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what kind of iceberg does that present and how can we steer around it? >> there is that sort of race with the institutions that have resources and we are addressing a generational, gender, race issues. he mass media t that has provided resources, that has funded the kind of journalism that we admire wakes up to this new reality of the audience or it will fade away. nothing right now

individually on the web as the institutional power to do what a lot of organizations can do when they are willing to do it. we are so much in the transition zone. i don't know where that will come out. i have to remind myself constantly that the web is 15 years old. it is a sprightly teenager. it is still. finding its still i worry in terms of the free pass ability -- free press ability to what our government prepares the argument that local newspapers and others who used to cover institutions on a local maybe thegone but blogger is interested in street paving in a neighborhood. when that street paving goes away, that person goes away. there is not that institutional memory. there is not that. at least there is an institutional memory of what came before to improve on, to build from.

i don't know where we are going with that as we become thimore interested in and lindsay lohan. i see this and i go nuts. i hate to slam someone for taylorheir job, but the swift piece in vanity fair was so double. it was like, she's upset because people talk about her love life even though she talks about it all the time. and now we'reb done. you can put up all the pictures of tailless with you want, but the story is incidental. >> my feeling, and i know that , in thet the newseum archival belly of the beast when it comes to cherishing the

collective memory and institutional status of the traditional press. but one thing we have to be aware of it is a lot of this collective new unconscious is good at what it was supposed of doing as we had hoped. one of the things we do see is that because of the designer to put these standards in place, because of privileging of the ways we have covered news of the past, a lot of the standards that reflect what are considered to be good journalism or active journalism or fair journalism do come out of a world where the news was being made in a very different kind of social economy. you still see that. on kind of classic rap american journalism is that the pursuit of balance, we actually

lose that. >> we overemphasize points that turn not valid. open windows as you get left or right or other kinds of partisan conversation during the more extreme, one or the other side gets, the likely you are to have the middle balance slip away. when you talk about race, it's even more so. is an accuratewho person to speak to on the perspective of race is very complicated. because you are of a certain race, you're expected to be an expert on being that race. even those of us who are journalists and who do right from editorial position find ourselves in that circumstance of being required to speak for the race a little upset too equally. it's one of those conundrum. if you are not doing stuff, you're not speaking from that

position, and no one will. or perhaps someone even less qualified will speak for it. but if you do, you find yourself in a small group of people required to carry that wherever you go. >> i want to switch to something that we got on our twitter feed. katchow.rom i cannot tell if that is a name or something clever. [laughter] probably both. basically, the move away, which you wrote about, richard, a move away from using " "illegal immigrant," that was a huge fight that was brought up by journalism associations, groups like the applied research center. tell us about the shift in newsroom policy that you attract? >> yesterday the associated press announced that it was

changing its stylebook entry on the term immigration. the reason why the associated press style was important is that is considered the style used by many newsrooms, the majority of newsrooms in the united states, because that's easier than creating your own stylebook. it's relatively -- readily available. they decided they would no longer use the term "illegal immigrant" or "illegal alien" and they would consider these people people first, so you talk about people who are in the country illegally and use terms such as that. this has been a fight that has been going on since the 1980's. the language is political. it wasat's why

interesting to see in the ap timending tafter all this to what these groups have been saying. we see the same thing going on and pro-life and pro-choice affirmative action versus racial preferences and same-sex marriage versus gay marriage. these are people who are advocates for all those causes fighting within the media for their turn to be the preferred term so that it makes people -- so for the associated press to describe the that being illegal is not the first and foremost thing you should know about someone, but that you are human being first, is an achievement. >> is that not crazy that it's an achievement in 2013?

