. this week return ship, encouraging those who have been out of the workforce to come back. pl plus, howie lieu from the start table and a silicon pine near tries to right the news. can he convince our report snerds those reporters are mit technology reviews rachel mets and joe mann from reuters in the this week on press here. >> good morning, everyone, i'm

scot scott mcdegree. president trump frequently accuse nbc of fake news, usually news he doesn't like. i reject that, but there have been legitimate questions raised about the trustworthiness of various news organization. is there one you trust more than another? is name for dependable than cbs or do you think fax is more demendable an nbc? how would you even quantify that? how about "the new york times"? is it more trustworthy than "the wall street journal"? could you rank the news? ? jonathan abrams thinks can he. he's a friend profit gram and he's been on several times before. long time silicon valley ceo and a pioneer in social media. engineers at its company have created a ranked list of trustworthiness. you can see "new york times" is one poll followed by "washington post" then tech crunch comes in third. name comes in seventh. jonathan willing to sit dwoun journalist and defend this ranking system this morning joined by rachel metss of the

m.i.t. technology review. let's talk about how you got it in your head that you thought this was possible to rankt news. >> we thought that first of all we have a lot of interesting data because a lot of businesses would use nesl erk. and we wanted to rankt contents of our media intelligence reports, we wanted to make sure that really important news sources were ranked higher. so we thought we have the data that we wanted to do this and it sort of tied a lot of different parts together. we also thought it would be interesting to partner with a lot thieves other initiatives. there's a whole bunch sort of trust reliability initiatives out there and many of the people working on those are nezle fans who wanted to talk zblous by partner do you mean you're going share data and what are you finding and combine them together? >> yes. it has three components. one is our internal data, which is the business reviews. har they reading.

>> that explains the tech krun zblch right. two is external sources. we're looking at signals that are outside n erk zle about sites, who links to them and how much they're shared on twitter and all those kind of things. those things are sort of more easy to sort of corrupt than our own internal date' had which is why both were interesting. but it goes badge boj ways. some have expressed interest in our data and using it as part ever their project. so we're exploring both of those. >> i'm interested in this overall and it seems like it's a complicated issue that a lot of companies are struggling with. facebook, youtube, it seems they'll announce one small thing that might help a little bit, another small thing we're going to promote videos in youtube's case from a few established brands. it seems really hard to get right. do you feel like there's being enough progress made quickly enough on this say, before, i don't know, pick a date? the november election? >> well, i agree it's a hard problem. and nezle my own personal feed

because i follow a lot of journalists has a lot of people talk about this. just today there was a buzz feed article. this is in the news every day and all the big players are doing things and most of them are saying it's not enough. one of the strategies that we're doing is we think that none of these systems are going to be perfect. none of the systems are partnering are going to be perfect on their opponent so we thought if we aggregate them altogether it's probably like the least imperfect systems. kind of like the sites that aggregate movie reviews. that may sound crass to be aggregating ratings of newser is visions but every site will have it's own approach. we thought if we take them and aggregate them together, that's the least imperfect approach. >> when i learned about what you're doing i started to think about rankings of individual journalists and i think that to a lot of judge cysts scary. i -- journalists is very scary.

and i wonder why you think that would be a good idea or bad idea. >> i think tech mooem migeme mi a board where they rank them. one thing we've done is create a imdb of news where we have pages for every publication, journalist, it shows what they write about and things could all be linked together in interesting ways. whether we want to sort of just rank journalists, you know, obviously that could be controversial, which is not necessarily appealing to us. i don't know if it it would be really useful to people. when we're creating media intelligence reports for our customers, where he want to make sure there's a bit of a boost given to more authoritative sources, and that's why we're doing this. doing that for journalists it could be useful. i think it's probably more interesting for people to sort of know data about these are the things that journalists cover and maybe these journalists are influencers in different topics. >> stop us from getting pitches about house plants.

