lbj and vietnam -- another 50,000 another 50,000 on the ground. the same thing with the internet. you woke up one day and sought -- everyone was using the internet. i halfs come from an industry that has seen its revenue good to $24 billion. they have come down crashing. one third of the people in newsrooms a decade ago are now gone. i agree with you that there is a lot of access instantaneously to lot of information. if you look at the local level this situation is very ambiguous. you cannot have 32 people covering the state legislature in this state. now they have a little bit above 20 to have major papers in the second biggest city pullout of

the state legislature for financial reasons, and not have ambiguity about the quality of local content. we were born as a result of a tumultuous times at the tribune, and one of the bigger ones in the country only 30 television stations and a lot of newspapers they went into bankruptcy. we started as a small nonprofit. the good news is our main client, the new york times, we produce a couple of pages on friday and sunday, very happy with the product. the not so good news is do we have a sustainable business model? i think that is very unclear at this point. whether the one will be able to get to folks, mostly the old foe is paying $700 to have the print subscription, to pay anywhere near that for the stuff that they may get online, and when we get into this later when it comes to politics, the lack of

consensus, fragmentation, if personalization the media, there is a real potential loss in these local communities where many of the paper goes serve a social medicine, doing the things -- social mission, doing the things like the chicago tribune on the subject of the death count robbing a long expo's these -- right team along expos days -- writing long expose about the death penalty. there's some questions to be raised as we go along, and i have a distinct sense of a transitional period, as we head down another path, even with all the wonderful new means of twitter and facebook and all that at our disposal that can get a lot more information out

to folks theoretically. there's still a big question about what happens at a local level if you do not have enough revenue to support a high enough quality staff so that you can have reporting in a sophisticated way, rather than some $35,000 deal or something like that. to me, that is the big question. what will be the sustainable model for any of these newly flowering, very idealistic, well intentioned organizations like ours? >> i will get to you in a second. one of the things you put your finger on and a worthy topic of discussion is, is the social mission of what we all do. the constitution protect one industry, media. they did not have the word then but it is the free press. you could not have a democracy without a free press.

the mantra of the internet for years has been information wants to be free. i always think that people want reaffirmation. information does not want anything at all. but you talk about a sustainable model. putting something together that, i do not know, will people pay for? will preserve some of the traditional values by packaging it in a new form? >> that is what we're trying to do. that is what we have done so far. part of our premise starting out was that you can actually do the stories that we do with a smaller scale, a smaller scale operation. instead of being a magazine that has 100 people working for it, we're very focused on paying the writers to go out to the world and report on something in debt, find the narrative story and bring that back and then we have a small system up fact checking, we have an in-house fact checker, but a is all contained

and it is all around the story. you do not have to sell that many stories in order to make up what you have put out. so that as kind of like one premise that we have adopted was, we wanted to have a small model that was able to make its money back and not make a profit and make money for the writers as well, and sending someone out for months it time, that is obviously going to cost money. but the way we sell our stories on the ipad and iphone and nook we sell them as a book. that premise is where there is so much information, so much recent information, twitter, breaking news, all over the web, huffington post, that there might be a space for stories that are longer, that have more debt where someone is spending time not only to get further into the story, but also to find

that compelling narrative that makes it fun to read. we are tackling that space assuming that, well, in the digital world, that is one of the hardest things to do. that is one of the things that the web has not done well creating narrative longer than 2500 words. and we're finding that there is a niche in there. if you want to keep your overhead low, you can make money. and as a startup organization, we approach it as a tax startup we are a news organization with a social values that you talk about and we have people spending half their time thinking of weekend's show a video and coded in today feed, we're taking a very technology first approach to how we tell the story. >> and they are not just long. when people that historic to me,

we can do a long story on x the problem with your pitches the word long. but i think what you're doing is creating something that people might actually want to pay for. you're talking about people reading keith richards' autobiography. but i loved the book. i was so frustrated that i could not hear music and see video while i was reading it. the future of book publishing will be things like that. but speaking of long form, you are a master of a long form, and you have been doing it the long time. even in "the selling of the president," it was about how people shape to the views of the audience in terms of the content that is produced. one of the controversies your book has pointed up is the idea that in the new media world, people can not -- because it is all pull the not pushed -- you