i'm trying to think of something really profound to respond to the statement, especially because i'm latino and therefore i represent every latino in america. [laughter] cannot find something profound to say to that. it's ridiculous we are even having a this conversation. >> that brings me to something i wanted to get to that gets to your point about tapping to represent your race. we could go on and on, but what do you think will happen as we begin to surface the identities within these groups? ? for example, i am half african and half black american. even my ethnicity -- all of our ethnicities are mixed, but mine is mixed in the way that -- now there's a lot of writing about mixtures within the african

community. give us perspectives from your book on what you learned about the latino community and the dominican-american community and then how uc coverage of latinos changing? >> a lot of the stuff that is in my book i could not get placed elsewhere in the mainstream media, because people don't want to talk about it or they cannot wrap their heads around the idea dish in the new world was in the dominican republic, santa domingo. the essence of being american, if you want to be american, you o.ould try to be latin the first successful european delegate in the new world was santo domingo. in the dominican republic was where the first boatload of slaves came in and the indigenous americans were there. all these things began who we are today. yet you come here and all of a

sudden you are illegal or make a few of you are not part of the american dream, which i think needs to be developed. maybe that is a separate panel. [laughter] at the end of the day it is holistic. i see it starting with ethnic studies. when you go to school and start to learn about history and that your people are primitive or they are savages, and the original illegal alien, the europeans, came here gloving freedom. you have children that you see drop out of school and become disinterested in school, feel like they are invisible in society. now you have a journalist writing about those same people for example during sandy. they also write about them as if they are just invisible. i am not as hopeful about the future of the discussion of race because i don't think there's enough biological,

sociopolitical diversity within even car races. the people that are writing about us within asian, latino, white. is not an of diversity within our groups to have a thorough and thoughtful discussion. >> jeff, maybe you can speak about asian-americans or about everybody. >> that's my role. >> exactly. everybody here has a hashtag. , have mongolian birthmark because i have asian ancestry. bring what you found out. your dna evidence, you can multitask. think part of the struggle and is that we did have black, white, asian, latino, native

american, and now we are finally having people's countries of origin. the korean-american community is different from the many different communities within chinese-american communities, all these cultural differences. will we get to a point where we can understand that nuance? >> an aside notes on the whole illegal immigrants thing, i know this is taking us back a step, but you mentioned native americans. everytime i see the word illegal immigrant i think to myself and i'm sure native americans have a very different perspective on the meaning of illegal immigrant, given the history of america's birth. that really does speak to where we are as a culture. these terms are the of the moment, snapshots of what the concepts we live in call for certain kings from the perspective of what a

predominant establishment is, wherever is at the top of the social economy pose the food chain at the moment. --when we talk about journalism, i am not a subscriber to the notion of the journalist as the gatekeeper of truth and so forth, but i do believe that journalists have a specific responsibility and specific capability of at least having a really good bs filters, which means you have to be diverse and have i diverse people group to speak to when you're not sure you have it right. a sense of skepticism, to a book to tell them that the story is not quite right yet is something we are starting to lose a little in the pace of news that we have gotten to. that is where we are right now, especially with the coverage on race. i don't think we can survive as

an industry if we try to say the only way to cover a certain thing is if they have a certain background, is certain specific context and which to speak, because that is what journalism is about. it's about telling stories that matter to a broad array of people and not purely one to one kind of customized perspectives. at the same time, i think >> but take away from this really is zone,n this discomfort for journalism to evolve, it needs to incorporate different types of journalism, but there's not a single standard journalism and that fits all occasions and that the people making news judgments need to be able to filter and appropriately allocate resources and deliver and distributes news into the right channels based on not just their understanding of what news is now but what news is

becoming. a quick round up. ibably attached a little bit more of portent = = a little bit more important, because it comes later. i understand to some degree where we were 50 years ago or the native americans were centuries ago. in terms of the language, we gave an award to a george carlin one year. he did a wonderful rest on language and identifiers. he asked a question of what you call white person from south africa who vents immigrates to united states? he went into all sorts of ethnic descriptions. in validityut the

of all those names. i hope that we will increasingly see that being diminished and a look at people more as people from the journalistic standpoint and from the selection. i think you put your finger on the next challenge. that is the people making the decisions about resources or coverage or funding, are they waiting upon? -- up? are there realizing there's a new world out there that will be in their faces increasingly? frankly, to push sales, to boost circulation? every year we are going to see this light bulb go off, i keep thinking, when they say it's the right thing to do but also the economic thing to do. i keep waiting for that. maybe we are just approaching it step by step. at some point we have to recognize this the first aspect

