>> sreenivasan: welcome to the program. i'm hari sreenivasan of the pbs "newshour" filling in for charlie rose who is away this week. we bethin this evening with glen thrush of politico on the f.b.i. investigation into hillary clinton's email practices. >> hillary clinton is not being led away from her mansion in handcuffs. there will be no criminal indictment preferred and essentially what he said was no reasonable prosecutor would bring a criminal case against her, but there was the potential for either a security sanction, which if she were still in the state department might involve her security clearance being reevaluated, or some sort of internal administrative sanction, and then he set up some sort of protocol of procedures that she should have followed and, of course, clinton over the past several months already said she was sorry for this and planned to deal with those in that manner anyway.

>> sreenivasan: we continue with a look at the sharing economy with rana foroohar and brad hargreaves. >> if you step back and think about the high end might be called a portfolio career and the end the big economy, it's basically people taking on many jobs. i have three different jobs. many people around the table probably have other jobs. what makes that stable socially is that if you have healthcare, for example, that you can take with you as a freelancer or from one part-time position to another, and, so, people are talking now in washington about portable benefits. mark warner senator from virginia is big into this, elizabeth warren is big on this, the sort of tweak that could be had to turn the sharing economy into a real positive instead of being something that we think about as we're all going to be

uber-ized. >> sreenivasan: jay rosen, john herrman and melissa bell about facebook and modern journalism. >> we definitely see this and other plat forms as great opportunity to connect with audiences. facebook has a huge audience that's hungry and looking for information every single day, as john mentioned. it's one of many. i think sometimes we can get a little distracted by facebook as the sole conversation topic. i think there is more of a theme here with the overall internet and how we're presenting news to people in today's day and age. it is one with of many place access points where we can meet people. it's an opportunity in that there's a hungry audience waiting for us there, but we also need to remember that there's a lot of different places for us to reach audiences in this day and age. >> sreenivasan: an update on hillary clinton's email investigation, the sharing economy and conversation about journalism and facebook when we continue.

>> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the following: captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> sreenivasan: good evening. i'm hari sreenivasan of the pbs "newshour" filling in for charlie rose who is away this week. we by again this evening with the latest development in the investigation into hillary clinton's email use during her tenure as secretary of state. in an announcement earlier today, f.b.i. director james comey recommended no charges be filed against clinton for her use of a private email server. comey did, however, describe clinton's email practices as "extremely careless." >> there is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable

person in secretary clinton's position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about those matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. >> sreenivasan: joining me to discuss the f.b.i.'s recommendation is glenn thrush of politico. what's the most important takeaway we should remember from this afternoon? >> hillary clinton is not being led away from her mansion in handcuffs. there will be no criminal indictment preferred and, essentially, what he said was no reasonable prosecutor would bring a criminal case against her, but there was the potential for either a security sanction, which if she were still in the state department might involve her security clearance be reevaluated, or some internal

administrative sanction, and then he set up a protocol of procedures she should have followed. of course, clinton over the past several months already said she was sorry for this and planned to deal with those in that manner anyway. >> sreenivasan: how important is the almost tongue lashing comey gave clinton in this because, while he said there isn't any charges filed, "extremely careless" is a quote i expect the trump campaign to be making ads with right now. >> listen, careless hillary is better than crooked hillary. let's put this in proportion, while comey's comments sting, we've known for months and months hillary clinton shouldn't have done this. we've known for months and months at hillary clinton was acting contrary to the rules of her own agency, however she wanted to defend that. so the detrimental information has been out there. the real danger posed by this entire process was the criminal

part of this. i recall when this story was first broken by the "new york times" back in march, the clinton campaign, insofar as it existed in march 2015, pushed back on the notion that this was a criminal investigation. this was, in fact, a criminal investigation. what occurred today barring something unforeseen and i've covered the clintons long enough to know that's a possibility, there won't be a criminal prosecution and that's a big deal. comey's tongue lashing he delivered to her, while it will find its way in ads pales in comparison to the weapons clinton might have given the republicans had this actually become a criminal matter. >> sreenivasan: attorney general loretta lynch said she would adhere to the recommendations of the f.b.i., to the career prosecutors in this case. will she stick to it? >> oh, yeah. i mean, that's what we're hearing. it would be unusual, perhaps unprecedented, for an attorney general to move beyond what an f.b.i. director had suggested. we should just point out that a very significant political subplot in this occurred a couple of days ago when loretta

