Good evening, and welcome to the Furfield Town Hall. My name's Laura Rocha. I'm the library director here. And we're the hosting organization for this event. Special thanks to Curtis Coran, whose web of connections and enthusiasm really helped organize this program. And thanks to the folks at the old town hall who have allowed us to use the space for you and for me. If you're so inclined, feel free to donate to the donation box as you leave. Donations help fund the old town hall's ongoing renovation and refurbishment, and allow us to have a community center. Tonight, we have a panel of journalists representing a variety of local, and regional, and even national publications and news outlets. They have quite a variety of expertise, interests, scope, and experience. And we will listen as they discuss issues and concerns related to the fast-changing media landscape. Hopefully it's not all about money, but it might well be. In short, at the table, we've got Tim Palabro, whose editor-in-chief of The Herald Randolph and Marty Frank, editor-in-chief of Valley News. Tom Powers, who's authored several books and been a contributor to The Atlantic and the York Review of Books and other publications. You can probably tell you more about that. Christopher Wren, who was a former foreign correspondent in The New York Times, currently recently released a book on ethnology. And Katie Jekling, a Brookfield native. And before the holidays, and moderating the panelist Anne Halloway, founder and editor of Montego.  I don't know. Questions will have a Q&A at the end. Yes, thank you very much, Laura. And thank you, everyone, for joining us tonight. We decided to go without microphones. So if you can't hear us, give us a signal and we'll talk a little louder. We're just going to start talking generally about the state of the news industry, which, as many of you know, is in kind of a sad condition. Commercial media is in any case. But I wonder if we could all start with a question about the audience, about readers. What do we think people want from the news media? And I'm going to start with Tim because he says he has half a brain cell left because he just put it out of his paper. He just put it out of his brain cell today. And so I'm going to start with Tim. So this is one of the tougher questions on this list. I think we know what we wish people wanted, what we hope they want, what they actually wanted. A difficult thing to decipher sometimes, I think. I think we hope that they want to know what important things are going on in their own communities. And I think, to some extent, that is the case. But I don't know that I have a better answer for that one. And just to follow up, Tim, why do you think it's hard to understand what people want? What do you perceive that they want? What are they doing instead of reading news? That's a great question. To some extent, I see this sort of with volunteer fire departments as well. We see a lot of fire departments who are desperate for personnel to participate in the organization. And this is kind of coincided with many more options for ways to spend your time. I think that while volunteering for a fire department or reading your local news are important endeavors, there's also, admittedly, an element of entertainment to these things. I mean, if your options for things to do when you're not working are somewhat limited, then your desire to participate in all these other things, like volunteering, like reading your newspaper, are an easier choice to make than watching Netflix until you fall asleep. That's kind of a bummer way to start that, but anyway. Let's go down the hill from there. Who else wants to chime in? For me, the essence of news is telling people something they don't know. For me, the challenge of putting out a newspaper in recent years is figuring out what people don't know. My newspaper has both national and local news. And I know our readers appreciate the mix that we offer them. And when it comes to choosing which national news to provide, it's hard for me as an editor to figure out where in the news cycle we're going to find. So when our paper comes out the next morning, do our readers necessarily want the breaking news that they might have already seen on their phone? Do they want analysis or something in between? And I often, that's something I struggle with more. How do you make that decision in the end? I just guess. You just get it. Now, part of the problem, of course, is that not all of our readers are the same. So there are certain, for the most part, I read more towards respecting the fact that we're not delivering breaking news anymore, at least when it comes to national news. So I'm talking about what goes on the front page, for the most part. So I mean more on our readers' analysis or second day pieces as much as I can. But there is some national and international news that's so consequential that you can't ignore the fact that the newspaper needs to recognize its importance by putting it on the front page. I think a lot about capturing attention. And to what degree are we responsible for doing that, for capturing people's attention? And I don't know if anybody else worries about that or anyone wants to comment on it. The way the internet has impacted our business, the 24% news cycle and how we deal with that, how we dive into this mass of information and distinguish ourselves as one whole, and even national, how do we capture people's attention long enough to help them understand what's going on? Uh-oh, I'll hazard a comment on that. I think it's always very dangerous to start by asking, what did they want? It's not that they don't want things, but they want changeable things that come and go. And the publications that spend the most time actually really seriously trying to find out what people want, hold focus groups, and they almost invariably find that what people want on the whole, numerically, are the shorter things, the easier things, the less disturbing and troubling things. I mean, it's a way of deciding what isn't the most important. There are a lot of publications that go about doing that. The most interesting papers are ones where the people that learn spend a lot of time thinking about what ought to be in the paper. And a good paper always has a very lively struggle over that question, and sometimes more, sometimes less. One of the things I discovered a few years ago, I was working on a book about the Indian Wars in the 1870s, and I spent a lot of time in Wyoming and Montana and places like that, and I read all the local papers. And one of the papers I read was the Cheyenne Leader in Wyoming. And the Cheyenne Leader in the 1870s was terrific. It was full of interesting stuff. The people were ambitious writers. They did all kinds of color stories. They seriously grappled with real issues and problems. And the Cheyenne Leader, they cannot bring itself to put an actual story on the front page. It's all about local high school football teams and other sporting events. It's a very, very, the people that run the paper aren't really very, their own paper, aren't really very interested in what's in it. And I think there are a lot of areas of journalism where that's generally the case. I think a lot of local television stations have all decided that if you just do crime, it's very easy because you know exactly where to go to get the info. And there's always something to get a picture of in the course of the day. And it doesn't cost much to do. And people do watch it. They turn it on and watch it. So I would listen to any reader that wanted to volunteer on what they'd like to hear about. But I wouldn't urge people putting out publications to concentrate on that. Give them what's important. Give them, you have your own idea.  And that defines your attitude towards the state right off. And people will show up because they instinctively understand what it is you're trying to do. I think that one thing that's really interesting and different, I think, about working for seven days is the publishers have basically chosen to cast really wide net and get as many readers as you can. And sometimes people will come up to me and say, oh, I love your high spies or like your personals along the goodness. Like do you know how long I've just been writing the news? And so sometimes I kind of roll my eyes at that. But I think often that's a question that all organizations are grappling with is how many people do we want to capture in some way? Because probably the people who are reading the personals or turning first to the personals are not going to be reading the news regardless. And so to capture that breath keeps the rest of us in business and it engages the community in different ways versus catering to what is primarily more and more the people who are reading the news are white and liberal and wealthy across nationally. Those are sort of statistics. And so grappling with the extent how much of that substantive news we want to put forward on a regular basis I think is both a business question as well. Well, I mean, I'm personally in the persuasion that people don't know what they want to go to give them. I mean, I realize that there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of arrogance in that. But I think that at the end of the day society works when we have experts. When we have people who are doing nothing but creating news and studying the news or plumbing or teaching. And these all things all require expertise. And in the news business it requires a certain amount of expertise to know how to ask the right question at the right time. It takes a lot of psychology. You have to know how to place a bubble group which requires a lot of fighting for those records. And you have to know what's happening in the world around you and it's complicated. And yet when I left the office today and we had Colin Miner editor said, wow, it's a major trash day. We had a decision that came down from EPA on PFOA. Don't ask me what happened. All I know is there was a decision. I didn't have time to be into it. You know, then we had a story about the FDA pulling back on the added sugar rule from April syrup. We have a story about a police officer who's been accused of wrongdoing in Chittenden County. We had the usual, sorry, both nonsense and the legislature over this fight over the budget and taxes in the governor's office. So that was happening all day, the day Colin and Xander were chasing that. So that's how I left. And there were four or five other stories that we were working on in the queue. And we were having a hard time deciding, okay, what goes? Like those decisions are actually made in the moment. You know, we're trying to figure out what's most important each day. And sometimes those are longer-term topics we're working on that might take a week or two weeks to finish.  So it really is tough to make these decisions, but I think the way that people decide that they want to read is they vote, you know, with their clicks. So, you know, I think the reason why people read Digger is because we are stories about our news. And, you know, we now have a lot, and we have turned 40 for a thousand years a month. And that surprises me, I believe, because we don't do anything entertaining, really, we should do something entertaining that's a lot, but we don't. And so I think, I actually think I'm a contrarian, but, you know, I do understand that people aren't really sure it's stories on the web. And that we should write in three paragraph pieces, but, you know, I've published 9,000 words on the web, you know, I think that people will stop reading when they feel it's stopped reading. Stopping reading.  