Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Knight Foundations and formed and engaged. This is our 15th episode And we're so glad that you're joining us today Today, we're going to be talking about the decline of local news Which has been accelerated of course by this global pandemic and we're going to be talking about a new a new idea a new solution and it was announced just last Friday a Coalition of 3,000 local news organizations around the country have come together To rebuild local news joining me today is Steve Waldman He's the president and co-founder of report for in America an initiative of the ground truth project but for all of you who have been watching and looking for and Building solutions for local news Steve Waldman is someone who has been at it for a very long time Steve is prior to Creating with Charlie Senate report for America Steve was the author of a land make landmark report called Information needs of communities. It was described by NPR is one of the most comprehensive Overviews of the US media ever produced and this report came about a year after Knight Commission Brought together experts around the country to address the concerns about Disappearing local news and information and that was more than a decade ago much has happened in the last 10 years and now Under his leadership this coalition of 3,000 local news outlets are looking for the government to play a role in Helping rebuild the future of local journalism. So please Please join me today for this conversation with Steve Waldman and Steve first Please tell us how did this coalition come about and why does it make sense now? for there to be a major call To government to government officials to step in and help address this problem Well, thank you for having me and thank you Again for your leadership and Knight Foundation's leadership on this very topic for coming on I guess 15 years now There the reason well two reasons one is the collapse has become so severe That it's it's now at the point where it's probably beyond It being solved only by philanthropy. I kind of say that reluctantly honestly But when you're talking about a drop of about 20 billion dollars in revenue at least of what? you know newspapers have lost the addition of You know 500 million in philanthropy or even more than that is is not going to be sufficient Now I say reluctantly because I don't think anyone is particularly excited about the idea of the government getting involved in this in any way Honestly, I mean, it's it just goes so against our sense that To hold government accountable You can't take money from the government. It's very logical. You know, how can the muck breakers take money from the muck makers? So I think a lot of journalists have been very resistant to the idea of the government getting involved in this and But I became convinced that because of the scale of the collapse we had to look at this again and Start thinking about Are there ways of doing this that the government could help? Where it would not endanger editorial independence and it became particularly acute with coven Because coven, you know, as you know that the problems with local news predate coven But coven has accelerated all of the harmful trends And made the the crisis even more severe and Congress is looking at solutions Congress is starting to look at, you know bailouts for this industry or that industry or what should we do? and so it started there started to be a discussion about what kind of help ought to happen for local news and Honestly, a lot of it ended up focusing on like the only piece of legislation that got included in the house bill For coven was a bill to make sure that the chains the newspaper chains got included in the coven relief bill the ones owned by private equity firms and You know, honestly, I was fine with that like this is a sufficient crisis that everyone probably needed some help But it was a bit eye-opening to me also that like that's it. That's all you got, you know That the that the the only public policy Idea around helping local news was to make sure that, you know, no chain is left behind So I just started to think that the combination of those two things That the scale of the problem is so severe that that there's gonna need to be a focus There's gonna need to be some sort of government Involvement and a little reminder that if journalists don't play a role in making this policy someone else will make the policy for them And it might not be too to our likings people who especially people who like both the First Amendment and innovation It might not come out that way. So I organized this sort of pop-up coalition It had a little bit of an emphasis on locally owned media and nonprofit media Not totally to the exclusion of chains who still represent a lot of you know How news is provided, but we wanted to make sure that locally owned and nonprofit media had a seat at the table, too Steve When you talk about support in Congress for this plan, is it bipartisan support that seems Surprising given the low levels of trust in the news media among Republicans according to a recent night Gallup poll It is a little bit surprising. I was kind of expecting that You know, this is a little bit of an academic exercise of where you know We got to slowly start building support for it, but that would take a long time to get Republican support And that turns out not to be true. There are not from the White House, but from from Republican members of Congress There is an understanding about the importance of local news and they tend to make a distinction between local news and national news and That you know, there's there's concern about government involvement and how it's done But there have been a few different proposals different pieces of it some of which got incorporated into our grand plan that do have Bipartisan support. There's a bill that is quite a number of the ideas we ended up endorsing come from a specific We're billed on a specific piece of legislation called the local Journalism Accountability Act and it's co-authored by a Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona and Kirkpatrick and a Republican Congress Men from Washington, Dan Newhouse, and it has the it's Freakishly broad coalition. I mean it has Congress and Bobby Rush From Chicago one of the most progressive people in Congress and Louie Gohmert From Texas are both co-sponsors of this legislation And I think the reason why is there really is a broad sense that that local news is important Now look it might not be just a really deep understanding of the importance of this for democracy It could be that the members of Congress think this is really hard to get press coverage of what I'm doing when there's no local news Let's you know be honest that that is part of the motivation But that's okay because covering the local congressional delegation is actually one of the things we lose When there's no local journalism and I think that the the reason that this particular approach has gotten bipartisan support including from us is That it's the idea the heart of the idea is you get a $250 refundable tax credit to Americans that they can use to buy a newspaper subscription or Donate to a local nonprofit news organization and a separate version of that a separate clause is to give a Tax credit to small