i'm very pleased to introduce

tonight's speakers. margaret sullivan is the media columnist for the washington post and has been a journalist for over four decades she has served four pulitzer prize juries and was a member of the pulitzer prize board from 2011 to 2012. she's a faculty of duke university's sanford school of public policy. she also taught journalism in the graduate at columbia university and sitting of new york. sullivan, the first woman editor of her hometown paper buffalo news and was also the first woman public editor of the new york times. her book is called ghosting the news local and the crisis of american democracy. we have one copy left to the register's. joining margaret sullivan is dr. joan donovan, a leading public scholar and disinformation researcher specializing in media media manipulation political movements, critical internet studies, and online extremism.

dr. donovan is the research director of the harvard kennedy school. shorenstein center on media, politics and public, and the director. the technology and social, social project. she is coauthor of the book memoirs the untold story of the online battles upending democracy in america. and her research can be found in several academic peer review journals. she's a columnist at mit technology review and a regular contributor to the new york times, the guardian, npr and pbs. tonight, they discussing sullivan's new book, newsroom confidential, charles kaser from the guardian called a beguiling memoir. and journalist katie couric said margaret sullivan's, perspective on our increasingly cook-off in its media ecosystem is invaluable by dealing her personal and professional experiences. and this lies an engaging memoir. she pulls the curtain back to reveal how journalism really works and the human decisions behind it. please join me in welcoming and

dr. joan donovan. wow, what a good crowd. i want to thank the students from my course that came over from the harvard kennedy school. cheers to them, always keeping me on my toes and i came here fresh from a lecture on this information in the anatomy of medium campaign. so i've got a few things that are front of mind. good to use your mike. i can't figure out. oh, i think it just slides up. is that try it out? yeah. we're here together now. all right. okay. so, sullivan? yes, sally. yes, you can call me. i mean, i know that you want to know why? because you read it in the book. well, no, because i'm from boston and it would be it be a special kind of trauma to call you by your name. you know, i live in new york city. and when say like for a

reservation or whatever i might have to give my name, i'll sullivan and they'll say, solomon. oh, no, it happens time. so here in boston, it's a little different. yeah, you see it? and you're like, which one? yes. you know what county? what county from county cork. yeah. what parish? you got it. you got it. so by way of, entering into a conversation with you, wanted to talk a little bit about your first book, local news and the crisis of the mccarthy, which seems to portend some the issues that we've found ourselves in with the drying of local news and the preponderance of internet platforms that make every thing global. there's no such thing as in local news link online and everything becomes a global story when it's posted online. thinking about what knew then and how you've matured since that book. how you're thinking as much as

only 2025, i know it's not. i'm just saying i'm not. i'm not making argument, but i made a lot of time in. yeah, i mean, what do you see the different is essentially question well it's worse everything. everything's worse. and why i mean it's, you know what's happened with local you know you can't say that local news equals newspapers and i want to be clear that. i know that's the case. there's lots of other ways to get local news. you know, there are digital first sites. there's public radio, there's tv stations. all kinds of things but local newspapers, really important. the boston globe is is really important. for example, the buffalo news in western new york is really important. and i think that they have they still even now in their sort of withered state while the globe is in that weathered. but but i mean it's certainly a lot smaller than it used to be a lot smaller.

they still are, i would argue, the engines of news and that the rest of the local news sort of echoes takes some of its content and a lot of its you know tone and and and direction from the newspaper. so when when newspapers which local which have you know suffered the sort of ruination their business models because of the death of print advertising when they suffer the whole thing suffers a lot and we see bad things happen people become more tribal. they become less politically engaged. they vote party because they are more tribal. corruption can flourish. municipal bonds cost more at times because watchdog effect isn't there of keeping, you know, politicians honest. so a lot of bad stuff happens. and and it's real worry.