lynch met with bill clinton on his plane on the tarmac. that has really thrown an additional element of political uncertainty into this, and there was a "new york times" story about my friend pat healy over the weekend revealing the clinton people would consider reappointing lynch if reelected. so this is a mixed goodie bag for trump. on the one hand the republicans definitely would have preferred obviously to be running against somebody under criminal indictment, but in the absence of an indictment, clinton has still been very much damaged by this. you know, there's a huge opportunity cost over the last 16 months of her having this hang over her head. two-thirds of americans, democrats and republicans, in the last cbs poll that i saw last week, don't trust hillary clinton. so she has already paid a political price for this and i think will continue to.

>> sreenivasan: what's the republican response been today? >> well, that's really interesting. you know, i was just looking, donald trump just put out his statement. there's a certain sense of tranquility about his pronouncements. he's been very messaged disciplined today, talking about the rigged system, the language of bernie sanders and donald trump in the primaries putting clinton as sort of an establishment figure who has this entire system rigged, but he's been relatively circumspect as other republicans, paul ryan the speaker of the house, a member of the establishment that eshooed donald trump, said he doesn't see how they came to. this that's the final line they're walking. >> sreenivasan: thanks for joining us. >> great seeing you. >> sreenivasan: the rise to have the so-called sharing economy is reorganizing how we live our lives. it's also changing how we do

business. industry leaders such as uber, abe been be and task rabbit have thrived alongside technology that empower individuals to share and also turn a profit. this new paradigm of commerce has widespread implication force the future of work and even economic growth. joining me, a professor of n.y.u. brad hargreaves is founder and c.e.o. of common who seeks to improve housing option by providing flexible, newton community-minded shared homes. rana foroohar is assistant editor of "time" and author of makers and takers. the bigger picture. how do you define it? it's not really sharing if i'm charging you a fee for using something i own. >> absolutely, hari. i think we're sort of traveling back to some version of the 18th century economy where individuals would provide goods

and services to other individuals. we sort of, over the 19th and 20th ce that model in favor of building organizations of increasing complexity, and what we're seeing now is some of those organizations remaining, but them facilitating a crowd-based form of exchange where, rather than accumulating the resources centrally, an organization will sort of draw them from the crowd as and when they need them. >> sreenivasan: you call it crowd-based capitalism. >> i call it crowd-based capitalism, except in my book title which i call it the shared economy. >> sreenivasan: brad, you run common, a co-living space, not the type of thing people are

used to manhattan. is something generational happening where people are open to the idea of sharing something even as fundamental as the space they inhabit? >> i don't think you can talk about the shared economy without mentioning access over ownership. there's a macro trend happening, specifically concentrated among younger people, where things such as houses and cars and even clothing that they would previously purchase and own, they are not accessing on demand in a flexible way that they see as a better overall experience. >> sreenivasan: rana, is there evidence of this happening on a large scale, not specific to just new york city or san francisco where lots of these sharing economies can jump in? >> it is, absolutely. if you look at co-opens, companies actually owned by the individual, this has been a big model for a long time in agriculture, it's becoming more common because of platform

technologies like described in the book across the economy, and this is crucial because ace talk about in my book makers and takers and the rise and fall of american business, one of the reasons we've had the wealth gap and distortion in economy and growth, is it's been dominated by namely financial institutions, create a bifurcated economy where workers have only gotten about a 2% wage hike since the financial crisis, that doesn't work in an economy that is 70% consumer spending. so these sorts of technologies will be very important in terms of helping labor catch a big share of the pie which is crucial to growing the economy as a whole. >> absolutely. i think a big shift we're seeing accompanying the sharing economy and crowd-based capitalism is a shift in the role of the individual. for 100 years, the individual has been a provider of labor. now we're creating a wide variety of models of engagement between the individual and the institution that sort of allow

the individual to sort of ascend past that labor provider rule and take on some form of ownership. i mean, it may not look like complete ownership. an uber driver has let ownership than an airbnb host who has perhaps less ownership than an etsy seller, but it's a fundamental shift in the role. the trouble, is of course, that we've built all the safety net-like things, all the stability, protections, the benefits, the funding model of that is wrapped around a full-time employment world, and, so, we're sort of at the early stages of starting to reinvent how we fund the things that people really want that a company, you know, how they make a living. >> that's why portable benefits and things like that are so crucial in the debate because unless you have the safety net the model doesn't work. >> sreenivasan: explain portable benefits. if i rented out my apartment for airbnb, performed tasks for task