As I was thinking, I think I agree with everything that you said, but can I just step back for a bit on this and talk about the elephant in the room, Donald Trump? And we can do that, power structure, wait, no, what I wanna say is that we're in, we're also in an era of where there is what's called fake news. Right, yeah.  And I think this is the problem that you have to, you know, when people are reading, and I think the future of journalists and lies are very heavily in local news. But I also think that we're getting, we're in a constant battle with the likes of Donald Trump to try to make news credible and keep news credible because, and I can talk about this later in the term, what is fake news and what is really fake news. Well, we can talk about that now. Where were you going? Well, let me give you an example. I went back and looked up some things. The buzzword is fake news and everything and because we get such an onslaught just today. Fake news is actually dates back to the colonial times. And let me give you an example. Here's something that they said in the British reaction from the British. They play, they pay little regard to facts but the contents of it are as we plead with deceit and falsehood as most of their publications. Well, what was the context of that? The British reaction to the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. So, and when I worked in Russia, I worked four and a half years there and I was expelled. Threatened the expulsion. Words are not those of the Soviet journalists. And the whole notion of disinformation because they have Russians have a word for it. This infects the whole progress. I think the area where we can hopefully, I'd like to see if we can keep it. The level later is the future of the local media. But the local news is fighting a hard battle in terms of having people give it the credibility that the U.S. is leading. And Trump's attacks and perils on fake news create one big advertisement for the value of basic journalism. But we can't afford to give it away for free and that's the problem. Leadership is up, digital circulation is up. Competition, as I look for what they Trump called the day in the New York Times and the Washington Post. What has saved us is what's coming out of the White House. The people will go online to read this. When I worked for the New York Times I was one of my jobs that was in the, laying out the front page and working on the front page for the paper. And we had a circulation, which was very good, of 1.1 million copies. And on a good weekend, we got to 1.7 million copies. Now that's no longer possible. The circulation of the New York Times is now 3.7 million, which is like triple what it was, but it's all digital, most of it is digital. And so I subscribe digitally and then I buy the Sunday paper, but I don't need to. And first, digital does not encompass local news. It should, because I think what's gonna save us is what we do. But I think that if we try to, I think we have to deal with the reality of the Trump era. I can give you an example if you want, or I can do it later. Well, why don't we talk a little bit about this issue, about trust in the news and things and sort of that? Yep. Okay, that would be great. You got 10. Can I, this kind of brought to mind, what you said about people are looking for something that they don't know yet. And I sort of find myself wondering from time to time, to what extent is that really true versus to what extent are people looking for things that reaffirm what they already know. I see that with trying to think of what the, what's the name of the website news that's been around for the watchdog, is that what it is? Vermont Watchdog or something? Oh yeah, they don't exist anymore, but yeah. Really? Yeah, they'll have to find out. Gotcha. But we see these little things propping up all over the place that are reporting news from a very specific viewpoint that is custom designed to tailor to what people want to reaffirmation that what they think is real true. Again, this is one of those things, I don't know the answer to it, but I think it's worth thinking about as we go through this. Well, I think you wanna, there's a continuum that I think is important to point out. Fake news is actually utter falsehood. A story that's completely false. That's fake news. So, you know, with the troll farms in Russia and Eastern Europe, you had people basically making things up and reporting that news and then spreading it on Facebook and people believed it and that's one extreme. And then when you talk to people about trust in news they'll also say, well, you know, if I click on it on sponsored content, that's fake news or if I read a story that has factual and accurate, that's fake news. Or something that Trump disagrees with, that's fake news. It's sort of, it's becoming sort of catch-all and I think that what people need to understand about journalism is that we all reverse the mistakes, editors make mistakes. And so there's a difference between making a good fake effort to get it right and making a mistake and completely fake news. So it can be, I think, difficult for people to discern the difference between fake and fake news. And there's a particularly, I mean, subtle and pernicious version of that, too, which is just cherry picking the facts that fit the narrative that you've picked out ahead of time. Well, and that's what you were getting at is the partisanship. So if you have a partisan news outlet that isn't giving you the whole story without a flavor, that's problematic, right, because you're not presenting the whole truth as best as you want me to present it without a point of view. Yeah, so actually I was in Maine yesterday and I found out that there are two very popular blogs in Maine, I don't know the names of the two blogs, but apparently one was very right-wing and the other was very left-wing. And there's really not much in the middle for the state of Maine. And when I found out about that, I thought, wow, that is a tragic state. Because it's really hard to claw back to watchdog.org, which Tim referred to was run by the Franklin Institute which is funded by the Koch brothers and that was basically a state-by-state effort to cover legislatures across the country. And it failed at the bottom, I don't know why. But these things exist and they can be very confusing for the public and for readers. Yeah. I want to say, let me, if I can just go back and the first I have to say is that when I look at what newspapers can do, I look at the ballet news, it is terrific. And you look at the work they put, they have good people, they work on a sous-trem I think and they try to, and they build up the, but it has a credibility. Now it has a credibility that everybody lives in the aftermath, but I think they are very good about making sure they check their facts. I've been written. They got it right. And I think that's important because you have to have something to do. The question is how long can you afford to do that? The New York Times has been through this. We had to cut back a lot of good sections. We had to shrink it and how far can you shrink it? One thing that occurs to me is the price of newsprint. You're all looking at the problems with that. And this really bags people when the administration puts a, who doesn't like Canada anyway, puts the tax, it puts on news, we could tariff on newsprint. It doesn't affect them, but this hurts all print. And then because print is a vehicle, then it also hurts the digital. You understand what I'm saying? And I think this is the problem. You know, when we had, part of it, now the news cycle, you've learned, you know about the news cycle, was the cycle of news, the weekly news. And when I was working, when I left the Times, I worked over in Central Asia and mostly Russia to train journalists. And we dealt with this whole thing of trying to cut out a paper and getting, they had no, what I was talking about was totally for it. And it set with them and they said, oh, we could do that. And then they got involved and they were doing first grade journalism. I've helped a number of papers, got treated with papers, right? Putin closed them all down. He came, and he trashed every day of Sunday towards the jail and everything. But I think there was an effort, people, journalists want to do the right thing. They want to do it. But they're fighting all these pressures on every, on every, at every side. I'm just gonna finish my thought on this, but when I talk about using social media to control the news cycle, we always, we had a news cycle, we'd get the stories in, you had a media deadline and everything. Now what happens is it's news cycles in journalism by Twitter, it's tweets. The tweets control what goes in to the national, or the international coverage. And how do you do this? You start, when I was there, the whole logic was that you had a news cycle, you had the, you conceived of the sharks swimming around in the pool. And at noon, the Zoom people, which throw a piece of media in there and they sort of tear it all up, and then it was settled, and that was that sort of cycle. Now it's every day that happens. And it's done by tweet, where Trump tweets something out and it's at six o'clock in the morning and it's preemptive framing. He's the first to frame an idea whether it's right or wrong. And it gets out there, and then it echoes back and forth where people pick up on it. Today, when the national or even some local, they see what Trump's, he controls that. So he preys the new, it's preemptive. And you have to work against that. The other thing he does is to divert. He diverts attention, we're having this now where he says what he didn't really mean to separate children from their parents. After that thing went crazy. He tries to divert the attention from real issues. He says, well, this is lying Hillary's fault and he's got these labels on people. So, and the other is he deflects. When something comes out, he attacks the messenger. Thank you. And that's by framing what the story about him is fake news. And the other is a trial balloon, which we didn't know. You have to store it and you put it, you send something up and see if anybody wants to grab it. And governments or diplomats, they always get this, and then you look whether you're gonna recover it. And if that's up there, so Trump sent for these draft balloons, and you see somebody for box moves, grabs it and runs with it and it's not really a story. So this is a legitimate problem. It is legitimate. What do we do about it? Tom, do you have some props? I certainly can't tell you what to do with it. There are a couple of things you can think about it. The first thing to keep in mind when we're talking about Trump, when Trump is the big fact in American political life at the moment, we've never had a guy like that running the United States. And for quite a while, we didn't think it was possible to happen and he didn't either. I mean, the first couple of hours after he was elected, he could hardly believe it, and he was almost paralyzed. He was very slow to get moving, but no longer slow to move it. He has a personality with a deep instinct for how to control a discussion and to remain perpetually the center of attention and to make every issue always around him. If you go back to the founding of the country and the writing of the Constitution, one of the things that the founding fathers obsessed by was the possibility of demagogues taking over the country. And they constructed a government that they thought would provide the checks and balances that would make that impossible. But we never had anybody with this native genius for that. The curious thing is that it exists completely without any actual interest in politics or world affairs or anything like that. I've never seen a sign that he's actually interested in anything except himself and zoning regs to New Jersey. That's it. So when we're dealing with a Trump problem, with a Trump challenge, it's really unique and it's very tough for news organizations to know what to do about it because of his skill in dominating these conversations. And the fact that he does have a bully pulpit and he has the loudest megaphone, however, there are things that we're working to further bind that.  