're not challenging the entirety of maryland's gun regulations. all we are challenging is the

idea that maryland can require that a person has good cause and good moral character in order to obtain the handgun permit. and if we prevail, then maryland will become a shall-issue state. >> thank you, alan. >> thank you so much. thank you. [applause] >> well, shortly the u.s. senate will be in for what's expected to be a quick pro forma session as the senate continues their august recess. while they're on break we're showing you booktv in prime time here on c-span2. today family stories meet national history. at 8 p.m. eastern, louisa thomas' "conscious." coming up at 8:45 eastern carla peterson on her book, "black gotham," a family history of

african-americans in 19th century new york city. and then at 9:50, ron reagan talks about "my father at 100." it's booktv in prime time all this month here on c-span2. early this afternoon we'll return to live coverage of a department of education conference. that'll be live this afternoon at 1:0 eastern on our companion network, c-span. seen as a testing ground for presidential hopefuls, republican candidates are gathering in iowa for some grassroots politics and state fair festivities. starting thursday live from des moines we'll interview the candidates and take your phone calls about politics. and saturday we'll go to ames for the iowa straw poll where three of the past five winners have gone on to win the iowa caucus and two have won the presidency. road to the white house in iowa this week on c-span.

every weekend it's american history tv on c-span3. of starting saturday mornings, 48 hours of people and events telling the american story. watch personal interviews about historic events on oral histories. our history book shelf features some of the best known history writers. revisit key figures, battles and events during the 150th anniversary of the civil war. visit college classrooms across the country during lectures in history. go behind the scenes at museums and historic sites on american artifacts, and the presidency looks at the policies and legacies of past american presidents. get our complete schedule at c-span.org/history and sign up to have it e-mailed to you by pressing the c-span alert button. again, the u.s. senate will be in at 11 for a quick pro forma session. until then, a discussion on the state of the news media with former npr ombudsman alicia

shepard. panelists comment on the changing landscape of journalism and the impact of twitter in the 24-hour news cycle. hosted by the conference of court and public information officers. >> okay, good morning. let's get back started again. we've heard it called evolving media, monitored media, modern media, new media already this morning. well, that's not what this panel is going to talk about, but it seems like the perfect way to kick off the more formal part of our meeting. in our discussions earlier, it seemed to me we were all leading towards, in the one direction and that is the thought that traditional media's either disappearing or shrinking, and we need to find out ways to use various tools to reach out to the public. um, and that's what we're going to talk about today.

and we have with us four real authorities to share information, and they all work in that traditional news media business. but i think you'll hear that that even has changed quite a bit. gene poll zinn sky will introduce our panelists. there's information bios and additional resource material on the conference web site. gene is the senior vice president and executive director of the first amendment center. he has worked in all three dying industries, newspaper, radio and tv -- [laughter] >> thank you, david. [laughter] >> so be sure to hire gene, right? gene was one of the founding editors of "usa today" and subsequently served as the washington editor and managing editor for sports. most importantly to us, gene is a real, sincere and valued friend of this group, and boring that we -- and everything that we do and has been for more than a decade. he was the driving force behind

these series of programs that we have had with judges and journalists around the country and really through gene's efforts significant bridges have been built between the two professions. and i think both have benefited because of it. also gene and his assistant, ashley hampton, have provided invaluable assistance and support and hospitality for this conference. as you probably know, we're meeting in some of the most desirable space in washington. i urge you the step outside or look out the window, um, and we appreciate gene and ashley's support. and i'll step aside now and let gene get started. >> thank you, david. the dying industry today. well, i think we'll try to keep some of them alive today. but it's great to have you here. welcome to the knight conference center and to the newseum. we're glad to have you here. we're going to talk about a subject that i think all of you know very well, so we're going the go to your questions fairly early in this session because i think it's really about a conversation today. and we can all sort of explore a

topic that you see from your perspectives, we see from ours. one of the things that i'd like to do to start us off is we produced a series at the newseum on the future of news, and we have a short clip of some, of the opinions expressed in that series, if ec roll that -- if we can roll that clip, please. >> we're in the middle of a massive transformation of journalism, and it's just beginning now. >> the old era is basically gone. the new order is not yet in place. >> can print news survive this digital revolution? tina, what do you think? >> i think print is in crisis, and we're still doing triage. >> there is a sense that newspapers are dying overnight, and that's really not the case. the sky is not falling, but it's a little shaky. >> this online journalism came in a very fast, packaged vehicle. turn that next page of the news, we see people consuming even more news online. >> the problem, of course, is

it's a two-edged sword. there's a lot of junk there. >> this idea of what is credible, ultimately, comes down to who do you trust? who has been trustworthy? >> our most valuable thing in this business is credibility, and you blow that, and people don't want to trust your stories. >> when the people formerly known as the audience use the tools they now have to inform one another, that's citizen journalism. >> i do have a problem with blogging where somebody's in a basement having pancakes delivered downstairs by their mother, and at the same time they're bringing down a government. >> if you look at the history of this country, the first amendment, the first amendment not by accident -- >> cuts to the newsroom make us less nimble and less responsive, but i believe that we still have it, or else i wouldn't be in this profession. >> or as we saw recently in iran, you know, it's people on the streets of tehran capturing protests when the old media -- or, sorry, tv media -- [laughter] >> we were the revolution, and now we're going to have to