rabbit, maybe use my car and drive an uber, how do i accrue the long-term benefits. >> it could be called portfolio career or the gig economy, it's basically people taking on many jobs. many of us are already. i have three different jobs. many people around the table probably have other jobs. what makes that stable socially is if you have healthcare, for example that's correct you can take with you as a freelancer or from one, you know, part-time position to another and, so, people are talking now in washington about portable benefits. mark warner a senator from virginia is very big into this. elizabeth warren is big are into this. it's the sort of tweak the public sector could make to unleash some of the economic growth that could be had and turn the sharing economy into a real positive instead of something that we think of as being uberized and outsourced

and end up as loser in the economy. >> in many ways, we talked about this before, a that the challenges that platforms that oosuber and lyft have faced in t should their workers be characterized as, but if you realize providers don't want the work structure associated with full-time employment, they want all the good stuff that goes with full-time employment, they want the income stability, the paid vacations, they want the benefits, they want the insurance, the workplace protections, and, so, it's time for us to sort of think about how we're going to create that infrastructure of protection around the new model of engagement, which is fundamentally empowering. >> in many cases, the companies want to provide them training, performance based bonopeses and some scheduling but they're actually limited from doing that because they don't want the employees classified as full-time.

they still want to keep them as independent contractors. so what it really goes to show is there is a gap between the independent contractor and the full-time employee where there is currently a lot of people existing in limbo. >> by the way, this also brings up another issue. we're probably going to have to re-think the entire area of labor law because the way the relationship between companies and employees is set up in a decades-old system that doesn't work in a new economy so it will require a lot of legislative tweaking. >> sreenivasan: does this change fundamentally where the wealth pools? right now when you look at airbnb, uber, the superstars, these are companies with enormous va valuations and technically it's the first founder group and maybe the investor class that profited. when you talk to an uber driver, there are not shares they have in the company. >> i think, of course, we've created tech billionaires but

for every tech billionaire we've created an airbnb, a million entrepreneurs who are supplementing their home and paying their mortgage bay birunning what does resemble a genuine small business -- they set prices do, merchandising, building a brand through the information system, they have to manage inventory. so i think the airbnb model is a good template for what sort of positive crowd-based tap callism might look like. but there is a broader issue as brad alluded to and rana brought up that we're sort of stuck in this world and we've got to sort of loosen the boxes around our labor categories ached we've got to g -- and we've got to do it fast. while companies are starting to see human beings as assets and while we're at the point where the focus might shift from raising capital to respecting

labor, it's a relatively short window because, 20 years down the road, automation will be at the point where that capital labor substitution will become easier and more fluid and, so, this is the point at which we're going to need to see the emergence of -- you know, the equivalent of the labor unions of the '50s and the '60s, the equivalent of policy that supports a company like airbnb that would sort of be good for its providers, and sort of is biased towards sort of more favorable labor practices or ownership practices. >> when i was reading your book, i was interested in whether or not the sharing economy could be an opportunity for a bigger, broader, untraditional labor movement. usually when you think about unions, you think about manufacturing, old line industries, working people, working class, lower socioeconomic groupings. the sharing economy goes all the which up the societiesio economic lard, so there could be

an opportunity to bring white-collar, blue-collar workers together and actually, you know, impart new strength to labor which economists feel is the way to improve sustainable growth. >> in the part about community, you're seeing a derth of communities. whereas people might formerly gather in a church, you see declining church attendance. where they might gather in a labor union you see declining labor. and you don't even have a group of employees to go into the office for. >> common, the place you live could be an important new community structure in this economy. >> given thousands of microentrepreneurs, as an employer in this workspace, what's the correlation between loyalty and flexibility? how do you make sure that the people who are working through

your company have some semblance of loyalty toward some shared mission and say, you know what? i'm going to carry the flag for this brand, this is a great company to work for or through, and if everyone can run off to the next project, that is to the next highest bidder, how do you say, well, to your clients, i can guarantee you that this really fantastic, talented individual that i've recruited can stay on this project for you? >> you have to be innovative about it. you have to think in a totally new way about how you keep your workers incentivized. we've made a decision at common to shy away from 1099 contractors, everybody from our kleiners to our managers, they are employees of common and almost all of them have equity in the company as well, as i think this sharing of equity is extraordinarily important, and you're seeing other companies, i think, take even more extreme versions of this. i know you mentioned in an article the other day the ride