of our society in ways we have never done before. >> i'm going to go to questions soon. i see one in the audience. i see a few. any thoughts before we go to questions, richard? >> eid al-adha stocks were running through my mind. thoughts were running through my mind. the success of diversity in journalism will depend on the success of diversity in society. that's why stories about education and standards of living and those kinds of things are important to journalists. where will the journalists come from? they are going to come from who have from people been well educated, who know how to spell, know how to speak

well. notthose things are delivered in an equitable fashion throughout the rest of society, you will not get the journalists you need in knows newsrooms'- in those there that was one of the things going through my mind. the other thing is the issue of diverse coverage and who tells the stories is also important because i don't believe that a lot of these issues have to be dealt with in isolation. telling a story about the environment can be a perverse story, depending on the frames of reference used in each story, the sources that are used, the examples that are used. is this was over and throughout the entire news operation, that makes for more

diversity. somebody who may not want to aad about what is going on in toxic waste dump in a poor neighborhood might want to get a glimpse of that by reading about something else that happens to use that as a reference point. diversity comes in a lot of forms. the important thing is that it's there. that is woven throughout the news product. >> i could not agree more. let's go to questions. the lady in the black and white top. >> my name is jane hall. i'm a continuing journalists. i used to work for shelby coffey. i teach at american university. gene, i just wanted to pursue a little further on the economic argument. state ofthe latest pew the media story that people are actually noticing cutbacks and

saying they're canceling their subscriptions. about people say that news organizations that we all know and love. that is one economic argument. i have friends who are under a lot of pressure at the networks and newspapers. if you are given a choice to cover a toxic waste dump, that wonderful story about osha that was just in the new york times, how report is to live from somebody, what is the economic arguments to make in terms of branding or something purely a crass about why should it cover poor people, people were not gentry? that is really a case that has to be made in a very crass way. >> i think we have gone through withperiod of infatuation eyeballs and analysts telling us the shell road coverage, -- --whener the coverage

you think about the internet, it was a toy. wear t became a tool were looking for roofing nails, that's where we would go. it's news that matters. things that are important are coming back to the forefront. they are what is propelling sites. i cannot tell you why people are not recognizing it. i just see this race between oblivion -- network news numbers are down. people are turning off to these institutions that i think have to exist. i'd just hope that the sense of getting back to news that matters and news that actually reflect communities takes hold before the economic model finally implodes.

on a day-to-day basis, i vary between it's going to happen right away and it's not going to happen. it's a very pressing question, because it says what about the news that is valuable to all of our diverse community is, news that counts? is such a thread within the rationale for free press and survival of a free press, but it just has to occur. i will be even more so apocalyptic than your question suggests. i see the whole thing going away, if we don't as an industry become more relevant and focused on news that really matters to a bunch of communities. the fact that there still are toxic waste dumps 50 years after we founded the epa. and it's in all those communities. why is that story not being done? i have 1 foot in the tar pit at my age, but i still think people want news that is valuable. they want documentary's that

teach me, not just entertain me. the economic rationale to me is there if maybe we stopped for a day somewhere and really right news that counts. > i will jump in because i think about this all the time, because some of what i do is entrepreneurial and i have to actually look at raising money and numbers, but i think there was -- this may be going a bit of fields, but stay with me. when a worked at abc, company is owned by a larger entity, it sometimes gets held peak.andards that don't s i felt that abc was being held to disney standards in terms of the amount of revenue it was expected to generate. news will not generate the same

numbers as entertainment. news has been held to an entertainment standard, particularly tv news. by news not doing badly standards. it was that we came to the standards that news was judged by in terms of profitability and and then got into a fear and panic cycle, which has meant overtime that the demographics of network news has become older and narrower. now there's a gap that either can or cannot be still depending on different management decisions to reach down demographically and out diversity wise. part of the issue was that a lot of different news entities were part of larger companies not just entertainment companies but the other holding companies that did not really know how the news was and did not know the profit margins. one person said to me that a 7% return is about right for

healthy news company. that is not necessarily good enough for some of the larger entities. that creates a huge problem. let's go to the next question. we've got a whole bunch. give us your name please. >> [indiscernible] [inaudible] from baltimore. >> baltimore, hometown! 1 second period how about we get him the other microphone? i worked for radio station. we're doing a series every friday about everyon wypr. you talk about when are the news decision makers going to wake- up? a lot of those decisionmakers

