in a few moments, a forum on the future of the internet. in a little more than an hour, a discussion on renewable and sustainable energy. after that, a hearing on wartime contracting reform. and later, the senate ageing committee looks at long-term care. now a discussion about the trends in digital media, including the evolution of the

internet and its future. the aspen institute and tmg custom media host this event. it's about an hour and 10 minutes. >> thank you all and very much, welcome. this is first in a series of dialogues on the future of content in partnership with charley fire stone's communication program. i want to thank tmg cus media. they are among others that publish the magazine, but really in the forefront of, that they came up for the idea of futures of content and it's our pleasure to thank them for doing it.

the event is on our website. aspeninstitute.org. it's also on twitter with a hash tag future of content. and one other quick announcement. our program will be holding a symposium on the state of race in america moderated by juan williams on april 9th at the museum. so see people as you go out if you want to hear more about it. so thank you very much. this is the first of our series. one thing you will notice is you have three guys from the old media up here. and i think this is part of a trajectory that we're going to try to do in this future of content series. this first will look from the vantage point of people who have been in print and traditional media, how are they moving things forward, and as we move along in the series, we'll do

people who have helped reinvent new forms of media and then perhaps people who have only worked in new forms of media and never old. and i do hope the last in our series will bring it full circle of people who have worked only in new forms of media, but now want to launch magazines and other things and feel that having a broad port foal ya of media and content delivery systems is the way to go. if you're wondering why we're starting this way, you'll see the trajectory. we will be going to people who have been involved in media from different vantage points. but first, two people i've respected for a very long time. marcus brauchli is the editor of "the washington post," was the editor of the washington journal. you have their buy yoes owes. ken i have known for 30 years.

he also has written ten books. the latest of which is "googled." but every one of these books has really dealt with communications and people who are changing the nature of communications. want to start with a little historical overview to get this thing started, which is it's been about 50 years since the advent of the digital age and its impact on content. for the first 25 years of that period in the digital age, the format of the content in dirgitl form was discussion. it was the early days of the internet with the bulletin board systems and then eventually online services with the well

and leading up to consumable like aol in which people formed communities and were on chat rooms and bulletin boards and discussion groups and everything was shared socially in terms of information and discussion. in approximately 1995 with the advent of the mosaic browser and other things, there was a dramatic shift in the way the internet worked. and that is the worldwide web and protocols of the web. and the reason i think that was a huge shift is that it shifted us away from having an internet-based content on community and more on publishing. it was actually a regression in some ways. once again, people just sort of published things or put things out, even if they were bloggers or newspapers or magazines or new newspapers and magazines. it was much more of a you put your content, your pictures,

whatever out for people to see. and the community was relegated to comment sections at the end, which were generally brain dead and stupid. now we're having another major shift that started three or four years ago for the next 25 years of the web, itsomes seems to me. it's being based on social networks and social media everything from facebook to twitter, which is bringing us back, thankfully i think, to a combination of people publishing things but also people forming communities, forming circles, forming discussion groups. and in some ways instead of resembling the web, the social media phase of the internet, i think, will resemble more of the first phase of the internet that was based around communities, sharing of information, and internet chat and internet relay h chat. so with that introduction, i was going to start with marcus because marcus with "the washington post" has been at the forefront now of not so much the

web, but social media with a good partnership with facebook. i was wondering how you think in the next five years both your partnership with facebook and social media will change what you do as a traditional newspaper editor. >> thank you, walter. thank you for putting this on. being called an expert by walter, who knows media more than i do. but even we have our idea of the futu future. and "washington post" has had a fairly close relationship with facebook and don gram, as you may know, is on the board of facebook and is friends with mark zuckerberg. we have been very attentive to social media. today we have a team of people in our newsroom who are focused on getting our content out to