reinvent ourselves and continue the revolution. >> well, joining me on the dais today moving from furthest away, rem reider, alicia shepard, author, educator, journalist and most immediately former ombudsman for national public radio. and george stanley who is managing editor and vice president of the milwaukee journal and sentinel which i would note has won three pulitzer prizes in the last four years. so, rem, if i can start with you, perhaps. moderator's prerogative right off the bat, the session is titled "state of the news media today," but let me just pose it to all of you, today and perhaps even tomorrow. >> well, state of the news media today is kind of a mixed picture. it's easy to be in despair about a lot of things, and as we see if not the collapse, the real retreat of traditional media yet at the same time there are a lot of exciting new ventures coming

forth. and as one of the people said in one of the clips, we're kind of early in this revolution. it's hard to know how it's going to play out, so it's easy to say we don't really have a business model, what are we going to do? we took a look at a magazine recently to try to put some numbers on specifics to see where journalism is, and we looked at investigative reporting, statehouse reporting, foreign reporting and coverage of washington agencies. not so much the president or, you know, things like the debt ceiling circus, but the meat and potatoes stuff. and there was a constant theme in these pieces. big retreats, as you would expect, sometimes bigger than we even thought they would be by traditional media. small number of upstarts, many of them nonprofit. and yet, and some bright spots by traditional media. you mentioned george's newspaper which is an example that, you know, i don't think we want to rule out the -- >> we'll leave this event for just a moment as the u.s. senate is about to gavel in for a brief

pro forma session. senators currently back in their home states for the august recess and will resume legislative work on tuesday, september 6th. now live to the floor of the senate. the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c, august 9, 2011. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable jim webb,a senator from the commonwealth of virginia, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: daniel k. inouye, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands in recess until 12:00 p.m. on friday, august 12, 2011. >> and as you heard, the senate recessing now. they'll continue to gavel in and out for brief pro forma sessions until senator trump from their august recess. and when they do return, it'll

be tuesday, september 6th. senators will take up consideration of the judicial nomination of bernice donald. following a final vote on her confirmation, the senate will begin work on a house-passed bill that overhauls the patent system. watch live gavel to gavel coverage of the u.s. senate as always. and we return now to the state of the news media with alicia shepard and george stanley. >> some blog. i mean, i don't buy chris matthews', you know, people in the basement stuff. i think that's ab -- an old saw. but i do think media literacy is going to be the key challenge for this coming generation. how do you know what to believe? >> george, you and i share roots in the industry that probably is most often seen as on the ropes. and yet you found a way to do the kind of reporting that not only wins prizes, but win

reeders. -- readers. talk for a moment, your view then, if you would, about where we are and the state of things today. >> i agree with what alicia said about it being a very exciting time and a lot of opportunity there as well and that we're not dying. i think we're going through a very difficult time in all the media, and some media are yet to face this, some of the broadcast media that, what they are going to because of the change in technology. um, the, you know, everything from craig eel list taking -- craig's list taking away classified advertising, offering it for free, to pandora, you know, building your own radio station that's suited to your own taste. and it's hard to compete with free. so so, um, and like alicia said, our audience has never been bigger. if you combine print and digital audiences, it's bigger than it's ever been. we'll have four million page view on a busy news day which is

huge for a paper our size in milwaukee. um, but we haven't figured out how to get money from the digital part of that audience. and that's the part that's changing and evolving. and when you're going through these real tough times, and it's a combination, i think, of the worst recession we've seen in our lives and the changes in technology coming together at the same time that, um, you know, it really forces you to adopt corps die -- adopt or die, adopt or per rich. and what we've decided to focus on at our paper, and we talk more than we ever have to our users and readers through twitter and facebook and everything else. um, what can we do, what can we do of value for you that you can't get anywhere else? what kind of news and information that you can't get anywhere else, and what can we deliver to you better than anyone else can? and those areas for us in the wisconsin are breaking news because of the size of our newsroom and using social media

as both sources and, um, everything else and to deliver the information. and, um, investigative in-depth journalism which is getting tremendous response from our readers. and, um, also, um, beat expertise from everything from the green bay packers to covering the courts to covering city hall, we're the only ones still doing that. so those are the areas we're really focusing our attention and our resources. and when alicia brought up the younger audience, um, i think that they will come along too and are coming along. and a great example with npr is "this american life." >> which is not produced by npr, but that's okay. >> distributed by npr. >> no, it's public radio, but it doesn't matter. >> but either way it's a public radio program this' exceptional and has -- that's exceptional and has a gigantic young audience for great narrative journalism. >> with you know, that actually brings up a point that i think for younger listeners, viewers,

readers and users -- i think we all have to say now -- the platform or the source on the platform is a little bit less important than the product. that you identify it as a public radio program. and if it's produced by somebody else, it's vetted through npr in that sense in terms of being a quality program. there's a certain npr label that goes with it. you know, i think that's something that news organization didn't worry about because it was staff-produced. the networks began to farm out and be hire freelancers a lot earlier than most other television networks, a lot of other media. but it's becoming really more and more ironically, i think, this an era where there's a perception, again, that journalism is on the ropes. the content is becoming the thing. less important where and who produces it, although i think there's a credibility aspect of npr, your paper and, rem, you would see it across the range in

media. credibility. our own survey at the first amendment center, we do a survey every year called the state of the first amendment, and we ask certain questions every year since 1997. one of those is, concerns bias. and we've been consistently getting the last few years about two-thirds of the american public sees bias in news reports. now, at the same time almost that same number sees a role for the press as watchdog, and if you just ask is a free press important, you get 95%. those sometimes seem at odds, but how do you all deal with the issue of bias? >> with as the ombudsman at npr, that's primarily what i dealt with. the job was to be the public advocate for the listeners, so explain npr to the listeners, the listeners to npr. and i came to learn that what we have now is a very fractured media, and people really listen, read, watch through their own