i see you write about house plants. i don't write about house plants. let me ask you whether you looked at the rankings, what surprised you? >> well, it's not so much as things that surprised us, but we knew we could get some controversy from it. and the system we just launched is very, very new so it's still under development. but the minute we launched it, even though we're a tina company and it's new, we started getting e-mails from people, major news organization complaining. i think one of the things is that our data, at least for now, ask is skewed towards the things that our readers read a lot of, and that's viewed towards the folks that are doing well as social, at mobile. so, you know -- >> your signal is bigger? >> well, sites like tech crunch and gizmodo, they are popular online. we're only look at online data. if somebody's reading the footage times in the paper, that's not going to be something we're seeing. older school sources are maybe not doing as well as some of the new digital players. but as some of those trust

initiative projects get more along and we get more data from that, that may give a bit more boost to sort of traditional news sources. >> there's an argument, though, that really this is sort of a binary. you know, npr rates lower than nyt on your list, but both are completely believable, you know, mainstream media outlets. you could just say generally believable or generally you should probably question what these outlets are writing. wouldn't that be a fairway of ranking them? >> you could. one of our executive news executives is doing more of a red, yellow, green type of thing. >> yeah. >> in our case we're looking at a lot of data. we're not make any subjective decision ps. we're agri getting a the data and using it to rank. it's not really binary for us. we're trying to rank the content and for us that's useful to have numerical scores for all the sources and use that along with other things to rank the

content. but we're also more focused on trying to figure out what's authoritative and important stuff that business people want to be know about versus trying to tackle sort of the should info wars being in facebook issue. when you get into the politics stuff that's probably a trickier problem. >> i like what a lot of these initiatives ever doing. i like the mix of different datasets what's popular but also, you know, what professionals are considering taking them most seriously. but i'm not sure that it actually gets to, you know, the person in poughkeepsie that's sharing the world news. i'm not sure that their volume consumer and i'm not sure that they're going to be influenced by whatever facebook or youtube does. how do you we've those people? >> yeah, i mean, that's an interesting question because there's more passive news consumers and more active news consumers. the truth is it is pretty popular with sophisticated business owners, ceo and not

necessarily the person in poughkeepsie and that's probably the person going on facebook and seeing those sort of conspiracy theories and all that kind of stuff. part of the problem is that there's some people who like that stuff and, you know from you're going to mcdonald easy and trying to knock the franchise out of people's hands saying you should eat broccoli instead, i don't know how well that will work. some people like see the controversies and then they get outrage and they write about it or click on it in social media. >> jonathan, i've got only just a couple seconds left. i want to throw this last one in. if you had to rate top three most trustworthy, what would they be? >> i think i would get into to great trouble if i expressed -- >> fair enough. i challenge these guys do it. let me start with mine. mine is the "new york times" followed by the bbc and then npr. rachel, do you remember what you answered sfl i think i said "the new york times" as well, wired, and npr. >> ha did you say? >> i said "the new york times,"

"washington post" and npr. >> so "new york times" on the top for all of us. npr chosen third and something in the middle. actually both of you had the same, it's interesting. i think that's true, that there is some sort of innate understanding of what's right and what's not. on thanh is with nezle, it's a great way to read the news. >> good to be back. >> thanks for being with us this morning. we'll be back in a minute.

welcome back to press here. when i was a kid the computer of choice was an apple 2 or a trs-80 and they did nothing without you telling them what do. computers were to be programmed. now that's changed, obviously. most people these days use prepackaged software but have no idea how the computer works. in a way, we kind of lost something there. your phone may be a marvelous device but you never tell it what do. your phone does what app programmers want it to do. that could be a good thing using the preinstalls message is a lot easier than installing your own chat program. but devote lose flex ability. there's mailed ground between doing your own programming and letting developers have aultd power. we call it programming lite. recently apple said it would add series short cuts. you could prix preprogram your phone to let someone know you're on your way home, check the eta,

check the traffic and the signal of your home thermostat to start of the air-conditioning. they say that's the future, software powerful enough to adapt to our liking. he's founder and ceo of the red hot air table, thanks for being with me. >> thanks for having me. >> i heard a podcast where he you were asked what air table is. your answer was awful. i'm giving you 15 seconds, what's air table? >> companies that are truly innovative are hard to explain because they are not just fitting into an -- >> i hear you. >> we're not uber for x or airbnb for time. we are the software creation platform for everyone that's the short answer. >> it's cool. let's move on and talk about things in general. air table is doing what i'm talking about, right? it's not just something that you've decided how i'm going use it, and it's not something i'm going to have to write my own program. it allows know without any understanding of how all that

programming works, make the program work for me. >> exactly. >> so there's an alan kaye quote that we like to look to for inspiration and it says that the best way to measure the success of a software kit is really that people are able to go in and use it for things that the kit's designers never even imagined spot we get really excite when'd we see people out there using air table for these unforeseen purposes. we have fortune 500 companies building out very sophisticated global pro destruction management work flows on it to retailers, actually keeping track of a lot of intrinsic parts of the production, the fabric design process. so i think what we really try to do is really just give you this lego kit. we don't want to prepackage is into every permeation, that's the users's job. >> what makes you think people want to do that? >> that's an interesting question and one that came up at the beginning of the company. we've been around for 6 1/2 years. first three were just kind of building out the original