and the other piece of this is that, you know, we talk and understand that there's been a huge decline. trust in the media generally. but local news still actually has high trust. so it's this weird paradox in which people trust local news more, but it's falling off a cliff in terms of its sort of sustainability. yeah. and i recently was talking with someone at the baltimore banner about how hard is to reintroduce local news given the digital platforms role and how hard it is. get local news to be discoverable on these platforms. do you think and this is my last question about the old stuff, then we'll go into the new stuff. but do you think that online news media is to the challenge of meeting this moment in our democracy? i think the content can be. i do. you know. discoverable is right i mean

it's not the same and never going back to this but i'll just say it's not the same as when people you know the paper landed on your doorstep and pretty much everybody it. now you have to sort of it out or if they're really they make sure it comes to you but it may not and so they could be doing great work but you may never see it. and it's not the kind of thing where i mean, the thing i worry about is that we don't have kind of a common basis reality that local news, though flawed, maybe it was too oriented towards. you know the established meant but it's still kind of we are we could argue about the issues but we all kind of shared a set of facts which doesn't seem to be the case anymore. yeah. and one of the things that we study in our class has a lot to do with the way that social media has failed to serve news and inform in knowledge, not just in ways that we build back

a healthier democracy and i wanted to ask you by way, asking you about writing a memoir. what was different about the writing for this book that, you know, process wise method ages. obviously, it's not research research, but there's quite a bit of new information in there. what were the different processes writing these different books? well, one of the weird aspect of doing this memoir is that i had, i guess what james would call contemporaneous notes because because i've been keeping a journal since i was ten. so when i was when i was ten, my dad gave me a date. but, you know, one of those i don't know, maybe this isn't familiar to everyone, but it was a date book. it had like a white plastic cover and had a year on the front, which i'm not going say what the year was it recent?

let's put it that way. and and i, you know i guess i could have used it as a date book like intramural basketball on tuesday or something, but i started to use it as journal and then i just always kept a journal. so it was helpful when i was writing because i was able to say i was actually able to use direct quotes in. some cases because i had them written down. it's not as if i went home every and wrote down exactly what happened, but i did, i did have a lot that was there. so that that was really and then i also for the past years since i've been either at the new york times or at the post, i've been writing columns, blog posts or columns. and so i was able to go back to them and say, oh, this is what was going on. and then sometimes draw from them. so, so that that was very helpful. and the other thing is that this memoir sort of took a turn and became i mean, people have been using this word which seems a little fancy to me but it is it

does have something to say beyond this my life, you know, it's about what's happened to to truth. it's about what's happened to politics and and kind of where we are. so it and and it looks at subjects like the kind of fraught issue of objectivity in newsrooms there such a thing? should there be such a thing? is it is it a word that means what it used to mean? it's so. well or it's my back. you may say that, but i. so i have a chapter titled objectivity and the woke newsroom. and so, you know, there is a whole thing going on in newsrooms as you know, that, you know, younger people of color or women are really not too interested in they see as an outdated of objectivity. but then, you know, i have someone like marty baron, who's

very, i think, very well known in the boston area, who in the book makes a very strong of objectivity and says it's not what people are. it's not the thing that people are to. it's it's approaching a story with an open mind, without the decision already made about the story is and looking evidence and and being rigorous and allowing that to drive where it's going. so but i think that the word has become kind of tainted. and in circles. and so i like use other words that don't set everybody off. like, for example accuracy, fairness you know, on evidence reporting, all those kinds of things because they don't make they make you cringe, see. yeah, i only cringes, you know, as a punctuation point because as researchers often called to

the task of objective ity and what that might in my research, especially around online extremism and violent extremists as well, is people will say, well, why you just interview them and then you'll know the whole story and you know anymore. we do this deep dive into all of these far right community online because the data is already out there. we don't need to hear again white supremacists what their talking points are. we know them very well what they eat for breakfast and know how they're just arguing point and so. but you've been called to task to have to make those decisions right as a public editor you have to think about well what is fair and what is objective and? what are some of the tougher calls you've had to make about objectivity? you're trying to think about you know are these stories that we're telling? are they balanced? are they capturing the truth or

they skirting the issue? because it's hard talk about so, you know, i was a public editor only at the new york times. i didn't do that at the washington post. and i didn't do it at the buffalo news, but i had for years in which and i'll just sort of say what that is or was because it doesn't exist anymore at the times it's been. but the public editor job was set up to be sort of an internal watchdog at the york times and the reader's representative. so the idea was and it is a bizarre in many ways, you were i was employed by the new york times, in essence, to criticize new york times. i sat in the newsroom of the new york times to say critical things about. the people who are sitting right around me. so you don't get a lot and you don't get invited to a lot of parties that way. and luckily i had friends already. i wasn't going to make any new one friend at work, but of the things i write about in newsroom