And a lot of the things he does skirt on the edge of real danger. His tariffs and economic plan is squirting on the edge of real economic trouble. And his dealing with Iran and North Korea is right on the edge of real serious military trouble. And Trump can't solve that. It was something like that that's out of control. The reality will begin to exercise checks upon him without arguments in public. So it seems to me that when we're talking about Trump, we're talking about one thing, which is kind of unique in history. And when we're talking about the news business, the general, when we're talking about something that's overlapped to that, then it's knocked back. Well, I think that sometimes when we talk about, and turn to this conversation, the discussion around local news is fundamentally different in terms of credibility. There's a Harvard sociologist who became pretty famous with a paper in the 90s called, Pulling Alone Robert Putnam. And he, yeah, he followed up with a couple books too, but talks about the decline of social capital and that fewer people are in elks clubs and going to church. And more people are bowling, but fewer people are in bowling leagues. And so you see this decline of civic engagement and in community and that structure. And he ties that directly to newspapers. And newspapers are included in that discussion. And so when you have newspapers that then build up the community and then the community builds up the newspaper, and in that cycle, you have growing trust in each other and in the news and growing civic engagement. And so a lot of the time we talk about newspapers as sort of separate from that, but I think it's a broader discussion about what's happening in American communities and how both the news responds, but also how we interact with the people, with readers, essentially. There's an interesting point and it raises a question that I have for Anne, even though she's supposed to be posing the questions to us. And I was wondering if as a former newspaper reporter and current editor of a digital news site, do you feel a different relationship with your readers now than you did working for print publication? Is it a more remote relationship? Because it's absolutely crucial to what we do. Well, you know, it's funny. When I worked at the newspaper, I was about, you know, many times I wrote this for about 10 years before I started digging and I always felt somewhat remote from readers at the paper because we had someone at the door who was checking people in when they came in. We had administrative assistants in the phone. You know, I answer the phone and dig her. We have someone who picks up the phone now, but you know, he comes in immediately. Where in Sioux comes in immediately and makes a list. I mean, I've got a call, you know. And I think the reason I feel so close to them is because when I started digging, every reader was precious.  I try to go to pick through and respond directly to readers. I'm going to have questions about our stories. But one thing I feel particularly close to readers is that they hold us accountable every day. You know, I think people hold us to a really high standard and we have typos. If we have errors, people criticize us all day long for everything we do. And you could see that as a problem. I don't, I feel like responding to that and allowing readers to weigh in on how we report and what we report on.  And in fact, we have this little form at the bottom of every story. It's a submitted tip, important error, and then a submitted document form. And we get three or four tips that way, almost every day. And then we also, people email us, they call us, they feel like they can turn to us for help. And that makes me really proud of the work we do. Unfortunately, we can't always respond every request to a report on something like that. Ironically, I mean, you think that like the web is sort of like the With Your Vots, right? You've got this web screen and nobody, you know, I think sometimes people think, well, you know, who's behind that web page, right? It feels really distant, but it could feel that way. But in our shop, it doesn't. It's really, and we get an effort to try to put our pictures up on them, you know, we have a picture of a reporter reviving every story along with their bio, mostly because we want people to see that we're human beings, you know, that we're there working on the website. And so we try to be really ultra responsive to readers. And in fact, to sort of counteract that feeling sometimes people can have distance, you know, with websites. We have our address on there, we have a phone number on there, our email address is on there, my cell phone is on there, I get random calls all the time.  Do you feel like you're closer to your readers through the newspaper part of the visualization or has it worked for you? It's hard for me to tell because when our readers are unhappy with us or our readers have a suggestion or want to respond to something we've done, it's almost indistinguishable for me. And it's, in fact, irrelevant whether they're responding to our website or to our newspaper. And there is some difference, but there's not a lot of difference between them. That's great. I mean, I think it comes down to customer service. You know, we really are a service industry. Yeah. Well, I think local news is basically news you can use, which I think is important. And I think that one of the problems you've had now is people are happy to pontificate and write not in the news, in the letters, in the language of the news. The notion that people are willing to purchase, there's a lot of people who give you their opinion, but how many people will actually go out and do the shoe leather and give you, and then build what you're doing in facts. And it's very easy sometimes to just assume that I teach a journalist, of course, a director, of course, you're not trying to write. And the students want to send them and write opinion pieces. And I said, no, no, I want the facts. If you can't justify everything that's in there, not only you. And I think this is the whole kind of thinking that still is relevant to local news, in a way that it isn't for a larger audience. Could I mention something, just getting back to the credibility component. And you mentioned the getting corrections from readers. And I have to say, that's always been one of my favorite sections in the newspaper. And I love that we do that as an industry. I love that we acknowledge that, yes, we're people, we make mistakes, and let us tell you exactly how we made a mistake and then set the record straight. I think that's one of the most positive things that newspapers honestly do. And I think that's really important as a way of communicating our credibility to the audience. Yeah, I agree. We haven't talked much about the business model. And the reason why, and Vermont, you know, the last, well, I was talking to Jim Welch about this the other day, he was the former executive editor of the Burlington Free Press, who we hired to help us get bigger with projects. And he and I were trying to figure out what the losses had been in the media in Vermont. And we think it's between 60 and 75% of journalists and newsrooms in the dailies have gone MIA. So Burlington Free Press, about 100 times others, they're two big, three big daily papers. You know, nationwide, we've lost 50% of the journalists. We used up 40,000 journalists. We now have 20,000. And that's because there's been a big shift in the advertising model. If you look, there are charts that show that, you know, advertising newspapers was always really profitable. People made 18% in the old days on newspaper. That's what the profit-learning was on average. So people made really good money every year on newspapers. But then things went south on the internet they made a big and Google Facebook started realizing that they could make money on advertising. And since that's happened, we've seen a complete reversal. So newspapers are going down like this and Google is quicker growing like this with advertising. And, you know, it's affected local papers a lot. And certainly the times. Although I was at a conference last week someone from the Times, Kenzie Wilson, who started the daily podcast at the Times with some folks there. It's now at Wordpress. And he was saying that about 50% of the revenues for the Times now come from readers from the subscriptions which is a huge thing. And, you know, so the business model's completely changed. And I wondered if Marty and Tim and anybody else who hasn't jumped in on that wants to talk about that and stand. Well, last week my paper announced that we are making a number of substantial changes. We are one of the last full broadsheets around and sometime over the, in the next year we are going to stop printing our paper. We're going to, we're putting in a new, we're building a new press that we will share with a sister paper and concrete monitor. And our newspaper will be printed there. And our newspaper will be narrower. It will be what the Times and the Globe is now. So, we, we will be, we will be, and we're also outsourcing our ad production. So the people who compose the ads are going to lose their jobs. And what the business model right now for daily newspapers is to, rather than look for new revenue, is to cut expenses, to see what kind of a newsroom they can afford. The Valley News has been extremely fortunate over the last, you know, over the last 10, 15 years. And I thought we've been affected less than, much less in the Rotland Herald and the Burlington Pre-Press. But in the last couple of years, we're really starting to feel that. And my newsroom is not what it was just a year ago. I have one less photographer, about two or three fewer reporters, a graphic artist we used to have is no longer with us. So that does two things. You have fewer resources to gather and write the news. And the other thing that isn't talked about enough and something I feel acutely as the editor of the newspaper is, people are working too hard. I'm really concerned, I'm really concerned about how sustainable the newspaper industry is with the workforce it has. So it's not a very optimistic message, I realize, but more so than any time in my history in newspapering I'm feeling it right now. It's really, I haven't thought about that. When newspapers first began, they sold for a penny or two pennies on the streets of London. And they were paid for by the readers. And slowly advertising began to creep in, but it was a long time before advertising took over the newspaper and people blocked the paper. And one of the things that hasn't happened in the growth of journalism on the internet is we haven't found a way to get people to pay for it. And the internet is a very easy medium in which to start a publication. I mean, the amount of overhead that's required is extremely low. But to raise the funds you need by advertising or by trying to get the readers to contribute is very cumbersome and very difficult and it doesn't move quickly and it's completely undependable. So I do feel, without having a specific suggestion about how to go about it, that digital publications need to find a way to get paid for what they're offered to people. Very, very simply, it should be as easy as the easy pass that you put on your car and go through toll stations. It's just a clip and it's done.  