are white. in aa white person majority black city doing a series about inequality. you have to make yourself fairly vulnerable. you have to go out on a limb to do these issues right, which means if you are doing it as a white person, you have to make yourself honorable. how'd you get the decision makers to confront the fact they are making these decisions from a place of rightness and make the discussions are richer? >> who would like to tackle that? however -- whoever. make yourself honorable being part of the process is really important. >> i think it by having people in your news room hotel you about these things that you may not know. there's education going on every time somebody with a different perspective is in your news from. the worrisome part about the decline in numbers is that there are fewer people and we're

losing minority representatives innews from its core -- newsrooms faster. i think it's education and information and it is willing to say to yourself and willing to make the argument to your boss, to say, wait a minute, from an economic standpoint, look at the demographics in baltimore. you just look at that and you say if we just added to the same audience or sell stories to the same group we were doing 20 years ago, we will die. i would rather people did this because they felt it was proper and moral and the right thing to do, but i'm not adverse to saying there's no revenue there, here's where revenue is. you want to talk about revenue, let's go after that market. then alldo stories --

of a sudden our numbers will be whether it'sroups age, gender, race, ethnicity. you begin to make that argument. we just cannot sit and say it's the right thing to do. there's an economic argument to be made. you just after look at the last political cycle and say if you want to be a winner in anything now, you need to look at the outcome and see where coalitions and groups have power. that is an economic argument, going back to our earlier question as well. >> we have a question in the front row. >> actually, one concern i have around the economic argument is that it is coming at a time when you have a vested stakeholder shift in certain platforms that are inherently not channeled appropriately for certain

audiences really able to engage. >> give us a concrete example of what you mean, like a structure. >> let's talk about newspapers. the reality is when we talk about newspapers and who is reading newspapers and whether or not there's a generation of young people of color who are reading newspapers by default, the answer is generally are the newspapers in the right place? are they at the right price? thethey making available andt kinds of distribution circulation models to make that content available? even if you were right to appropriately for that audience are youing a properly, delivering to that platform that they are capable of engaging with?

there are free papers that have been launched in various cities with some success. most newspapers have web sites at this point. newspaper to me now. >> i lived in crown heights, brooklyn, which has traditionally been considered a lower income neighborhood and is going through a rapid gentrification. i just moved there three years ago after living in a very high price neighborhood in manhattan. i love my neighborhood. in brooklyn. now there's a new york times seller at my subway stop, just happened. i'm like, gentrification roles in and then the newspaper. it would've been nice to have it before. tons of really smart people have always lived in the neighborhood. there are thriving immigrant families who would've been happy to read the new york times for years excess of a kiosk on the way to work there are

assumptions at play. want to applaud your question about how to relate to these other folks. i interviewed the editor of the milwaukee journal sentinel. >> toward stanley cup? -- stanley? >> no. >> marty? >> yes. it was after the and shooting of the sikh people. he said that he loves having people not like him around because that is one he thrives on as a journalist. "what is this person like?" that part of being a journalist. you should have people like that around you who just love learning about new things and different kinds of people. that's what adds to diversity. >> they have somebody who knew

about medical issues at the paper in terms of cadavers newsroom. across a range of talents and knowledge. >> it goes back to the basic curiosity journalists have. >> i'm at the aclu. my organization over the 93 years we have been around started with concern for freedom of the press, that we have to do less and less on these days. that is covered very well by the newspapers, the media outlets, their own in-house counsels. we always look for greece where freedom and of the press or freedom of speech is being shut down. for us, the press has become an instrumentality of our work. how do we work with depressed and promotes our other issues? when i reflect upon my 12 years as director of the organization, i have to say the best relationships i have had with journalists have been with white journalists. that's not because i prefer talking to my journalists.