can find a point of view that agrees with you and you are not forced to read a contrary opinion. is that part of the reaction to your book? >> i am not so sure about that. but i did think that i sit here as the dinosaur in the room. probably the only person here who is collecting social security. but that does not mean i am not interested in the future. i like to think that i still have a future. however, the kind of work i have been doing for 40 years has been dependent on the economic model of publishing, reaching an audience making the publisher field that they want to invest in your netbook and not just throw money down a drain. -- in your next book and not just throw money down a dream. some books i could never get a

contract to write them because the potential audience is simply not big enough. one of the other things that has happened over recent years that i think has been a real step backwards has been the failure of magazine journalism to sustain itself. back in the selling of the president days, there were so many magazines, weekly and monthly, harper's, the atlantic, the saturday evening post that printed long form journalism. that word to not exist but it was a story. almost all of them have gone by the wayside. i have a friend named tom juno one of the best magazine writers in america worked for esquire and we were talking recently about a couple of story ideas and i said gee that might be in egypt -- in interesting thing for me to do for esquire. and he said they are not hiring in the house side writers.

it is all produced by the staff. what if i had a story that i wanted to tell that the magazine is not going to want to -- the magazines are not there anymore. alas magazine story i wrote was about sarah palin's nonexistent natural gas pipeline. it was in her next-to-last issue. i did not quite close it up but i came close. i spent three weeks in alaska researching that story. without padding, my expenses came to $12,000. most magazines will not even pay the fee of $12,000 anymore. what is a writer to do? this is where i look at the gentleman to my right and i look at "the atavist" and i say this as my savior. this is where we can still do the kind of work i like to do. we do not have to make decisions

on simply commercial but tell the stories that we want to tell and reach of smaller audience. he can make money because he does not have the overhead. i think that "the atavist" is one of the most important steps forward. they're very few people who support themselves solely by writing anymore. i have a lot of novelist friends who already said that the one thing that would never do is teach. i can find them now on faculties all over the country because they cannot sell their books. now they are teaching. likewise the work i am doing most nonfiction books are not written by people who make a living at it. people are either connected to an organization, like kara rights and excellent book but does not make a living as a book writer. the book is something extra.

another writer for the new yorker writes books as a supplement. talese is one and another is still working, but not many other people are out there. no new people are coming into writing nonfiction for a living because there is no living to be made at it. if it is not a celebrity biography, which maybe we think sarah palin is a celebrity biography, but basically that kind of books, the best nonfiction writers have always been interested in planting, the market seems to have disappeared, not entirely, not entirely. obviously there are good new books, but for the mid level the writer who is not a star or a guaranteed best seller, the publishers will not pay the money, the magazines are not there anymore so you need something like "the atavist" to

keep this tradition of paternalism alive. >> and there are other forms of that. single evokes, and one of the things that we have done that time we had a cover story about the new thinking about the civil war. it came in at 10,000 words. we were on we going to run 5000 words. it became a kindle single. it did not make a lot of dough but that is in the future. you started out in what used to the new media -- television and broadcast journalism. let them know how this change for you. because no one can do just one thing anymore. i am sure you have pressure to tweet, to block it, to write stories online. -- to blog, to write stories online. you said that nbc looked on like

other networks has a 24 hour cable. it has the msnbc web site and a panoply things. but that means that you have to do all of those things. >> yes, and in my perspective, i think there is a huge difference between information and knowledge. we all sit in this room and a bomb could go off in afghanistan and within minutes we would get it on our messages and facebook and twitter. but very few of us will understand why that actually happened. there's a difference between knowledge and information. the difference between media and journalism. at the end of today good journalism will ultimately sell. what we are challenged with now and i think what the american public have grown frustrated with is one way journalism, where that journalists is an off formal setting, holds the microphone, and tells you what the most important story is. but it may not be what you think is the most important story. what is changing is that there

is a much more viewer-reporter involvement. so many times, even coming up here, i greeted and asked people what they thought was the future of journalism. i got a tremendous amount at the book of people -- feedback from people. if there is a good product people will buy it. that is what itunes shows us and kendall choses. kin -- kindle shows us. i use it to news gather and to disseminate. there are so many times in the middle east where something is happening in syria, journalists are not allowed to get in, a military attack on a small village, i can get on twitter and messengeage the people that follow me. within seconds, i will say -- i would get a number or a contact. i will get that information and