Well, you can email you will. Maybe you can do that too. They give your email to Donna from me. I mean, I just, I've got what Marty said. I think there's a lot of pain in our industry. I think that those of us who've survived, those of us who are left, I think feel really intense obligation to the public and we love our jobs and we love what we do. And I do think that when I started, people are working in my shop to the way too far. I mean, you know, I don't know when Call of Mine's gonna leave the office from now. When we started at nine, it couldn't be 10. Those are the kinds of days that we're all coming in and we can't do that forever. It's really true. When you're running it daily, that's really great. Because you've got the fire notice. I could fit in your face all the time. So, yeah. There's also the question of where the next generation of reporters and editors are going to come from. I think we have people like Katie, we still have some young people coming in to it. It will be just Katie. What's that? That's why it's involved to get Katie out of her book. I've been counting on her to buy the book. We started bidding more on Katie before we came here. Yeah, right. But the battling news has a really good writer. It's a writer's favorite, I think, in many ways. We're fortunate to have some very talented people in this state. But it's true, I don't know if you've seen this, but it's hard to find mid-career professionals. When we couldn't add out a digger for a reporter or for an editor, it tends to be people who either end up in a different path. Is people right out of college? Or is people who are retired or are on the verge of retiring? Are you finding one or two? Or you? Yeah. When you can find people. When you can find people at all. Yeah. There's people who just love the profession of drugs, you know? There's just a, you know, you can't really look at it. It's actually weird. It is, I think, actually. Oh, boy, we're just getting, we're going further and further down the road. Can I jump in there? Can you say something positive? I'll say something positive. That's okay. I'm soliciting. Oh, great. And I definitely wanted to say this, but another way in which Vermont newspapers and New Hampshire newspapers, for that matter, have suffered, is that with the decline of daily newspapers and the weeklies and the Associated Press has really struggled. And the Associated Press used to be absolutely essential to all of us to get our state news, which is as important to our readers as our local news. And in Vermont, I'm not sure what would happen in terms of getting Vermont or the information they need. We didn't have Vermont data to tell you the truth. Vermont data, there's not a wonderful job stepping into that breach and making sure the state house is covered. And if you're not supporting Vermont data now, I urge you all to do that. I would stop asking to say that. To put in another plug, I mean, you mentioned the loss of jobs of the free press and the Times Argus. And a lot of those people have ended up at Vermont Digger at least for a while. We're a good refugee camp. We're all grateful. Well, I think it's been so wonderful that we've been able to develop these collaborative relationships with you guys because it's really about working together and thank God for the value. It's really run your stories all the time. And we would not be able to help people run the state and understand what's happening in the Amber Valley without your intent. So I think that's where we're coming together with resources and trying to collaborate in a competitive environment for the betterment of readers. And that's where I hope it's all going to go. I think we should all be working together. So Katie talked to your boss about taking care of you. In the midst of all the doom and gloom, I think that it obviously has been a challenge for established newspapers, but at the same time, or established news media, but at the same time, there's like this sort of incredible democratization of news with the internet. And in some ways, I think you could argue that readers aren't necessarily worse off. I was just brainstorming some of the things that have popped up in the last few years, like Eric Hyland and Mr. Vermont. There are a couple of podcasts out in Burlington or once called Browner Now, like highlighting non-white, non-binary or queer people. There are some. Montpelier Bridge just became an on-profit. There's UV Daily and the Amber Valley, which is mostly online. Frederick Ford Forum, a lot of people are getting their news there. And so it allows regular citizens or people who want to work at journalism to jump in and do it in a lot of ways in a way that has the potential to be really effective. But on the other hand, there are cold regions that are not being covered by the media. Yeah. And some of them are really bad, right? So I don't know what they're doing. So there's that risk too, but. I'm prejudice, but I also, I'm not a huge fan of publications online or otherwise that don't have editors. And I think there's a number of problems that come with some of these sites that are run on citizen journalism, which is not to say that we don't benefit from them in many ways, but there are a lot of problems. Even with professional reporters, I think, I mean, having an editor look at something and say, hey, did you think about this? You made this assumption in this story and there might be two ways of thinking about that. I think that's hugely valuable, whether it's citizen journalism or professional journalism. Or some of these reputation is at stake or you want to be careful with the facts because facts can very much affect people. Yeah.  So one of the things they decided to do, which we all felt was a great mistake, is to eliminate the editors in the middle. They had something like Backfield Editor, where you'd plan to put them in the paper and everything, which I was when I wasn't out in the field. And then you had the copy editors who checked everything. And when I was working, filing out a release, far away, paid places, I'd file a story and you did it by any way you can to get it out. You don't be writing a story in a box of chisels just to disinvade them down. And you always felt that there was an editor who would say, well, that's not right. You had that. They stripped that away to save money. They decided to incorporate it into one person. And the one person, and so we now had one, even now we have just one layer of editors. And the mistakes immediately just soared because there was nobody there to check it. And on Facebook, they have a closed site for New York Times alumni. And I read it because all the things that go wrong, you can catch it there. And people were complaining. They had a thing, when they were talking about Guam and Kim Jong-un saying his rockets could hit Guam. And nobody thought of running a map. In the old days, you'd have a map. Here's who Guam is. And nobody knew who Guam is. So we sent a message, somebody circulated, where is Guam? Where did they hide Guam? And the site, you know, this memory, lagged to be until they had to find a map of Guam. Well, it's very important to know what Guam is if Kim Jong-un has got a firearm missile. And this is the problem where the lack of oversight, the lack of, there isn't enough money to do the editing that needs to be done. So reporters have to be their own editors. And that can be treacherous. Especially since some reporters don't like to admit they made a mistake. If it's digital, and you make a mistake, then you just go in and just, never happen. So should we have entertainment questions for the audience or? Yeah. But, can anybody have any questions for the editors? Yes sir. I have a question for you guys in the monitor. When people rely on advertisers, it was always that worry that you have really big advertisers, you know, that these people, you know, self monitor what you print because you're afraid of them, and you don't have to do that kind of thing. But with your model, you really mostly rely on the nation. Do you have a similar kind of problem where you worry about just giving them money and how are they going to use that effect to kind of get the GC back? Well, I can't worry about that. And I don't let my staff worry about it. In fact, recently we had a series of stories about the basin of the F-35 in Burlington.  And I had a back and forth with them. And I tried to explain the number trying to be fair to all sides. And he didn't like that. And I don't expect to never give his money again. And that's okay, you know, because at the end of the day, we have to be true to our readers, you know, writing for one person, he was giving us one and we write for readers in Vermont. And that series of stories had a big impact. There were three city council folks in which residents had pressured the city councils to reject the basin. And they went that way instead of agreeing with the congressional delegation and the mayor and Governor Phil Scott, that, you know, the fighter jets should be based there. People are worried about the sound and the impact on human health, especially children. And it's coming on us to lay all that out regardless of what people like in the month. You know, I mean, if I had to worry about things like I would be able to get up in the morning.  