three hours live sunday at noon eastern on booktv on c-span2. we'll talk about the role that religion plays in american politics and culture today. this is from this morning's washington journal and it's 45 minutes. >> host: russell moore is our guest. he's with a southern baptist convention. good morning thank you for being let start with the basic. what is a southern baptist convention. how did us your role relate. >> it's the nation's largest non-catholic made up of over 40,000 churches. and my role as president of theth i thinks and religious liberty commission would be twofold to speak to baptist christian and public policy issue and help churches to address the things. also to speak for churches in

the public square and the culture in the political arena on those issues. >> host: you have a background working here in politics in washington, d.c. you worked as a capitol hill aid to former mississippi congressman gene taylor. >> guest: yes. i started as an intern with congressman taylor and worked in various roles for a period of four or five years. great memory and friendship. >> host: what do you see as a role religion should play in politics? >> guest: it deals with ultimate matters what we value. what it is how we see the world. and so i think religious people must be involved in public policy matters because as citizens of this republican we have a responsibility to care for the good of our neighbor, to maintain the common good of the nation, and i think the nation has an interest in seeing to it that religious believers are involved in the process. after all, what religion teaches us and shows us is that the state is an ultimate culture is

an ultimate. there are ultimate priorities beyond those things. so it helps to shape and form the virtue of the citizens. when we come as christians or muslims or jews or various other religious backgrounds, we're speaking to one another not in order to in any way oppress one another. but in order to persuade. these are thing we thought agree on. they for the sake of the common good. >> host: how does the ethics and religious liberty commission make recommendations? how do you determine what message you share with both the southern baptist convention and the general public. >> guest: a variety of ways one is through the resolution process in our denomination. they gather once a year. an open, free, democratic issues. where they speak on various issues. reconcerned about the abortion or sex trafficking or concerned about aids in africa or any other variety of issues. and then that helps to form a consensus as to what matters to

us as southern baptist and speak to one another calling churches to give attention to things that perhaps we haven't given attention to in the past. >> host: we see in national journal why the culture war favor democrat. the prominence, pleasure a critical political shift in the culture war you have offense and defense have switched sides. what side are you on in the culture war? are you concerned some of of the issue you advocate for are losing in the poll now? >> guest: i don't like to think in term of culture war. i don't we are at war with one another. i think we have deep disagreement on issues that matter. but i think we come to that with civility and in conversation. i do think that evangelical we need recognize we're not speaking as majortarians. we're not standing and saying that everything we're concerned

about is by necessity what the country agrees with us about on many issues where we're going have a voice to a culture that largely disagrees with us. and saylet think about what it is you're forgetting and bypasses. that's been the case with even gel call christian and baptists all the way back to the founding of the republican when baptist preachers were the one agitating for a first amendment for instance for protection of freedom of conscious and religious liberty. when it didn't seem to be a priority for many people. >> host: the pugh forum on religion and public life looks attitudes on gay marriage. we can see how it breaks down. unaffiliated 77% favor same-sex marriage, white evangelical protestant 2 4 percent over group in the middle black prod accident at 48%.

>> guest: as a christian believe that marriage is a congress call union lifelong union between a man and woman. i think that's the kind of debate that we needed to have with an american society. what is marriage? how ought we to understand the definition? because i believe that the state doesn't define marriage. the state merely recognizes something that already exists. so i hope that the supreme court will recognize the goodness of that ongoing debate in american society and doesn't usurp it. and also recognize the government has an interest in providing definition and maintaining for the protection of children, families and future

generations marriage. and so i hope the supreme court will take action there. >> host: let's take a look at the immigration issue. immigration and the gospel. you say there was a question about our mission when it comes to immigration. there are upwards of 12 million undocumented immigrant in the country right now. many more in the latino community who came here legally. it if our response is to absorb to the nativism and bigotry to some of the -- reshowing a vision what the bible calls the flesh rather than the spirit. how do you believe the issue of immigration should be handled. what should happen to those in the country illegally? >> guest: i think we need to recognize that those who immigrated to the country are persons created an image of god. they bear dignity and ought to be loved and respected. the kind of language we use in the debate ought to recognize that and see that. so terms of derision toward

immigration communities words like anchor baby, for instance, i think are dehumanizing and grating. we ought to be standing our neighbors who immigranted to the country who say these are not things. these are persons and ought to be recognizes as such. we awlgt to welcome the growing consensus that is happening in the country. nobody or very few people believe we're going to deport 11 or 12 million people. what do we do? what is the just way to move people out of the shadows in to the full pes of american life? i think there's a growing con consensus in this country. whefn we see growing division in other areas, i really think we're moving closer to one another on those questions. >> host: if you would like to speak with dr. russell north here are the phone numbers you can call. republicans 202-585-3881-

>> caller: good morning, i want to bring to light the religious legislation that is on the floor of the state legislature in north carolina about declaring a state religion. i really do think that the religious right evangelical, et. cetera, are engaged in a war against the rest of the country or nonbelievers, as they would think. they want this to be a theocracy. they are working toward this country being a theocracy. and it even goes as far to the

military and whether people are religious or express their religiousty or whatever or be subjected to discrimination within the military. it has no business for politics like gay marriage. this man from a religious point of view has no method to say about who gets married. >> host: let's gate response. >> guest: the last thing we as evangelical christian is want theocracy. we believe as christians that people are reconciled to god through the power of the spirit, through the proclamation of the word not through the action of the state. and so having some form of state enforced religion would not create religious revival that would not move us toward the

gospel. that would make religion a equivalent of a driver's license. that's not what we're for. we're instead for religious liberty, freedom of coach. question have the playing ground to seek to persuade one another about the things we believe with ultimate values. i'm able to speak to my neighbor about the reality of the gospel and christian message. my neighbor is able to talk to me about secular progressive values or buddhist understanding of reality. we have those conversations honestly. now that doesn't mean that we don't bring our sense of what is important in to the public square, of course we do. we all do. we have -- we all bring a certain understanding of what marriage is and ought to be what ought to be recognized as a marriage. obviously we don't claim every relationship to be marital. there's some, why the state has an interest in marriage. i hardly think that's though karattic. when it comes to the military, no one supports cohearsessing

anyone to religious belief. to the contrary we want the freedom for the chaplain to accommodate the free exercise of religion to be able to practice and empower those service men and women to be able to live out their religious beliefs freely. that means muslim chaplains being free to be muslim and catholic chaplain free to be catholic and evangelical chaplain free to be evangelical with everything it means. praying in the name of jesus and speaking the whole counsel of god as we believe it. that's not theocracy. that's religious liberty. >> host: let's hear from palm bay florida, david independent line. >> caller: i have a question for you. you talked about immigrants and all the problems with imgrants. isn't the southern baptist convention very wealthy convention? >> guest: no, i wouldn't say we're a wealthy convention at all. as a matter of fact, if you did

the demographic we would probably be a largely blue collar lower middle class convention. >> caller: wasn't, if i'm not mistaken about six months ago you had a president or one of your persons that worked for you stole a bunch of money from the convention and you had to have him step down? >> guest: no. that's not my -- >> caller: i guess my one comment is, you know, i guess it was about the immigrants, you know, coming and going i think, you know, if you have an attitude like that. who is going feed these people if you're going to make the attitude you as the church should take care of the people. feed them, clothe them. we have enough financial problems in this country. my closing argument, if we stop complaining and we all start doing something about it, things will start changing in this country. >> guest: all right, david let's gate response. >> guest: many of the

immigrants come together country are coming not in order to take from this country but in order to provide a future for their children. stand in a long line of immigrants who have come to this country all the way from the beginning seeking to work hard and make a life for their children. of course, the church needs to be on the front lines of ministering to all of those who are in impoverishes and vulnerable including immigrants in the community. that's what churches are doing. go to a evangelical church or roman catholic church in the community you will probably find a ministry taking place right there at the front lines. including with immigrant communities welcoming them to the country and helping them to get their feet on the ground here. so i think that is already taking place. i think we what we shouldn't do is to see immigrant communities as takers in a way your question would imply. instead we need to see what the immigrant communities can bring to the country and how question

help to get them a step ahead. >> host: let's take a look at american's perspective on how illegal immigrants should be dealt with. 59% say they should be allowed to stay and apply for citizenship. 25% say those here illegally should be required to leave the united states. 11% say allowed to stay but no citizenship. we recently saw a major coalition of evangelical groups calling for what they're saying should be a clear path to citizenship. what do you think about that? >> guest: i support a path to citizenship. i think the numbers bear out what i was talking about earlier. a do youing consensus say we agree more than disagree on the issue. no one is for totally open borders. we all for border security. we must have it in order to enforce the law of the cub. no one is saying on the other hand or very few people are saying we thought have the kind of police force that would come in and deport 12 million people. what is the alternative? the at five is to say how do we justly and fairly and humanely

help people to become contributing part of the society and have the kind of future they came here looking for? many of them holding to american values the reason they came here. many committed christians, i would add and share many of the same values i share. and so i think there's growing con consensus there to say what is the path to citizenship mean? it means that we do not want people to be left in the shadows. we want them to be able to come forward and move forward with us as a country. >> how do you talk to republicans who don't agree with you? let's look at senator ted cruz and others in the house and senate. some of whom are self-professed christian. how do you speak with them about the issues. >> guest: right. i think again most people on either side of the issue have vailed and legitimate concerns. and so some who are fearful of path to citizenship concerned about a path to citizenship are arguing what we don't want to do is to somehow penalize people

who have played by the rules and have come here. we don't want to fare down the rule of law. -- and i think that's true. and since that's the case, we need find a way to take the next step. so i think the concern is valid at the front end. but i don't think that ultimately it's workable. >> host: russell moor is our guest. the president elect at the southern baptist ethic and religious entity charged by the southern baptist. he mentioned his predecessor richard land leaving that position. in his 60s. you're 41? >> guest: right. >> host: what does it mean to have a young person?

>> guest: i'm not sure 41 is young. >> host: compared to 66. >> guest: i think so. what is happening in evangelical life and southern baptist life, there's a connecting of generations i think that some of the generational fragmentation that we have seen in some of our churches is starting to be resolved. younger people are active in evangelical life and southern baptist life. and we have a greater generation pouring themselves to a younger generation. i hope to be a bridge between the younger and older generation in the years to come. >> host: albert is the next caller on charleston, rhode island. >> caller: good morning. [inaudible] there is a war so you to wage. i'll tell you what it is. it's that the secular left is trying to turn this country totally around.

there are wars against christianity. in the school of our children, they have trying to take away all the values that country was started on. what really, really infuriates me i see no christian try to involve themselves in the secular left how they approach their religion. but they are totally -- it's schools, work, every phase of american life what they're doing in rhode island here we had a statute up in providence that god bless the veterans in world world war ii. we had to take it down. we have to -- there is actually a war that the secular leftist is raging again christian society in this country. and -- >> host: let's leave it there. >> guest: where i would agree with albert is that there is an understanding sometimes in the country that having separation of church and state means that

one must have a secular rising influence that margin alizing the voice of religious people and people of faith. obviously as not only as a christian as an american, i believe that's not the way to go. i think we need to not silence voices in the public square. we need empower them. we have more conversation in the public square including about the thing of ultimate importance. of the faith that animates us. and that disagreements about those things. so i would agree with him there's often a misunderstanding of religious liberty and separation of church and state. that leads to some really serious threats to religious liberty in this country that i think we ought to be concerned about coming on in the future. i think sometimes the debates that we have in term of the way we as war on us are less than helpful. but i think that's an important conversation to have. >> caller in washington, d.c.,

ew a democrat. go ahead. >> caller: thank you. first of all, i would like to -- the discussion many of us have not developed a true position. i know, i have not. because being a christian i'm still developing right-wing with the idea of not forcing anyone to be like i am. i mean, my ministry and part of my ministry is branch out in a way to compel people about the way i live. if it happens to be what i say on one thing. more importantly where i live. you know, they choose to want to take that way of life. that's what we're calling to do. and so civil rights, i think people should have the choice to choose. >> host: you're talking about gay marriage? >> caller: any aspect of life including gay marriage. i'm against gay marriage -- i

should not want to force my belief on anyone as someone who chooses to be an atiest. you know, it's not my right make it legally where they have to be a christian. we cannot force anyone to be what we are. i think that this discussion is important for -- those are not in agreement with that doesn't necessarily have the total life to define something like that marriage that exists between a man and woman. that's up for discussion. >> host: quick question before you let you go. how much does your religious faith influence your vote? and your politics >> caller: it impact it is to a degree. what degree? i don't know i can't give you a number.