where the audiences are. the one thing you can't can't do is deliver news tablet form. you have to figure out where the audiences are that are interested in the kinds of content you're producing and put that content in front of them. there are conversations that take place over many other platforms than obviously "the washington post" website. rather than assuming people are going to come to us and look for information, which is i think still the attitude of people who read newspapers and go to websites thinking they need to know what "the washington post" has to say, i think what happens more and more is people go where their friends are. they engage with their friends. and in that community, they learn what is interesting. the truth is probably the reason many people or most people even read any information or look for my news stories is because they want to be informed and be able to share whatever information they get with their friends. and facebook clearly recognizes this in a big way. the folks at facebook refer to

their home page as a personal newspaper. at "the washington post" in the last six months, we developed "washington post" social reader which takes not just "washington post" content but content from other sources. it puts the content up in front of audiences that they then read. as they read, their reads are s seeing what they read. if i know that don gram read an article, i'm curious to know what he's reading so i can talk to him about it. and the conversation is very different than the interaction of going to a newspaper or going to a website and reading the article. i'm more interested in what my friends are reading and talking about than i am just being told. >> if used to be traditional editors and anchors of the news media were the gate keepers. what you're saying is that in

the future, your circle of your social network will be the gate keepers for you to say, hey, this new album by coldplay is really cool or this new story is really good or whatever. >> it's not the future. i guess i should say this is now. if you talk to people to a large swath of the population, people that advertisers care about and people we want to develop as local followers, that's how they consume content. craig is going to tweet this. if craig tweets something about an event or craig tweets about an article he reads in "the washington post," i don't know how many followers he has, they will see it and they are interested because he's interested in it. by the same token, somebody on facebook, that's how a lot of people consume media.

we get -- the percentage of readers we have reading "washington post" content on social media platforms is rising dramatically. >> let me ask one more question and then get to ken. which is one of the things i get from "the washington post" is here's today's front page. i don't mean just in print. i will go to it now and it will lead with the supreme court discussion, let's say. and i know that those are the stories i should know about. could you ever imagine producing on the web a front page that is tailored just to me based on a, what you think is important, b, the type of content i generally go to, and c, the stories that my friends are reading. so everybody gets a different front page? >> i want to start the answer to that by i didn't set these questions up the way they are coming out, but we launched a product that does something like

that. it's in early stages, but you can sign up for personal posts. it knows what you have been reading and you can go through and tell it i'm interested in this content or that stream of content. and ideally what we would like to do is give people interested in that a front page of content that they are most likely to be interested in based on their past habits including what their friends are interested in. the experience of reading news becomes a more tailored experience and a more engaging experience, which naturally is what we'd like to see happen. >> you know, the 1995, the year you were launching, andy grove was on a platform at the american society of newspaper editors. and i was interviewing him. i said to him, mr. grove, you have a thousand newspaper editors in this room. what's their value in the future? he looked at them, the devil

that he is, and he said, e zero. i don't need them. because in the internet age, which was then coming abroad, i can create my own newspaper and i don't need an editor. i can pick and choose if i want sports, if i want health, business, i can get just what i want. two years later, i was interviewing him again. and i quoted what he said. and i said mr. grove, do you still feel that way? and he said, i was totally wrong. he said there's too much god damn information out there. there was too much information. i would never have known to read about surbia. so and actually, that's one of the most hopeful stories i can think of in the importance of editors. and i hope we don't see and

create individual newspapers because the readers are going to miss that se ren dip us to experience. >> i think it's a mix. i'm not suggesting that everything you read is what you want to read, but it has to be a mix of content. not everybody wants to have exactly the same information delivered to them. there's clearly a role in any newspaper. the front page of a newspaper is a way of signaling what we think is important. e we do that on our website now too. but we need to be attentive to what the audience areas of interest are. the audience doesn't always know what they are interested in. there needs to be a way of surfacing it. i don't think we're going to abandon that any time soon, but what you have to feather into the mix is some kind of personalization so that the news really is what people want to know about and the news is what

their friends are talking about. >> steve jobs was great when they asked him, shouldn't we allow users to figure out what they want in this machine? and he said how do they know what they want until we have told them. there is a sense that you're trying to do three things now in the next five years as an editor. one is to allow people to tailor based on their own interests. two is allow their friends to be the crowd-sourcing filter, but three is for you to say, and also on this front page, you should know that the health care law got shot down. or even what i would call se ren dipty. you have no interest in sports, but you should know that jeremy lynn lin has just emerged as a phenomenon. that's not just important. it's se ren dipty. >> we have a story on the front page of the print newspaper