do that journalism part, verify report, and use the same technology used to get the information to disseminated to the public. this is become a two-way street. i would never have been able to get that content from my sources, but i was not able to disseminate without that same technology. >> so, again, you put out a tweed. what is the future of journalism? >> i think the constant thing that i got was not being told. media should not be beholden to the interest of the few that define the rundown, so to speak. it is all about your involvement and your engagement. people want to be able to understand what is happening. they do not want to be told information. they want to be involved in the knowledge process and the analysis of that information. >> can go the other way? i was just on the fox news show

this morning in chicago, and just before my segment they had a story about the red sox general manager probably going to take over the chicago cubs. they put out a thing on the screen, tell us what you think. will he do it? then there was an entire three- minute segment where they showed the responses they were getting from viewers and saying this is what so and so things, this is what's so and so things. of what value is that? that gets you an audience, guess, but to me, it is wasting a lot of time. >> it is discouraging in a way. if you look at the surveys done about internet use and sites like amazon, people trust. valuations more than they trust traditional journalism -- they trust peer evaluations more than they trust traditional journalism.

to people understand journalism and what role it plays? if they value the opinions of their peers what value is it for a man like yourself saying what is important and why? >> there is less a sense of that and what are trustworthy sources and on interest was a pace sources. it is a complicated issue and deals with the educational system and a lack of civics education, people not knowing the difference between the person blabbing on fox or msnbc kara and kara who may have taken two weeks to assess the problem. we are also partly to blame if you take political coverage. i think we have simply taken the political system's obsession over the last 20 or 30 years for making mountains out of molehills, for going negative, and tactics and strategy has fed right into that. you get the echo chamber if you

look at the debate coverage of the republican debates this morning, and watch the mainstream media and, you will see stories about statecraft and are the best and about how people are trying to position themselves. -- and are at best -- arti fice and about how people are trying to position themselves. i was looking a more distant than i plan, and i lifted a blimps are restored. not only did i learn about substantial economic issues but they seemingly sophisticated analysis of what they were saying. that when romney says that obama healthcare plan calls $1 billion, it is bs. when perry says that he created 50,000 taxpayer funded jobs in texas, that is bs. when herman cain talks about balancing the budget, it is

absolutely, totally impossible. but i do worry about whether or not someone growing up with an ipad will have a sense of where there is an error of authority. you work for a network news operation which is in some ways imperil the by some of the very technology that it is employing. a quick demonstration cairo, and i do not have to wait for my friend brian williams. i will not wait for bryan williams because whether it is on my mobile device or on my mac, i'll be seeing dozens of video from tahrir square. i have no clue who i might trust. how do i sort that out not hating on consumer journalist, but the guy at patterson, new jersey going on youtube, and

there are 50 videos of the demonstrations? >> i have to disagree with you. maybe i am not wearing a blue blazer. >> our pants a different color. >> that said, there is nothing wrong with these people speaking up. there is no reason to abandon ethics and at that same time have fairness. " we believe that all those things are critically important. including that you trust our brand. at the same time, incredibly valuable things being brought up by readers. i have always thought that readers were smarter than i was. when e-mail was just coming out, at reporters rely quite you want to hear from the reader? i would say that they know things and they tell me stuff. the argument that come from old media that this stuff is not trustworthy or is not right, it is not vetted. that is not entirely true. first of all i love in your

times but it is a bunch of white dudes and a lady who all live on the upper east side. >> upper west side. >> it is the same people. it is the same people. secondly, if people are smart and they can rise above this. they can rise above the noise and you will get patrols but you'll get a much more rich and valuable system -- you will get the trolls, but you get a much more rich and valuable system. and it can get better and better. keep in mind, getting more video adds richness to the store. >> kara, lest i get characterized as alli luddite who grew on the upper west side and wearing a blue blazer. >> your tie is fantastic. >> i got it in london.

[laughter] i think it is great that all that stuff is out there. there is in some way the question of a small group of folks as the gatekeepers. the populism and the democracy to a vault, it is salutary. my question is, tell me about the business model whereby this fellow and brian williams can make the sort of money by telling you about what is going on in cairo in a day in which you have been submerged -- >> i want you to weigh in on that. >> talking about the importance of that and you will talk about this, but the time that twitter blew me away was with the iranian uprising four years ago, where people were tweaking in real time about what was happening. it is not like they are trusted sources but real time primary source information.