>> guest: i would agree with him that no one wants cohearse people. i think the problem with saying that is that many of the issues that perhaps you're referring to aren't about cohearsessing people to hold believes they don't hold at all. for instance on the marriage question, both sides are arguing that marriage is important and that the state has to address the question of marriage. we both agree to that. we simply disagree on what the definition of marriage is and so we can't simply say the state is going to ignore this and be totally neutral on the question of marriage because the state has an interest in marriage. and what i would say is why is the state interested in marriage? and i would say there's something unique about the congress call union between a man and woman that is different from other relationships and the state has an interest in that because of the harm that can be b done to children and families in future generation.

that's true. that hardly takes all the issue off the table. >> host: a recent poll asked people whether they thought the basis for legality for same-sex marriage should be based on the institution or states individual laws. 56% said the constitution. 36% said laws in each state. what does that that's say to you. >> guest: i think you have a lot of conflicting visions when it comes to question of marriage right now. how are we one to frame the discussion? and so i think it is -- both sides recognize it's a complicated matter if you're simply going state by state. when it comes to marriage. what happens to someone who is so-called married in one state and not married in another state? that was the intent behind the defense of marriage act. now before the supreme court is 0 to say in term of the federal government we're going recognize a certain definition of marriage. and i believe the state has an

interest in man, woman, -- living lives in other way. that's simply to say it's a unique sort of relationship the state has an interest in because of the consequences. karl in ohio, independ. >> caller: good morning, everybody. how from you? >> host: good. >> caller: i must be getting old twenty years ago, we would never be talking about these kind of issues. breaking the law, being other in the country, we're talking about letting gays get married. the family values are out the door. they are gone. they are gone for good. i am so scared because the liberals, have really ruined this country and the republicans have not helped much. they made things worse. we're not talking about getting jobs. we're getting rid of social security, getting rid of medicare. i can't believe how much we have

changed in this country. thank you. >> guest: well, i agree with karl that you have had sudden changes. consider for instance the same-sex marriage argument. this is a conversation that is changed dramatically not only just since 2004 but even in the last month or two. the conversation is changed. that's one reason why social conservatives say we ought not to base radical changes in public policy on the basis as something as l cultural moment. if you have something as important as marriage historically and marriage we ought to protect that and conserve it. >> host: question on twitter. a what will the position on fiscal issues be? >> guest: christians disagree to a great extent on what particular fiscal policies and economic policies ought to be. so you won't see the erlc coming

out with a specific policy on what next year's budget ought to look like, for instance. we'll have certain priority and values that thought shape the way we see economics, the way we see our responsibility as a country to live within our means. and to empower people to be able to provide for their families and bread for their children. but we're not going the kind of place that takes a position on everything and assigns bible verses to it . >> host: we have aty pow on twitter. theth i ethics and religious clibty commission. our guest is the president elect of the group. he'll start in the job officially on june 1st. let's go to florida. an agree, republican. >> caller: good morning, dr. moore. it's great to hear your voice and to stand up for the christian belief. i do believe everybody has an opportunity to make their own choices in this world. i do think that our country was founded on principle of the bible. i don't think redefining what

things are is in a good way. marriage is marriage. god created man. he created woman from man. he meant for women and men to be married and have a family. i think the last three callers that you had expressed a great deal of concern as christians. we do -- we don't want to ski our country bawl -- fall by the wayside. we have such bigger problems. the financial problem and i just want to know i'm praying for you as a leader and speaker that as you get in front of the people and you speak the word of what is true. people understand you trying to present the gospel in a way that, you know, i think we should stand up for what is right as christian. i thank you for taking this time to do that this morning.

>> guest: thank you, angie. i think one of the things that is important for christian believer such as myself and for all salespeople to say -- people what we're dealing with here is ultimately, at least for me as a christian and optimistic scenario not a pessimistic scenario. the situations that we face are very important and many cases very dire. and the consequences are crucial. but if we really believe what jesus has said about the kingdom of god and about the ongoing march of the gospel in history. then we don't come to this as loser and people frantic or people who are outraged. we come with a quited confidence that we speak to our neighbors and we seek to do what is right and we seek to oppose evil where evil is present. and whatever form that is. and speak a word of good. we don't do that as people who are terrified. we do it as people who are confident in the sovereignty of god.

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>> guest: i think the answer to that is not one party or the other to pup christians as one group. we have to make a compelling case for the importance of the issues and long for candidates who are going to be willing to not only listen to that, but also to articulate that vision of human life. >> host: what does it take for the ethics and religious liberty commission of the southern baptists to really sanctify a candidate and support them? for example, when it comes to abortion issues, does the candidate have to be pro-life to the extent of believing abortion should not happen in the case of rain or incest?

>> guest: we endorse issues. we say to churches and christians, these are the sorts of questions that are on the table in the culture now, and these are the thing we believe are of priority to be concerned about. the life of the unborn and you move forward through a whole list of issues, and then, also, speaking to cap dates and policy policymakers. these are the things christians are concerned about, and this is why. the pro-life issue is in the just a generational blip, but something that is increasing in terms of the next generation of evangelicals, roman catholic, and others as issue of concern, and so we communicate that to candidates and elected officials and others, but we don't endorse candidates. >> host: blackstone, massachusetts, susan, a democratic. good morning. >> caller: good morning. my comment is about the bill of rights. when they mentioned the freedom of religion, it seems like the

gun -- the gun part, they never kind of focused on that second part, like the first part is freedom of religion, and the second part is there shall be no law that the government should make against, you know, that would prohibit the free exercise of that religion, and i think sometimes this separation of church and state, which is, according to some, not really mentioned anywhere in the constitution. they kind of started going overboard on, you know, not allowing, say a christian group to have an area in the school to meet or having children in school talk about their, like, christmas or hanukkah and

explain to the other kids what that's all about. i think tolerance and the more children know about each other in their states, in their ethnic backgrounds, makes for a better melting pot for our country, and the other thing i wanted to mention on the abortion issue, it's tough when government gets involved in those issues. they did it initially because women were doing horrible things to themselves to abort their children, and then they said, well, they should get hospital care, and then it went overboard, and now abortion for any reason is supposedded to be fine, and i think most people feel that abortion is not right,

but i think it's also between a person and god. he's the one who reads the heart of the person and makes the decision. we can say it's outlawed or that it's fine, but either way, it's between the person and god. >> guest: except there's at least two people involved. the question is not should government be involved in abortion, but the question is what we refer to as a fetus or em bree -- embryo, is this, in fact, a person, an unborn human person? if so, we hardly say about any other person, well, that person's right to life is dependent upon someone else, and that person's relationship with his god or with his doctor, but we say that person has inalienable right to life rooted in the image of god, that life

is not meaningful, simply because of someone's utility or usefulness or wantedness. a human life is in and of itself precious and worthy of protecting. that's -- that's the argument that i think we're having. is this a person? is this our neighbor? if this is our neighbor, then we ought to see to it that that person has a right to life, recognize the right to life that god conferred and work to help women and chirp to move forward. that's the reason why we need -- i'm for laws preacing unborn children, laws against legal abortion. i'm also for creating the kind of adoption culture and widow care culture within churches that we welcome in children whose birth mothers made adoption plans, and we welcome in mothers who are in crisis, pregnant women in crisis. i think you see that in chucialgs all around the country, both of those two

things hang together. >> host: in ohio, justin, independent line, good morning. >> caller: morning. i just had a quick question on the religious freedom aspect you talk about earlier. you said that you looked for religious freedom in terms of your views and stuff, but a couple issues that have been brought up. you said that there's state interest. what goes into the evaluation for your organization as to whether or not there is a state interest or it should be just left up for freedom to the individual? >> guest: well, that would, of course, depend upon the influence of the act on the rest of the society. how does this affect our neighbors? how does this affect the civic arena? we all agree there's things we don't agree with that we wouldn't choose ourselves that shouldn't happen. i don't -- i don't want to smoke cigarettes, but i don't think smoking cigarettes ought to be illegal. on the other hand, abortion is

not just a moral decision, but takes the life of another perp, and therefore, the state has app interest there. when it comes to the question of marriage, for instance, all of us in this country or most of us in the country do agree that the state has an interest in marriage. thars the reason why -- that's the reason why we have divorce laws for instance. that's the reason why we have chill support, the state enforces child support because it's in the state's interest to see it that children are not left without the safety net of stable families, so the question then becomes, well, then, what is the way to do that? what is the definition of a marriage? that's not restrictive of religious freedom of people. we have a responsibility together as a society to maintain the just society. >> host: dr. russell moore, president at the southern baptist convention. the president of the southern baptist convention did a recent

interview this week that gained some attention. he's the headline in "huffington post," conservative radio host and reverend suggests that gay marriage and the north korean threats are linked. it says that reverend fred of the southern baptist convention talked with radio hosts rick wild, and the reverend said this when asked could our flight to immorality unleash this madman, over here in asia, the leader of north korea, and the reverend said it could be a possibility, not surprised in a time when we debate same-sex marriage, whether or not we should have gays leading the boy scout movement, i don't think it's a coincidence that we have a madman in asia saying some of the things he's saying. what does he mean, and what's your response? >> guest: he spoke since them saying he's not making a connection between the threat. i think what he was intended to say is that we are living in a

time of great to -- tumult, great change, and all of these things are pressing issues that are facing us right now. obviously, i don't think he believes that north korea is in response to whatever's going on in the united states of america when it comes to same-sex marriage, and he's clarified that on anderson cooper and other places. fred luter is a heroic man, a godly man, pastors in new orleans and was one of the anchoring figures in new orleans after katrina to lead the community towards recovery, a great gospel preacher and leader. i have nothing but respect for him. i don't think he's intended to say that somehow these two issues are directly linked. i think he's just simply saying we don't really umsz how to read our times with the great tumult going on around us, something that many of the callers, even this morning, they expressed.

things are changing, don't know how to read it. i think that's what he met. >> host: republican, steve, good morning. >> caller: good morning. i really admire you as an interviewer. calling from cleveland, ohio, if i sound anything by cheerful, it's because i have not had my coffee yet, and i'm going to be 80 years old. i have to ask mr. moore a respectful question. >> host: okay, we're listening, steve, go ahead. >> caller: all right. i'm a baritone, a singer, and i sing in a roman catholic -- something that was unheard of -- i sing in the choir at the first baptist church of cleveland, ohio, proudly. the reverend doctor is tremendous, and i listen avidly to his sermon, and i just wanted to ask mr. moore on what basis he says that the holy family,

st. joseph, his lawful wife, mary, and our lord jesus christ were illegal immigrants. i think that's prudent to the topic. >> host: are you saying they were illegal immigrants in your opinion? >> caller: he said they were illegal immigrants, and i'm just asking on what basis do thaw say that? >> host: to you. >> guest: i said earlier when we welcome the soldier and stranger among us, those who are undocumented in the strange land, remember, our lord jesus, himself, was an immigrant in egypt, our lord's parents took him into egypt after the threat that was coming to herrod living in a strange land for a period of years in exile. people who follow jesus ought to have compassion upon those also taking children out of very, very difficult situations, going into a strange land where they don't know the people, they

don't have connections, they don't have support networks, and we have to show mercy to them. >> host: go get some coffee, steve, and we'll move on to bobby in oklahoma, democratics' line. hi, bobby. >> caller: thanks, how are you? > host: i'm good, how are you? >> caller: i'm all right. we have callers today who take it as a secular war on christianity, this whole gay marriage issue. i'm a homosexual, i'm almost 40 years old -- excuse me -- i was raised in a church, my grandpa's a minister. i'm familiar with scripture. i don't see it as a war. i see it as finally we're able to speak out for our civil rights. i don't think that this zapses me from god. i think that the definition of marriage would be a commitment of lifelong commitment between two people, male or female, that

love each other and want to be together in the eyes of god forever making a commitment, and i've heard mentioned that it's for protection of the children and the future of family values. i don't see how that is different from two people who are straight being married and having children when i have been in the same relationship for 13 years and don't see in the future i'd ever be outside that relationship, and i never have been, i just think that we're finally able to bring this out in the open, all -- there's so many laws that are based on christian, sexual miranda morald we're tired of having it shoved down our throats. >> host: okay, bobby, let's get a response. >> guest: i wouldn't say the definition of marriage is something that's shoving christian morality down our

throats. as a matter of fact, until just very, very recently, there's a broad consensus in the country about at least with the minimal definition of what marriage was. now, that doesn't mean we've been living in some ideal society when it comes to marriage. we have had a marriage crisis when it comes to divorce and cohabitation and all sorts of issues for a long time, but i don't think the answer to that is to expand the definition of marriage beyond its natural limits, and having said that, that doesn't mean that evangelical christians, catholic christians, or others have hostility to the gay and please beian neighbors, we don't. we have respect and love for the neighbors. we disagree about what the proper purpose of human sexuality is, which we believe is consigned to a marital union of a man and woman, but that doesn't mean we have a war going on against our friends and neighbors. most of us have gay and lesbian

friends and neighbors, and we don't seek to oppress people, but we seek, instead, to say we really believe this issue is important because a god designed sexuality to work in a certain way for the good of the people and for human flourishing. that's not an act of hostility, but a matter of disagreement. >> host: dr. russell ruer, president legislate of the ethics and religious liberty commission going into that role june 1st. thank you so much for sharing your time with us. >> guest: thanks so much.