i think it's just because the alchemy of that relationship has been quite different than with minority journalists, with one exception, bob herbert. i often approach relations with a journalist in the deepest weigh is how can i moved the ball forward on the issue i care about? how can we make change? change,hange, societal understanding the complex issue. unless you have a journalist who will cover the story over and over again like a beast, you don't really have that ability. national security reporters are really quite good on this one. >> i wanted to ask you a question. why do you think you had in constructivere experience with white reporters? was it because they were in the right position, there are more receptive? they were covering stories over and over again. when i had the same reporter

covering guantanamo over six years, i could developer relationship. race issues, is one off. it's a different journalists each day covering immigration, housing, employment, voting. so you don't develop a rapport. then i'm not focused as much on moving the policy agenda forward. i want to make sure we are covered, that our cases are covered. it's not the rapport. so my question to you in the journalist world, is i know as a puerto rican i would not want to be the guy covering puerto ricans. having the people covered the puerto rican community would seem like being placed in the ghetto again. at the same time we need journalists who will cover our communities that we can develop relationships with so they can get to know those communities. >> what is so funny is that i am a dominican american journalists covering dominican americans. i'm in the ghetto. when a white person covers dominican americans, they also

have the luxury of having a more diverse roster. that is kind of a microcosm of what we see in society where the white communities have more social capital than the communities of color and you see that in the newsrooms. of course you can develop a relationship with white journalists, because they are the ones who are staff riders, they make money, they have the real estate. journalists of color against the honor to have great space in major newspapers, that usually gets rotated out, because there are only so many that you allow a. >> bob held on to his column for a long time, and he was under pressure for years. >> exactly. you're dealing with different kinds of social capital. >> this is something i have been talking about. >> by the way, gonzales in the new york times is puerto rican

and he writes beautifully about puerto rican and other people. >> exactly. i went to his total exhibit recently. amazing. -- phot exhibit. >> richard and i have been exchanging taunts about, there's something inherently interesting about the fact that the proxy for journalists who actually have a beat and can cover a strategically and london and totally a topic is white journalists -- and longitudinally a topic. these are the individuals that have social capital. more than that, the particular status of being able to focus on a concern in a way that allows accrue theer time

credibility in that area and the ability to choose news as opposed to having it assigned to them. i stopped about with richard is the one place where journalists of color have often been able to sneak in and establish a platform where they can even talk about race without it being a one off is when they are columnists, and they are contributorsd's and no longer held to the standard of the report of the day, general fund, etc.. that's one place where you are seeing fewer and fewer faces of color. you mentioned bob herbert. to a columnist who happens write about topics that are very close to my areas of interest and have the freedom to do so. i write about asian and asian- american issues. this is after many years of covering those things. it is a complete happenstance that i have been able to do so. i have ever gone through the mill of being in a newsroom,

gone through a job assignments and all the other things that have led many other people to have the accrued social capital and newsroom capital to take out a beat. there is no path and will within newsrooms to do that. >> that's another problem that goes back to the system in existence of these organizations. hiring, giveed them opportunities, those pathways where you move from the new kid to apprentice to experts to the owner of that topic, where you have a chance to really spend time, those are gone. we do a program that covers the federal courts. there are probably that many people now full-time covering the federal court system in america. that's as a full speed. the parachute in. they have many other things later on. the complaint we hear from

judges is we don't get any coverage. there's a loss of the systemic ability to stake out your territory. i am hopeful that if we look at the rise of ethnic media, which came apart because they were excluded from mainstream media, may be on the social media side or in the new media side, we will see people able to stake out that territory with some funding source, but at least there's an audience to able to attract people to. that unit pace right now. i don't see the beads system coming back in standard, traditional media for a long time. -- beat system. there's a necessity to develop that expertise and there's a multiplicity of voices. right now we're really at an impasse in terms of developing that. >> what you said about columnists, it is true that a about columnists write

race, but they also hear from their editors and readers, "all you ever write about is race." so there's a counter-pressure. >> i acknowledge that. i hear about it myself. is less whether or not they're getting this pressure and more whether or not there are any other sources for that content to get into publication. columnists still able a littleand even have photograph that designates them as of a race and their last name, it is almost a safety zone to talk about a lot of these topics, because they are speaking from an opinionated place. >> behalf to get ready to wrap up.