if you had benjamin franklin tweeting from the constitutional convention, there would be a lot less books printed about the constitutional convention because we would know. i do not know how you pay brian williams so much money, but how does that affect your reporting? in no way, had you compete with those folks? >> i do not care whether anyone watch as a single one of my news reports, on an ipad or on their walk in the metro and there i popped up for a few minutes that is not my concern. that is for the brainy at technology people. unfortunately the big corporation who delays the technology delays how quickly i can get my report you. i want people to consume news and product. one of the biggest challenges is the steve jobs case, where steve jobs dies one day

wednesday night after most of the american nightly news cast had finished. the next day, they all led with his death. at 730 on thursday, there is nothing that i learned just by normal regular consumption of the reformation. i did not go out of my way to do anything. just by logging on the internet and going on my gmail account people posting things on facebook -- i cannot tell you how many people linked his commencement address at stanford. i was like honestly, have any of you just turned on the internet? i did not say that. i am new to the company. but my point is, when you talk about this, and i could be

completely wrong, but one idea i think might work is that the internet itself needs to be restructured in the sense that, all of us today at a television set. -- had a television set where will we pay $150 to get the premium channels to get the hbo and showtime. and some just pay $50 a month for the basic channels. i do not think that model is wrong to apply to the internet. i do not think that all of us visit that trillion websites that exist. we visit about a dozen to two doesn't websites on a regular basis. and spend a lot of time there. why would an internet company charge me $100 to have access to a trillion websites one i only used 10? if they give you access to the new york times for an additional $5 fee lflat i am still

getting the same experience, but $4 for every package of websites that i want, a bundle of website. you can start bundling them. you can get that for $4, al jazeera english arabic, and you may not want that. you may be very content with a few american newspapers and you will pay the $4. but there is none of this going back and here is a $99 cents for this premium article. here it out -- i want to be of a access the internet but i understand that it i'm going to give you a good product, that comes with costs. that goes back to what i said earlier. the american sumer's are willing to pay for a good product. you increase the quality of journalism and the product people will pay for it. and finally, making the material

more enriching, one of the key products that nbc is working on is that they have an amazing arcade that goes back to the 1921 universal media. they did this book about john f. kennedy that is called "50 days." they had an ipad application that goes along with the book. their pictures that if you tap on them, you see the report filed on the day that john f. kennedy gave a stern speech, all when jacqueline onassis went to paris. i cannot live around the time of john f. kennedy, but i want to learn as much as possible, and i am so fascinated by our reporters back and used it covered presidents and how polite they were. nobody nowadays, so i think the technology is going to take my package, my reports, and it will put it on the website and an article about egypt with a video

from nbc about the revolution and perhaps also a link to a longer format book. and you get this great product for the small fee of $3.99. >> [unintelligible] >> alan ask a question about technology. i like to ask you to weigh in on this. we think that this is organic. speaking of technology. cultural forms are organic, and i forget the guy who wrote the book back in the 1950's and 1960's, but he began set by saying the record album. you know why i record album exist? because someone invented long playing technology. it used to be just singles. they invented along verplank record and that created the album.

we just grew up thinking that albums were organic. but technology changes cultural forms. we were talking about steve jobs on the way in. i was skeptical. how did everything that he did change the form of what we consume, but they have been a radical way. i like for you to talk about that. what is the value of the tweet 140 characters? but believe me, they will have collected books of the best tweets of the decade. >> you can tweak of product and endorse it. >> kim kardashian is a genius but she is horrible at the same time [laughter]

a lot of these formats come up the media likes it that way. it is not because people concerned that way. by the start of every speech by going the kids love it. they love the internet, they love the iphone, stop arguing about what would happen. the way the media should cover itself is the way they cover group on varianton. one of the things they don't want to do is to adapt to the way people want to consume media based on the technology. people like smart phones. people like ipads. they like to get their news and little bursts. people like facebook. stop arguing and start to adapt and create good quality things pretty technology is important.

what you are carrying is a more powerful computer than you had 10 years ago. it is a computing device were you can get almost any piece of information. it is a big gigantic opportunity for media to take advantage and they have to stop saying that i wish it was not so and start to do things with it. we don't get rid of equality and fairness but we adapt. we don't make as much money as brian williams. you have to start thinking what people want to have and how do they want to consume their devices. >> i have been saying this for 10 years the visual image is replacing the written word as the basic unit of communication. because technology now enables