personal beliefs. and so what they see as bias is you're not on my side, you're not advocating for me. and that isn't the role of the news media. so i think it's a specious complaint, and no matter, i mean, within ten minutes once i got a complaint about the same story that had to do with the arab-israeli conflict, and one was npr's nothing but national palestinian radio. ten minutes later, npr's a mouthpiece for the israeli defense force, you know? the same story perceived through different lenses of personal belief. >> that's a really versatile news organization that can be both. [laughter] you know, we've had one interesting thing in the last few years, and it kind of spins off the bias question. there are a lot of people who agree with lisa, they talk about bias, they're really saying you didn't come out on my side. and what we've had with the rise of cable and the internet and i think fox news takes a lot of

the credit or blame for this, we're developing -- a sizable number of people only go to news outlets that climb of preach to the choir, that reinforce their views. so you have people that get their news from fox, they go to the drudge web site and listen to the rush limbaughs of the world. and for a while that was pretty much a right phenomenon. now we've had equivalents on the left with msnbc which sort of was going nowhere through most of its existence and kind of has found a niche as the left alternative. or the huffington post, a huge and successful aggregator that also does it own content. and i think that's kind of troubling the more that happens, and it kind of, you can see the reflection in our politics and, i guess, one -- they both come from the same source. we have two sides in washington not talking to each other, and you have a big slice of the public who are listening only to what they see as their own news.

>> george, how -- that's, to some degree, a national phenom. i've always wondered how does that play out on the regional and local level when you're talking about bias? >> very much the same way largely because there's business models around that now. there's local conservative talk radio just like there's rush limbaugh. and it draws a niche audience, and people are solid to advertisers, and there's local foundations and organizations pushing political candidates on both sides that do the same sort of thing. there's more and more of these kind of shadowy groups that kind of are doing a form of watchdog journalism. actually, sometimes they will break stories although they're coming at it from a very strong political perspective. another trend that's come in somewhat reaction to this that i think is, um, a great opportunity for people like us that, um, just want to get where

the truth is and not worry about the politics is, um, politifact and fact-checking groups. it takes a lot of resources. you know, it took three people the establish politifact in wisconsin. there's a lot of resources going into that fact-checking operation. >> you're checking claims about, well, really any campaign claim at that point? >> >> campaign claims which have been intense in wisconsin since the last election and through this year. and advertising. but also anything involved in the polical issues process is up for grabs including talk radio and thing like that. but, um, it's got enormous positive response from readers. the two things that have gotten the biggest positive response from readers the last several years, and it's a more positive response in my career. i've been in this business for more than 30 years now, and i've

never seen responses this positive toward us. and the two big things are fact checking and watchdog journalism, the real serious, in-depth investigations. we had one investigation last year or two years ago, um, into subsidized childcare scams. and so far that's saved the state of wisconsin taxpayers more than $100 million, the fraud that we uncovered. and, um, that's really delivering news of value, and readers really respond very strongly to that. >> i think the fact-checking thing is really a positive step. i think a valid criticism for years of traditional media is there was too much on the one hand, on the other hand. somebody would make an outrageous charge or maybe a valid charge. the other side would respond, and you could walk away and call it a day, and you'd leave the reader saying, what? and the sense was, well, to be objective, you have to do that.

and that, to me, is silly. what you need to do is these fact-checking outfits, you reach a conclusion, but it's based on the facts. it's not based on the fact that you're right-wing or left-wing, but this is the actual truth of it. there's a lot of excitement, there's a lot to deplore about this time, but i think that's one of the really positive things we're seeing. >> rem just brought up based on the fact. and be i think, you know, one of the troubling things that i see is whose facts and whose interpretation of the facts and what are facts. i mean, just look at the s&p and whether it was a $2 trillion mistake, i mean, um, and, you know, i have lived through the juan williams firing at npr. he recently wrote a book, and he was giving his side. well, those are his facts, and that's what he said, i want to give you the facts. well, you know, i know the facts to be different. so, um, and most of the reporting that's done is, that i've seen is all on juan's

facts. and, you know, that's partially npr's fault. but, you know, that's the problem is that it really takes a lot of digging to get down to, you know, what is the truth of the situation. and the truth is always more nuanced. i mean, juan williams wasn't fired because of one thing he said on air. you know, it was much more complicated. but that's, that's the narrative. and no matter what happens now, that's the narrative, and it's hard to put that down. >> you know, and be of particular interest, i think, to this group who, of course, are responsible about getting information about the courts out to the public is that the trend has been in some ways and certainly started, i think n local tv to not do so-called institutional news, not to go to the institutions that provide facts, that have a case where you can read things that have been filed, you can read the opinion, but move to more sort of lifestyle, softer subject matter. and yet what i'm hearing is really the future of news to some degree at least or large degree is in these kinds of

factual institutional accountability kinds of reporting. is it we're just seeing that that trend sort of ran its course along with a lot of other pressures and has managed to sort of peter out now at this point and we're going to go back to more institutional, more accountability kind of reporting? >> i think that, um, there's -- a news organization will always do some of both, entertaining and informing what's serious news. and that's part of our job. being part of our community is covering entertainment, covering the arts, things like that. but when you're covering general feature issues, there's a lot of options out there now, more than there's ever been before both online and on tv and everything else. hgtv and all the types of things they offer that we used to put in our feature sections which people can find anytime they want to. um, so with our smaller staffs, we're going to have smaller staffs, what are we going to