>> now, the challenges facing print journalism from circulation rates and online payment models. they are part of the spring conference of the society of american business editors and writers held today at george washington university. this is about an hour. [inaudible conversations] >> good morning. nice of you to be here. i'm rob, a journalism professor at colorado state university, and i was president in

2010-2011. in the interest of full disclosure, with the title of this presentation being the future the print, i lost my print job in 2009 as business editor of the rocky mountain news when it closed in february of that year. some of you read the report recently issued on the state of journalism this year. if you have not read it, i read it on the plane ride here, so you don't have to. they trade print dollars for digital dimes as revenue from print e van evaporated faster than digital revenue have grown. now things could be worse. the news industry may be entering the era of mobile pennys. print ads fell for the sixth consecutive year last year by 1.5 billion or 7.3%. for news magazines, single copy sales up 16% last year, yet, the

atlantic, here today to present reported subscription increase of 6%. the two biggest developments of last year probably were digital pay walls and reduced print frequency. it captures the odd mix of expansion and contraction not typical within the news industry. digital pay plans are adopted right now at 450 of the nation's 14 # 00 dailies, and they appear to be working even at small and mid sized papers. for now, the future of print seems to be shifting with more of an industry acknowledgement it's around for years, even decades contributing a smaller, but still significant portion of an organization's revenue. to quote media analysts, ken doctor, until recently, the holy grail was summed up in two words, "replacement revenue,"

and now the jig is up. no matter how faze you shosm digital dirt into the chasm of print loss, you can't fill the hole. companies experiment in a big way with a variety of revenue streams and organizational changes, some of these are too new even to be measured industry wide, but they are showing signs of stabilizing revenue which syrup is promising to hear for us. here to talk about those things, first of all, kate, senior vice president and news for ganette corporation since 2008. her one-line job description is to elevate journalism across the country. also with us is chris hendricks, vice president for interactive media. this is astounding to me, and since 1999, he's been involved in digital since 1994, prebrowser days, and filling out the lineup is kim, vice

president and general manager of atlantic digital coming to the economy in 20 # 12, having been with hurst magazine since 2006. we'll start out eat participant, each panelist has a relatively short powerpoint, and we'll open things up for questions. if you ask a question, care to ask a question, you need to be a member, and you have to go up to one of the strategically placed microphone, identify yourself, and ask the question. with that, we'll start with chris hendricks. >> thank you, one of the things is you need glasses to read. i'll try to get this running here. start with a brief about what we are about. you know, the company, itself -- it's up there, good -- you know, 30 daily newspapers located around the u.s. from miami,

florida, all the way through anchorage, alaska, a lot of different markets. we have about a 2.4 million daily circulation, 1.4 billion in revenue, 2 # 00 million of that in digital revenue, and about 40 # million uniques -- 40 million uniques come to the site every month. it's about journalism, believe it or not, this is where we start quality journalism. we have won 52 pulitzers, but we're not a big name in this. small little company from sacramento, california. if you look at the strategy, and this is what i want to talk about today, about revenue disverseification. tradition nayly -- traditionally, newspapers relied on print and advertising with it believing they were linked. with journalism, our feeling is, look, doesn't matter where the money comes from, find the profitable businesses to throw out the cash to continue our commitment to journalism.

that's what we seek to do whether it's print, digital, or niche products, doesn't matter to us. we diversified over the last, probably, two decades away from print, deliberately, even before the digital came along, we looked at diversification as a strategy. the recent press release for the fourth quarter shows what that means for us. 36% of our total revenue now comes from non-traditional revenue sources. 16% from niche products. we have over 200 niche products publishedded regularly, whether they are digital or print, and another 20% coming from digital, pure digital, that 200 million i talk about, and the rest come from traditional print. our strategy's to continue to evolve the print, but also to take advantage of opportunities of things we see happening in the market. we'll continue to believe in print. one of the things that you can see up here, i guess you can, there's four touch points from the q4 release that are interesting. one is you finance 900 million

dollars worth of debt, pushing bonds out to 2022 at a lower rate than we currently have those bonds sitting at. conventional wiz doll suggests newspapers are dead, but i rely on the market place to determine that, and financial folks believe we have at least at decade. [laughter] second, as you can see, the diversification points i mentioned. what's the strategy? on a distribution channels, we have to master all the channels that are out there. we are aware of them, print, digital, e-mail, everything we can, but with a focus on the consumer and how they consume, so channels are with we are focused, and you see the different behaviors that each one of the channels have, and we work hard to master the channels. each has different compelling reasons why consumers like them. we know the websites, shallow, fly-by readership, five, ten, 10 pages a month. on the tablet, consumption is ten times that.

we have to learn how to publish content and differentiate ourselves. it's about advertising as i said before. we have to develop new revenue streams at all times. a few examples, and i don't want to bore you to death here, but as you can see here on the bottom here, there's a bunch of brands there, non-traditional newspaper brands. some we own. some we partner with. we sell other people's products. we sell yahoo inventory on the website, nothing to do with us, but we have a sales force capable of doing that, we do it profitably and allow jumpism to continue. we have our own brand, our own version of groupon. you hear about living social and groupon, but we have advantages in our local market places that believe, we believe, make us successful. we use our newspapers. we use our local sales forces, something that most of these competitors don't use. we use our local relationships. we know something else in our deals product, that our readers are much more affluent, much

more educated, and spend more money when they walk into the stores, and they are not the traditional groupon person. this is 5 highly profitable line of business for us. it works. it will continue to work. we don't look to flip it out and take it to market and monetize it, but it's a way for us to bring new customers in at the low end of the spectrum into our agencies, realms, and services, and work with them to be successful and be more successful products and services that w. i have some of them are local. this is our plight as a small and medium sized business. the category newspapers traditionally could not attack because of the cost structure of print. we were priced too hie. with the disappearance of large advertisers and consolidation of retailers, we're forced down downstream. our cost structures still remain, but we can develop bundled products and services they need and want in the digital spectrum, whether it's

mobile landing pages, search optimization, marketing, whatever it is, bundle it, work with them to help them understand the performance of the product and services larching this line last year to test it, in kansas, and also in fort worth, successful, and rolling it out in more and more market places. we rely on the core sales force to sell it as well as dedicated sellers. we are ag agnostic about the dee who salespeople sell everything or certain things. it depends on the product. when we need higher sells, we will, but when the core sales force handles it, let them do it. preprints are a large beast for us, a lot of revenue. the sunday preprints are profitable for us, but we worry about where is it going to go digitally? we, the industry, founded a company called wonderful media, and they have a product called find and save, the digital

equivalent of preprint newspaper. it's a compliment strategy. cars.com, you know, but some don't. cars.com is owned by newspapers, created by newspapers. it is a product to the automotive section in the newspapers. careerbuilder, also owned by newspapers, another product to what's in print. this fits with the strategies of the print products, but we are opportunistic, and deal saver is an example of that. the last digital page strategy as earlier said. this is big for newspapers. we launched all the newspapers l.a. -- last year with digital paid, been very successful, and print subscribers engauge it, increase the price for it, they engage in the products, and we capture a lot of digital one-way subscribers using a threshold model, but not boring you with that because the next speaker has more to say on the topic similar to ours, so thank you very much. [applause]

>> thank you chris, and now we're going to hear from kate. >> thank you. [background sounds] [inaudible conversations] >> okay. we're good.

no, we're good. ha-ha, no. yeah, we're good. sorry about that. technology is not my forte. ..

a people crave information, more than ever so it has value, and we can't do this business and give it away free. people do value what we have. so we've created a new way of delivering it, and month do mono

tieing it. people don't describe to a form of delivery. they subscribe to the content, and so you pay for the content and you may access it any way you want, through print, desk top, your choice, but you're subscribing to the content. every subscription is full access, so you may choose to have delivery seven days a week, just weekends, you may access is any way you choose. we launched this about a year ago now, and and rolled it out across the country into 78 of our community newspapers. this model does not apply to u.s.a. today nor our television

stations. what i'm talking about here today are our community newspapers from very large, to mid-size markets, so very small markets. we completed the rollout over the course of last year. it was ambitious. we were sprinting but we got it done. we know now that more than half of our readers are getting news and information from multiple -- at least two platforms. multiple platform every day. so we feel like we have to be there. and it's working very well. we have had growth in subscription revenue of 24%. that's tied to the fact that we, too, raise prices when we went to market with this. we feet like we had been undervaluing our content in some ways. readers see more value. so we did a rate increase that averaged 32% across the board.

people are adapting it. overviews are up substantially. we have 47,000 digital only subscribers, but well north of two million subscribers overall, and half of those have activated their digital piece of their subscription. another important part of theline was that we have to give readers unique high-impact journalism, to distinguish our ourselves and be of al view. we cannot produce the mundane. we cannot produce commodity information you can acquire numerous places. we have to give -- if we ask readers to invest their time and money with us, we have to give them something of value, and that needs to be unique,

high-impact local journalism. so we really focused in every market on understanding the key audiences and what day care -- what they care about deeply weapon dent have a paint by numbers approach to journalism. our approach is you and your market need to understand your readers and develop the content they most want, and we focused on that, too, as we rolled out this program. we invested in people. we invested in technology to make this happen. we identified key places where additional staffing was needed to support the content evolution. we distributed iphones so every single journalist across the company so they could do more video, file from the field. so, we invested in making this happen. moving ahead, this year we're focusing on expanding our

digital portfolio with -- made of ipad apps, new android apps. we're working hard to sustain and build retention, and our goal is to increase our digital-only subscribers between five and seven-fold. so ambitious plans there. so, that at the highest level is our approach to print, is to say it is part of our full portfolio, and we are happy to report that our readers are embracing that. >> thank you, kate. we'll now hear from tim lyle from atlantic.com.

>> good morning. i'm more or less the odd man out because obviously i'm not coming from a newspaper background, and i think being a magazine there are certainly a lot of similarities the business of newspapers but also some distinct differences. just to start, i think the atlantic is a brand that has been around for a very long time so we were originally launched in 1857. and obviously over the years have been known to contribute to many areas of importance to the evolution of this country and to the national debate. one of the big differences between us and some of these newspapers, i think, is that contrary to most newspaper's history we actually for a long

time were not making money at all. so it wasn't until 2010 where we actually posted our first profit, in the memory of our current owner. so, it's a bit of a different tale. i think the stories of the atlantic is not about the decline of print but about the rise of additional platforms and the growth of the brands. in fact our print, as you'll see in a couple more slides, is actually pretty solid today, and there certainly are challenges but it's not the story of decline i think you typically hear in the market as we talk about that piece. today, though, obviously, our digital efforts are a big piece of what we do. i was brought on to the anymore 2012 as the first general manager for deathal -- digital, and that's an acknowledgment of where we need to invest to continue to innovate and reach our audiences wherever they are.