is the coverage by the new york times of hillary clinton. so, you know, i thought it was i got there in 2012, which was long before she declared for president. and i thought it was very weird that in 2013, a reporter was assigned to cover hillary full time why she wasn't a candidate. you and it sort of acted as a way of i mean it was i think it was a bad idea because it puts so much emphasis her it sort of was a way to say we already know that she's going to be a candidate and actually already know that she's going to be the president. and so then there was this there was this kind of coverage. that scrutinized her and made, i think, much bigger deal than

should have been made of. the supposed scandal over her emails. and so the chapter is called bought her emails and and at the same what was the level of scrutiny brought to trump and to particularly the connections between the trump campaign and russia. mm hmm. so i mean, that was a big topic. yeah. so one of the ways in which i've tried to think about the email is on the one hand, it's like zombie content. it keeps coming. it's back again in the news because of what the search it and why didn't we search servers for hillary clinton's and and there's a of lore about her using you know her personal email for the state department purposes. what did people think were the real risks of that and do they compare at all to the risks of keeping the kind of documents that trump at mar a lago is.

this is this even on this scale? no, it's on the same scale at all. and it's it's of weird to compare it the other day i had a book stop in at politics and prose which is in washington, d.c. and, like about two doors down from politics and prose is this pizzeria called comet ping pong well comet ping pong is like the heart and it's the it's ground zero for fake news because the place that supposedly was what having a sex trafficking scheme involving children. oh, i know this one. yeah, right. she she was harvesting adrina chrome in the basement and she had, she had extorted all of these children and wayfair cabinets to get their. and it was a whole thing. and was selling children when they actually walked with a gun. yeah. there's that. but, and there's no basement yeah. which of these punch lines right to this is conspiracy theories that over time take on quite a life of their own and i would

love to know from your perspective just inside newsrooms particularly from your time wapo what was the feeling on covering stuff that seemed so outlandish at the time. you know, when you're a media, so your job is to help us reflect on help the public reflect on the the media where we too late to q and on were we or was the dismissal of it a big problem or like where do you where do you fit in when you're trying to think about the political importance of how these conspiracy theories that then mobilized all of these communities into january six? i mean, sometimes feel as though i mean, of course i critique the media and i think they could do better, but i don't know that more of. q and on early was going to make such a huge. i mean, i think that there's a

kind of a curious ity factor. there's like, you know inside newsrooms, there's a lot of desire to write stories that are going to get what we call engagement, which you might think of as clicks. and so is it outrageous? is it is it crazy? and that is the tone of the coverage opposed to really diving deep into something, trying to explain the underpinnings of it. i mean, i think we've all gotten much, much about that. but i think it probably a little late, a little late, yeah. i mean, it was hard as researchers to even figure out the degree to which these conspiracy were taking root in the public because of the way in which people there was such a horseshoe effect where you had just as many people upset about you and on and dismiss of of it as you had people that believed in it. and so it was a very hard thing to study because it it it looked

like it was everywhere. but at the same time it was partly the outrage about it that was everywhere as well, which in some ways is paradoxical, right? because you don't want to spread the conspiracy theory. but by virtue of covering it it does the job, right? no, i think we run into that a lot. and i write lot about this, that the the difficulty in writing about lies and conspiracy theories without magnifying them. and how do you cover, you know? i mean, trump, of course, is the main problem with this, because everything says is, you know, during his campaign and during presidency, by virtue of, the fact that he was president, you know, what he said was news worthy. and yet by him and by putting what was false or a lie into a headline, into a tweet into a news alert, you do you are actually helping. you're doing the thing that works so well in propaganda,