focus our attention on? and that's going to be the stuff we can do that nobody else can do. >> let me give just a few numbers to maybe put it in perspective a little bit on sop of the -- some of the subject we've talked to. again, according to the pew study on the state of the media in 2011. the projection this year is to lose somewhere between a thousand and 1500 jobs in the industry. that doesn't sound like great news other than you look at the trend where one year, i believe, or over a couple of years we lost 11,000 jobs in total in the news industry. it's, on average, newsrooms are 30% smaller than they would have been in 2000, so roughly a decade we've lost 30% of the staff. and that, i think, probably folds in some smaller papers where the reductions were a lot less than 30% because some newspapers have certainly experienced more than that. nearly half of americans, 47% actually, now get some local news no longer through a traditional medium, but through

a mobile device, a phone, an ipod touch or ipad. and those numbers are going up dramatically. if i remember the information from the study correctly in december, the number of people who were getting or had access to a ipad or phone it was four times higher than it was four months earlier. so that pad explosion is just a new trend. other than the internet, every other platform saw a decline in audience including cable news which had been holding steady or going up for a long, long time. and for the first time in 2010 more people got their news from the web than from newspapers. and newspaper circulations were projected the first six months, i think, of this year to go down at, again, national average of 5%. there's been a slow decline and not entirely out of control of the newspaper. >> is that balanced against increased readership on the web? is are we talking about subscriptions to both or the

actual paper product? >> i think it's 5%ty clean in the -- decline in the actual sale of the paper product. but the trend was to see people going to a web-based product which, again, might be your web site rather than, you know, somebody else's site particularly for be local and regional news. >> i think that's one of the things that's most important is to recognize that newspapers, despite all their woes, have a much larger audience for knews than ever before because many of their sites are among the most popular on the internet. >> i had an eye-opening experience where i get "the washington post" delivered every day. my son one morning picked up, he was 22. picked up his laptop and read a story, it's his home page about what it's like to live on minimum wage. he came downstairs and was talking about that story. he never would have -- he would have walked by that newspaper all day. but, you know, he got the stories, so it's the delivery systems that are changing. the real problem is how do you

make money out of that. if you get ten cents for an ad versus $100 for an ad in a newspaper. >> that pesky revenue thing seems to show up in all these discussions. >> that first stat you talked about was a significant one, that 30% reduction. because i agree with lisa and george, it is a very exciting time. a lot of things are being create d, and there are new forms and exciting new platforms, new web sites like propublica with its investigative news, great local sites, that kind of thing. >> but -- >> but, the big but is 30% fewer reporters. you haven't had nearly a consummate increase on the new forms. so what you worry about at least in the near term is the coverage of news particularly at regional papers around the country where the cut off mean a lack of --

often mean a lack of the kind of journalism that george has championed. the kind of digging, the watchdog, the enterprise journalism that's so important. and it means important beats are abandoned, and in democracy it means a lot less information. i'm not saying that the sky is falling and the world's ending, but in the short term that's a real concern. >> but you haven't been spared cuts in the newsroom. how have you as an editor, how is your paper balancing that loss of often the type of person who's most highly paid and maybe the one that's most attracted to the financial side to part ways with? how do you balance that as an editor either, you know, deal with it because it occurred, or can you prevent it? >> right. well, the first thing we really had to do was figure out which, which positions we needed to save the most. and, um, so some of the -- technology'sal given us new ways to cover things that are more

efficient. so, for example, 20 years ago, 25 years ago we had 30 people in our library. we had two newspapers with multiple editions, and we had to, we had to cut and clip every single article and cross-reference it and put it in envelopes and put 'em in these giant envelope retrieving machines that went up stories so that people could find stories in the past. now nobody does that. that's 30 people that have been replaced by digital archiving. we used to have all sorts of technicians that were needed to fine tune photographs and things like that. and now the computers do that. we used to have whole composing rooms of people to do layout, and now that's done by our newsroom on the computers. so, um, so a lot of the losses in staff have been in nonjournallist positions. and then -- but we have lost

journalist positions, i'm not trying to down play that. what we really had to decide on what we were going to save, what we saved the most were the people who were on the street getting the news and information. and new skill like computer or data mining skills, you can get a lot of investigative data now easier than you used to. you don't always have to drive down to the courthouse and ask a clerk to open files and then photocopy them for hours. >> i think a fair amount of that still goes on. faces around the room. >> there is some of that. but so much more of it's available digitally now. and, you know, that makes you a lot more efficient. so it isn't, it isn't, it isn't like we've lost 30% of our reporters. now, the -- but, on the other hand, there's been vast cuts all around, and so this is everybody cutting. so there's far fewer reporters covering madson and politics in

madison now because everybody's cut. when we go to some state, really important state meetings like our state natural resources board that sets policy for environmental and wildlife things, we're often the only news outlet that's there at those meetings. that's scary. >> quick survey in the room, show of hands, how many of you in your respective locations have a journalist assigned full time to coverage of your area? there's one, two, three, four, five. okay. >> can i say something? >> yeah, sure. and i think we have a microphone coming so that we can be heard both in the room and on c-span. >> how many used to? >> the yeah. what was it like ten years ago? >> >> i thought they were going to disappear. we do have them, but they're increasingly young and inexperienced. and they rotate off their beats very quickly. and so what we're dealing with is even when we get assigned reporters, they don't stay very long, and they come in extremely unknowledgeable about the legal system. >> you know, i will tell you in