last year we saw almost 30% of our traffic coming from social on digital. we see about 40,000 average facebook recommends per cover story, and a fair amount of twitter usage as well. in 2012 one of our blockbuster stories, which by many accounts we believe at least since we have been recording, has more readership than any of our other stories was the "why women still can't have it all." and at it fascinating because it wasn't a new conversation but certainly did spark a new debate that continues today, and i think we're really proud to be part of that conversation and to be contributing to the national debate there. more on facebook. more on twitter. i think the interesting thing about this slide is one of the things we get asked a lot and we

have to rethink is, who are our comp pet fors? some in the digital realm when you look at your competitors, we do look at brands like the new yorker. like the economist. but really our competitors in the digital world today are much larger, and they're -- it's a lot more variety there. so, you see brands like the daily beast or like gawker that-under purely digital brand that we're now adding to the competition. so atlantic about using the trust of our brand and building on top of that with innovation to find new audiences to increase our reach, to increase our impact. so when you look at us today, we are still the magazine, and in many ways sort of the core of our business. that's where the biggest ideas

sort of get explored. but we're also daily and hourly and by the minute on our dot-com property, and likely their and atlantic cities. a very important part of our business is events business. so we're now live. we do -- don't want get this number wrong -- we do more than 30 events a year and have a fantastic team that is really out there, bringing what we do in print and online to audiences. mobile is part of digital, but increasingly people are fragmented in how they want to consume content. and in 2012, 30% of our audience was coming from mobile devices whether that be smartphones or tablets. we expect that's going to continue to grow, and i won't be

surprised if that reaches 50% by the end of this year. so, lots of new challenges and also lots of new opportunities. just to cover sort of the key pieces of business here. so, as rod mentioned in the intro, the atlantic subscription base was up 6% in 2012. news stand was actually down a little bit so netanyahu we -- so net-net we were up 4.3%. so this is relevant to the competition. really makes us stand out. the interesting thing about it, and for anybody who knows the bowels of circulation modeling, a lot of companies are able to boost their circulation because they're actually losing money on circulation. we don't do that. this isuay a real increase, and i think it speaks to the fact that the brand of the atlantic has grown, and the reach of our brand has grown as we have expanded in these other areas and grown our audience.

so we see our circulation being very strong today. certainly i think newsstand in general for magazines is challenged, just as barnes & noble's shut down stores and has the pressures and the grocery aisles continue to sort of decrease the amount people are spending on discretionary magazine purchasing. but subscriptions are up and we see high demand for that. live, as i mentioned some of our biggest events, washington ideas forum. yesterday we had a conference here, women on washington, which is an ongoing series, where linda douglas was interviewing valerie jarrett. fascinating interview, and if it's of interest to you, check it out online. you can watch the full program. philosophy new york ideas, we're going to be doing philosophy

in -- doing a festival in d.c. in the fall. great events with the biggest, boldest thinkers, together with thoughtful and influential people to have the tough conversations about where this country is going a how we make it better. digital. these numbers are actuallycom store numbers. last year was 12.3 million emergency our instincts on that atlantic so we continue to grow. it's interesting because it's all totally organic. largely driven by social and just -- it's been a pleasure to see the brands continue to be well-received by the audience, and to be distributed in that way. mobile actually -- hate to use the word mobile because it lumps a lot of different strategies into one bucket which is not really correct. what i would say is we have mobile optimized sites. we have digital replicas.

ipad epas, all of them have different business models and all of them are important as we think about reaching our audience as we go forward. finally, i think, the last thing about 2013, for the atlantic it's really about pursuing new platforms and new ways to reach the audience. so two things of focus this year, we're heavily focused on other paid content revenue sources. so, how else can we build on the atlantic's trust and innovate against that. we just announced today a long-term partnership with long read.com that will help us highlight the long-form journalism online, and we're also be launching new products as we go, so more ebooks and new digital products that will spread the atlantic even further. and then finally we're going to spend a lot of time investing in

video this year. so i think the future of media brands has to be multiplatform. tv is sort of the last space to really see some of the new media disruption. but we're starting to see that as cable ads decline and people are increasingly, the younger generations, have no intention of ever signing up for cable. they're consuming all of their media online so as we look to those trends, video is the next frontier where we have to make a name for ourselves in that space. so that's the atlantic in a nutshell. >> thank you, kim. now that we have heard from the panelists we would like to hear from you if you would approach the microphones and identified yourselves. >> i'm mark, a member and formerly worked for forbes magazine. what aid like to hear from each of you quickly, everybody is trying to figure this out in

terms of, do pay walls work, pay walls not work, how do you convert people from free to paid, or is the web only going to be an advertiser-supported platform at a very diminished advertising revenue model, or are you at some point when things reach a critical pass, be able to charge more for ads on the web? right now things are growing but for many places it's not a money-making proposition or a break-even or slightly profitable proposition. when does it become a profitable profitable proposition, and what is going to happen? consolidation? branding? what is the future? what is the strategy? i think that's what everybody here would like to know other than things are growing and getting better. is it a certain brand will be able to command pricing power? or certain brand -- any insight you can offer would be

appreciated. >> there's about six questions there. >> how do you make money on the web innings what i really want to know. is whether than just put a bunch of content up or put a pay wall up or a lot of different segments up. how do you make money, lots of money? >> well, we do $200 million and it's very profitable, more profitable than the actual printed version of the newspaper. so it's matter of where the product selections you're putting in place and not. there's inventer to the inventory is outpacing demand so the prices are coming down, whether at the national level or local level. rates are coming down. it's almost commodities. so what other businesses can you be? one of them happens to be paid. paid is -- anybody says paid, i say which paid model are you talking sunset the fleshhold model where you let people model

and after a certain period of reading they're asked to pay? and then they're this wall guard that says you get nothing until you pay, and then there's derivatives in between that. we have applied the threshold mod'll we said people are casual readers. we don't get them to convert into fully page so have 15 pains per 30-day cycle. after that we'll ask you to pay. we've also gone back to our most local readers and say you get all these extra products for free -- not free but you get a slight increase and you'll have access to these products. those are the ones we want to push into the digital spectrum over time. but on the digital only side you can play game is with the threshold. we have a strategiy we'll lower the threshold over time to capture more and more natives. ones that do not want the print product. then we have the revenue diversification strategy where we have nondisplay advertising

related ads. carses.com is a growth category for the business for us. it's also a category that is inverted, where there's more digital revenues than print revenue. 53% of the franchise is digital. we sill automotive systems to dealers. we sell them an inventory him in that allows their cars to be pumped into cars.com where people can find them. that has nothing do with display advertising but a highly profitable business that build over time, to the point where our second largest digital category is automotive. so my point is i don't think there is a answer. the-and-to find profitable businesses you can leverage off an existing enter prize or add to your enter prize that will be the solution over the long haul. we're in so many business now, and relationships and partnerships is so big, but they're growing and they're more profitable than the printed

products. >> thank you. can we hear from the other panelist quickly? >> kate? >> yeah. i would give much to the same answer. journalism is our core business and we are profitable. we are in a career-builder. we're in point where we, too, have diversified. i guess i would disagree with the idea that we have to figure out how to make money. we are making money, and supporting our journalism. >> again, for us as well, are profitable, in 201260% of the ad revenue was coming from digital. so it's false to say that we actually are not making money from digital. i think for us we have the unique influential audience and that's part of the story so the our cpms are fairly substantial, not the bottom of the barrel, but as go forward,

the fragmentation of media means the days of having one or two business models -- i argue in the past it was an advertising and circulation model. the days out that are gone, and so as we go forward the real challenge is we have to be able to do circulation, we have to be able to do advertising, we have to do advertising on multiple platforms but we also have to find other ways to continue to reach our audience and so that's the challenge, and diversifying, doing more things, doing those things with the same amount of people. it's just this -- it's more frenetic pace, i guess. >> thank you very much. >> next question. >> my name is kevin durant, an editor at global post. kim, this question is to you. actually i know a few weeks ago one of your evidence did temperatures had a dustup with the correspondent, trying to reach an agreement with the

correspondent on a fair fee for a story. i just want to ask you, what is your approach in budgeting for editor toal -- editorial and how are you trying to approach that in a way that is fair for correspondents and also good for business. >> i would say first all the atlantic is very committed to paid journalists. we value their, and it's our position they should be paid. i think the difference -- the challenge today is that in online, the way the business models work, we found it makes more sense to have more people on staff, and that's where the bulk of our content comes from. our newsroom is actually -- we have 70% more paid editorial people on staff than we had in 2010. so, we are very committed to journalism and paying for it. i think that scenario is

something of an outliar. our policy generally is to pay our journalists. so, is it true that freelance prices are much lower than they used to be the digital realm? no. >> can the other panelists talk about budgeting for editorial versus business interests vs. new investment in technology platforms and expanding reach? >> drew want to take that? >> i'll go after. >> i'm a content person. i'm not in the business side. so, no, i can't answer that because i don't really know. >> fair enough. never hurts to ask. >> from our perspectivetive it's to try to preserve as much as we have. in the past it's not possible given the circumstances we're in, in declining cash flows about we have done the best we can to preserve the quality of the journalism we produce with the assets we have. so that's the last place we go

when we look to cut. >> thank you. >> next question. >> hi, deb nelson from the conditional of journalism. this is for kate because it's content you said we have to give readers unique high impact local journalism you said you research what they care about. what is that? >> yes. as we went to market with this new plan last year, we rolled out a program of research in every single community, and it's different from community to community. what readers care about in asbury park, new jersey, is very different than what they care about in palm springs, california. so, we did both qualitative and quantitative research in every market to narrow those things that people care about most, and so each community has a written plan. who their audiences are, and it's not universal. >> but going to the content of

that, an example of some trend you're seeing across your news organizations. >> it didn't surprise us that we were delighted to find that just without exception the number one interest is watch dog journalism. everybody expects us to be their eyes and ears, and stay true to that mission. so that was really exciting. watch dog journalism was number one everywhere. but there it splinters. the environment is big in a lot of places. raising a healthy family is northern a lot of places. but then there's very unique things, too. like in our military communities, the issues of retired military folks are very different from people other places. so, there were some broad themes but we're trying to drill down into precise topics. >> thanks. >> next question.

>> i'm beth from american city business journals. i suspect i'm not the only person, kim in the room who is wondering why you didn't talk about courts? >> well, really only because i'm here representing the atlantic as a brand. so atlantic media as a company has several divisions. national journals, government executive, and the atlantic division so my focus is just the atlantic division, confusing because there's lots of atlantics. i think quarts is a great represent television of the company's commitment to funding new ventures dedicated to great journalism, and new topic areas, and quartz had great support from advertising when they launched and continue to see really a fabulous reception. so, i didn't mention it because it's not part of my business but

it is important in our strategy as we think about new ways to reach niche influential audienceses. >> thank you. >> next question. >> i'm jill jordan from the arizona daily star. i had a followup question to the question just before me for kate, about tharyoffs focus and the research you mentioned. i wonder if you you could go into a bit more detail. i under in some places the staff was doing interviews of the community and i wonder how you started to get to the right areas of focus. was it open-ended conversation like focus groups or just know where you were headed in each community? >> we started by bringing all of our editors together for a couple of days in virginia, and reviewing how to analyze all that data that is available to us, that was the science of it. and we gave them tool kits how to do that. but then we also instructed them on more of the art of it,

getting inside people's hearts and brains, and we tried to involve staff in conversations with residents of their communities, to get beyond the obvious answers, to find out what really, day in and day out part of they're daily life we were missing. we can get so focused on the institutional and the things we have always done and lose sight of people's real life. we're trying to weave the two together and stay true to the core values of our journalism and layer on things that people might care about that we're missing. is that close to what you were looking for? >> thanks. >> next question. >> james, and my question is for both kate and chris. i'm wondering if you're seeing more people using apps or web sites and we're seeing an

increase in print subscribers. we have news, thankfully late yesterday, early today, that another number, the cleveland plain-dealer, has decided to eliminate publishing on several days and now will only deliver three days a week. so i'm wondering what your seeing in terms of the relationship between the print business and the digital business and digital producing some cases more print subscribers. >> the answer to the last question is no. in fact doing paid has proven to -- it's slightly increased the decrease that was going on. but that was only pricing kind of sensitivity result. as we look at the different products we have placed in transport of the existing core readership, we're seeing a migration -- a faster migration growth of readership in the replica edition of what we do, which is interesting. but then if you think about it

logically, they understand how that works. if they're moving into the digital only to suddenly have an app for a web site, they don't know how to navigate that. we hope to push them over to digital assets. the real growth is on the digital only subscribers. that's where there's a lot of opportunity to bring in the digital natives, from -- the truth is newspapers like to think everybody should read us. well, that's 35-40% penetration, the majority of people aren't reading in that form so you have to see the pockets of opportunity. i believe the question is, how long will print be around? is a relatively good question but looking from everyday 10,000 baby-boomers are retiring and are living longer so there's a long leg on print but there are examples of people who have been able to turn circulation around and we lope to do that. but i don't think that digital is going to do that.