which is repetition. and so how do you avoid that and there actually are ways to avoid it say more. well, there's something that that it's not my thing, but it's something written about called the truth sandwich which george lakoff a linguist came up with, which instead of putting the lie or the misstatement or the outrage into the top paragraph, the headline, you actually start with the truth and you say, what is? and then you say, and here's what's said. and then you say, and here's why it's wrong. so it's much more effective than like just putting the outrage out there and then fact checking it. it's it's surrounding the lie with truth. it's a little truth sandwiches is actually a little bit of a misnomer because the truth is the bread. but we're going let that go. i call it fact. fact. so i sound like i'm a bunch of

sixth graders. you know, because it's hard. it's hard to, like, walk into a and be like, hey, guys, guess what's up, harvard professor. and we're going to talk about truth sandwiches. and i'm just like, no, but the fact fallacy, fact model has a lot to do with the psychology of news and also the way in which we present information in and of course, we did go through this era of sort of the buzzfeed action of news, where everything was a list or an advertiser and the headlines always very clickbait. then actually know what the article was about. do you think the you know, we're going to get away that any time soon? or do you think that news and headlines in this drive for engagement it's is going to continue to saturate us with questionable or leading with the

lie do you think that there's a way out this situation if engagement is the business model so i think the whole idea of engagement has changed a little bit, at least at places like the washington and the new york times, because you're not actually any longer looking just purely for numbers or clicks. you're looking for people to get interested enough to subscribe. and so that actually pushes us in the direction of more depth and better content. so it's not just about, oh, let me, lure someone in for one second, disappoint and they'll never come back. this sounds some really wild lives. sorry, sorry. this set me up. you can't let me hit it out of the park. that won't happen again. okay. sorry. sorry about that. i think you're right. i think ultimately you're right. the clickbait stuff is always somewhat saccharine and unfulfilling.

i want to switch gears a little bit and talk about your style of and how covering politics, covering platforms has changed in the last several years. in particular you write one bad story about facebook. you'll never get access again, right? you were a one bad story about certain politicians. you'll never get access again. and there are some in our professions that do cultivate that aspect at a deep cost to everybody else. that is trying to find the story another way. what are. what are your feelings about access journalism and people that are playing that inside game? i think it has a place i, i always think of it as, you know there's sort of the beat reporter and i've a beat reporter. you know, i've covered a, a school board, for example or a county legislator, a county legislature. and when you cover those things, you absolutely must have access. you you have to be talking to

the inside. but when comes time to do the big investigation, the way probably going to happen is you might know about because you're the beat reporter and you tell your editor about it and then the team or an investigative reporter, an accountability person or a watchdog, whatever they may be, they're the ones who are going to do that investigation. because as you just said, if you do it, probably no one's going to speak to you again and you need them to speak to you to do the day in day out job of beat reporting. but i think where it's gotten to be more of a problem is with coverage of the white house and and in washington where, you know, it's like scoop journalism about palace intrigue and while it is salacious and sometimes it might tell you something that's sort of interesting or

important. it's not the most important kind of journalism can do at this sort of hinge in history. mm yeah, i feel the same way about researchers some of them that do work inside companies. i really a lot of the work that they do but the data that they pull and the way in which they make sense of the world i'm not always sure i trust the methods is internal to these companies but there are a lot of parallels i in doing research to investigative journalism and it would be awesome to be able to pull on a second team and say all right you know you go in there you guys. yeah and that would i mean it's it sense so i want to ask some of this or that question. so this is going to be speed round, okay. you don't get a lot of time think about this. so don't too much. okay. but sox bare feet pick one i got

all night got all night you're not going to answer that one. that one's the easiest one on this list. savory or sweet why? why are we talking about this? i just. i'm getting there. okay, just come on, play along me for a second. sure. sweet. a pooler lake. always a lake. cheney or rumsfeld? which cheney is a good one. good one. heroes or villains. yeah, let's move on, shall we? come on. next month trump or bannon? in what way? like do i like more. you could person. well it's you know this or that list or a way to get you to move fast through the content so that we can get at some of the other issues but part of this was about trying to get you to know you a little bit. the last one was new york times are wapo huh.