our justice and journalism program which began in '99, when we began to usually have about a dozen judges and journalists by circuit on the federal level, the easiest thing to do was get 12 veteran courthouse reporters to come in and sit and talk to the judges. by the time we were about two-thirds of the way through that, i could count on one veteran reporter being there who'd been covering the courts -- and veteran being there for five years. and after that it was parachuting in or multibeats or the so-called justice beat where they were covering police on one day and a trial on the next. now, you know, electronic journalism, television, radio now web has dealt with that probably more than print. print had the luxury of assigning somebody. it wasn't all that uncommon to find a television or radio reporter having to parachute into the court. >> yeah. i think that's always been the case. i mean, i covered the courts for the san jose mercury. i don't recall someone from tv,

and we're talking over 20 years ago. >> yeah. >> the one thing i would -- i don't know everyone's individual situation, and a lot of this will depend on the size of your county, um, or your community, um, of what kind of experience level your reporters are likely to have. but i would really encourage people, one of the tendencies, um, folks have is to get very defensive with reporters and to give out as little information as possible. and, um, and i'd really encourage you to develop those relationships even with the young, inexperienced reporters and help teach them what you know about the legal system. and really, you know, they're usually very intelligent young people, and if you can, um, if you can really help 'em through, they want to get it right. and most cases where we've gotten our story wrong, i think we're making, actually, few beer mistakes than we -- fewer mistakes than we used to, probably because we kept the right people in a lot of cases. but when we have made mistakes

or have had to run another story to clarify something because we didn't get it all right or something like that, it's often been the case where the source or sources were so defensive that they were so afraid to talk that they never, they never clarified the issue to the point where we fully understood the issue. and so that' what led to the problem to begin with. so i think, um, the vast majority of people you're working with will be people of goodwill, and if you can help them learn about what you know, it'll really -- they can, they can learn things very quickly. >> and we did hear from a lot of the judges who participated over that range of programs that that credibility with a reporter that they knew was very important to them. and they were a lot more reluctant to talk to somebody they didn't know or who has only been there for a short time. so, you know, it's interesting in the flow of information. it wasn't just i know a fact,

here it is. it was do i talk to you about it, how much do i tell you? a lot of people were backing off. so inadvertently, maybe, contributing to misinformation or maybe less information getting out. >> i wrote a chapter for a book about coverage of columbine, and one of the things that i learned was one of the tv stations there, and i thought this was a really good idea, they would have, like, the pio officer for the police or some policeman come and spend the day with them to see what their pressures were, what their job was like so that the police or, you know, whoever the reporter was going to for information would have a better understanding of what, how the news business works and then vice versa. so really sort of get to know each other's jobs so that you would understand what the pressures are. and, you know, i think it's a very generally -- maybe not in your situation, but, you know,

reporter/policeman is often a very adversarial relationship. and it doesn't need to be. and everybody's just doing their job. >> the group introduced themselves to each other this morning before this panel, and i was struck by the number of people who had mentioned those hot, big, giant media trials that we've all seen come up with increasing frequency, it seems. but let me go to a little example to pose my next question. my older son, ryan, was visiting us where we live in nashville. he's from out of town. he was driving to my office. he came on a police blockade near the vanderbilt university campus. that was probably ten blocks from my office. by the time he arrived at my office, he knew why it had been blockaded which was a suspicious package at a hotel, he knew that the package had been found not to be an explosive device, and

the story had kind of come and gone in the course of ten blocks. he was stuck for a moment and had time to tweet and got that all the way through. so we tend to think of these, the new media explosion and the new media use in the big stories, but there was a fairly ordinary story, obviously, that turned out not to be newsworthy in the largest sense. and yet he knew about it. so i'm going to ask with that as a backdrop plus the mega trials, how has 24/7, instant media made this business different? for good or bad? >> it's made it different in a lot of of wayses and in both ways, i think. sort of your example, the fact that, you know, reflects the fact that you can instantaneously learn about all kinds of things whether it's at vanderbilt or egypt. and, you know, you hear a lot about citizen journalism which has, you know, tremendous upsides in terms of getting

information out. it has a real risk, you know, a lot of it isn't necessarily confirmable, and you don't know what spin it is. never the less, there's a huge amount of information that comes out quickly. and just in general, news organizations have changed. in years at morning newspapers, there was always a rule that if somebody covered a story at 10 in the morning, it et psyched like a -- it seemed like a law that they couldn't start writing until 4 in the afternoon. [laughter] mostly it was just, you know, it wasn't deadline yet. and can now you have a world where, you know -- >> i remember those days. >> we're being punished for our sins. right now you cover the thing, and you'd better tweet about it. then you write a blog post, then maybe you post some video. and then maybe actually write a full-fledged story for the next day's paper. but the upside is that there's a lot whether it's on a local or national circuit, you have tons of information really quickly,

and you have excess to it which pre-internet you didn't have. so, you know, i think we've all gotten spoiled with this. i get very frustrated if there's not an update on a web site every two seconds. so for a news consumer, it's very exciting. the downside is they're particularly competitive stories, and you see it a lot in washington. there's a lot of, you know, there are a lot of new players in the political world, and there's a tremendous premium. and on other stories, too, financial stories with bloomberg. they placed a tremendous premium on getting it first. and this is not brand new. for years we had two wire services, the ap and upi, where you'd be in trouble if you were two seconds behind the other. so this is kind of reinventing the old. but now it's like on steroids. ..

so i think there is the attention and it really puts a premium on being careful, not to get it wrong. >> that was once the province of the electronic side of broadcasters. as you said didn't have the technology to deliver it up. i remember a state senator in indiana when really the first equipment showed up electronic newsgathering step or they could go live from the chamber. this guy had been in the senate at that point for a lot of years and walked over and goes great, now you can screwed up faster.