>> i think that it is helping to stabilize but i don't think we're going to see a rapid ramp in print but we're seeing a rapid ramp in overall con expulsion overall revenue. i don't think i shared the figures earlier that, as we rolled our new subscription model out last year, we saw $20 million in additional revenue and this year we'll see 80 million because of the new plan. so at it supporting the journalism. and we think print will be around a long time. >> do either of your companies have plans to reduce print delivery this year? >> no. >> no. nothing from our reader suggested they want newspapers only certain days of the week. >> next question. >> editorial director at aol athlete question about social, for all of you, but specifically for the atlantic. one of the things we struggle is

we can have a social strategy but how do we quantify and qualify whether those referrals coming in -- does that traffic stick and do they stay? because you can have all the likes you want and all the tweets you want but are you correlating in any way that traffic and how it sticks and then they become subscribers? >> so, i don't have anything that ties that exposure directly to subscriptions but given that we adapt change any of our tactics in the last couple of years on circulation, that the growth that we have seen in subscription, i would -- not scientific but anecdotally saying given where the market is going, there's going to be increased exposure through

storm. question about the return on social is one that we consistently have, and in traditional webs discussions it's always been about, how do we get more page views out of a visit? and so you're constantly thinking about, okay, you came to my site. how do i keep you here long center that's probably the one thing that other than using slide shows which we don't do, we've -- i've struggled to move the needle on that. i think we have to shift the conversation from that goal and has to be more about ongoing repeat visitors throughout a period of time. because what we're seeing is increasingly people -- we actually do have a robot front payment. there is a core audience that comes in through the home page and consumes content and do consume much more than the people coming in through side doors but increasingly twitter is the home payment for a lot of

people. my husband is a perfect example of that. he will never pay for any pay wall. he gets all of his information directly from twitter. he consumes a ton of news but it's all on following the writers and that i like to follow and i'm going to get what i want from them. so i guess to answer your question, on the one hand i think trying place a value on the social door versus the other is maybe not the right conversation that we need to be having, and i think we're still trying to figure out where that evolves to and how we get a more holistic view of valuing our audience. generally i would say one of the amazing things is that there's so much data, but one thing we still struggle with is actually tying the offline with the online with the tablet with the mobile face. so, we have a lot of initiatives we're going to try to be -- we're going to put things in place to actually do a better job of tying those things together so we have a more clear

picture of what the audience is actually doing. >> if anybody else -- >> i would say that's a great answer. >> you know, it's kind of better to understand who the influencer was, and that's what we're trying to dial into. somebody -- kind if like if you're looking for a car and a friend says that's a great car, and you go to the lot and say i want to see that car and somehow you're going to truck into a truck next. that's not going to happen. it's going to be where somebody recommends something and we expected when they land on a page, an experience to come from facebook to come to the sacramento bee, and jarring experience to hear all the trucks, so it's a better understanding who influences what. >> i'm john with the boston business journal. a question for kate. i'm specifically interested in are there certain markets or papers where you can say the pay

wall and digital your only subscriptions are working better? you're selling better in major metro markets or better in isolated markets? can you name some papers where they have been strong in places where you had trouble? and do you have a universal strategy for the porousness of the pay wall and how does that affect your engagement with social media? >> trying to thing where the greatest successes are. we have in almost every market -- let me back up and say part of that rich research we did was also to build a business plan, so that the meter is unique, the pricing ises unique in every market. it was not a one size fits all because different markets have different price sensitivities. some had taken price increases recently and others hadn't. so different plan in every

market. and i can tell you that in almost every one of our markets we're exceeding our business plan. we expected some erosion because of the price increase, and we have held better than we anticipated almost across the board. so we're very pleased with the outcome so far. is there a difference between major markets and smaller markets? no. i think it probably hasmer to do with the competitive nature of different markets than anything. >> do you mean if there's more competitors with news, it's harder to charge for the news? >> it's -- we have to invest harder in building our brand and keeping or acquiring the readers in more competition areas. >> how many hits to biehl usual

live get? -- do beep people usually get of if i don't want to can describe. >> in the low end is five, the high enis 15 or 20678 it's different from market to market. and we adjust as we see necessary. >> we'll hear from the final two questioners now. >> i'm also with the cnbc.com. in the scramble for revenues, advertising is getting more and more aggressive. i believe the atlantic had a little snafu with an ad from scientology a couple months ago. where do you draw the line? do you have procedures in place for what kind of advertising you're going to take or not take? is it formal? is it weighed in editorial screens? >> we do now. i think that scenario was regrettable but it taught us a

lot, and we had, and we continue to have, very robust conversations about how we handle those things. i think the atlantic has had an interesting past few years because we have gone from being unprofitable to profitability, into continuing to try and support the journalism that we're doing. we didn't have policies before and that was a mistake. we were moving too fast. we -- when you're a certain size it's -- to some extent you can avoid some of the problemmed. we finally hit the sizes where there were things that were slipping through the cracks. so, none of that debacle -- we knew right away when we saw it start to blow up that what we had done wrong. it wasn't a question of disagreeing or being in denial weapon recognized our mistakes and moved very quickly to try to recollectty republic rectify

those and now we're in a position where people are doing native advertising and there really aren't standards for it. everybody is making up their rules as they go. i would say -- this where is going -- we do look at buzz feed and mashable and these other brands and that's the digital world who we consider the competitors or the people that are sort of leading the way into a new era. so, -- but what we have learned is that people will hold our brand to a much higher level, that we have to be more upfront in order to respect the trust with our audience that the bar for us is different. i think we have made a lot of progress. i think going forward, we do think that our advertisers have ideas and messages that can contribute to an overall conversation, but we will not make the mistake of not being clear about that in the future,

and i think we believe in that has a business model but one we had to make creeks on. >> we definitely have policies and procedures in place, both for con accident for advertiser types and categories. it's a little more relaxed than present weapon have procedures if there's a question, it can even roll up to the corporate office. our vp of news, or vp or advertising. but doesn't mean you won't see the lose 30-pounds in 30 minutes ads on digital. >> we too have policies in place, but they're constantly having to be reviewed because new forms of advertising keep emerging. so, it's an ongoing conversation. we try to stress that our new folks and advertising folks tackle those head on in advance, and not -- don't get snake bitten. >> last. >> as one of the baby-boomers

who has read print all her life but finds her -- >> your name. >> i'm sorry, contributing write are for "the new york times." i find myself consuming even my favorite newspaper more online. what's happened if you studied it to the demographics of your online audience in particularly in terms of page also in terms of socioeconomics message, if you measured that, and that's across the board. getting a younger crowd or not? >> the answer is, yes, it is younger but not wildly youngerment ten years younger on average on the digital side. it is getting younger but at the same time the print audience is definitely getting older, just by mother nature and also by people who are leaving. since 2008 time frame our circulation has drop in half and a lot of those were younger readers, households with the disposable income is not the same as what was left so the older readers are more affluent,

more educated than before but we're recapturing some of the online on the mobile size we're seeing the emergence of a younger crowd, which is good, but there's no real revenue stream yet but it's a good story from a readership standpoint. >> i would echo all of that. we're seeing a younger aidens on phones but it's slightly older on some tablets. >> ditto. >> all right two things, first of all, join me in thanking our panelists today. [applause] >> secondly, please visit the hallway. thanks. the exhibitors need your eye balls. thanks. >> now more from the society of

american business editors and writers conference with a look of avoid egg mistake inside the college admissions and loan process and options available to students seeking financial aid. this 50eus minutes. >> thank you. today's session on student debt is sponsored by the national endowment for financial education, and i would like to introduce you to its ceo and'd ted beck. we're very glad to have him as a partner. ted served a appointee to president obama's sad vicary council on financial capable and prior to that he was on the financial literacy council for president bush. ted serve on -- is chairman of the jump start coalition for personal financial literacy. we're very proud to have him here with us today and i'd like to introduce you to ted beck. [applause]

>> thank you, jill. we're a nonprofit organization that is soley focused on improving the financial capability of all americans. we do that through research and data gathering, and one of the things we're most proud of us our relationship with sabu. we have had this relationship for three years now and have been able to actually sponsor this spaniel or its equivalents h -- this panel or its equivalent. we provide data tower you membership and unbiased sources hopefully you can turn into great stories. we're also very pleased to be holding this at the george washington university. many of you probably know but those who don't, one of the top centers to financial education in the run i happens to be located here. the global center for financial literacy, and the man in red is the head of the center and is in

our book the top researcher and academic expert on personal gps issues in the country. so if you call us and we say, we're going to get back to you it's because we're taking the time to call unanimous -- all anna and fine out the real answers. so congratulations for doing this here at george washington university. today's panel is something we're very interested in the whole idea of student debt hat gotten great press over the last year. just because of the magnitude of it. but we also think there's some very critical underlying questions that hopefully they panel can get at today. issues like what is the difficulty in finding jobs? how is that affecting graduating students? the issue of for-profit schools and how that has skewed the numbers, and possibly the biggest single issue we're concerned about is not the student who graduates with $27,000 in debt, but the student who doesn't graduate and still has the debt. so some very, very significant

meaty issues to talk about and luckily you have an outstanding final do it. our moderator is kathy christoph, well known to all of you as an author, a columnist, and a past president of sabu. so, kathy, it's your show. [applause] >> i organized this panel because i felt very strongly that we as journalists and as parents were involved in the conning of america's children. we told them that college is an investment. don't worry about going into debt for this. we told them that you can go to any school you want. we'll make it work. we didn't tell them that your major is going to have a big impact on whether you can repay your debt. we didn't tell them there are differences of types of student debt. and to be fair, we didn't know. in a lot of cases the reason why

we kennedy our children is because the whole student debt issue has changed so much in the past 20 years, that we as parents had one experience and experience of our children is completely different. so, i got together a panel of people who can talk to you about really all aspects of student debt and how debt is different. one of the things -- actually i'm going to stop. i was talking to becky before this and she said, okay, kathy, there's so much to say and she said, cathy, they're not here to listen to you. and some goes, it's like, okay, we have a program, we know who all these people are, it's very impressive elm want them to talk. so i'm going to make it quick. i him a jane from kiplingers and is an expert on student loans, on colleges, she's also a parent has had these experiences herself. i've got pauline abernathy, one

of the world's greatest -- actually bowling pauline and steven bird or incredible experts on a broad array of the differences in the types of debt, your repayment options, and also the incredible number of legislative efforts being made and consumer protection efforts being made in the student debt arena right now because the debt is truly unique, and actually among the most toxic forms of debt we can get our kids into. so without further adieu i'm going to introduce you to jane bennett clark who will come um here -- the program,-under speakers will come um and speak at the podium for a few minutes and then we'll all sit down and hopefully answer your questions. jane? thank you. >> so as kathy says, i have been

covering college financial aid. we also have annual rankings we have been doing for other dozen years, and so we have been focusing on the value. we focus on net price, and we focus on average debt for about a dozen years. we also tried to explore the decisionmaking process that parent goess through as their kids are applying for college and choosing a college, and i kind of concluded as both parent and as a financial reporter, that the admissions process as well as the financial aid process really encourages parents to make an emotional decision about borrowing, and here's something of the reasons why. first of all, families put together their college lists based on academic qualifications, and offer times

they're aspirational. maybe i can get into this school. the focus on the reach schools and don't focus on the financial aspect. they start with the academic, and they put that list together from that point of view, and then the colleges actually encourage them to just wait to see what you get. especially when it comes to merit. you can go on the college can bees and check out the net price calculator but you won't know what kind of kind of merit aid your kid would get. so i have done this myself. i have three kid, all through college, and you get to the point where your kids are getting letters, and i have been in the room when my own kid has been jumping around going oh, my gosh, got into this school. i can't believe it. i'm going to this school and i'm thinking to myself, yeah, and the other school is the one we could actually afford. so now it's like, well, yeah, i guess we're going to send her to

this school. it's like, yikes. so, then you're just primed for the next decision, which is, well, how the heck aim going to do this? and what happens is, first of alling, the financial aid letters sort of convey the idea they're doing you a big favor, that they're actually presenting you with this financial aid award that is actually largely loans. basically inviting you to take out a loan. and i can tell you this has happened to me because my daughter -- we got the financial aid awards letter, and it congratulated us, telling us that we had the opportunity to take out 100% loans to cover the -- we were going to get to take out a plus loan on top of -- on top of stafford loan's

we were entitled to. so it's a very misleading situation and very emotional situation. here you are, your kid has gotten into the school of his or her dreams, and you want to make that kid happy. you're excited. so there you go. and these loans are easy to get. you can get a stafford loan pretty much with no underwriting, nothing, and plus loans have gotten a little harder to get but pace blast pretty easy to get. so parents are ultimately signing up for these things and the kids are, too. so, people have a responsibility to think about it. you need to start when you're putting the college list together, and then you have to think about it again. you have to talk to your kids and say, what can we really do? if we don't get the aid? so i think there is a level of responsibility for the families,