sharing company that is actually owned by the drivers, which i think the an extremely promising development. >> yeah, there is this company called juno now -- >> i have been using them. , too. we're the fortunate few. >> how do they compare to uber? they have comparable wait times. i think the big difference is you can't just download the app and install it, you have to be invited by a driver. the drivers seem a lot happier. >> i bet. uber takes a 30% share. >> and juno has cap -- has capped at 10%. it's early days. in 2012, uber drivers were very happy as well. but i think more importantly, you can call a number -- >> tech support. here is an office in one world trade center. there is sort of a feeling of, you know, respect that the drivers seem to be reacting very

positively to, and this is in some ways sort of a tried and tested sort of competitive strategy. i mean, uber's identified weakness is its relationship with its drivers. so a new entrant can build market share by targeting them on that particular dimension. >> goes to human capital. the companies are competing for the drivers, which is sort of interesting. >> and i think that will sort of even out, the bargaining position between the providers or the individuals and the institutions over time. >> yeah. but it may not be enough. they have to move quickly. uber is clearly betting that in five to ten years, they will have a fleet of driverless vehicles, and if you look at their investments in driverless technology, where they're putting their r&d spend, it is clearly removing the driver from the equation. they know that's their weakness, and, you know, uber's c.e.o. has come out and said in five to ten years, there won't be any

drivers. >> sreenivasan: what role does the state play? when you're about to take over a building and you've got to go by building codes, fire codes, what framework should there be? is it the bare minimum? where's the line where it's an infringement of your ability to innovate and deliver? >> first and foremost we look at the purpose of the regulations. why were they conceived and what was the spirit of the regulations? 99% of the cases, they were conceived in the right spirit and manner and an incredibly important part of the ecosystem. it's important to understand when you're going about that why those regulations exist. the thing that i actually focus much more on, i think sometimes entrepreneurs have a tendency to be overly focused on specific regulations, is more of the user interface of government. that is, is it easy to get

someone on the phone? how long does it take when you're applying for a permit to get a yes or no answer. i actually believe there is too much emphasis on the regulations themselves, and there needs to be -- many of those regulations, certainly building codes exist for good reasons to protect people, to make sure people are safe and things are done in the best possible way. it's much more about the user interface and the process that i believe holds entrepreneurs back. >> see, i would go a step further, actually, and say that, as we sort of transition into this new world of capitalism, the role of government is going to change in a way that makes it much more of a rule setter. a lot of the execution of the regulations themselves and maybe even invention of new regulations is going to happen naturally through other stakeholders in society, the platforms. so for example, as common

scales, there will be a host of new regulatory issues that come up that, like, you know, we wouldn't have known existed when co-living didn't exist and the same way we're seeing the airbnb hosting issues emerge. and the wrong response, to me, is for the government to clamp down and say, well, follow the rules and we're going to enforce them. the right approach is to treat the platform as a partner, to say, well, part of the role that you're going to be playing in the future society isn't just as a marketplace, it's more than that. it's someone who actually has better information about where the market is failing. >> sreenivasan: so in that light do you believe platforms such as airbnb should be regulated as public utilities? >> i think we should stop thinking of them as an entity to be regular laid. they're not a protagonist. they're a partner. start thinking of them as they are a part of the regulatory ecosystem. understand, they have better

information about -- you know, we've got all this new opportunity because you've got this sort of really detailed data trail, and sort of this great history of interaction between two individuals. so for things like discrimination, for things like safety, all of those, there's a whole new host of opportunities for new regulatory models that start to come up. we've got to bring the platforms into the regulatory fold as partners rather than thinking of them as people who are breaking the rules. >> i think the role of government ultimately will be to make sure that the sharing economy doesn't become a zero sum game. i see two very die metric futures, one in which you have more of an uber model, bun in which the actual worker is not getting a huge share of value and wealth is held in a very small number of people's hands. and you have a different model which is a more of capitalism 2.0 and a shared growth paradigm. i think most main stream

economists would say that's a path to sustainable robust growth, particularly since we're going into a period because of 40 years of financialization that the growth will be lower. >> it seems we've displaced most of the risk down to the individual level. in the driver case, they buy the cars, paying for the maintenance, the gas, and perhaps they're not computing that into the cost of doing this, whereas the companies, once they build the app, get the drivers, the customers, they just kind of see the profits coming in. >> absolutely. it's interesting and this brings up an issue in my book that i raise is whether or not the technology sector is going to follow in the footsteps of the financial sector. we have 40 years where finance creates 40% of jobs in the u.s. but take profits. tech companies are following the same paradigm. huge market cap but fewer jobs