that's gone viral about had this guy in maryland who dresses up in a batman outfit. nobody would know to look for that story. obviously, you wouldn't tailor that. it's clearly working because it's gone completely viral. >> you know, you talked about in billing this luncheon session today is content king and there's been this debate for decades as to who is king? is it distribution? is it content? and the truth is, and it flows from what you were saying about social media, the consumers came. and technology gives them the armaments to become king. and basically, they choose to lower the prices on books through digital books, which is technology that comes along. free google searches and get news on that. and to say what they liked in your newspaper and what they

don't like in the newspaper. or use the content on youtube. so that's something that we -- and that sometimes collides with traditional media. and our wants or our desire to play gate keeper or editor. eat your spinach. you should know this as a citizen. maybe i don't want to know that as a citizen. maybe i find it boring. that's an ongoing conflict in the media. >> what happens to trust in a particular story or trust in media when there's nobody particularly responsible for the source? >> the argument that marcus would make and "the new york times" and "the wall street journal" and other reputable news organizations make is that we have a brand value. and that if we put our reporter on that story, you should trust it. and the problem is that on the web, you often don't know where that story is coming from. you do a google search. or your friends on facebook and

their links. you don't necessarily know. so it inevitably risks diminishing the value of that brand. >> you have done a lot on google. what do you think google is going to do in the next five years to try to navigate this environment? >> well, i mean, people think of google as a search company and that's a mistake. they are much broader than that. steve balmer, the head of microsoft, likes to say google is a one-trick pony. but in fact, they have four p y ponies that they are riding. search is one. and by the way, as mobile phones and smart phones grow, so does search share because people are doing it on their mobile phones. so that's not a declining business. second they have android, the operating system. it's now the largest for all cell phones. they will figure out how to monotar rise that. third they have cloud computing, which is a hot area, which is

when you do on your blackberry or iphone a server, that's a cloud. and they are saying to companies, you don't need your own i.t. department. let us do it for you. and obviously, advertising is a huge area for google. and there's a fifth, which is youtube. 40% of the videos downloaded are done on youtube. this is relevant to what we're talking about content today. youtube was losing a billion dollars a year by relying on user-generated content. what they discovered is advertisers would not want their friendly ads next to some dog pooping on the street. so increasingly, google, like apple or amazon, is going out and buying professional content. and they are making money. it makes it important.

on the other hand, the user gets to vote. i mean i think content clear lir has a great deal of power. you can see evidence that content power is outlasting some of the platforms that came before. cable televisions is an interesting situation. i don't presume to be an expert, but if you think about what cable television does, it delivers content you're not consuming. and you could pay -- if you could buy online just the espn that you want to watch or just the cnbc you want to watch for $10 a month, they would get more money than they are getting today and you just have the concept you want. any time you have this situation where the amount you're spending is vastly more than what you're getting for it, the technology has a way of come pressing it out. and i think that platform is

facing some challenges and i surmise but don't know is one of the reasons comcast wanted to buy nbc universal. what youtube is doing, what comcast did in buying nbc universal, we see it too. our audience has been growing terrifically in the last couple years. our digital audience -- this "washington post" social regard started in november is up to 18 million downloads, which is extraordinary in a few months. people are reading "washington post" content in larger numbers. >> let me pause there. there's another major shift that's about to be happening in what i would call internet or digital-based content, which is not only to social networks, but a way for desk top computers and web bases to mobile, but more important to apps, which are not actually the same as a --

necessarily the same as a web-based application. where the apps have more functionality. they can be paid for and often are paid for. do you think the move to an app-based digital content is a major shift? >> not clear. i did for awhile. there's now a new technology that people are starting to write websites on called html 5. it works across platforms. and the app really became common place with apple's use of it it in the ipad. and the iphone before that. now you can actually create a website that was the same website whether you're on a mobile phone, a tablet, a desk top. and you might have all the qualities and the attributes of an app, but it might not be an

app. >> so html 5 will blur the distinction between an app and a websi website. >> i would think so. the other thing is they are basically two basic streams. there's open which is google, and there's closed, which is amazon and apple and middle ground is facebook. and i think you may see a lot of apps built on facebook that are unique to facebook. and that may be the way a lot of people consume content. but it's slightly different from the notion of the app that you have on an ipad where you're often paid money for an app. >> so you think this it's hard to make people pay for them? >> i don't know. the financial times does. they charge for people. i don't know. i think that i wouldn't say that we're necessarily going to end up in an app world.