And if we can keep an open mind and try to gather as much information as we can about things in our communities, then, you know, maybe we can learn something and we can build some consensus as a community and as a society. One of the things that bothers me sometimes will print a story and we'll have many sides in that story. And someone will write to us and we'll say, you only should have told this side of the story. And that's not the way it works. You know, we want people to come together and understand different perspectives. Because maybe you haven't thought of it that way before. And maybe if you thought of it in a way in a different way, it would not, it would call you thinking a little bit and you'd have a more nuanced kind of view. Yeah, I firmly believe that we can disagree and still get along. And we can actually point out things that aren't good and we can disagree with our readers. We can hold our readers accountable and make them on a better place. I know it's completely naive and idealistic, but I really truly believe that. And my people believe that. I think a lot of people think that journalists are naive. And that's actually not true. Journalists are really idealistic people.  And it happens all the time. You guys are used to it right now. And you know, it's not, and I don't think, I used to take it, I used to not only be shocked, but I also used to take events because I was dumb about it. And then I realized, you know, we all do this. It's just the human condition, right? And then there are people who you want to protect and you love and you're connected to and you don't want to get hurt or, you know, there are things that you just don't want people to know or, you know, there are all kinds of reasons why people don't tell you the truth. They don't fuss about it. And that's the fun of it for journalists because you begin to read the signs, you know what people really want to. And then you're like, aha, there's a great story there. You have to see it as a gift, you know. So, I mean, how do they get all the answers? I don't know. Any other questions? Well, what you just said about, you know, just wishing you gave this person where that person's perspective reminds me of, I think, the dark day and sometimes, including Randolph, when they went to Australia in the ballot, you don't want to have to go to your neighbors. That's right. You know, it was a topic you might have thought you had a strong opinion on and, you know, you listened to those points of view and you were missing a lot of information and now you've committed your opinion and both the way you think and that whole layer is gone and so. So, that's why people value media because people see the other side and they see that you do not understand unless you hear them all. Well, I, you know, I served on the school board once. It was a really interesting experience this week before I came to the journal. So, it was for three or four years and I loved it because I'd go into a school board and I'd hear something, you know, I'd get the agenda and I'd think about what we'd been talking about and I'd go into it with a very definite opinion. And by the time I left the school board meeting or I thought it was so beautiful that we all came into meetings with our meetings and then by the end of the meeting we had come to a consensus where we had divided the numbers in the votes. We hashed it out and at the end of the meeting nine times out of ten, we voted unanimous on something that in the beginning we just, it was a problem we solved.  And then it reviewed many minds around the table and we're coming together to solve the problem. I, that's, that's, that's where we need to go. You know, somehow, as a society, we've kind of lost that. So I agree with you, that's really about that. Let's bring back the time we have here. I just gave you the video, sorry. Go ahead. That's the time you took. One thing, when I started as a journalist across the editing, gave me two rules. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. If you want a friend, get a dog. And I don't even think about those. It's nice to be friends with one thing, but you know, when the chips are down, you've got to get the, you've got to come, get the facts out there. Absolutely. Any other questions? Yeah.  The, your publication is a little bit unusual in that it distributes pretty widely, free, and obviously, there's a lot of advertising. Do you think that model is going to continue to work in the next decade? It seems amazing and successful. We just heard some bad news about the development of all papers. All papers. But, you know. Yeah, I think that, so the two publishers started Pamela and Paula, started about 23 years ago now, and have really sort of worked hard, I think, to think there are a few things that have done well, I think, developing roots in the community and building that trust. And so, and also creating a diversified funding stream so that we do a lot of things that a lot of newspapers don't do. We have events.  How many people get jazzed up about this like voting comment that this is really absurd. It's great. And things like the Personals, things like specialty publications for the airport and for tourists and French speakers and college students, and there are seven different publications. We just launched the Super Readers Program, which is basically like a voluntary subscription, right? It's for profit, so it's not the same as Ann's model, say. But I think that sort of hedges your vats a little bit, and that, I think that advertising is fine at this point, but if that changes, and if more people are moving toward Facebook locally, or if a whole bunch of chain stores come in and don't want to be paying to advertise in the local paper, then there are other options. And so I think those creative approaches at this point, there are a lot of people that, you know, we don't know what works. We don't know how to people what I want. Cast your net wide, I guess.  And without saying which newspaper this is, I was struck being noticing how the legislature was covered, the state legislature. One of the publications called it Inside the Golden Bubble, and I responded to that as someone who was really offended by, does everything about the government have to be undermined? Do we have to make a pun or, you know, witty, and I'm not saying that that was the intention, but that was my reaction.  I don't know if that's directed to anyone in particular. Well, Inside the Golden Bubble is David who's just running that platform. Yeah. And it does offend some people, but we haven't changed it yet. We might, at some point. But we used to call scope log, log, the Supremes. That also generated some of my reaction. I don't know if it's because of the time where I'd be asked, you know, everything gets to be right or wrong, and it's more, you know. Absolutely, it's a personal reaction. And I think I'll think about something else. But what do you all think about? Well, one thing that you notice that's different in response to Trump, in terms of what newspapers do is, newspapers feel much more comfortable labeling a lie a lie. I think that could never happen before. And Trump forced that upon us. That's one thing that's changed. And I get the sense, especially with the times, that there's a little bit more recognition of the adversarial role that they're playing because it's almost existential at this point. In terms of the times in the Washington Post, he has revitalized the news industry. Many of them are into it, but people wanna know what's happening. And now every man and his dog is trying to find that story about that nobody has covered that could reveal what's happening. And, you know, when you have, I had one of my favorite, if I find it here. If you hear it, it's, oh, this is, because part of the problem we have now nationally is the politics of grievance. And I think about Trump at the Coast Guard graduation last year saying, telling the graduates, look at the way I've been treated lately, especially in the media, no politician in history. And I say this with great certainty, has been treated worse or more unfairly. Well, why can't you grab that and run with it? So we have, it's a funny word for people who are the financed or the problematical, but I think Trump, to give an example, has revitalized the news industry vis-a-vis the New York Times and Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. They're looking, and McClashy in these papers, with the small news papers, is not financed and good stuff, and they're just digging through everything to try to figure out what Trump is up to and what his background is, which is you get into this kind of sleazy. And I think this, I shouldn't draw a conclusion. I mean, basically. You said, I don't know. I don't know. Something like that. And I think what's happening now is that vigorous, in terms of data, it's a vigorous news gathering operation. People are looking, turning over rocks, saying, where did you see this and that, because it's like timing for gold, and a lot of the stuff is there, if you just turn over the right rock. And what you need then is something to, so you have that enthusiasm, the whole politics of grievance. And will that sell newspapers? I don't know it. People want to know what the next shoe, I think it's kind of, but this is the fact of how it's working now, in terms of the national press. And there's some very good reporting. And if you look at what's happening with this sad business of taking children away from people crossing the border, that really went viral in everybody's way, and now they're having to be worried about it. So you can't have an impact what's happening. I like it, you can't just get a page one story every time about the equivalent. But I think to have the press working and looking here. And I think that in the Vermont journalism, you do have the people who are looking at the issue of the jets at Burlington Airport is a very interesting story, because they say they need them for national defense. Do they really need to put them there? But people look around and say, this is a lot. We've had this and now you have noise. So I think there are a lot of basic issues that touch people's lives, and you can figure out how to work those. I think there's a future for journalism, the question is, you have sufficient money for that. I think it's a very interesting point for a lot of different reasons, that I keep hearing the word newspaper. And I think that in 10 years, when all the kids who are on their tablets and their computers and they'll be in these papers, I don't think there will be newspapers. There will be journalists, and there will be journalism outlets. And so I feel like, please don't take offense at this, but I feel like the newspapers are the courses and the electronic devices are the motocross. And I think there is going to be that transition. And I think it sounds like one of the limiting factors for online journalism is getting funding because people don't want to pay for anything online. But there's also the fact that, and I will be very general and offensive and say millennials usually just want to do the basics. When John Hershey published Hiroshima in the New Yorker, it took up the entire issue. And so there's some reality factors, but in terms of having journalism go on, is it the finances that you think are the limiting factors? Interesting, is it the interest in people going into the field? What will keep this incredibly important, I don't know, service, profession, whatever, to the country? Waking up, people waking up in the morning saying, I wonder what happened today. I wonder what happened overnight. But they're still doing that. Yes, I know. And that's what you're saying. That's