created so a lot of value held way up here, that is not a model for sustainable growth. tons of research shows inequality leads to growth and boom bust cycles. >> and broader unhappiness in a society. >> that, too. exactly. (laughter) >> i think part of the challenge here isn't so much that -- actually, part of the opportunity for the sharing economy is that i feel that we actually have a way of shifting a way from the concentration of a tremendous amount of wealth in the hands of a few because if you look at sort of the beneficiaries of the growth of facebook or the growth of google or microsoft, it tended to be people who had skills associated with the new technology, and so this is what mainstream economists would call skill-biased technical change. with the sharing economy platforms, you're actually touching people across the skill spectrum. there's a whole bunch of different people, whether they are making things, whether they want a host or a drive, who now

can sort of share in the growth that comes from technological progress. so, you know, the challenge here now is going to be to sort of put in place policy that makes sure that this collective of providers can sort of get enough bargaining power to reduce the inherent imbalance there between the individual and institutions in situations like this. >> sreenivasan: once that happens we'll have you back at this table. the book "sharing economy," and also the book "makers and takers." thanks so much for joining us. >> thank you. >> sreenivasan: facebook connects over a billion people each day around the world on its social media platform. it has also become increasingly influential in how we stay informed about the world.

a pew research center study found 44% of adults in the united states regularly read news content on the site. facebook last week announced plans to make a series of changes to its news feed algorithm to more favorably post content by friends and families of users. john herrman is here, media reporter for the "new york times." jay rosen, new york university, and melissa bell, vox media. john, how significant has the impact on facebook been? one on consumers and how people get the news and the story tellers. let's start with the consumers, how we get the news. >> it's kind of hard to overstate in the last five years, especially, a huge number of people have, while using facebook, started to treat it as a primary news source. some of this is intentional, some of this is just happening.

there's more and more news to read, more and more organizations vying for your attention on the platform. the result has been that over 100 million people in america alone are actively checking a single news source. it's composed of many other news sources, but that is argue pli the largest single outlet in the country and in the world and it's facebook's. >> sreenivasan: isn't that a good thing? a more informed public, more people getting information from perhaps friends they trust saying read this article, this is a great read? >> well, there are advantages to consuming news through a social layer which is what facebook makes possible in that you're connected to your friends and family through the news, so it's going to be inherently more meaningful to you. what's lost, of course, with that is editorial judgment and that extra emphasis that

journalists once added to the flow of news so that they could say to us, you may not initially think so, but this is really important, or this may not be the sort of thing that you normally pay attention to, but you really should, and i think that's one of the things that's being lost through news system. but we should also add that, in many ways, this change is being driven by users. it's being driven by the fact that people love their mobile devices and on their mobile devices they want their pages to load fast and a good user experience and facebook distinguished itself at that. so we can talk about the power of facebook and we should. we should talk about the choices it makes and we should. but we should also keep in mind that the underlying trend here is that users are making the choice to use their phones and on their phones to use the app facebook. >> sreenivasan: melissa, this is good news for vox in some ways. facebook is virtually your paper boy yelling from every

street corner on the planet you couldn't possibly get to, and a good chunk of your audience comes not to your specific web site but facebook and other social platforms, right? >> yeah, we definitely see this and other platforms as a great way to connect with other audiences. facebook has a huge audience hungry and looking for information every single day, as john mentioned. one of many. sometimes we can get distracted by facebook as the sole conversation topic. i think there is a theme of the overall internet and how we're presenting news to people in this day and age. it's one of many access points we can reach people. we have a hungry audience, but we also need to remember there is a lot of different people for us to reach audiences in this day and age. >> sreenivasan: let's unpack the second part of it, the story tellers. what's the relationship between facebook and publishing companies been and how's that changed over time?