us to see everything as it is happening, to go back and see the coverage of jfk and not just read about it, who wants to read about it? it has more immediate impact to actually see it and hear it. the written word was a way of explaining things to a reader but if you can show them and tell them for live action and visual imagery, it is much more powerful. basically, the printed word has had a good long run. it started with gutenberg and it has run up until steve jobs. i think that phase is ebbing and being replaced by something new which will be more visual impact and is much more suitable for the and technology we have. >> you can use all of them though. >> what i take exception to is the rise of email, more people all around the world typed more

since the rise of e mail than any time in human history. i learned to type and i was 18. my kids learn when there were eight or nine years old. >> it is pretty tough to type on iphones. i have an ipad now. i am not dexterous enough. >> maybe it is that you don't have to choose. it kills the media that they think the consumer can choose. if the consumer wants text or a video or audio they can choose. you can send pictures and people talk about it. it does not matter. we have to stop arguing about the medium and how it is coming through and realize you can do anything. >> i completely agree with you

but one of the daunting challenges with journalists that they have not come to grips with is they are annoyed about the fact that when they make a run down they are the ones prioritizing this story which none of us in this room may think are the important story. they may decide to lead with a certain story when everyone thinks something completely different. people do want to waste their time watching a three-minute report about the weather when i don't think the weather is the most important story. >> how do you get around that? >> consumers don't care what we think. >> the idea that there is a hierarchy in the evening news and a hierarchy on the front page of a newspaper, people don't want you to say this is more important than that. >> stop putting so much emphasis

on what the lead story is. give me the best story that you worked on for today. if they are important stories people will find a way to get to them. make sure they are getting out to the public on their technology-driven resources and people will choose. i want to watch what the three networks did about egypt today. other people want to know about jobs. if you are thinking that you have 22 minutes and you want to leave with a health story and whether story and not with egypt on the list, you are monopolizing your 22 minutes and you are probably turning off of yours. the viewer ship of nightly news and others are declining not because people suddenly don't want news, everything you were telling them at 7:30 p.m., they have already consumed. >> what do you do with the weekly magazine? is there a future for the weekly magazine? >> every form still exists.

radio exists. people still make pottery. [laughter] >> don't compare yourself to pottery. >> t > >weet that. >> everybody -- time magazine = pottery. >> there covering this in real time and we are on every single platform there is. in a way print magazine is a legacy product but it is a product from a brand. you might say you like getting under mobile platform and i will throw in i will charge for this i will throw in this print magazine that comes out once a week. we have 12 or 30 million unique users per month on line. many of them are young people.

they will be pleasantly surprised to discover that this is a print product that goes with it. people will have every different form of media. >> as managing editor, you have to make judgments on what will go into that magazine every week. you don't have room for everything. >> that's true. you don't have to make those decisions on line. even online is shrinking. how does your technology answer these questions? >> i would just agreed that the difference is that you have to make an argument to their readers or listeners or the watchers. you have to make an argument that you are the place they are going to go to for that story and that information. if a story broke about aol buying a company i know they have been reliable reporting and i have been there before.

i can get the information of that happening in many places. they have created a community of people want to go there because they have proven reliable in the past. we are trying to do it in a different way. we are trying to make an argument that we are telling a story that you cannot read anywhere else. you'll not find his narrative about this topic anywhere else. in this print your, we went around to many publications before we lost and said we want to do things that are longer than magazines but shorter than books but there is no one who deals with that. if a magazine is longer than 10,000 words, you don't have the advertising space. if it is a book, you will not be able to sell a $25 hardback edition. the platforms allow you to create a form that was not viable before. it is not an answer to all the questions about local news. i don't have the answers to

those questions but i think it is true that rather than looking at the technology and the ipad or the of -- i found taking away from these older models, they open up these new doors. people are standing there reading their kindle. the old kindle was only good for reading books and millions of people bought it. it is opening up a way to get those readers. >> i brought up the subject about state legislature which is not particularly well covered. i think the great sculduggery takes place there. at the same time, and a place like illinois and maybe this segment sacramento and albany, you have fewer reporters. when you dig down and talk to some of them and find out what their work load is light they are tweeting and sending out video and there are ways you can

go online and get video of hearings in the illinois legislature. there is a whole lot of information that one could not get before. one reporter told me he had a radio interview in quad cities and he let folks link to it and he is a smart guy. there is kind of an interesting tension here with the challenge of diminished resources and the upside of the technology enabling you to do what people really what we're to get the stuff out fast. it will be interesting to see in the era of personalization where you are spending money on what you think you want. what happens to these lower priority items? you cannot imagine many people spend much money to get stuff on

arcane subject. it was there once upon a time even if you pick up the paper under way to the lifestyle section or the sports section you might stumble into that little expos tse about something else. >> i think about resources a lot. . we do more with less people. i love "the washington post." but there are a lot of people doing a lot of nothing. you can pare down./ we have great health care systems. we have five people versus 25. they are really dedicated and passionate about it. i don't work than any harder than i work when i was a journalist.