too, that you can't blame it all on the colleges. i think families get set up for this, but they do play a role in this decisionmaking process. >> my plan with my children is i told them, really don't study that hard in school. if you get into a junior college that would be agreement all your parents, all you tiger moms, you're going to pay for that. pauline. >> so, thank you for inviting me to speak here. we're based in oakland, california, have a small office here in dc. all of the things that you just heard are absolutely true, and one question is get often from many of you is, how could this

be? how could it be that the award letters don't actually distinguish between loans and grants? how could it be we expect people to apply before they know how much aid they'll will be eligible for? how can it by we don't spain the difference between a federal and a private loan? and the answer is when i went to college, when many of you went to college, it was an entirely different world. private loans barely existed. college did cost much less. you could actually put yourself through college working during the year, and on summers. the world has changed, and college wasn't as essential then as it was today for everyone. so, we've got a dramatically different world today and our poll skis practices have not changed. we have the same policies in police when fewer people went to college, college cost much less. the financial situation was very different. so, we're in a process of major catchup, of changing our

policies and practices to actually reflect the new world. so, just a little bit of context. you all no doubt heard we have more than a trillion dollars of student loan debt outstanding. that's more than car loans or credit card debt. that includes both federal and private loan debt. students are indeed borrowing more. when i went to college the majorie of student whose graduated with a bachelor degree from a knopp profit or public college did not borrow. and today they borrow an average of $27,000. that's federal and private loan debt. you hear a lot about students who are borrowing $100,000 and graduating from college with 100,000 -- those of really are the outliars. the average 27,000, a third

aren't borrowing anything in student loans. but you do see more and more and later this year there will be new federal data on federal loan borrowing, which will be a major development. the latest data we have is still for 2007-2008, and that showed at that time that about 10% of students were borrowing more than 40,000. so, those students were highly concentrated in the for-profit college sector. the majority of the students who graduate from for-profit colleges have both federal and private loan debt and a much higher level of debt than those in the public or private sector. what we say often is it's not just how much you borrow, it's how you borrow, and if you complete to your point, your ability to repay is much greater if your complete school, and people don't realize their chance of following and

completing varies by school the go to by public and nonprofit, and there's huge variations in terms of the what the costs will be, what you're likely to borrowing, and likelihood of completing, and we need to provide much better information to families up front so they can make better decisions about where they apply, where they enroll. right now, in fact some of that key data you expect in order to make those decisions is not available. it's not that it's available to experts in a hard to find place. a lot of it simply is not available. what do i mean by nat? the federal government does not collect the average debt at graduation by college. so, we at ticas put out an annual report on student debt for the class of -- most recent was 2011. we'll have 2012 late theirs

year. we use a private data set we buy access to that colleges voluntarily participate in to come up with the data but that data should be required too be reported and collected and made available because it's voluntary the for-profit college, none of them participate. so that's a study of nonprofit and public colleges and only those who choose to participate in each year sometimes when hi highlight those that are high-debt colleges, they disappear. they're not on the list. i they don't report. so that is bakic data the administration has put out a college score card that has on it completion rates and debt information which is a step forward to make -- to say here's a one-painer with basic information about this college. but the completion rates are not

for college students, which community colleges, for-profit colleges, a small percentage of their students. so it's not a real graduation rate. it can be very deceptive. likewise the debt data on that score card is the median debt of those who entered with payment. so it's the immediate yap debt of those who graduated and dropped out, and doesn't tell you what percentage of the students actually borrowed. so it's not the information that most families want and need to make good decisions about where to apply. but it is a huge step forward. i've alluded to private loans verdict federal loops. ford loops, the term -- federal loans, they have fixed interest rates, they have a whole host of consumer protections, and an array of flexible repayment plans, including income-based repayment, which allows you to re pay as a share of your income

so your payments will always be manageable, and every after 20 or 25 years you have not repaid in full, the balance is forgive. there's discharge of the debt if you become disabled. a whole host of protections, none of which are guaranteed in the private loop world, private loans are literally the riskiest way to pay for college. it's like paying for college with a credit card. they're usually veriable, uncapped rates, some fixed now but typically variable, uncapped. very little repayment protection or options, and they're not -- they're considered nondischargable in bankruptcy. they're very difficult to discharge bankruptcy, unlike credit card debt or even gambling debt. that is one of the issues that large coalition and legislation pending in congress to change that treatment of private loans to say they should be treated just like other forms of consumer debt, not like alimony

or criminal fines. so, again, it's not just how much you borrow but whether you're borrowing federal loans, private loans. in terms of what can be done. just very briefly and then i'll turn over to steve to leave room for questions. we have a whole agenda to reduce the burden of student debt on our web site. so ial will just talk about a range of key issues that can be done to address this. one is the federal student loan policy. so as many of you know, the interest rate on subsidized federal loans is scheduled to double again this july 1st, from 3.4% today to 6.8%. from our perspective it makes no sense at a time of record low interest rates to be charging 6.8% on federal student loans. but that is exactly what will

happen if congress does not act. they will automatically double. there's also the issue of the doubling of them will make it more likely that we'll see students turning to private loans when they could have borrowed a federal loop. they'll say the federal loan has a 6.8% interest rate. this private loan, the bank is saying it starts as low as 2%. and won't appreciate the difference between a variable rate and a fixed rate, and the differences in the types of loans, and so we already see, even at the height of the private loan market in '07-'08 half of private borrowers could have borrowed with federal loans so imagine if we suddenly saw all the federal loans at 6.8% and private loops being advertised aggressively low as, mentioning if you have a perfect record that's your interest rate today but it will go up a each

month as interest raise ride and if your credit record or your parents' credit record isn't perfect, it's not going to be that low today and will only rise over time. so, it's addressing the federal student loans. it's making sure that borrows nor about income-bakessed repaymentment we have rising student loan default rates in this economy, and people -- many of the borrowers could have avoided default if they were aware of income-based repayment which only became available in 2009. so we need to see a lot more outreach to let people know that income-based repayment is there and available to them. we also need better loan counseling up front so when a student is making a decision how much to borrow, they understand what that means to them in terms of monthly payments, and if this is their first year and they're in school four years, that means four times that amount.

and really happening them through that. the department of education to their credit just did release a new loan counseling tool with an online repayment calculator. long overdue. a step in the right direction of helping borrowers make better informed decisions, and specifically during the counseling that is required when they're leaving school, it allows borrowers to act as part of the of the counseling pick a repayment plan so they can see what their monthly payment witness be, what the total payments will be, and then pick one rate and apply online. so that's an important way of helping them pick the right plan for them and get into it rather than defaulting into a very expensive, high monthly payment plan. which is the current policy. so, i already talked about the need for better consumer information. we have net price calculators that help people get a sense of what is the real price to them, novelty the stick arer -- sticker price, which very few

people pay the sticker price. so eave college has a net price calculator. the college score card we talked about. the administration has put forward a model award letter calling the shopping sheet, and more than 500 colleges that enroll more than 10% of students have agreed to use them for the first time this year, and it will distinguish between loans and grants. it will actually make clear what is the net price. the price you pay after grants that you have too either earn, save, or borrow. that is not the case with most award letters today. there's bipartisan legislation pending in congress that would require all colleges to use that kind of a standard award letter, so that families would have an easier time comparing the offers. it's not easy even for someone like myself to look at award letters currently and actually determine which is a lower cost college because of the way the information is presented.

two other private loops. i talked about changing the bankruptcy treatment and we also need to be requiring that all private loans be certified by the school first. to ensure that the student is actually qualified for that private loan and to ensure the school can tell the studentor taking out 500s to private loan. do you know you can take ute a 5 how much federal loan with consumer protections? it's not required that the school tell the student how much remaining federal loan availability they have, and so that is something that also there's legislation pending, it's something that the consumer financial protection bureau could just move forward to require as well, which we have been advocating for. and equally important for the millions of private loan borrowers who have private loans today, many of them with interest rates in the double digits, and really they're saying, we hear from borrowers,

the consumer financial protection bureau saying i'm willing to pay $100 a month but they want $500 a month. i don't make $500 a month and they can't get any relief from thei flexibility. the loop is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. so one of the things pending next week is the deadline for commenting on a request for input from the consumer financial protection bureau on suggestions for how to develop a way to make private loan payments more affordable. what kind of a loan modification system, what other typed of relief would help address what they have seen and the complaints they received and the data they're showing, we just see lots of people are going to not be able too buy a home, not participate fully in the economy, as long as they've got that kind of unmanageable private loan debt hanging over their head. and then finally to end, the last item that is critical for

keeping -- reducing the burden of student debt is funding pell grants. pel grabs are need-based grant. the largest program that the federal government has and even after the recent inkatrinas in the maximum pel grant it covers a small are share of the cost of a four-year public college than it has since the program started. less than a third and used to be well over half or two-thirds. and i can talk a little bit about why that is, but we need to be investing in pel grants. it is the key to reducing the need to borrow, particularly for low-income students, and pel grant recipients are actually twice as likely to borrow today has nonpel grant recipients, and pel grant recipients who graduate from a four-year program, nine out of ten of them have student debt. so they're much more likely to borrow and in fact they also graduate with $3,500 more in

debt than the average nonpel grant recipient. so, we are al expecting the lowest income to take on more debt, and that will only get worse unless we are able to invest in pel grants going forward. >> thank you, pauline. i want to actually have you sit down up there and, jane, you, too because after steve we're going to questions. just don't want to take extra time getting us all situated. >> hello. jane scared me because i have two little kid so i'm trying to figure out how much debt that's going to be 15 years from now. very frightening, and if i have to tell them -- i'm already telling them that montgomery college -- i live in mont good morningry county in maryland -- is the way to go. so i'm steve berg.

with the new america foundation, public policy think tank in washington. before coming to new america i was a reporter at the chronicle for higher education for 15 years. i started covering student loans in 1995, and the changes that have occurred over that period of time are just amazing. at that point, very few people, very few undergraduates were take ought private student loans. in fact i never thought about covering them at that point because you didn't hear about them. so, it was a surprise even to me when about ten years later you started hearing these horror stories about undergraduates with these loans and hough aggressively lenders were marketing them. so, i want to talk a little bit from the students' perspective on this. but i just wanted to start off by saying the federal government has subsidized loans to college students for nearly 50 years.

when the government's main loan program, the stafford loan program, first began, it was intended mainly for middle income students to help them to afford to go to the college of their choice. as late as early 1990s less than half of students were taking out student loans, today two-thirds do with an average debt of $27,000 per borrower, student and parents borrow an estimated 112 bill a year through the various federal loan programs. in addition, students are borrowing nearly ten billion dollars a year in risky private loans. which as pauline said are are almost always more expensive and less consumer friendly than federal loans. student lions have long been considered a good investment. providing individuals with the means to obtain an education that would pay substantial different of dividends in their

lifetime but it's been increasingly clear that many students are i finds themselves with unmanageable elf levels of debt that could hamper future life choices such as getting married, buying a, how having children, and retiring. if you want to get a sense of the significant toll that our student loan policies have had. just look at some in the comments that financially distressed borrower have committed to the consumer protection bureau recently. i came upon one borrower who has a substantial debt load rote even with the can i generate working two jobs and my wife working one job we cannot afford many things because of the amount we have to pay to the student loan companies. we cannot afford health coverage which limits our ability to start a family. as we both will turn 30 this year, we feel that time is running out for us to be able to reach our personal goals and dreams. another borrower who pays over