>> at times happier, and at times a little more strained. i think in the longer sort of story of the media and the the internet, facebook is -- feels like a conclusion, the companies that made the jump from print to the web sites and who had dealt with google and search engines and getting readers through other companies like that. facebook is bigger than anything before kind of more centralized and editorially cureiated than anything before. so that's why there is a sense of urgency among publishers now. >> sreenivasan: jay, recently they announced the values behind what they say the algorithm is and how the algorithm choose that stories they want. first friends and family, then the ability to inform, and then to entertain. in one sense, that's good because we know how the black box of the algorithm works.

in other sense, it tilts towards i want to give you what you want, not necessarily what i think you want or need. you said there is the editorial decision making process that newspaper and tv editors and anyone else said this story in some far flung place in the world might not seem important but it really is and that's where we'll use our precious 22 minutes and page space to do that and facebook doesn't have to do that. >> no, they don't. what they said in the recent statement, news feed values, is friends and family come first and your social graph, your social world is the most important thing for facebook, and the public world is a distant second, and i think this is an important thing that they finally said it that way because, prior to that, they had wanted to assure news publishers, it's okay, we love news and we want you on our

platform, and they wanted to make significant sounding noses about how key facebook is to the algorithm. here they were being a little more honest saying the most important thing for this company because users tell us this is what they want is for my daughter's baby pictures to show up first in my feed. this is important for news publishers to understand is because it underlines that this is a struggle between the strong and the weak. facebook is in charge, they are the goliath here, and it's good to know what goliath is about to do because you might get crushed otherwise. the other thing i think that's interesting about this, because facebook is such a data-driven company and so focused on what users "want," the one demand it has trouble with is what if users want is to be surprised? what if what users want is to

know about what they don't know about yet? and that's where i think news publishers have an advantage because that's the desire they cater to. for engineers, that's a tricky problem. for editors, that's where they come in and what they're good at. >> sreenivasan: melissa, if there is this black box that is making these decisions, aren't you as a publisher sort of at the mercy of where that black box decides or at least the engineers and what they program in and how the values fluctuate up and down on important the stories you're working hard to create ever reach people? >> so, to a certain extent, yes. but i don't think that's really what we should be focusing on. i think what we should be looking at with facebook is they're a company very committed to figuring out what they users want and building a product that serves those users. i don't think this shift is that much of a dramatic shift. they've always been trying to

appeal to create a platform for people to share information about themselves and i think what we should be doing in the publishing industry is taking -- seeing that as an example for us, we need to be creating a service for our readers that we can accel at, that we have a competitive advantage at. what i think of ourselves as as the end of the day is story tellers, we ultimately have a competitive advantage in that we are able to create and inform people through the value of telling their stories. that's something that facebook doesn't do. facebook is a distributor, as john mentions, but not the originator of those stories. if you look at most of the major technological advances and major platforms that are out there, they're aggregators of stories, youtube, snapshot, facebook. these people are building products that aggregate stories but do not tell stories. so what can we do as journalists to focus on those stories and be the best at that rather than trying to constantly understand

what a black box is doing? we should be aware of it and p be thoughtful about it, but i would rather us be focused on being the best at what we can do and provide to readers and that's where i think we can be smart about this. >> it's also important for vox, i think you would agree, melissa, to have a distinct way of telling stories. so brand can't be just news anymore. we are journalists. that's not good enough. you have to have your own way of giving people information so that when i see a vox story in my feed, i want that because i know how vox approaches things, and i think that's a big change for news companies, too, is before they could do news, now they have to increasingly do it their way because it's not packaged in a big, bright bow with the news brand on it, it comes to them in an atomized form. >> sreenivasan: it's not the view from nowhere as someone from the table said.

>> increasingly, that's not good enough. >> sreenivasan: john, what you said about the business side of things, i want to point out facebook entered into relationships with different media companies including vox at times where they are encouraging publishes to create video for their facebook live. you say wow they built a tv network without having to pay for satellite because we're all contributing video for them. so how important does that relationship affect the possible storytelling you might do? >> well, in one way, and you hear this articulated by a lot of newer media companies including vox, this is an amazing time to reach a lot of people in new ways, and there are a lot of challenges. we don't intuitively know from experience what the best way to reach people is on facebook and snapchat. these are new platforms and they change a lot.