i could talk about that yeah. what are the differences there? i mean, the new york times is bigger and more powerful. and the post would say is nimbler and, you know, mean. they both have a lot of great people at them. i, you know, i, i think that when it comes doing like the for the ages coverage, that's probably at the times but i think that you know day to day a lot of times the post is more engaging and more interesting interesting. and when it comes the the day to day which you the beginning talked about how important that was for reconstructing the timeline that you put into book. how did your memoir develop day to day? at what point did you realize, oh, i need to write about this and this issue as you were

putting the book together, what stories did you decide to include? well, it's weird because i started started off sort of, you know, just doing things like having a list of the things that i thought would be interesting to include. but as it happened, a woman lives in my building in new york who wrote a memoir that i really admire, she was jack kerouac's girlfriend and she she's in her eighties. she wrote a book called minor characters, and it won, you know, like the whatever that award, the book circle award. and she's and she also was a book editor, so she read some of it early and she said, you should just with jumping around and it in a kind of a a simple narrative like at the beginning and take us through it that's the thread that you really need to have. so then i went and started with being a kid and, and, and watching the watergate, you know, particularly watching the

watergate and being inspired about journalism in part because of my brother who's sitting here who lives in cambridge, but because he identified journalism as, something that would really interest me. so i ended up making it more or less chronological and that seemed be more sensible. and then i was able to just follow that thread most of the way through. amazing. it's a fascinating to think about to the stories that you chose. tell was as you had developed this, this canon of, you know, different examples and in which either the ball had been dropped or people had. you know, look to you for advice. what would you say some of the best feedback that you've been able to give someone on a story

as like as a as a public editor as well? i mean, one of the things that i that i wrote about a lot and that i felt strongly about actually felt like i made a little progress with at the new york times was the use overuse of anonymous sources. so there is a trust problem in in news. and one of the reasons there's a trust problem is that we when we use anonymous sources, we say to the public, just trust us. we know who this is. you're never going to know, but we're going to tell you this story anyway. and i think the times ran into a big problem that during the coverage, in the run up to the iraq war, which turned out to be very flawed and left, left about weapons of mass destruction and people really remember that. and even though i was at the times years later, readers would constantly bring that up to me. and so and then there were a couple of incidents that occurred in which anonymous sources turned out to be either

wrong or it mess the story up or. and so by the time i left, the times had had changed the rules on the use of anonymous sources to say that if a story hung on an anonymous source, if that was the main reason for the story that had to be seen and signed off on by either the top editor of the or one of his top or her top deputies. and so that was that tightened up the rules. and i felt good about that although they never said we did this because the public editor and i was just like, no, we were going to do this anyway. come on now. well, i don't know if they would have, you know, because at that time, if you think about just as you were leaving. 2016 was the year of anonymous sources. people were leaking stuff left and from from the white house. you had this whole set up of twitter accounts that were leaking from all the different agencies.

these you know, i'm thinking here about rogue you know was an account so i think you're right and when you hang your story on an anonymous source the word that i use often is hollow sourcing where you have a story but you can't really in and prove what it is that the story's hanging on so i think that that i mean to get a rule like that implemented i think is huge in terms of i felt good it i mean you should because it's so hard you need to protect it and i because of the roles that these people occupy and and some of the most important reporting that's ever been done has been based on anonymous sources. so would never say you can't use sources or anything like that yeah yeah yeah. so we're to switch to audience questions now and make sure that we have time for that. there's going to be a microphone going around from c-span. so the microphone not going to

amplify you, though. so you will need to speak up, but you will be recorded. but you will be recorded for or for c-span. and so if you want to raise your hand, if have a question so that can come over, we always need to start the questions. it's a very important we got a couple of reporters in room to. hi. you've talked a lot recently about your kind of guarded faith and our hope, the reality based journalism moving back toward doing more of the right thing. but do you think that the challenge of conservative platforms is too overwhelming? well, it is overwhelming. thank you. i mean, i worry a lot about it. you you can reduce it to five to saying fox.

i mean, fox news is such an important, i think, destructive force in our in our society because. it's a way for people to i mean you can say this in some ways about cable news generally that it's a place you go to get your outrage on and it's not necessary really a place you go to be really well informed. but the difference with fox news is that often it is not really to reality. and so people i mean, the who showed up at the capitol january six were you know were immersed in the kind of evening you can't really call it news but they immersed in this false information some of which was being encouraged strongly encouraged on fox. i mean, obviously in other places. well, including from the president. but, you know, yes, i think it's going to be really hard to overcome that. and i worry about it.