$1,600 a month on his federal and private loans wrote, i will never own a home because of this crippling dealt i have faced since i graduated college. i can't even buy a car because i can't qualify for a car loan. i drive a 2000 honda civic that will die on me and i have no idea nat to do. do these borrowers make mistake unless certainly and they readily admit it. but what kind of system requires teenagers at the ripe age of 18 to make financial decisions that could have such a life-altering effect. as another wrote, coming out of high school i didn't realize that taking on this much debt could affect me this much. just want total get away from home and get ant an education. students and families are generally left on their own to navigate a complexion student loan system. offers of a variety of choices, each witch different interest rates and loan limits. yet the education department

department requires colleges to provide counseling to students but often comes too late in the process. after borrowers have already committed to taking out the loans by signing their promissory notes and often perfunctory. the first week of college done overwhelm and the last thing students wouldn't do is focus on the detailed of student aid packages. federal student loan borrowers face a behalfling array of repayment options. therer is forebearance, deferments and income-based repayment but these choices have their own rules and regulations and require borrowers to actively take steps steps to enl and stay the. the unfortunately many borrowers simply don't receive the kind of counseling they need. once students leave college they're on their own to sort these things out. as a result many borrowers

unnecessarily fall behind on their payments and end up defaulting. the consequence office defaulting are severe, ranging from ballooning repayments to ruined credit rate examination the loss of professional licenses. federal policymakers have made it much more difficult for borrowers to discharge the student loans in bankruptcy than any other form of consumer debt and have removed any statute of limitation on the collection of the loose loans, allowing the government to literally unleash an army of student loan collection agencies who can pursue defaulters to the grave. they've also empowered the government to garnish wages and seize tax refunds and portions of social security payments from elderly and disabled borroweres are. certainly unacceptable for students to take out federal loans without having intention of paying them back. the reality is that many ex-if not most people who default do so because they don't have the

money to repay them. they are not looking for a free ride. yet the system does not recognize the crucial distinction. borrow are who deliberately skip out on their loans and those who are too financially dissuppressed to repay them are subject to the same harsh treatment and many lives are ruined as a result. so, what can we do to -- what are the of the steps we can take? pauline, ticas has some great idea requests and i would definitely recommend you go to their web site. one of the areas they're really -- that some of the -- some idea of federal loan counseling, really impress met wind chill e be believe ther in america foundation there should be a single loan program for

undergraduated and the same conditions and income-based repayment should see the default repayment option for studentings meaning that student was automatically be enrolled in the program which would allow them to pay back their loans as a percentage of their income after they've graduate. such a system would recognize that some people just simply don't earn enough to fully repay their loans no matter how earnest live they try to. as i said loan counseling needs to be strengthened, and congress needs to make private loans dischargeable in bankruptcy like all other forms of consumer debt. only then will private loan providers have any incentive to work with financially distressed borroweres to ease their burdens through loan modifications and refinancing, options general lip not available today. i'm going to stop there and i look forward to your questions. >> thanks, stephen. before we go to question and answer, i have a couple questions for the audience. how many people are here because you have children who have dead and you want to personal --

okay. how many people here are looking for a way to cover student loans -- college, all that stuff? great. i want to throw a couple of ideas at you because there's so many things that i think could help us raise the bar and how we cover college. one of them is every oneoff you have local colleges in your neighborhood and you can find out just exactly how good they are at graduating kids in less than six years, which has huge impact on how much you pay for college. how much debt the kids come out with the end of the school, and whether they graduate kids at all. some of the private colleges, if you go to the college navigator site and -- college newscast navigator.gov. all this data is there and online and if you want to do a comparison of all the colleges in your legislation area, i

think it would be the most incredibly mind-blowing thing to your parents, readers, because you would suddenly see, look, this college that my son wants to go to that is charging $40,000 a year, they've graduate 10% of their students. if you are one of the 90% who don't grated what and you borrowedded for that education your chance of being financially devastated for the rest of your life is huge. you also -- there are step-by-step tutorials that i think we can do a better job of doing, what do you do when you graduate, five tip for paying off student loans. i think some of it is just all in your local neighborhoods. look at your individual colleges, go in and compare. like what the administrators are making versus what they're charging college. compare how much they give to needy students.

compare their award letters. hold their feet to the fire. because in fact we have been too easy on schools. we have acted as if they were giving our kids something to valuable, and we have actually acted like they're a commodity. we don't do a great job of comparing one school to the next, and the differences between schools are actually life-altering. so, with that, i'm going to go to questions. >> hi, i'm karen miller, sabew member from redding, pennsylvania. my question is why do you think colleges don't make a greater effort to reduce their price? has anyone tried to itemize exactly what goes into the cost of college? and whoa wouldn't they want to make their product more

affordable? >> i'm going to say they don't have to but go ahead. >> microphone right there. >> so, if you look at their -- i have two different answers to that. one is called the effect which mainly affects private colleges and also some of -- some public. where basically it's just lowering prices makes you look bad in the market. you don't want to look like you're a discount. that you're discounting the education you provide. so colleges -- there's a great pressure to keep up with the competition and to continually look more expensive. which is just strange. but then the other aspect for public colleges, a lot of schools don't have a choice or they have choices but the states

have just been cutting the amount of money they provide these schools. and so the easiest way to deal with these cuts is to raise prices. >> well, i do think there's an issue of -- there's kind of a backwards way of approaching it because colleges have to -- they do have to give out a lot of financial aid and often times tuition discounts in order to fill the seats. but then that means they have to raise tuition to cover the people that aren't getting the aid. it's just like kind of a vicious cycle in that, sure, many people don't pay the sticker price, but somebody has to pay the higher price, and this whole issue of enrollment manage. is such that colleges work very hard to figure out exactly how much you will be willing to pay to come to their knowledge, and

they will -- come to their college and they will give you just enough to get you in the door but not ms. often as you can afford to pay. so it's situational type of financial model that -- >> think of them as auto dealers. you walk into the showroom. they size you up. how much will this person pay for the mercedes? that's what they're doing to you with college. they really are. if you go good and your defend is so set on georgetown -- not that i'm speaking from experience -- you're going to fine a way to let them go to georgetown and that's the thing. if they figure they don't have to give you aid to get you in, they won't give you aid to get you in. the other thing, too is when you are telling your kids to apply to all the colleges the top of the list is less likely to give them aid.

the college that they totally fit into their profile are more likely to get give them aid and if they go to a come that is a little under they're status for grades those colleges will give them a lot of aid. where do we tell them to go. >> top of the list. right? so we're part of the problem. >> the car dealer analogy is actually a very good one in that for more than 15 years we have had the sticker sheets in the window sheets that have been required by federal law on cars? we're only now debating doing that for colleges with these standardized award letters. that's how far behind we are but it's exactly the same idea of allowing -- helping consumers make an informed decision. really want to underscore steve's point that what is driving the cost and why you don't see a lot of reductions in price -- although we're seeing more in the last few years you're seeing many more colleges

freezing tuition, but the key -- it really varies by sector. for-profit colleges set prices very differently than public colleges which irdriven by the appropriations and the withdrawal of aid appropriations, nonprofit colleges yet again a different factor, and depending on their level of selectivity, and i want to underscore the point that everyone needs to be looking at net price, not sticker price. that's the college with the highest sticker price will often be the most affordable, particularly for low-income students. they're going to go to harvard if they can get into harvard, they're going for free. they're going to get much more aid than at a local college that might be public or nonprofit. so we need to help people understand it's not -- net

price, not sticker price you need to look at. >> i'm collin campbell, student at the university of south carolina, and we've written about this with the student newspaper a good deal and one of the things we wrote about obviously the doubling of the student loans, federal loans, has couple up a couple of different times and keeps getting pushed down then road. one of the things we notice when we are -- obviously you want to source and get people on both sides thereof argue. and people who are proponents of that same doubling, their argument is we need -- how else are we going to put our foot down on the colleges? and if you make that loan rate double, then colleges are going to have to bring down their prices. it's going to really put their feet to the fire like you were talking about. if it stays low, which i think -- i agree it needs to but if i stays low how else do you keep their feet to the fire and

force them to do that? >> well, i think that the interest rate doesn't actually do that for colleges. 80% of the students who take out subsidizes loans with the 3.4% interest rate have unsubsidized loans as well so they're already paying 6.8% and picking up 3.4 and 6.8%. so it hat not stopped having an impactment the only people who den e benefit from student aren't rates doubling are the private lenders. >> high. was wondering if any on the panel could address the the parents obligation because when we did it and we did it in the spring of '08, which was very different than the fall of '08 -- we came up with a very different number, and to schools

were recalcitrant in their negotiating ability on this number, and we kept on scratching our heads because it was based on really parents' income. the student -- if the student has a thousand or two thune thousand dollars worth of saving from a parttime after school job, it seems that the schools were expecting the families to go out on a limb based on an income level that would never be the student's. >> the forms have change dramatically since 2008. they're a little easier to negotiate right now. but one of the things you should do is get cal chainy's book, paying for college without going broke, because it takes you through the forms and there's a lot of mistakes that parents make on that form, because

normal english is not how at it written. and so if you read it or particularly if you skim through it because it's like massive, and you don't want to read all 300 pages of the instructions, you're likely to make some very costly errors, and at the time that book will lead you through how to do that without making those costly errors but it is easier than it used to be. we need to wrap up so i'm going to just have you guys go as fast you can and we'll try tons asic as we can;...

that would probably have been even worse, but maybe i should have taken some time off, like done something else. nobody that we know is like are there other options that, i don't know, help you make that decision or if you have to make you when you're 17 years old. >> at think it would be so great if we hope to counsel parents in the newspaper and on tv if we gave them a little bit of an emotional support. seriously, junior colleges not such a bad option. sticking to years in getting your undergrad gun -- dad is not a bad option, but in my community there are a lot of mormon families.

their kids go on a two-year mission. they come back so much more mature and ready for college. instead of failing there freshman year, they actually study. okay. i cannot -- the number of kids to take five and six years to get through college is phenomenal, and some of that is, i think, the majority of the student that -- how prepared they are for college. as parents and as journalists, we don't present that this is a really good option for kids. you know, do not just go down this path because all the parents and your neighbor are talking about harvard and princeton and all of these places. to end up pushing your kid to do something that you know, as a parent, they're not ready for. >> i would add to that that the research is clear. the date is very clear. the unemployment rate for those who don't go to college is more

than twice as high for those who have a college degree, so on average it is a good investments , but people need to be much -- where they go to college, do they come a you know, go and take six years, or can they get it done faster? that will be significantly less debt. what are they studying and to think about those things more carefully. >> one of the things that you want to think about in terms of whether it is worth it is how much you borrowed to get the degree. if you borrowed may be 10,000, 5,000, maybe it is worth it at the end of the day, but if you borrowed 40 or $50,000, i would say, probably not worth it. >> is some schools, particularly community colleges, there are still in super bowl would be better off if there were not taken out of love than trying to work two jobs while trying to go to school.

if they took that one loan to help prepare their cars, there would have a better chance of completing and that would be a good investment. >> unfortunately warring is telling me that he's going to send in the bouncers if we don't get off the stage, but i would like to suggest that these guys will stick around for a little while an answer questions. there are incredible resources, so if you want to cover this topic, come up and get there contacted permission. thank you very much. [applause] >> on c-span today, the role of religion and politics, a look on the future of print journalism and later another look at certain loans and financial aid.

>> in this high-tech digital age with high-definition television and digital radio, all we ever get is static, that veil of distortion and lies and misrepresentations and half truths that obscure reality when will we need the media to give us is a dictionary definition of static, criticism, opposition, and warranted interference, a media that covers power, not covers for power, mean that is the fourth estate, not for the state. and we need a media that covers the movements that creates

static and make history. >> author, hose, and executive producer of democracy now, amy goodman, taking calls, e-mails, tweets. three hours live sunday at noon eastern on book tv on c-span2. >> now we talk about the role that religion plays a american politics and culture today. this morning's washington journal, 45 minutes. >> mr. russell moore is our guest with the southern baptist convention, president-elect of its ethics and religious liberty commission. good morning and thank you for being here. >> guest: thank you for having me. >> host: what is the southern baptist commission, and have as doral relate? >> guest: well, it is the nation's largest on catholic denominations christian denomination made up of over 40,000 churches. and my role as president of the ethics of religious liberty

commission would really be to fold, to speak to baptist chrises but ethical and moral and public policy issues and up into the "church is to address those things and also to speak for churches in the public square. the culture, the political arena on those issues. >> host: you know the background working in politics right here in washington d.c., the capitol hill, aide to former mississippi congressman jay taylor, a democrat. >> guest: yes, i started with an intern and worked in various roles over a. of for five years. great, great memories and a great french ships. >> host: what do you see as the role that religion should play in politics and legislative long? >> guest: religion deals with matters, what we value, but it is that we -- how we see the world. and so i think religious people must be involved in public policy matters because as citizens of this republic we have a responsibility to care for the good of our neighbor, to maintain the common good of the nation, and i think the nation

has an interest in seeing their religious believers are involved in the process. after all, or religion teaches us and shows us is that the state is an ultimate, the culture is an alternate. there are all to the priorities beyond those things, and so it helps to shape and form the virtue of the citizens. and so when we come as christians or as muslims are is used, various other religious backgrounds, we are speaking to one another, not in order to in any way oppress one another, but roared to persuade one another, these other things that we ought to agree on because there for the sake of the common good. >> host: how does the ethics and liberty religious confession make recommendations? howdy you determine what message you share with folks in the general public? >> guest: a variety of ways. one is to the resolution process. southern baptists get there once a year in the open, free, democratic process where southern baptists speak on various issues we are concerned