what does a story look like on snapchat or twitter or told through a messaging app? these are all interesting questions and the answers often result in millions of new readers or viewers or whatever. the problem is that, let's say we figure out facebook live. let's say a reporter figures out a format for telling a story on facebook live or a producer figures out a novel way to do a live event that is like tv but like facebook and somehow novel and new and exciting, that solves a really interesting problem for the publisher, for facebook. it doesn't tell us in the long term how media companies will make money doing this, what a media company that specializes in these types of things will look like. the big existential questions are business questions. >> sreenivasan: shed some light on the business. i'm watching this. i don't understand necessarily how, say for example if 100,000 people show up to your page and a bunch of them click on this ad, i get how you could make

money off it. if 100,000 people show up to your story on facebook or twitter, how do you make money? >> your web site has a certain amount of money spent for advertisement on that page. podcasts have a different revenue model for advertising there. news letters for instance have a different advertising model there. each one is distinct. facebook has its own as well. facebook, though, has been slower to monetize its pages and are work with publishers really aggressively to figure out ways to monetize the content they are putting on facebook. in my mind, i think that is a really positive turn because what we're seeing not just from facebook but from google, twitter, these platform technology companies is there is a value for them as well as for us to have good quality content on their pages. they want it to have -- they want to have informative, entertaining or personal stories told on their platform, and they know that they can't just rely

on day-to-day users for that, that they also need to turn to publishers as well. so in my mind i think this is a great evolution for journalists to see that there is a tilt towards quality happening. and i think that we sometimes can get caught up in the fact that it feels like we have been doing this for a long time in the digital age. it's been 20 years that publishers have been online and going through web site cycles, google cycles and facebook cycles, but that's a short time to figure out a new medium, particularly one disrupted by mobile. and we have to realize that not only are publishers trying to figure this out, not just the storytelling but the revenue, technology platforms are as well. we're all sort of experimenting in this space right now. that's what ink is -- that's why i feel optimistic and excited about it that just as much innovative storytelling is happening and own vaift

modeling - -- innovative modelig happening as well. >> the publisher publishes the thing and sells the audience it has to advertisers, which is something we've taken for grand so -- for granted so long we forget the problems inherent in that. but in a situation where a media company like vox is publishing to snapchat, facebook and also to a web site, i would argue they're less than a publisher than something new. facebook is the publisher, snapchat is the publisher. they're providing the means for the story, the video, the reporting to be distributed. what a media company has to do in an environment like that feels not just like an adjustment, but it feels totally different. it's you're almost like an agency, in the background feeding all these different

distribution chains that you don't quite have control over. that's like a fundamental change in what a media company is. it's not really -- i mean, i don't think it would square with r previous definitions of a publisher. >> so i think that, though -- you are coming from a newspaper mindset. this is something we've with talked about internally a lot is perhaps publishing is the wrong term. we've thought of ourselves as programmers. you are programming stories to different platforms. it's not so much -- one of the things that is really, i think, wonderful for our company like vox media that doesn't have to be thinking about the median they were born within, they can be much more agile in adapting to different mediums. the "new york times" was so tied to the medium it was created in, i think they're doing a good job, but that is a move that they have to step away from. so you're right, publishing might be the wrong term for it. you know, we do think about how

can we program our stories for these different platforms. >> another thing, hari, this makes me think of is there is audiences, and there is audiences. it used to be that the media just looked at how many people were accessing its stuff and that was the audience. now i think we have to recognize that 50 million people who are consuming your content but disconnected from one another may not be as valuable as 5 million people consuming your content who are interconnected with one another, talking, liking, sharing, able to produce their own content back. so it's not just how many people you're reaching. reach is sort of one dimension. it's how interconnected are those people to one another, and an interconnected audience is more valuable, and if you are the platform through which they connect to one another, that's even more valuable. so that's what we're beginning to understand now is that it's not just how many people you reach. it's how are they configured.

and if you are the configurer, that's the strong position to be in. >> those 5 million people talking about your stories in one place are doing it on facebook. >> right. so that's a fantastic thing for facebook. >> right. and it's exciting to be a part of that and it feels like it's very much yours but the amount of money you get from that and the amount of control you ultimately have over what happens next is up to them. >> how much of this is sort of sour grapes of what used to be gatekeepers? i got to decide what was above the fold, a-1, the top story in the newscast tonight. right now, whatever you see when you flip your phone open and you open any number of these platform apps, i don't have that power anymore. i don't know if you will see my work. but if you do, you might be see a story i published 15 days ago and it was in c-3.