microsoft and big companies think that's the direction we're going, but i don't know. >> i think the battle is the platform battle. it's not an app battle. apps are within the platforms. it used to be that the powerful platform was cable. and broadcasters and others had had to go through them. well increasingly if you think about it, facebook is a platform. youtube, google, amazon, they are all platforms. netflix is a platform. and these platform companies are competing and diminishing the power of cable. and increasingly, traditional media wants to be on that platform and what kind of money will facebook offer me to run my shows. and that increasingly is a battle, i think, that's taking place. >> so the last of the great gate

keepers, in a way, are the cable company. they have some control of what gets from the curb side into your living room, you know. they own some of that pie. do you they that daeisappears i the next five years? >> it doesn't disappear because it becomes more kmomtized. so cable programming companies, fx, amc, hbo become very valuable. and they can then sell that content to some of these various platforms. not just keep it exclusively. >> but will i ever be able to take out an ipad and be able to watch espn and cnn? >> you can now. >> not exactly. >> time warner will let you extent your subscription. >> go through the cable? >> if you were in the arab

spring, you were riding around in a taxicab on your ipad and you could watch streaming live. you realize. how come i can watch what's going on but i can't -- and the answer is cable. >> does that get blown up in the next five years. >> it has to at some point. >> the other thing, i don't know if you follow this. it didn't get a lot of pub l publicity. but they announced a new technology, which is totally disruptive to cable and broadcasting, it's a little box you have in your house. it's like an old antenna. but wirelessly you can get television signals from broadcasters. they set up a plant in new york city and they are going to roll it out in new york and bring it to other cities. $10 a month. they are not going to pay the broadcasters anything. they say we're going to sue you. they say, no, it's free over the air broadcasting. and huge battle is about to take place because one of the ways

that broadcasters -- >> but we're rooting for them aren't we? >> one of the interesting things. you believe in content. one of the ways that cbs or nbc or abc and the broadcasters have been able to pay for content is they have gotten from companies is retransmission fees. which are quite lucrative for them. why would cable pay them hundreds of millions of dollars a year if had he is competing with them for free? so there's a huge battle potentially if the technology works down the road on this. >> looking further down the road, each new technology and medium eventually creates its whole new form of content. they didn't go back to the printing press and novels get invented. you can look at television and at first it was the only wine being poured in the new bottle, which is radio shows but with

pictures. and suddenly people invent new forms of content for television. it seems to me that with the exception of perhaps blogs, there really isn't a new form of content that has been invent ed for the interactive digital age. >> i'm not sure i would agree with that. if you go on your website and you read that, what is different about that than the paper you're getting tonight or tomorrow morning? for instance, on "the new york times" today, i could find out what happened in the supreme court at 11:00 in the morning. i would have questions about that in terms of how much time is there to report that story. and you know, maybe they are not being able to report as well. but on the other hand, in addition to that, i'm on my ipad and i'm watching video and i'm reading about an obituary of somebody who died and i can look

at their artwork and go to the archives. suddenly a newspaper becomes a live event and i can talk back to reporters and other stories. it seems to me that has changed the nature of what a newspaper is. >> there are several strains that are different that department exist before. the first one is, you know, when ken goes to our website at 11:00 in the morning, not only can he see an early version of the news, and we are competitive there now, but we have a lot of very talented, smart bloggers who write fast analysis. and it's a different form than what we would have publish ed i the print form. there's a group of people working on blogs. they turn around 300-word analysis throughout the day as things are coming out as a transcript of the court hearings. do the same thing with politics.