that was his assessment of the value of getting it out quick. but broadcasters by broadcasters of dealt with it now for some time. does not really all that new for them. newspapers over the world having to tweets, blog, post, video, whatever. >> i think not even quite 10 years ago, on september 11, we were still putting on extras and hawkers using a wire services as her primary their primary source of information. it seems like ancient history today. we will never do an extra print edition again. you know, and i think rem headed on the head. there is good and bad to this. a lot of good and bad i think is actually an opportunity for us to apply that credibility and one of the most interesting things we have seen with twitter, which is the place for breaking news period.

it used to be if someone beat you by a few seconds or a few minutes or something like that, while it is their story and shame on you, you should be embarrassed and people would come at you with that type of attitude. that is gone. it seems to me when we go into twitter, they don't care if we are first that much, as long as once we get there, we are trustworthy. then they start coming to us and we can create a hashtag and drive people to us, because, and there is good and bad. so a great example, last year like a lot of places in the country we had torrential rain pours last summer and big floods, flash flooding type stuff. there was a big storm. what are the chances and i think this happened at 7:00 at night -- a storm sewer below a street was washed out, and made the land above it unstable.

what are the chances of a reporter or a photographer from our paper of being at that intersection the moment a cadillac escalade pulled up to the stoplights, stop and fell into a 10-foot pole coax what are the chances of someone else being there with a smartphone and a camera? so because their reporters and their breaking news editors are on twitter, and because they created a hashtag called brew city flood that everyone was going to, as soon as that guy posted his photo of the escalade and 10 feet down in the hole, which was about five minutes after he personally helped the guy out of the hole, there was the driver of the truck, we had it on our web site as their lead photo because we were there with him. and we got back, so there is a credible source of information. whoever whoever's at the event can tell you about it instantly. on the other hand, you have a

congresswoman getting shot and many news outlets reporting that she has been killed when that is untrue, by the same rush to the truth. in bloomberg's case you can almost justify it does the old rumor sell on truth or sell on facts, sell on the story where in the financial industry with daytrading sometimes rumors all you need. he'd are really needed to be factual but in our world you need to be factual and i think it we go in there and sometimes what we tell our reporters is if there is a rumor out there, just get out there and say yeah we know what you are hearing and we are hearing a too but we haven't confirmed it or found out it isn't true yet. stay tuned. people really seem to appreciate that. >> the latter part is very significant. there was just a recent sort of flap on twitter. that sounds awfully bad to me but over reports that piers morgan had been suspended i

believe by cnn as a result of the whole investigation in great britain and the phone hacking thing involving murdoch and news corp.. there was a discussion about later. rem you commented on this, and richer reporter said it is fine. we talk about this things in the newsroom all the time. hey did you here? it is fine to tweet that, and saw no problem with doing that. because we talk about those things in the newsroom all the time and tweeting is just letting people know what we are talking about in the newsroom but getting a foothold and gating measure of credibility by his simply tweeting. rem you wrote about that. >> i think there was a blog post you mentioned i thought was nuts that basically said it is fine. it is like a conversation and he said in the newsroom so just send it out. twitter may be the new newsroom but to a lot of people it is a new source, and you have to be really careful.

this was a distinguished british journalist posting this as if it were a fact. it was the latest, and you just don't add anything to the conversation. passing stuff along that may be true or may not. just because you know we hear a lot about the journalism thing the platform is different and this is a great example of it. until you know something is true, you have got no business sending it out there. you are not adding anything to the public knowledge. >> i think we have seen also the coverage of the megatrials where there is an awful lot of that speculation, guessing what it means. i will tell you that in one of the trials now that i can't recall from two or three years ago, so it is about 40 megatrials ago, there was a cable show opened up by saying we have got this development. we don't know what it means and it has spent 30 minutes talking about it. admitting at the start of the show we have no idea what this development means. and you know that i think leads

to some of the complaints and problems that people see in journalism. we will go to your questions in just a minute. if you are raise your hand we have the technique. they michael come to you so i will go to a question in just a second but what about that idea if i can just let you all respond to that tweet because it is kind of a rumor and kind of interesting we need to be first or we need to be out there so people will follow us. is that what is driving this? >> i think that one of the questions that we should ask is like, why does it matter. i mean there's a lot of trivialization of the news on twitter and so what if your son new and was within 10 seconds? to me what it does is equalize all at the events. you know, the majority of tweets actually are people passing link link -- links and not actually commenting on things there. so i think that is good good because then you can go to the source and look at the source and see, but i think it is

really dangerous just to put something out there and if you use twitter, you know be very careful with it because i had an experience at npr which made me, and i was really embarrassed. i teach media ethics at georgetown, where an npr intern was shot last summer on her way. she was stabbed in the back, i'm sorry, on her way to work. and i saw on twitter someone said morning edition producer stabbed. and i just did a direct response on twitter and said no, it was an intern. i think she is okay. she is on her way to the hospital. two hours later i get a call and i am independent of npr. i get a call from the head of communications saying, please stop acting like a spokesman because someone had taken that tweet and 30 and into a piece, a blog piece and then sent that out on twitter and used me use me as the source. so i thought whoa, you have to

be -- just think anything can and will be used against you and be very very careful with social media. i think i can give hundreds of examples of where it comes back to bite you. >> will go to some questions and the microphone is there. if you just tell us who you are and where you are from that would be great. >> and what you are twitter name is. [laughter] >> rem you mentioned that there is a development that some news organizations are identified with a certain ideology or political slant. it occurs to me that some of these are those who are making, who have pretty good revenue flows, are buried popular. 100 years ago when i studied journalism history, i seem to remember that is how journalism got his start in this country, that every news organization had its own political slant and you