we have one right in front here, then one over here. i was wondering what you think of the new trend to more coverage of, democracy itself and. of the posts started to democracy 18. do you see that as a part of a larger trends do you think it's a positive direction and do you see other positive things are happening? i do. i think it's good. i was very heartened to see that the washington post had started a democracy. i mean, it seemed like it was a way to say we see this as a problem and we see this as a place that needs coverage of, you know, efforts to suppress votes. you, you know, all those kinds issues. the the thing that and, you know, the times has this of tag called democracy challenged and. they're doing a lot of good work. i mean and, that's not just those two places. the thing that i kind of worry about is, is it kind of in silo?

is it sort of like saying, well, here's where we're going to deal with democracy. and then we're going to have the rest of our coverage, including the, you know, treating politics as, a horse race. and, you using polls for everything, you know, treating unequal things as equal. we're going keep doing those things, but we're going to have a democracy silo over here. so i think it's positive. but i'd like to see, you know, really, it should be in a way we shouldn't have to have a democracy team because everything we do in a news organization should oriented towards the public good. but i still think it's i still think it's good to put that kind of some attention on it and to bring it to people's i mean, it's really interesting that polls are showing now if you believe in polls, but but polls are showing that 70% of americans are very concerned. you know, democracy and whether whether we you know, it's

slipping. but i guess when you dig down a little bit, it's a question of they mean by that, like what mean by it is are are going to be free and fair election is what is voting access like and is there going to be an acceptance of elections that are done properly? and is there going to be a peaceful transfer of power? that's what mean. but what some people seem to mean about it based reporting i've seen is well, there's too much immigration and. my children are being taught horrible things. school, i mean, i don't know. i don't think that's what it's about. but people seem to mean things by it. and so when we see these numbers that seem to be like, well, that's good that people are concerned because we really do have a problem. i'm not sure it translates into every body being concerned about the thing that's actually happening. okay. so we had one over on this site. is it possible for you to come

over because he's got a short range here. thank you so much. here's good. i like this interview, by the way, guys, keep those hands coming up ahead. i was a freelance journalist for about two decades and i have been reflecting on the coverage that trump gotten. and i think six years of almost daily above the fold coverage is largely responsible for his rise to power. and i think it's a real failure of the media to have allowed that to happen. he kept throwing out stories. they were fast. they were easy, they were cheap and all the media outlets kept running with them. yeah, i mean, i thank you. i know what you're and i in a way, i don't disagree. certainly when he was president, it's pretty hard not to cover the president, but i think you're talking about the of salacious coverage of every crazy thing he said being made into big story and then you'd go on these sites and it would be

like every was about trump and. i agree that you know it went too far and that it probably helped solidify his on the country. so i do fault the media for that. yes right. we have in the green then i had a question about financial sustainability. local newsrooms given power imbalance and the cannibalization that tech platforms do have, ad revenue. what do you think is the path forward to getting local newsrooms back on their feet? wow, this is harvard, isn't it? well it's hard. i mean, local newsrooms are local news is very troubled. and it it kind of comes down to the thing, the lifeblood that supported newspaper readers for so long was print advertising and print advertising know took a huge hit, basically, the internet came along when craigslist along all of that you

can't put that genie back in the bottle. so now have to reinvent ourselves and find other ways of of sustain meaning. you know the cost of hiring reporters and the cost of putting the paper out. and it's hard. i mean, papers are, you know, newsrooms doing it. the globe is actually doing better than most. and it's heartening to see. i mean, what they're doing is emphasizing digital subscriptions, and that is the measure. of one of the biggest measures success right now. how you know what how many digital subscription do you have? and there's a de-emphasis print which doesn't make everybody happy i mean, when i was in buffalo the other day, my hometown, a guy stood up in the question period and told me how he spent. he gave me chapter and verse on how much his daily subscription cost. ten years ago, five years ago, two years ago. and now. now. the person who was interviewing me, the john was that was the