product before we launched. and i think the key belief that we had then and still do now and i think is validated, there's a ton of creativity that's diskrib tributed out in the world. often in silicon valley we tend to get into our own bubble. there's a lot of -- there tends to be a lot of hub russ amongst tech operators that tech people are the only ones that can come up with the best app ideas. what we've seen out there in the wild is all these people in small businesses and large companies, et cetera, not necessarily programmers, not necessarily in i.t. but who have great ideas but to run their business or teams or work flows. so this dwlidea that creativity distribute and people need a platform to express that, that's the core of our company's philosophy. >> oo if you're going to make it as modular as possible and give people the ability to play within apps and programs, does

it have to be open source? is it more complicated if it's closed source? how do you deal with those issues? >> air table is not an open-source product. we're a cloud-based product that you get the lego pieces out of the box and you can configure them how you'd like but the underlying code of air terrible is not open sourced in the same way that linux is. now, what we do is i think we try to get as many of these core pieces that people need to kind of create their own, you know, software creation has no very, very intuitive pieces. so in many ways we liken our product design challenge to that of the gooey and the design of the mcintosh and wind doze where it's really about taking all of these ar cane, powerful technologies locked within these computers and exposing them in the most transparent and intuitive way possible. >> one of the things i'm reminded of in what you're saying is there is a children's toy, a little bulldozer sort of thing and these dragon drop if

then, then do this, et cetera. the kids don't necessarily understanding that they're programming it. i think that's the exciting thing is that soon we will be able to tell our iphones if i leave to go home, then do that sort of thing. what are the ways do you think that we'll see that where people will be like, oh, yeah, i've got a thing that i do, let me show you how it works where we're programming our devices in a way that they hadn't been programmed before. >> so we take a pretty different starting point to the problem from a lot of the programs are if this and that types. and what we think is the important foundation of a large class of useful apps, whether it's kids building them or people within businesses or people for individual use cases is the relational database. so this idea that the vast majority of use cases out there for software are little more than an interface on top of a database model, whether you're keeping track of the vendor list for your wedding planning. it's a database at the core. given people the ability to model their own representation

of their world or their work, i think that's the key foundation. and then we build lots of interesting things. >> let me squeeze in one more question and we have to go to commercial break. that's what do we call this? i've heard it called low code or no code, i called it code lite, but what's the thing that we're going to say when we mean not a program you can't touch and not having to program it yourself? what is that word? >> so no code is a fairly -- a fairly good term for the category. we like to think of it as, you know, it's not just about whether there's code involved or not because we are actually eventually going to expose more layers for coders to cully come actually come in and participate over different ways. but it's the way people are able to create and ma nip pew lay software. it's a much more kind of broad based. >> are we going to call it demock contract advertised software? >> i hope so. >> as opposed to no code? >> yeah, the no code sounds very negative. >> i have to stop you there. you're a company to watch, no

doubt. >> thank you. >> thank you for being with us this morning. press here will be back in just a minute. flrs

welcome back to press here. i have some video of a person who may be the ideal employee. lindsay rays nickel has an ph.d and mba.

she's worked at stanford and every boss seems to have something wonderful to say. but she hasn't worked since 2014. for good reason. she had a baby, chose to stay home and raise her little girl. this video is of her return to the workplace after four years in something called the return shift. a 16-week program that helps people who have left the workforce for a significant period of time ease back in and come back up to speed. billy is a big fan of the return ship. he instituted and his company data stacks where he is ceo. in fact, just offered lindsey i full-time job. thank you for being with us this morning. let's talk generally about this program. what the gave you the idea or inspired you to adopt this? >> we're all in the hunt for talent. right now in particular in tech it's very difficult to find great talent. this year we're going to be hiring 150 new people, we're a 500-person company now so that's a significant increase. you can't look in all the normal

place dollars you have to get creative where is talent that's untapped and return ships present once of the best opportunities for the future in tapping a pool that's been largely overlooked in the u.s. >> so how many people are you guys using this program with? i mean, is it just this one woman or how is this all working? >> we just opened it up this year. we have three returnees right now in the program. we liked lindsey so much we hired her within 30 days. it's a 16-week cycle so they come in for 16 weeks and during that time they also attend workshops to make sure their skills are appropriate, whether they're learning, how can they improve. but we want to fin do this just like we do our internship program and we want to keep it going year after year. so we're just getting started but we're looking to a lot more. >> how do you find the snem is it through rekrout centers you tell them to -- i'm trying to imagine the search on linked-in or some other recruiting site, look for people that haven't had a job for a couple years.