had to buy 6-penny newspapers to figure out what was going on in the real world. do you see this development or this return to this type of journalism as a plus, a, and i can't remember from my journalism days what was behind the demise of that kind of journalism back in colonial times. >> you are right there is kind of a back to the future aspect of this because it goes back and a lot more recently than colonial times where we had this. overtime the business model evolved where appealing to a broader swath of people made business sense and it is kind of the underpinning of the objective or the people but the independent journalism that is not wedded to an ideology kind of came about. i think it is an unfortunate development, whatever the history to go back to that, because i think as i mentioned,

a it leads to what we have just seen in the debt ceiling business and what has dominated our politics in recent years. we have a whole lot of people who don't talk to each other and only hear what they want to hear. and that makes dialogue very very difficult, but as you also point out it has been a good business model. i don't think "fox news" and msnbc are going to going to latterly disarm any time soon. >> david sellers also from washington d.c.. you have talked about the cataclysmic changes in your industry. what might you expect from government public affairs people whether it is the courts or the department of health or whatever, that we might do to help meet you halfway perhaps to

make your jobs easier? >> well, i think the judiciary, the look of the branches of government, has been much slower to respond to this new media environment in a way. obviously the executive legislative branches run for election and they have been much more comfortable without reach. you know i suspect if we had an equivalent gathering from both the executive legislative branches compared to the public information officers numbers here we would have a much larger room because they're just more people assigned to that. you are also somewhat of a stationary target i think. we sort of knew where you were in what you were doing. you put out schedules. you had hearings in things that are there to be covered, where the other branches were very often more fluid. so i think that there seems to be over the course of our 10 years, now actually almost 12 years, more of an awareness of the need from your site to get

that story out that he really aren't the shopkeeper now who can count on people coming into the store because they need to buy. you need to go out and advertise or at least tell the story a little more. so i think any of those efforts we have heard about a little bit in some earlier sessions of going out and reaching out to the public more, making documents available on line to make up for perhaps some reduced resources on the news side seems to be an interesting thing. the difficulty of course is news organizations take advantage of those new tools and is there an audience for it i guess in the end? >> there is definitely an audience for public records, and putting, getting public records up in a digital format is easily accessible. there is a great desire for that when we put them up as databases on our web site to help the public. they are very strongly utilized. some of them get page to send

people use them for all different reasons, business reasons, personal reasons, knowledge. so i would really encourage everyone to continue moving along those lines to digitize the records and get them available to the public because they belong to the public and people can use them in a lot of ways, most of them positive ways. most of what we are talking about though really i think hasn't changed the basics of what we do. the business models that disrupt it. but i think the same rules that have always applied in telling a truthful, honest, factual story still do and i think that when i was a reporter, the public information officers who i thought for the most if over the years were the ones who realized

that they couldn't control the political leadership and the political leaders come and go and different parties come into office and out of office. but the one thing that they could control, so they could necessarily control scandals to someone who is was up to no good. that wasn't really within their power to control but what they could control was the wrong relationships and their own credibility. and the public information officers that really shined and i thought were extremely effective were the ones who build relationships and became knowledgeable as credible sources of information that were always honest, and if they couldn't say something because it would get their crooked boss in trouble, they just wouldn't say anything. but they wouldn't lie. so i think those rules still apply. >> i have just one piece of advice, which i learned from an fbi agent ed a hostage situation which is feed the shark or the shark feed itself.

[laughter] and so, the more that you are open or at least providing some information, because that is what i meant by understanding the role of the reporter, that particularly in this, i've got to have it now, we are going live in five minutes or something like that. so finding credible or providing credible information on a. >> basis is really critical. >> we talk from the beginning about what is better and what is worse in this current climate in one of the things that is really huge plus is the accessibility of public records and documents like this that are available on web sites and that the public can see them. and you can link their link to from stories, so you can really see kind of the basis for a story. i mean, the accessibility of that kind of public information is. >> whenever we do a court decision we links to all of the

court opinions, including the minority opinions and they are all there and what a great resource that is. >> but i do think it poses an ethical issue for news outlets, which is just because we can, should we? and for instance, if gene you probably know more about this but when one of the tennessee papers posted all the names of the gunowners, who legally were allowed to carry a gun, so you could go on line to the newspaper and find that. you could go to the courthouse and look it up. but this caused a lot of problems and people felt that their rights were violated. suddenly sleepovers weren't allowed because that person had a gun, and i just think there needs to be some thought to linking. i'm not quite clear on this, but can you go to a courthouse and get the names of jurors? >> except for one case in florida right now where it is going to be october.

>> ride, but in that case do you link to the names of jurors? i think that is an ethical question that a news organization needs to think about and talk about and what is the good, what is their purpose, what is an alternative? so just because you can, should you, is an important thing. >> well, let's for a moment look at that casey anthony trial. >> no. [laughter] >> speaking for a lot of americans, but in this sense, the judge in that case decided to temporarily not disclose, if i'm saying it properly, not disclose the names of jurors and keep it under seal until i think about october. but in doing that, he bodes in the order in comments to lawyers in the courtroom released as it was reported, just basically hashed and slashed at the media coverage of that trial. and in fact called for changes

in florida's public records laws, saying it is time to evaluate. in a state that has had a strong tradition and a strong law on open public records. i was struck by that because you really have an official due in some ways made rulings very favorable to openness during the trial. i think there was at least a judgment early on that he was balancing the access versus the right to a fair trial. and then at the end of the trial, looks at this and says this excessive somewhat trivial, trivializing kinds of coverage moved him in a very different direction. you know, we had on public records, you will know all know this, practical obscurity, [but it was in a dusty book down in some archive and only people who maybe were courting land transfers and divorces would come and look. the public really didn't get that information. at a very time when we can be more responsive as an industry,