just, what's that? They're not paying. Well, in the New York Times they do, I paid $45 a month. I did so. But they're also looking, we're also looking for answers on the Facebook. So how do they're looking for answers from their friends? So as a kind of journalist, how do you see this going forward? We don't know. Thank you. So, I can say that, first of all, I like the term newspaper, and I think it lends some credibility to the profession. There are lots of organizations that call themselves that say that they knew journalism and some of them I cringe at. I consider Vermont Digger a newspaper. I call it the newspaper. Yeah. That's what we do because that's the tradition. That's the tradition. That's the tradition. That's the part of it. But really, in contemporary times, we've always sort of run two tandem organizations. We have a news gathering organization that makes basically no money. And we have this business operation that we use all the money we make there to fund the news gathering organization. And so, I mean, in all of our memories, that tandem organization has been advertising sales. I think we need to, and I think more and more, we're finding other ways, other tandem organizations to ride alongside our news organization. So if it's not advertising, we just have to figure out what's the next thing that will make money for us. Like what? I don't know, maybe I do. There you go. There you go. Like, for example, I know that Valley News has done a bunch of media consulting type of things. Is that in my name, do you do that? This is what we have attempted to diversify to, by doing such things as offering our expertise for a price to websites, advertisers who want to spiff up their websites. So they use expertise in our advertising department to figure out how to deal with websites. Which I think is a great, I mean, what skills do we already have that we can share with other people to get the same thing done until the 90s or so when the Herald press closed and we started printing at the Valley News, we had a bunch of other publications that we were printing and designing. So that was another source of revenue that once we closed our press, we lost. But it's not a new thing to have to cobble together different chunks of revenue to fund the news. So we're on the search. If you have ideas, let us know. I do think that there is hope in our profit mostly because of the way people share on the web. So I hope that it'll work for a while anyway. But I think that it's very difficult with the commercial model online just because, like I said before, we're talking about trading big advertising dollars really for what is called digital dime. So Google and Facebook charge very small amounts for reaching large audiences. It's really designed for millions of eyeballs, millions of viewers, right? And our small outfits are reaching thousands of readers. And so we can't sell digital advertising at the same rate. Our rates are, you know, Google sells for between a dollar and three dollars per thousand impressions. That's a thousand views of a web page, a website. We charge a digger 14 per thousand. And that's the going rate, state-wide. WCX change charges the same rate. I'm not sure what Sunphase does, but 14 is the going rate. So you really can't compete with Google and Facebook. That's been the problem. That's why it's been difficult for print newspapers to move to the web. And that's why I think if the end game is we're all gonna be on the web and we're all gonna have to rely on readers for support in a way we didn't before. The good news is that, as I think Tom and Chris pointed out, that's the barrier for entry is much lower. It's not as expensive to be on the web print. I mean, at the times I used to work on the air, I would make this kind of lease when we had ours a year on newsprint when I was there. That's a lot of money. Diggers budget is 1.5 million. That would be most of our budget, right? So we don't have to use paper all of our money is spent on people either raising money for news operation or recording or editing. So it's a totally different model. You don't have to keep the press maintained. You don't have to deliver the newspaper and print the thing. And God knows I loved all that because when I worked there, my favorite thing to do was to run out of that paper and take a look at it and smell it and everything. You know, put that in the table. I'm sorry, there was a question here. I had a question. You mentioned some of the issues that we're crossing the base. Yeah. She expected return of a few percent. Yeah, that's right. What are they expecting today? Well, that's a good question. I don't think, I don't know what the profits are. I'm not sure there are any profits. I think some for-profit newspapers are essentially operating in operatives. And that's why you see continued decline in the number of positions in newspapers. People are having a really tight-knit belts, tight-knit belts, tight-knit belts. One wonders whether you've never left that industry. Yes, John. Well, I have two questions. One is, it's a follow-up to that. Is it that, or is it the owners of those papers are looking at how the returns on investment in other companies are making them a lot more money.  Well, I mean, that's an interesting question because I didn't have time to read the story that there were piece recently about how publishers are continuing to make the profits on newspapers as they, as the Joseph staff, like the Denver Post. The Denver Post was the reason for that. You know, I think we're talking really big newspapers here. The local papers inside, that the margins are much much tighter than local newspapers. I do think the free press, though, was a real cash cow back in the day. And they are, I think. Second question. Well, I have a friend who wonders if the media industry basically is supporting the dominant paradigm and how would you react to somebody saying that you're supporting the dominant paradigm, which is a, which is, you know, pro-growth, unlimited growth on a finite planet type of approach, especially as we enter the heart of the climate crisis. Pretty provocative. Sorry. It was just a friend who was asking that. No one can accuse a newspaper industry these days of unlimited growth. No, no, no. Supporting the unlimited growth of the capitalist economy, what the question is, not unlimited growth of newspapers. That's a really interesting question. I've found myself skeptical of unlimited growth as any positive thing to aspire to, but I'm curious to know how we would are supporting that. What's the mechanism you see for that? Except the sun. We obviously operate in a capitalist economy. But I think we all are doing that, not just the newspapers, right? I mean, we're all doing that, though, right? That's not just a media issue. Sure, sure. But it sort of goes back to the question about how close you are to your non-profit donors or your for-profit advertisers. Those are the people that are paying the bills. And so, while I understand that there is the two sides of the house, which I think makes a lot of sense, there doesn't appear to be criticism of this dominant capitalistic paradigm. Gotcha. And maybe, we all see what some politicians have to say, including Bernie, about northern European countries that are more socialist economies. You know, they're still having an impact on the world, the global economy as well. But anyway, it's a really interesting idea. I mean, I don't know how everyone else deals with this type of thing, but in general, I feel like our news pages are there to report what's going on, not necessarily to champion one particular method of doing anything at all, really, if you would find something like that, it would be on the editorial page. And I wouldn't be surprised to find that there. But to compare that, I mean, to follow that, take the Dairy Crisis in Vermont right now. Man. Canada's not how it's going to go, and that's just to me, like that's another elephant in the room, that would be, I mean, why that is, is a completely interesting, and I would think that could be covered very thoroughly. And it's a huge reality. Why would you put that farmers to make a living off of 40 cow farms? Yeah. And so, anyway, I think it's a really interesting idea, and so, that is a big question. That's actually a story that is somewhat in the works, and there's a lot of divergent opinions on that. I think in general of Crisis in Vermont publication, I think that we could do a better job of looking outside the state to see what other states are doing, what Canada is doing to solve problems. And so, I think you're right, we could be doing that. We could be looking at states that have solved problems to a limit we haven't addressed yet. For example, my understanding is that in Ohio, farmers are required to inject in the room soil here in Vermont, that's not a requirement, whether it should be in the room or the question, but they're doing it differently there, it would be interesting to do it, right? So, there are all kinds of things like that, that we could be taking a look at, I think in Vermont, we tend to be really insular, and we tend to think that we've figured it all out, and the newspapers are digital, and credit newspapers are guilty of doing it. We tend not to look outside the world to find out whether they're there or otherwise doing things. As a reporter doing this every day, I know that it's very easy to get caught up in going back to the same sources, or I'm a certain quota that I'm basically expected to produce, and I work long hours, it's easy to fall back into this sort of Rolex journalism of like, oh, I know these people will call me back, and I don't have Rolex anymore, but I'm going to stop. And so, I mean, one question, I'm always trying to step back and sort of, okay, so what's going on, what am I missing? And I really try to put in a lot of time, just meeting for coffee with people off the record that I have never met before to sort of get a broader view, yeah, I cover Burlington, so get a broader view of what's going on at the city on the ground level. Like last year, I went like, once a week was my goal for several months to eat at the Salvation Army for dinner, just to like, see what I was missing. I think I ended up writing months to worry about it. But, so one question I always ask my sources, what did I not ask you? What am I missing here? And a lot of the time we do rely, like we're human too, so we rely on you guys to be saying, why aren't you covering this, or here's a tip that you may not have seen, or, you know, so. And I have to say too that on that, I'm always appreciative of sources who are willing to talk. We're willing to handle it because so many people won't. And especially, I'm appreciative of sources who are courageous enough to come out on the record. And, you know, so few of us are willing to take a stand on anything now, and it's really depressing to report. So, interview five, six, seven people who won't come out on the record. And something is really basic sometimes. So, you know, we are a reflection of society in that way. It's really amazing how that's changed, and the course of my career. And it's as frustrating as anything in journalism, both the reluctance of people to talk on the record in almost any situation, and the willingness of institutions to try to control people in their institutions in either stopping them from talking or trying to control what they said. That has changed a lot. It used to be when we were over here, and it's just like that. I mean, it would have been shocking 15 years ago for me as a reporter to call a member of the school board and ask him or her for an opinion about an issue before the board, and for the school board member to say, you need to talk to the chair or the chair speaks for the board. I mean, this isn't like an official who should be held accountable. But it also goes to talking to non-officials on the street. I don't know if the uncivil tone of social media is making people more reluctant to talk, afraid of the consequences of speaking out. But even tenured professors at Dartmouth College are more reluctant to speak out these days. And it's a problem. It's a little story. Mr. Chairman, if you are more fearful, why on the line? I think I'm going to add to that. Mr. Chairman, if you're gentlemen and we're talking about our president and how he has forwarded the standards in the country, he's polarized everybody, and we're challenging for journalists to deal with that polarization. And we have a whole group of people that don't hear one thing.  