we broke many stories. they have 10 reporters and we have one. are we smarter? are we working better? the consumers want what they want and that is something you should respect, you can do with law -- a lot less people. i think there were people who will cover the illinois legislature better than some of the old reporters used to. >> it is easier now in the sense that someone who wants to find that can find that. i don't remember when we first met but the first presidential campaign i covered was 1988. i had two suitcases, one had closed and one had all the position papers, all the speeches, all the papers of all the candidates and i carried that around. this is the information that we need. you go to a whistle stop and a candidate gets up in 20 minutes

before they give you the text of the speech. you would be standing there reading it and there will be a rope barrier and actual american citizens will look over and ask where i got that. they can't get it because i am doing something exclusive. every voter in america now has access to with more information than we had in the days when we had information that seemed exclusive. a candidate's website has every speech every poet -- every position paper. it is incumbent on citizens to do more. there is more available. >> there are other formats. there are rich people paying for great journals. it is funded by the guy who was editor of "the wall street journal." someone will come up with a different system. media has to become entrepreneurial. it is not like a priesthood or

they deserve to be in business. they have to stop complaining about that. the consumer has taken control and they are not getting it back in music movies, entertainment or any part of their lives. how do you fit in with accurate quality journalism? you become entrepreneurial. >> we have only five minutes left. i would love each of you to take a couple of minutes and i will let you talk about what you want to say -- what will the media and journalistic environment look-alike five years from now 10 years from now? how different will it be? you were actually doing something that is available now. that might seem like a dinosaur in two or three years. look in that crystal ball and say what things will look like five or 10 years from now.

>> very quickly -- on the issue of radio -- i am a news junkie. i don't know a single dial in this country for npr. i know i can always go to npr.org and i can find any story i am looking for. radio has increased because of technology. that is the underlying theme. technology will enhance journalism once some of these corporate institutions of journalism figure that out and stop fighting it but embrace it. once they figure out the best way to deliver to everyone in this room the three-minute story or the six-minute story about egypt, i am in great shape. i don't care where you watch it or when you watch it, i care that you have a right to watch it and that is the most important thing as a journalist. if your interested in a story

about the middle east or sports, you have the right to be able to find it and get to it. my biggest challenge is that people don't necessarily have the choice in the past. if you are being told 22 minutes of what is the most important news story, people will be more engaged in now. they have more information but a greater civic responsibility to be more knowledgeable. that is where reporters come in. you can see all the youtube video but you will not understand it if you don't have somebody there that you trust and go to regulate. rly. people are more accepting of slightly opinionated news. these are people who are more polemic and question. are we done enough to think these stories will be that straight forward? you will question it.

that is the spirit of the old journalism which has not gone away which will always be there but now you can hear it in so many different platforms. >> let's go around a bullhorn. -- a round of the horn. >> my wife is a pulitzer prize winner on child development and owl broker asked -- and al roker asked her to sum up in 30 seconds childhood education and she did it. i can take out my clay tablet and i think there are some problems we now face like lack of cooperation. it is almost impossible to reach consensus everywhere. i can be mown some of the potential problems of fragmentation. on a local level lack of social

cohesion is a very complicated matter. there's a lack of sense of community and that is significant. journalists like myself are terrible historians. we too often forget what came before us. steve jobs as a visionary but there will be another one. there will be something else which we will harness in intelligence, innovative ways even have guys like me go into that new world kicking and screaming. i think the technology is so wonderfully powerful as i watch my two-year old fiddle with an ipad. he will never know what a mouse is. as my seven year-old becomes a mini-chess savant playing on the macintosh, there is a

wonderfully bright future and we will figure out ways to pay for quality and we will harness this technology and get it to people where they wanted it. whoever is the stuff is, -- whoever's stuff i its it will be easily accessible and a golden era potentially is beckoning. >> i second of that. i completely think technology is the key and all the examples you just gave, at the end of the day, it is about the viewers have been the right to choose and that is my main concern. they need to be empowered to make the choice of how and when and where they consume the journalism. that is never going away because people will always speak in -- inquisitive. they want to be better informed citizenry with choices. >> i am not quite so optimistic.