>> sure. long ago, the journalism profession in the united states took for granted its power as a gatekeeper and confused it with another fact which was a very limited channel media universe that happened to prevail at that time, which was an historical era that ran for a long time, almost 100 years, and it's over now. and the people who confused the limited channel media universe with their own authority and brilliance as journalists are having a hard time. the lost gatekeeper syndrome recurs over and over for that group of people. but i teach young journalists and the kinds of people who go to work for melissa's company, they don't have that because they didn't grow up in that world and they don't necessarily have an attitude of entitlement about their gaitkeeping power or audience and they're much more

willing to go out and seek users for what they do and i think that's really healthy. but for the people who thought they had cultural authority and they now see it taken by these tech companies, there is something deeply offensive to them about that. >> but again, i think this is where we sort of meld, like, critiques of facebook with changes in business a little bit. there are certainly critics who are nostalgic for a time for when they maybe personally had more say over what people saw or thought, but that's sort of -- that runs in parallel to a very clear business problem for any sort of media company that made its money from distribution, which virtually all newspapers and magazines did, which most of the media as we know it does to some degree. maybe in a more complex arrangement on tv. but taking that away is not just

about nays tailingia or feeling there are young, arrogant tech companies that are taking over, it's this is the destruction of one version of advertising for video, for writing, this is one industry kind of just eating another one. so that's -- i mean, really, we always have to acknowledge that when we talk about who's right and wrong in these critiques and who is sort of appealing to good old days that maybe were never that great. i resist that a little bit only because it leads us to sort of, like, dismiss the source of all the anxiety, which is just collapsing businesses everywhere. and in the period before people know what comes next, that's apocket apocalyptic -- apocket

appocalyptic. people know what the verbal is. people know -- people know what verge is and vox.com is and you are able to do good work on those sites and through facebook and snapchat and the sites themselves, vox is able to sort of put together some version of a new type of media company. but i don't think you would be comfortable turning to another publisher and saying here's the road map. no one knows this yet. that's why everyone is so tense all the time. >> yeah. i agree that there is a stress around the revenue model. i think that if we are talking specifically about the journalism model just for a minute, i actually want to pause it that we have a slightly different problem from the gatekeeper issue. i think that is something that also is a little bit of a smoke and mirrors for the real problem. the real problem is that we're

inundating people with information at such a huge rate that we're not providing clarity anymore. i think this goes back to the idea where we used to have a limited means of publication distribution so we could present a number of stories, people could follow along those stories, they were up to date and well informed, and that shifted not just because to have the internet but because of television and 24-hour news channels and even the facebook update mentioned this, a few years ago facebook could never imagine a news feed so overrun with information that they were trying to provide some ways to help people be guided through that information. and i think that that's really something that we have yet to solve for. we think about that a lot at vox media. we tried hard. vox.com was built on the premise that we wanted to provide explanation to readers behind the news, but it's a challenge in the way we've set up technology and web sites with

reverse chronology feeds, it's a challenge with the way we've set up television, and that to me more -- that concerns my journalism heart more i think than where we have the right gatekeepers in place or not. >> the recent hubbub with gizmoto where human editors with facebook, there was concern they were putting their own bias in the trending topic section. the facebook editorial policy said we don't allow for any sort of suppression. if you look at 44% of americans are reading this and 170 million americans spend nearly 50 minutes a day with facebook, instagram or whatsapp, do we have a tendency to walk back into those filter bubbles and things that we liked and see an affirmation for ourselves over time in "wall street journal"

built a red feed, blue feed something where you can press a button and see how someone who would be far more progressive or conservative would see the world. are you concerned over time that as these different social media reflect that we like that we might not hear the thing that was so important to an editor to put a certai comment that you me this even though it doesn't jibe with your own point of view. >> people with different filters are talking to each other, but it bases an important issue for me which is if people are going to be informed citizens in the world we have now, if we're going to have a public engage with the news, it's probably going to be because those people intentionally chose it as oppose to it flowing to them through the structure of the media world they were in, and that to me is the big question, is do americans actually want to elect

to be informed? and the information will be there, if they do, but that's the puzzle for us as a democracy is now we have to actively choose it. >> sreenivasan: well, i think once they see this conversation, they will all opt to be informed. jay rosen of n.y.u., john herrman of the "new york times," melissa bell with vox, thank you for joining us. >> thank you. >> rose: fo for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

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announcer: the following kqed production was produced in high definition. ♪ >> must have soup! >> the pancake is to die for! >> it was a gut-bomb, but i liked it. >> i actually fantasized in private moments about the food i had. >> i didn't like it. >> you didn't like it? >> dining here makes me feel rich. >> and what about dessert? pecan pie? sweet potato pie?