>> you just put your finger on a couple of real challenges. one, when you're trying to reassert yourself into the workforce where do you go? my wife is currently in this situation. she too chose to stay home and raise our kids, but she's highly educated, mast's degree, but she's very intimidated so where does she go to look? and then how do recruiters know to go look? that's the other big challenge. because normally if you see a gap in a resume you toss it. we work with a company called path forward. and their mission is to help people who are reentering the workforce. so we post on passe path forward where returnees know to go there to look. we know where to go to post the jobs, they know where to go to look for the jobs. >> this sounds like an interesting idea and it sounds like right now this is something that you're going at least a little bit in part because it's such a hot job market and you're looking for talent and you want to leave no stone unturned. but would you be doing this if it weren't such a hot job market? >> absolutely. i'm probably ail little biased on my own personal stage of life

watching my wife reenter the workforce. i know that she has accumulated so much wisdom and there's a different between knowledge and wisdom. and when i look at somebody like lindsey and look at what she's experienced over her life the past four or five years, i want that wisdom inside of our company. you make better decision, you have better context and background. so this is something that will enrich our workforce irrespective of the macrocondition for hiring. >> what do people need to be brought up to speed about? you said it was a 16-week program. i can think of one would be slack. you don't know how to use slack because you've never seen it because it was just invented sort of thing. but what other things do people say, oh, i'm glad you taught me that because back when i was at work we did do that. >> yeah. we're a distributed workforce so that's one thing different to a lot of people. my company was founded on the principle that we were all going to be very distributed. so even though we're 500 people, we're probably in about 20 to 25 kwunts our employees working out of their homes. how do you communicate in an

environment like that? how do joao you stay connected and provide a culture? at the are lies on slack and video conferencing. but we find people pick up ton pretty fast because in our private lives we're doing this already. but it is one of the things that translatding that to work is a little different. >> do you feel like this is primarily for women or is this something that you'll expand to men or millennial be involved from the get-go? i mean, there are a ton of reasons why people leave the workforce for a year or five years and it might not even be because they had a child and stayed home to raise them or a man might want to do that. >> one thing we do see that's gender neutral is aging parents. and we've seen people with parents in tough situation where's they've chosen to bring a parent into the home or go to help the parent through a transitionary time of life and that affects men and women equally. so this is by no means limited to just women, it just so happens that for child raising that's one of the more common things. >> sure. >> but it's absolutely open to

anybody for any life situation. maybe they went to get a dlirch degre -- different degree. maybe they had a child with a medical problem for a certain numbers of years. >> i imagine this is the basic terms of it is there tls no commitment, you pay them a regular wage, but it's no harm no foul if it doesn't work out. is that the basic philosophy? >> absolutely. thattics away the fear. i think one of the challenges is if i said to you if you had a friend or child in college right now and said you have no skills but wouldn't it be nice if you could go into a company, make a little money and learn a little about it? you would all say you need to do an internship, right? what do you tell somebody who's been out of the workforce? you need to do a -- they have no idea. so we need to get in word, this returnship to come part of our vernacular so everybody knows thousand get inserted into this field. when they do that i think it becomes easier for everybody, right, as they go through the

process. the companies, the hires and the returnees. >> and your specific to people who are in tech. it's not i've been out of the industry. people like lindsey worked in similar sort of things and now understand your -- what you're doing when they come? >> that's the beauty of it. lindsey's sbround in training, heavily in training and ed cag. even though we're a tech company, within our hr department we have a lot of needs that aren't necessarily technical needs. it's really open to anybody, it doesn't have to be just the technical element. >> what would you say obviously do the right thing there are is the right thing to do, it's proper. is your best lesson? you'll have to give me a very quick answer to that, but why should a company do this? >> because the best talent through the doesn't always come packaged in the way we think. and, again, the accumulation of wisdom that happens over the course of a lifetime is something we do not just want to disregard in this current environment and any environment. so that's why we want to bring them in. >> thanks for being with us this morning. i like your program. >> thank you. >> we'll be back in just a second. a meeting the world will

watch. president trump and vladmir putin. monday: analysis of every key development overnight. plus: keeping your home safe while you )re on vacation. the free way one east bay police department is putting people at ease. )today in the bay. ) 4:30 to 7.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to our guests and thank you for make us part of your sunday morning.

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