put more information of, the memphis newspaper got a lot of flak from posting those gun records. we did a program on it with both sides. the newspaper pointed out that there were felons identified who wrongly had gotten gun permits. we also had a gentleman who said that his wife who was handicapped, they kept the gun there because when he was gone for long periods of time he feared for her safety. now resell and knows exactly what kind of weapon is in their house so we had again in an interesting debate on that. but what is the effect in a way for these folks of being more transparent, being more open and what are we doing with it when we get it? regarding responsibly reporting those public records or are we doing the casey anthony trial that even drive some of this in these chairs to say enough? what is happening with this new opportunity, this new challenge? >> we is always a big term and you have to make the statement

that tmc handles things differently than "the new york times" or the milwaukee journey -- journal sentinel. and i think alicia's point is a good one and it is a classic journalism tenant that goes back to the other platforms that is really important now and that is the question of just because we can do it, should we do it? and so there is no, just because it is out there we don't have -- it doesn't mean you can make that judgment. the problem is and what is so different now is there are so many more players in the game that often your individual judgment will fly in the face of everybody else who who is posted that thing, and after a while do you kind of look silly by 90% of the news sites have named somebody? >> in big dsk case. everyone knew who she was. >> we used to have a system in the prehistoric days where a

handful of mainstream, national news anyway, handful of these institutions would decide almost, they would make individual choices but they would decide whether something was going to be out there or not and the error of the gatekeeper is long gone in many ways that is a good thing and nobody died and made these gatekeepers god, but at the same time it means all bets are off, and so what do you do once one person identifies that they made in that case, that it expands dramatically the range of dilemmas really. >> heavy really worried about throwing the baby out with the bathwater? and a lot of these cases there is a lot of outrage and people being angry, but what real harm has been done and if there was harm done, what can be done to prevent that specific type of

harm from happening again, rather than closing off a whole bunch of records? because, we have had that happen in our state, where for privacy issues for example, it was very popular for the legislature to pass laws making it much harder to get records because people were worried about identity theft and things like that. the unintended consequence was we went to dewey story on finding out which appraisers were in cahoots with bad mortgage brokers in the financial, leading the financial crisis by giving false appraisals and leading to all this damage we are still going through today for mortgages going to people who should have never got mortgages and houses that it never -- should never been paid that money for. the privacy laws that have been passed, we could get them ironically on the mortgage brokers because i was regulated

by a different agency and wasn't covered by this law but we couldn't get them on the appraisers they were in cahoots with. so, what worries me is you have got, the more you seal off the more likely it is that there will be wrongdoing that can't be exposed and will never come out because of that. >> i think we are talking about stealing things. i think we are talking about asking the questions. >> but what she was talking about is are they going to pass a new law if florida that makes a bunch of things private because the casey anthony? what i worry about is people really overreacting. the ones i have seen that is spoken publicly have explained their decision very very well and i think. >> i think two or three just to go public and the others have not yet. you know, one of the things that i call the prehistoric days -- do we have a question? good, let's go to that.

>> my name is jennifer from arizona, and you have touched on the investigative and the watchdog reporting, and i am curious, how often or how many stories do you feel have to be i guess dugout in order to find out legitimate stories that there was misuse? i do see a lot of news reporters going into that investigative, but you have to do a lot of research in order to find that one story, which can then consume the time of the agency as they are searching for you know, they misuse. how would you recommend as a public information officer we handle those kinds of requests knowing that navy 90% of them probably won't lead anywhere? >> that is a good question. what i think, what has really worked well with us in the past

when we have run into people that are worried that they are being overwhelmed by records request for example is just pick up the phone and talk to us or, let's work this out and say okay what is reasonable? we are not trying to put it out and sometimes what happens is you clarify the request and you get a lot more sustained than you really focus on where you think there might a something that you have got a tip for something. you have narrowed that request and they get much easier and much easier to deal with. so i think the more you can establish those relationships where you can talk back and forth and say okay, this is just going to take too much time. you were not going to get that for three months and it doesn't do you any good and doesn't do me any good, what can we do about this? usually if you work out a much more focused request. and i do think that the problem is, and i can see it and rem can see it, there are different

definitions of what watchdog is. some people kind of put that label on things and look for things that i don't really think merit it. and maybe misuse of a little bit and that is part of the nature of the beast too. but in our case we are trying to do pretty sophisticated reporting and really get to the truth. if it is not there we are not going to continue. >> the problems at the outset is you just don't know that and that is why can lead to what seems like wasted time on your and because it may be a tip that doesn't pan out or it may be kind of more nuanced and murky and not really be a story. it is hard out of the gate, it is hard to know. >> is funny because a lot of reasons why people don't do investigative reporting is that it is time-consuming and expensive and likely -- i hadn't thought about it from the other side. [laughter] >> there is another story. >> here they are.

>> hayek, and catherine from indiana. my concern is that once, with declining numbers in the newsroom that once that investigation has started, it doesn't sort of matter what is bound. there has to be a story there when you have three weeks looking for records. the most minor point that isn't a watchdog story and that is so nuanced has to be a story. >> i think the hardest job for an editor is often called not to run a story rather than to just go ahead and empty your notebook and put it in the paper or put on the air. >> the questioner is right. in this climate, this is your one medium-sized paper somewhere and this is kind of your big investment of the period, is very hard to say well we devoted to reporters for four months and wash her hands a bit but often that is absolutely the best thing you can do. >> again i think to echo what has been said about working and