current executive editor of the of the buffalo news. so i was and i did my best and i sort of said, sheila, but it's you, you know, there is an effort to drive people to digital i mean, it's the future, it's the present, it's the. you know, and so getting a print subscription, it's sort of like i think jeff bezos said this or i think i can attribute to him, i'm not sure c-span, but he said that at some point when you'll you'll go to visit someone and you'll see a print newspaper on their cupboard or, you know, cabinet or something and. you'll it'll be like it'll be like going to somebody's place and saying, oh, you keep a horse, you know it's like it would be that unusual, that weird. we're not there yet, but it's so, you know there has to be a mix of philanthropy, public support, citizen support and,

advertising. you know it has to be a bunch of different things and. it's it's not going that great. i the example i like to give about the decline of local news and then i'll get off high horse about this is denver so denver used to have two big newspapers the rocky mountain news and the denver post this wasn't that long ago they each had 300 people roughly in their newsrooms. so you had a staff, you know, reporting, editing staff between the two of them of 600 people, the rocky mountain news went out of business. the denver post bought by the worst of the horrible hedge fund owners chain and probably has roughly 60 people in newsroom now. so you've gone from 600 to 60. now, there are other news organization events that have cropped up in the area. that's all great, but again, i see the newspapers as kind of engines and that i think those

numbers tell you something, but i'm not i mean, i'm not i don't think it's futile. i it's tough. yeah. you had one question in the in the front here. i thank you. i'm one of those people who keeps the horse. yeah. yeah. so it's oats. yeah, that's it but i wanted to go back to the questions previously about the threat to democracy and the very different ways that people what the real threat is. and you know this this different reality is that that americans are facing the world with i think very much comes from the diet of news that they get and how different those are. you know the whether mainstream media or whether it's fox news or the social media which i think is a big problem. i guess my question in there, is there anything that be done to bridge those, get people out of their news, out of their silos and, you know, other than because you think it's the right

thing to do as a citizen, i, you know, get out of of that that rut and get into something more based. right. i mean, i think it i think it comes down to education to some extent. and really would like to see news literacy taught in schools. you know, everybody says we need to go teach more civics school. and i think that news literacy should be taught in school, too, so that, you know, when you encounter something that looks like a news story, you actually would know how to judge it and would hesitate to share it before you would say, is this true how you compare contrast with go to other sources? not that we expect people to a research project every time they see a news story, but maybe stop long enough say i'm not sure i actually believe so. and i think adults should have news, literacy, education well, so that's one way to get at it. great. other questions from the

audience there's nobody but nobody on this side of the room. but one of the asks the question, which i feel like that one i somebody i see a half back myself. yeah, actually i guess one that's one question because. i think the news profession reason has been challenged by many different kinds of reasons, but how do you think how to reach so to regain the trust from the audiences or wannabes? i mean that's the key question and that's the really the underlying question. even though my book is a memoir, it's sort the underlying question of the whole book. and i think it's hard. i mean, one way that i think news can start to rebuild is by explaining ourselves to the public a little more than we being more transparent and saying, here's how we did this story. here's the reporting method we used. i mean, that's a relatively small thing.

i think it could it could start to make a difference. and think education is a big part of it. so, you know i will say, though, that while seen this huge decrease trust, it's happened at a time institutions in general have seen a huge decrease trust. and that's true of, you know, government business, the police, every institu you can think of. there's just much less public trust. so it's not just the news media, but it's you know, i do address this in some in in in the and i, i think that shoring up local news is a part of it too, because that is a place where where people tend to trust more so it has to be of a multifaceted approach and a it's a difficult problem. i agree think the way we talk about on our research team is how we add more talk to the internet is timely accurate local knowledge and knowledge

being different from information and it just ends up costing more. right. and i think that local journalism a big part of that and your you know, being a local journalist that someone that you know was in your hometown for so long and saw all of these technological changes political changes. i think this book is not just pertinent to the moment and the call to action at the end of the book where you want a return more reality based, accurate journalism is long overdue too. but also it's just such a wonderful read to get to know you. and even though you wouldn't play my silly game, i still love you. and it's from my to yours. i've been i've just loved your columns over the years and i don't think i would have ended being the scholar that i am without having fierce media out there holding people account. so everybody, let's thanks, ollie and the political.