>> that's because you lived next to sarah palin for a year. >> i learned to keep my head down. people have the right to choose and there is so much more to choose from and they tend to choose what reinforces with the already believe. people do not seek out. when sarah palin was elected mayor she presided over first city council meeting and a friend of hers, somebody who voted for her, gave her a book at the end of the meeting because she was worried that she was ignorant in so many ways. he gave her the book called " worldly philosophers" to teach her something about economics. she would not even take a book out of his hands. she put her own hand out and said no. i never read anything that might challenge my beliefs. [laughter]

i am afraid that palinization is spreading through technology. people watch fox news because that reinforces what they believe or msnbc, they will carry that mind set over to the internet and all the wonderful opportunities that are available. who seeks out typical the information? tell me something i know is right to strengthen my position but i don't want to have somebody arguing with me through technology. that is much less optimistic point of view. >> you are talking about sarah palin. >> we are way beyond that. >> i think media will be promiscuous. it will be everywhere. it will have to be everywhere and where people want to consume it. promiscuity is important for me

going for it. it will be everywhere, meaning ubiquity. i was in korea and i saw some astonishing touch screens that react to people in an environment. my kid is 6 years old and we got a big new screen and he touched the the television screen and it did not do something. he said the screen is broken. those screens have to start interacting with you and the environment. the third thing is it will be noise here. there is no way it will not be noisy and that is okay. you cannot panic when it is noisy. quality rises to the top and people want quality barracks you don't want bad milk or bad water. people care about quality. there's a certain audience that cares but certain people become

more ignorant. the most important thing is that you have to be entirely flexible and entrepreneurialism it if you don't, you will not exist. you have to take lessons from steve jobs and silicon valley that failure is ok. certain things go way of something else will replace it and you have to get used to that. this is how people are consuming. it is like arguing against cars or highways or something like that. it is hard to argue against them. they have been negative aspects but they have made society better. our federal government has laid down on the job. these other societies place an important part on technology

learning and math and science and getting these technologies. we are the highest prices in broadband access for people. i think we are number 26 in terms of quality and speed and everything else. the government has to get involved more heavily in getting this stuff out to everybody in this country at all levels. if we don't it is like saying that tin cans are good instead of a telethon. there are roads are fantastic instead of state highways. it is important to get the federal government behind this and they are laying down on the job. it is a critically important part of our future and if we don't get on that, china will run right past us, every country. >> i think everyone has covered it very well. i would follow up on the entrepreneurial point because i

think there will be a rise of smaller news entities, literary entities. the technology enables people to reach a large audience, an international audience very quickly and easily if they find the right niche. something like the ipad which has already had a large impact on how people absorb news information is only two years old. it is really at the beginning of these sorts of things. a lot of small start-ups will start but it is not like "the new york times" will quit printing or shut down. they are on top of things. they know the impact of technology. they coopt things they see and smaller organizations. i think you will see this mix of the rise of new organizations. it is moving a lot faster but i

think it is exciting because it enables smaller organizations to do quality work and find an audience. there might be a little bit of a return of the professional writer in the sense that it is possible for individuals to create their own small models and produce their own work wetter -- whether it is direct to kindle or on the web. it is not the same money as a book advance but it is spreading out and offering new opportunities. it is taking down some of the older publishing or news industry aspects. >> i am incredibly optimistic about the future. i think there'll be more ways of information available. we have to be agnostic about what form it takes. i think there will be new forms that will be created. there will be new kinds of content that will revolutionize the way we think about things someone was saying that their

two-year old of swords everything they say. we're moving into a new era that is fantastic but we cannot keep looking backward. >> there will be jet packs. >> the lunch hour is beckoning -- can i get a beat -- decent news on salami sandwiches? [laughter] you have to be promiscuous about it, too. [laughter] >> that is the right way to think. the one thing i know about the future of media is that you don't have the incredible content produced by this smart talented, competent people up on this stage all is lost. i know that will be true and want to thank you so much for being here. i thought was a fastening panel and i learned a lot and all of you keep doing what you are doing, thank you. [applause]

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] [no audio] >> coming up, "washington journal" after that " newsmakers." then our cspan series "the contenders." and then a british investigation on the fun hacking investigation and we will hear from q grant. -- hugh grant. this morning, a discussion of the impact of the deficit reduction committee's