about, like abortion or sex trafficking or aids in africa, any other variety of issues. that helps to form a consensus as to what matters to us as southern baptists. we can also speak to one another, calling churches to give attention to things that perhaps we have not been tested to in the past. >> host: alysian national journal this piece, why the culture wars now favor democrats a coincidence that the marriage command-and-control, and emigration all of the news this month, prominence and measures a critical shift in the culture wars, offense and defense have switched sides. was that you want in the culture wars? >> well, i don't like to us begin terms of culture wars. i don't think we're a war with one another. i think we have very deep disagreements on issues that matter, but i think we come to

that with civility and the conversation. i do think that evangelicals we need to recognize that we are not speaking as the majoritarian we are not standing and saying that everything we are concerned about is by necessity what the entire country agrees with us about. on many issues we're going to have to have a profit forced to a culture that was the disagrees with us. so let's think about what is the you're forgetting and what you're by passing. a variety of issues, and that has been the case all the way back to the founding of the republic when baptist preachers were the ones agitating for a first amendment, for instance, for protection of freedom of conscience and religious liberty, when that did not seem to be a priority for many people >> host: the pugh form of religion and public life looks and attitudes and a marriage, the percentage of people pulled in favor of same-sex marriage, and we can see a breakdown. unaffiliated 77 percent favor

same-sex marriage. you can see here, other groups in the middle. protestants that 34 percent of catholics 48%, with mainline protestants 55%. how did you hope that the supreme court rules on the game marriage issues that we saw argued on last month, proposition a common defense of marriage act? >> guest: i hope the supreme court does not usurp the democratic process and causes composition to go on american society. i come as an evangelical christian belief that marriage it it -- marriage is a conjugal union between a man and woman, but i think that is the kind of debate that we need to have with the american society. what is marriage? how are we to understand this definition? because i believe the state does not define marriage, it merely recognizes something that already exists, of the supreme court will recognize the goodness of that ongoing debate in american society and as i use

separate. also recognizing that the government has an interest in providing definition and maintaining for the protection of children, families, and future generations. i hope the supreme court will take action there. >> host: another issue, emigration, piece that you authored a couple of years ago. immigration and the gospel. you say their is a question about our mission when it comes to immigration. upwards of 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country right now. many more in the latino community became merely delete. if our response to them is to absorber that bigotry of some elements of society, we're showing them a vision of what the bible calls the flesh, rather than the spirit. howdy you believe the issue of immigration should be handled right now? what should happen to those are in the country right now illegally? >> guest: the first is we need to recognize that those who have emigrated to this country are persons created in the image of

god and their dignity ought to be loved and respected. i think that the kind of language that we use ought to recognize that and to see that. and so terms of derision toward arab communities, words like anger baby, for instance, i think, are dehumanizing and denigrating and we get to be standing for our neighbors who have emigrated to this country to say, these are not things. these are persons and ought to be recognized as such. i also think that we ought to get -- we ought to welcome the trend of growing consensus that i think is happening in the country, but the left and the right. nobody or very few people actually believe that we are going to deport 11 or 12 million people. what do we do? what is that just like to move the blood of the shadows and into the fullness of american life? i think there's a growing consensus in this country. even though we see growing divisions in the areas to my

really think we're moving closer to one another. >> host: if you would like to speak with dr. russell moore, you're the phone numbers. our first caller is alfred in south portland, maine, democratic line. good morning. >> good morning. i just wanted to up bring to light the religious legislation that is on the floor of the state democrat -- state legislature in north carolina about declaring a state religion i really do think that the religious right evangelicals are engaged in a war against the rest of the country or nonbelievers, as they think,

that they do want this to be a theocracy. they're working toward this country being a theocracy. and in leaving go this -- goes as far as the military where people are forced to either be religious or express the religiosity, whenever. be subjected to discrimination within the military. religion has no business and politics, just like for gingrich. this man, from a religious point of view, has no -- nothing to say about who gets married. >> host: let's get our response from russell moore. >> guest: first of all, the last thing that we, as evangelical christians, what what is a theocracy. we believe, as christians, that people are reconciled to got through the power of the spirit,

threw the proclamation of the word, not to the action of the state. to having some form of state in the fourth religion would not create really is revival. would not move and store the gospel. would simply make religion the equivalent of a driver's license was not aware for. we are, instead, for religious liberty, freedom of conscience where we can have the playground as perceptive up to persuade one another about those things that we believe our ultimate value. i am able to speak to my neighbor about the reality of the gospel and the christian message inmate neighbors it will talk to me a message to the progressive values with a buddhist understand the reality and we have those conversations honestly. now, that does not mean to but, that we don't bring your sense of what is important to the public square. of course we do. we all do. we'll bring a certain understanding of what marriage is and ought to be told what ought to be recognized as

marriage. obviously we don't claim every relationship to be marital. there is some reason why the state has an interest in marriage. i hardly think that is democratic. when it comes to the military, no one supports forcing anyone in the military into any religious belief. to the contrary, we would want is to have the freedom for chaplains, nor there, after all, to accommodate the free exercise of religion, to be able to practice and to empower those servicemen and women to be able to live out their religious beliefs freely and that means muslim chaplains, free to be muslim. catholic chaplains being free to be catholic and evangelical calf -- chaplain's being free to the evangelical with everything that that means, praying in the name of jesus. that is not a theocracy. that is religious liberty. >> host: let's hear from the independent line. >> caller: hello, mr. more. i have a question for you.

immigrants and all the problems with immigrants. this is the southern baptist convention. a very well the convention. >> guest: i would not say we are very well the convention at all. as a matter of fact, if you did the demographics it would probably be a largely blue-collar, lower middle-class convention. >> caller: if i'm not mistaken about six months ago you had a president or one of your purse is the work for you stealing a bunch of money from the convention and you had to 11 -- let him step down beach you know. that is not mine. >> caller: i guess my one comment is to my left -- i guess it was about the merits coming and going if you have an attitude like that, who is going to be these people. if you make that attitude, you, as the church, should take care of those people, feed them, clothe them because we have enough financial problems in this country. and my closing argument is, you know, if we all stop complaining

and we'll start doing something about that things will start changing in this country. >> guest: -- >> host, a response. >> guest: many of the wretched come into this country are coming, not in order to take from this country, but in order to provide a better future for the children, stand in a long line of immigrants who have come to this country all the way from the very beginning seeking to work harder and make a life for the children. of course, the church needs to be on the front lines of ministering to all those who are impoverished and vulnerable, including aaron's command that is what churches are doing. going to end evangelical church in your community. a roman catholic church, and you'll probably find a ministry taking place right there at the front lines, including with separate communities welcoming in this country and helping them to get the feel the ground. i think that is already taking place. i think we should not do is to

see immigrant communities as takers in the way the air? implied. we simply need to see what these immigrant communities can bring to this country and how we can help to get them a step ahead. >> host: let's take a look at american's perspective on how illegal immigrants should be dealt with. 59 percent say they should be allowed to stay up live for citizenship and 25 percent say those here illegally should be required to leave the united states. 11 percent say allowed to stay, but no citizenship. we recently saw a major coalition of evangelical groups calling for what they're saying should be a clear path to citizenship. >> guest: i support the past. i think those numbers bear out what i was talking about earlier a growing consensus to say we agree more than we disagree on this issue. no one is for totally open borders. we all have a border security. we must have more security in order to enforce the laws of this country.

no one is saying and the other hand, very few people saying we ought to have the kind of police force that would come and in deport 12 million people. what is your alternative to mecca is to say, well, how we justly and fairly and humanely help people to become contributing parts of the society and that kind of future there here looking for. many of them holding to american bar use, the reason they came here, committed christians i would add. we do not want people to be left in the shadows. you want them to be able to come forward and to move forward with a sell the country speech you how you talk to republicans who don't agree with you? takers, others, both the house and senate, some of whom are self professed christians. how do you speak with them about these issues? >> guest: again, most people

on either side of this issue have valid and legitimate concerns. and so some who are fearful of the path to citizenship or concerned about a path the citizenship are arguing, we don't want to do is to a somehow penalize people who play by the rules and to have come here, and we also don't want to tear down a rule of law. what i would argue is, we have been given mixed messages in this country to emigrants' all along. my predecessor as president of the ethics and religious liberty commission has said that our message at the border has been simultaneously keep out and help wanted. i think that is true. since that is the case, we need to find a way take the next at. i think the concern is valid at the front-end, but i do not think ultimately it is workable. >> host: russell moore is our guest, president-elect. that is the entity charged by the southern baptists of addressing moral and religious

freedom issues. he mentioned his predecessor leaving that position. in his 60's. forty-one years old. what does it mean to have a young person in this position? >> guest: i'm not sure 41 is young. i think that what is happening in evangelical life and southern baptist life is that there is a connecting of generations. some of the generation of fragmentation that we have seen, some of our churches is starting to be resolved. denver people are active and vital within evangelical life, southern baptist life, and we also have a great tradition of the older generation pouring themselves out into the younger generation, and i hope to be a bridge between those under baptist christians and the older generation in years to come. >> host: our next caller on the republican line. welcome. >> caller: good morning. give me a couple of minutes.

dr. russell, one caller, there really is a war you have to wage, and i will tell you where it is, the secular left is trying to turn this country holier around. your war is against christianity in the form of it. our children, they have taken away, try to take away all the values that this country was -- starting on. really cannot really infuriates me is that of the christians tried said involve themselves in the secular left. they -- they are totally -- it is in scrolls, works, every phase of american life what they're doing. in rhode island we have a statue in province that says, bless veterans have died in world war two. we have to get out and stop these decisions. there is actually a war that the secular left, they are raging against christian society in

this country. >> host: let's see if we can get a response. >> guest: where i would agree is that there is an understanding sometimes in this country that having separation of church and state means that one must have a secular rise in influence that marginalizes the voices of religious people and people of faith. obviously, not only as a christian, but as an american i believe that is not the way to go. we need to not silence voices in the public square but empower them so that we have more conversation in the public square, including those things that are ultimate importance, the faith that animates us, and disagreements about those things. i would agree with him that there is often a misunderstanding of religious liberty and separation of church and state at least two some really serious threats to religious liberty in this country that i think we ought to be concerned about coming on in the future. i think sometimes that a base

that we have in terms of the way we friend is as a warm us are less than helpful. but i do think that is an important conversation to have. >> host: a caller in washington d.c. democrat. go ahead. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. i would like to say, the gentleman's -- very important in the discussion. not develop the true position. i know i have not because being a christian i am still developing and rifling with the idea of not forcing anyone to be like diane. i mean, my ministry and part of my ministry to be able to evangelize in such a way to compel people by the way i live. that happens to be what i say. more importantly, the way and live, you know, if they choose to want to take that way of life, you know, that is a we're called to do. and so civil rights, i think people should have the choice to

choose. >> host: i'm sorry, are you talking about cameras? >> guest: i'm talking about any aspect of life, including gay marriage. again, i am against the marriage -- chavez and not ford, but i should not want to force my beliefs on anyone. just as someone who's used to touch is to be an atheist, not legally when they have to become a christian. again, i, as many people are going in that position, but we cannot force anyone to be why we are. i think the discussion is important that both sides the year. about the same token i do also believe that those who ought not in agreement does not necessarily have the tower right to define something like marriage that already exists between a man and woman. that is, again, up for discussion said the one i question, how much is your religion state influence your vote and your politics?

>> caller: it does impact it to a degree. to what degree, and still growing as a person as as it -- and as a christian. i do not know. i cannot give your number or forgive. >> host: thank you for your call predestine response. >> guest: i would agree that no one wants to coerce people to all the believe said they do not hold, when i think the problem with saying that is that many of the issues that perhaps you are referring to are not about forcing people to all the believes that not all little. for instance, the marriage question, both sides are arguing that marriage is important and that the state has to address the question of marriage. we both agree on that. we simply disagree on what the definition marriages and so we cannot simply say the state is going to ignore this and be totally neutral in the question of marriage because the state has an interest emerged. so what i would say is why is the state interested in marriage? i would say there is something unique about the conjugal union

of a man and woman that is different from other relationships. the state has an interest in that because of the harm that can be done to children and to families and future generations. and so i think simply saying we ought not to course when others true, but that hardly simply takes all the issues of the table. >> host: our recent poll asked people whether they thought the basis for the legality of same-sex marriage should be based on the constitution or states individual laws. 56 percent said the constitution , 36 percent said laws in each state. what does that say to you? >> guest: well, i think that you have a lot of conflicting visions when it comes to questions of marriage right now. we even want to define this session. and so i think it is to fighting both sides recognize it is a complicated matter if you're simply going state-by-state when it comes to marriage because what happens when someone who is so-called married in one state and not married in another state.