if you have a brief remark. >> the solution to that is to have people of color in management, because then they can put all those threats throughout the whole operation and they are in charge of. why don't you have any sources of color? did you talk to so and so? clark told people accountable. >> what i'm going to do is take both of your questions back-to- back. there's a lot of different people who have questions who will not able to get to. your first, sir. >> i am john welch. i'm a poet, political lager, cultural critic. my observation, as i go-around five nights a week to portray events around the area, i find, despite the plurality emerging, great stratification. there are 90 blacks in a room and i am one of three others.

a few whites and maybe a couple agents. if i go to the writer's center, it's all white. occasionally a black person shows up. what is the role of journalism in trying to pull these diverse communities back together as we stratify and ourselves and like those would like in this emerging? >> great question. >> i am retired physician. i have heard the word raise a lot but not much the word class. >> if you could stand. >> the group i am most interested in are the 1% that are now approaching 25% of all the wealth and the income. where do these three topics of race, class, and social mobility? mobility we have been mostly talking about race. >> thank you so much for bringing that up, because we do have a very robust -- if you go

.org we going to great depths of that. the two questions on the table that we want to end up with, any thoughts on the changes in social mobility and wealth stratification, how they have affected journalism? and the question about how do we reclaimed the town hall space of newess? >> basically, by having more diversity, socio-economic, sociopolitical, gender, everything diversity in a management position. >> absolutely. >> i think those things are inter-related in some ways. we have raised a couple times about fighting social mobility and class.

things like the increasingly well-based hegemony in some ways of being able to be a journalist. you have to be able to afford to do it now. you cannot earn a living by doing it. that is increasingly making it more and more challenging to ensure that the vario -- that there is still accurate coverage of inequality within that. -- many of us journalists come from onrcumstances where it are social context cover the way we perceive racial inequality, it becomes more and more challenging for us to provide a thorough dialogue around issues related to wealth wealth means and whether social mobility is diminishing. we do need to have that kind of diversity.

i would argue that in some ways, despite the storied working class blue-collar journalists that come out of dire circumstances and moved up to the newsroom and become columnists, that does not really happen so much anymore. nownews media, especially that we have started to do more type of stuff where people who are print journalists are expected to be on tv, there's more of a cultivation of a perception around what types of individual represents good news iconography? they have to be well spoken, particulate, a possible. that's also translates very often into issues of class as well. >> thanks. >> i was struck by the fact that when i got into journalism, if you looked around the average newsroom, we where people who

had trouble getting a car loan. it was very different than than what is happening today. i got back on something i had not thought of in years. i was doing interview with jesse jackson as a young reporter with operation push. he was really educating me. he said, "it's difficult to perceive right now that rates will be the easier question for america to settle, that it will be class, economic issues of class that will be the tougher thing." this had been 35 years ago, but it's been an undercurrent in the civil rights movement. it's probably now just really [indiscernible]. we are still struggling with racial issues that the class issue has yet to be. as we stratify, it may be the bigger challenge. >> where to begin?

we talk about the march on washington was for jobs and freedom in 1963. during the civil rights movement there was a conscious decision made to talk about public policy rather than economics. the civil rights movement had a range of people with a range of approaches. that wasn league was -- their thing, jobs, business community, economics. other people said let's go to the streets. others had the voter registration. what we remember about that time now are the marches and public policy. we don't remember that part of it was economics. that got overshadowed. >> that is the great place to leave it. a full circle of history. to remember that race and class have always been intertwined.

class and journalism and grace and journalism have also been intertwined. this is not anything that we will puzzle through easily. we got here after many years of struggling pan with american identity, race, and class. we will keep pushing. that is one thing that we hear. nobody here is shy. everybody here is passionate. there's still so much passion left amongst us in the media for tackling these issues. i want to thank everyone here with us in the room. the columbia journalism review, of course. and cindy and everyone on the team. and the aclu and the newseum. it's wonderful to have all of you here again. and raquel, is no book is a "bird of paradise." and thank you all. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute]

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] "q&a" with tom korologos, deputy assistant to president nixon and president ford. salida 7:00, your calls and comments on washington journal. live at 7:00. >> today a look at the international military education and training program in asia. and the future of u.s. military engagement in the region. participants include wallace dericks -- gregson. that's live beginning at 10:00 eastern on c-span. [video clip] >> the fcc is structured the way things. it has a