And then on the other side, it's more rational. You think you can't do it? Yes. You know, I wouldn't want to live there. But, you know, irrationality drives me crazy. And it must drive journalists nuts.  So, I'll be negative, but our society is plummeting to the bottom a lot faster than it was 10 years ago. What would happen if the media ignored Trump's tweets? Just said, got all together and said, we're going to ignore them. That would be powerful. Wouldn't that be powerful? I mean, you could all have an act where you're just going to see it. Let's fly by. And as I've argued to a member of my household who has made that same argument, it's really hard to ignore the president of the United States. It's really hard. But he doesn't have anything to say? That's the point. You have to ignore him because he has adopted the best friends of this dictator from North Korea. And that's something I think we'll then, you know, should attract our attention.  He has to be helping. Do you have one more question? Yes, yes. You talk about fake news and you talk about real news and I think the next thing we're going to see is designer news. Where you only get the news that's suited for your but is that real news, isn't it? Desire news. The next thing that's going to be because they'll design my Facebook on me. I see one Netflix thing. One Netflix thing. And it's on my Facebook. Yeah, it is. Okay? What if they design my news to suit me? That's not... I work foundation. Get off Facebook. It's just news. You're going to go digitally on news. How do you know we'll end up being a designer news? Yeah. That's what the box is. That is the future we are faced with. That's not going to change. I mean, we're going to have, you know, people are already using Echo and Alexa in their homes, right? Asking Alexa questions. You know, getting their news from Alexa and a lot of local news organizations aren't on the Alexa yet. So our news and information is already being increasingly shaped by the world of Facebook. You know, I think they've brought their good things, of course, about one of those platforms, but they don't necessarily have public interest in mind. They're interested in making money. That's their primary interest that people forget about.  And the politics of greed. In grievance, you know, people are... Trump has made an agreement and not an agreement. It's something new, though. But the whole idea that everybody complains and nobody understands anything such. But it's also a way to get out and try to talk to some people about different views, not get common with them, but... Can we take one more question? Oh, no. I'm about to explode. Oh, no. Let's turn it on. I'll come back to you later. One thing, I'm very happy to meet the editor of The Valley News.  So I have my sister in Orford and I read all the articles that she knows I'd be interested in. I love the fact that you put in emotion, human interests, in a lot of stories. And I think that has to be done by newspapers.  I'm all by myself in my own dinosaur age about getting critical thinking back into the schools.  I don't think the kids are getting any of that. And they get swept up into this isolationist internet, which to me is ruining the human race very quickly, which also allows in such as a monster like Donald Trump. And it's either fight him or just give it up and assume that, you know, little bitty tweet things are going to take over the conversation. It's all safe. Excellent. Well, thank you all for coming at this the start of the video. I appreciate all of you for letting your time and expertise. It was great to have you. Have a good evening.


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Okay, welcome to the session on Estanium to NetZero with verifiable credentials. It's an interesting combination of two topics, a verifiable credential, I think it's a pretty known concept in this kind of community, in the hyperledge areas are the sort of known stacks in this space and NetZero refers to carbon emission sustainability. So let's see, I want to tell the story actually from a Siemens side. I work for Siemens and what you see here is a factory, a Siemens factory. It's one of the sort of factories in a global network that was actually called the Lighthouse Network of Global Factories by the World Economic Forum. It's a factory that produces roughly one product per second, so it has a very high and for many, many years factories of this kind of scale, this kind of automation had always the challenge of being efficient, of optimizing, of being more and more automated and there's now a new kind of challenge and it's actually a big challenge, it's a huge challenge around carbon pricing. Carbon pricing is a concept that tries to move to shift the burden from global warming to those who can actually change it, to those who cause it also and this goes to factories like these, of course not only Siemens factories, but many other factories in the world too. So for us it's a key product like this, it's a program which is produced there as I said every second and the key question is really what is the carbon footprint of this device? How is it composed and how potentially can I change as a manufacturer also on the actual footprint and then of course the price because if we really go into an area where carbon is priced much more heavily than today, the price or the cost of the product will be affected by this footprint and this kind of question came up inside of Siemens but it applies in the same way to a manufacturer of an iPhone or of a phone, a mobile phone, to a manufacturer of some sneakers or to a car manufacturer and all these cases is always the same question what is the carbon footprint and to make it a bit more specific there are actually different scopes when computing a product carbon footprint. There's the scope one which relates to the emissions that are locally happening in a factory so this is normally quite known to a manufacturer also scope two is quite known it's the electricity bill sort of very sort of straightforward the bill that that a factory receives but actually the challenge is to map the values that people or the data that people and manufacturers have on that site scale down to the actual products that's not straightforward because you have variations in the type in the kind of energy consumption you have periods where there is a higher consumption of energy maybe in the summer when you have the air condition more running and how do you then map it actually in a way to your product that it's also understandable you have to average in a certain way you have to aggregate but much more difficult is actually the scope three upstream so the part of the aggregation of scope one and scope two from all the suppliers and that's complicated because we live in an area where supply chains are very complex they are typically global so the sourcing happens not just locally but it happens really across the world and it changes quite frequently so knowing for one particular product with multiple sourcing channels for a single component exactly what is now the product carbon footprint of a component is not really involves a tight connection to the suppliers key question is also how can you request this data in a trustful manner so how can you basically when you receive a product carbon footprint about the components that go into a product such that you can actually trust it and then shift potentially to a different sourcing and then the very right hand side how you then share your own kind of product carbon footprint with the next manufacturer in the chain or basically with your customer so these are the key questions and we believe verifiable credentials can play a role here it's a little bit different role than traditionally where verifiable credentials are used with individuals to use a selected set of identity attributes share them in a privacy preserving and sort of self-serving manner here in the context we talk about products we talk about companies so it's a slight different angle and the scope three what I mentioned before is actually very important because 80% of the co2 emissions of products in general come from the upstream scope three so that's where the biggest problem is within the open within the the own context of the manufacturing that's possible to handle that's in the domain of a manufacturer it's not straightforward but it's much easier because it doesn't involve so many other parties so in this context in this chart here you see the the footprint of a typical product it goes quite some steps and there is confidentiality involved so the way the logistics setup by the the suppliers is confidential to the suppliers they would not want to share it because it's also their differentiation the same about the components of the parts that the manufacturers manufacture this is also confidential and should not be disclosed in the same way as the manufacturer doesn't want to disclose the suppliers and the components that that the manufacturer itself uses so there's there are confidentiality requirements with people you would say privacy requirements here we talk about companies so it's it's more like around confidentiality and an important part is also to integrate the aspect of recycling and the aspect of offsetting you might have heard in co2 decarbonization efforts it's very often that companies try to not really reduce their emissions or their energy consumption or change their sourcing but they're basically try to offset by buying co2 certificates and this could be related to helping to grow forest to do some other means of co2 negative efforts but unfortunately there's a lot of dodgy things happen so this kind of integration of things important thing to bring in here and in all these cases it has to do with trust and the concept of verifiable credentials is exactly for doing this you typically have this these three roles of an issuer a holder and a verifier sometimes the subject is the holder itself but in our case the subject is actually a product in our case it's what is called a zimatic s7 1500 an issuer in our setup here is a technical inspection company here in Germany you have them typically referred as tÜV I think even outside of Germany this term is quite known but in every country you have these technical inspection companies that are quite familiar with certain domains so for ease as they will be used for certain certification of processes in any kind of industry they are used and we believe they can play an important role here for bringing the trust into the system the system cannot work by simply self declaring that a manufacturer says okay my product has this kind of protocol and footprint or what is also very typical today that a so-called lifecycle assessment databases are used where for a product you basically go into a database you look it up and you you get a protocol and footprint value this is a generalization it doesn't really help to move forward with decolonization because it's always the same value it won't change if anything in the supply chain is changed so the idea is here to use the role of the technical inspection companies as the issuer of verifiable credentials that the issuer has inside into the factory it knows about the specific way of measuring energy maybe even on the factory floor it knows about the emissions as well and it knows also about the bill of material the bill of processes that are being used with a product and it can reach out to the supplier or it can get the data that the holder would request from a supplier in this case it's always a direct relationship so the holder the direct relationship with a supplier and would expect to receive some information preferably in the format of a presentation of a verifiable presentation of again verifiable credentials that have been issued with a supplier in the step before such that the issuer can then really have the trust not only based on assumptions with respect to the supplier but information coming in a verifiable way through credentials and this requires again an issuer of course it has to be a different or it's very typically then a different issuer otherwise there could be collusion such that we believe there's a chain of issuers holders and verifiers verifiers that can stretch across the supply chain so underlying is the typical verifiable data registry that helps to give everybody access to the public DIDs the the identities basically of the holder would not be registered here because for the next step the holder should be not known by the real identity for the end verifier so this is exactly the confidentiality the direct relationship also exists between the holder and the verifier typically the customer that would request for a particular product to to issue information in the data registry important is also to have the credential schema and the revocation list by no means there should be any real PCF data so that's also important we have these one-to-one relationships typically established through pairways pseudonyms that help to potentially also anonymize the the the identity of some of the parties with every tool we have claims associated there would be two different types of claims so for the verifiable credential that is issued by the certifier so the the issuer in this so the certifier that plays the issuer role or is the technical inspection company the claim would relate to a product in this case it's the s7 1500 there would be two values for scope one scope two you could think of it also as one value for both scope one and scope two and there would be more information related to the components here just shown as one component as an example which has a manufacturer and a unit it's important to specify the unit the amount of these components within the product as well because the multiplication has to done has to be done based on the information coming then with a presentation from the supplier and here we see already that there is potentially the need for bringing in an anonymized information with respect to the component that is part of the component one so the component to this part of component one also the name of the supplier should not necessarily be revealed so that's the claim that is passed on to the supplier there may be different kind of variations how this can be exactly implemented it depends on the trust assumptions between the different parties but the basic flow would be that a customer would would send a request to a manufacturer expecting there is either already information available or the manufacturer would have to send out likewise a request to a supplier a tier one supplier and the respective tier one supplier if necessary would send again a request to the next supplier in certain cases and you will see it in the short demo that I have also here this won't go to the very end of the supply chain there could be cases where a supplier has not the means to reach out to the next level in this case it would be possible to do some form of self declaration again being potentially certified by a technical inspection company and the actual value that the aggregate value that goes back then to the customer would have a different quality than if everything would be really based on the certification so just this just to let you know that this is considered in the system that we have different of authenticity and different levels of quality in the system but the actual flow is then coming from the left hand side of the supply chain from the tier two tier one and the towards the manufacturer and the customer always in in pair so there's a there's a issuing of a verified the credential former certified to a supplier to a supplier there's again of course a manufacturer then a presentation of selected information that didn't doesn't necessarily have to be or can be the full information that this the certifier issued in the in the credential and indy provides this or the concept of verifiable credential provides this where multiple credentials can be combined in a presentation can be combined in ways of selectively taking information also taking also only a range of the values so there's the crypto scheme of zero knowledge proofs also available so that not the full information that is issued through the verified credential it has to be presented to the next to the next player in the supply chain and then again from tier one supplier there would be a presentation to the manufacturer again an issuing from the certifier that is in the same trust domain as a manufacturer and then eventually a presentation to the end customer there's optional extension here that the suppliers it's anonymously presents certain information also to the end customer think about an auditing kind of situation where you might want to have at the customer in quotes here so talking about the the auditor as a customer would have the need to see more information directly coming from the parties in this in the supply chain we think it's the entire concept has two two sides to it so there's a part where we have the actual network with it this must be an open network where other people can join in there's need for agreeing on standards on things like the quality what I mentioned it's not enough just to point to the greenhouse gas protocol it is still too broad there's there's need also to agree on how you exactly map values down to the the actual product level and then there will be connectors to the network and here you see an example of such a connector where we believe different industries would come up with their own kind of connectors with different kind of requirements okay so I wanted to give very briefly a demo I had believe I have to do it very quickly because we're almost at the end of the time so let me just jump to a very I think it's it's not more than 30 seconds to to show you how this looks like so this is this is an instance of such a such a connector where there's a dashboard you lock in as in this case as a manufacturer you have your overview of the factory you could see all kinds of statistics with your emissions and then you have requests coming in from from a supplier to share data and this relates to a base housing where we seem to have enough data ourselves so we sent a request to our supplier called Ries so here the the view from the supplier in the same tool where the request comes in there's the possibility to enter data through an LCA database there's a possibility to type in the data manually based on the available information at hand but there could be also a possibility then to reach out to actually the next part in in the in the supply chain which yeah would be basically the same kind of request coming into the system and so on here you see the quality values as well that addresses how information is provided the base is it actually by multiple steps in the supply chain and so on so this I probably stop my presentation and and see if you have any kind of questions and I look here in the questions uh Estanium all of us is asking Estanium because of Estonia now it's the the name Estanium comes from is derived actually from the project name that we had it was called Sustainium inside of Siemens but externally we wanted to find a name that relates to sustainability and environment so that's the combination of the E and the Estanium it's a bit like an artificial name but it has nothing to do with the country Estonia any other questions okay I see two more questions coming in which other companies are participating in this network we're currently looking for interested parties to launch the association and we believe we're quite interesting initial founding members here I cannot disclose them at that point but that's important that we have a balanced mix of parties being involved here this should not be dominated by any kind of small circle or even a single company the way information is shared here how the network is run what is the agreement on the layer on top of Indian areas it should be really come up by this by this association another question are you working with Bosch on the agents in the process BC Gov is working on a similar project okay now you have to help him BC Gov Bosch we were in discussions yeah there are discussions with Bosch we were any on multiple projects actually with Bosch on yeah also on yeah very similar topics so I probably can adopt too much in this round here okay yeah yeah BC Gov there's some momentum okay thanks for the information happy to follow up on this Steven just ping me British Columbia yeah got it okay any more questions I think we're actually over time already but maybe one last one otherwise I guess we would have to close good then thanks a lot to all of you please ping me please come back to me if you're interested we have two more presentations tomorrow on the panel there's a sustainability panel on my morning it would be a different time in the in the US and other time zones of course please join and we have a presentation also on very fiber credentials for asset management quite interesting and finally on the ID Union project it's a large association European driven many use cases very exciting also on around verifiable credentials with this okay thanks a lot for your attention and take care