businesses To buy local advertising in local news organizations So the key difference is there's not someone in Washington at a you know department of local news Sitting around parceling out grants to news organizations like we can all pretty it doesn't take a lot of imagination These days to see how that could go wrong like how you know under this administration or really any Administration having the government, you know parcel out huge sums of money to particular media organizations would compromise their independence So this doesn't do that it put it essentially amplifies The voices of America the choices that they want to make now We may not always agree with those choices But it basically is amplifying the the choices of Americans and pointing it in the direction of local news You know, we kind of do the same thing with the charitable to tax the tax deduction for charitable giving Like the government doesn't tell you what charity to give to But it says hey if you whatever charity you give to as long as it's a legit charity will essentially top it off And it was you know part of what my thinking on this was very influenced by by news match Which was created by by night and other foundations To help nonprofit media and the theory behind it Was rather than just us, you know given out grants to news organizations. We like What if we also had it as a way of amplifying the voices that are happening organically on the ground So it matches donations that you know nonprofit news or is it so both of those ideas or it kind of have a similar spirit to them So just to build on a news match because tonight is going to be announcing next week A major contribution to the National Seed Fund one of the other benefits of news match is that One of the goals of news match is not just provide matching contributions, but to help local not-for-profit news Organizations across the country Build their individual donor base find those next major donors Really develop best practices around audience development because at the end of the day if Local journalism cannot be sustainable. It cannot be it cannot be Independent and that's one of our key goals here at Knight Foundation is helping local journalism become sustainable So imagine if I'm sorry. Well, I was just going to say I'm a big fan of news match for the reasons you said It's it's not just you know plugging a hole. It's building capacity that can and capability Yeah, imagine if you know, I forget what the maximum grant amount was 25,000 So imagine if it were 250,000 or 500,000 right the federal government is often is not very good at You know stimulating innovation or picking winners and losers, but it's good at writing checks So imagine if if the federal government essentially wrote a hundred million dollar check to news match or something like it to create an endowment that simply You know super sized what news match is already doing news match already has a set of criteria That I and N, you know implements the Institute for non-profit news to make sure it's legit local news So it's not like a new idea You're taking something that's been built and kind of refined over the last few years through experience and just making it you know the difference between a newsroom being able to get $20,000 and 250,000 or 500,000 could be transformative it could be really on a par with what happened in 1967 when the federal government looked at this assortment of a couple hundred Important but small fragile public radio stations and said this is really important But they're too few and they're not strong enough and they passed the public broadcasting Which essentially now we have 900 public radio stations So I could see a scenario where a supersized news match Could do that for the non-profit, you know, non-profit local news world and also it could do that for many Not-for-profit public radio stations as it does now those public radio stations that are in the business of delivering local journalism Because unfortunately despite all of those local public radio stations across the country. They're not all committed to or or have the have the capacity to deliver local news So Steve let's take the plan walk us through the plan and for one it's in the chat But for everyone watching and listening today the website that you must go to right now or after this broadcast is rebuild localnews.org and Go right to our plan So Steve take us through the plan. It could be it's a little complicated You know the different tax credits the different but but walk us through the plan and and tell us why You and members of the coalition are confident that this this could happen Well, so the madder there are lots of different pieces to this But they kind of fall into some thematic buckets and basic big strategies One is to empower Americans through their own choices to help them financially help local media so that you know as I said could could happen through a refundable tax credit of $250 that you could use to To promote to buy a subscription to a newspaper or a donation to a non-profit. This is I like earned my little Lobbying stripes or angel wings was when we urged the sponsors of this law to include nonprofits in it and say Hey, how about instead in addition to $250 for subscriptions? We also made it for $250 for a donation to nonprofits And and there are experiments like this happening in France and Canada that we can learn from and build on so a second piece of that legislation which we also like is the tax credit to small businesses that they can use for for Advertising in in local media so then the second big thrust is growing nonprofit media and And you know, I don't have to convince you on that front, but we we all believed and by the way This is a coalition that includes nonprofit media and for-profit media And it was very interesting and exciting to see that both of those Constituencies agreed on the importance of the other Like the for-profit folks got the idea that you're going to need a strong nonprofit sector and vice versa So, uh, we need to do a bunch of things to grow nonprofit media And and I do think the historical analogy of of what the government did around public broadcasting is really relevant here They didn't they didn't invent it You know, there was all this and very interesting creative stuff that had happened on the ground and through universities and and things like that just as has happened through The creation of all sorts of nonprofit media So it's really sort of stunning to me The number of public radio stations in 1967 is almost exactly the same as the number of nonprofit local newsrooms right now It's about 300 So it's like at the same moment the same part of their evolution and they're ready To to blow up in a good way Um, you know with government help So the new the supersizing the news match Is is one idea to do that the best way to do that to avoid government monkeying around Would be for the government to write a one-time big check To create an endowment that would essentially supersize the news match That would sort of avoid the possibility of the government going in and you know Wanting to wanting to monkey around with the the ian standards about who could be a legit Newsroom that would probably be the way the way to do it There's also all sorts of things that Have historically stood in the way of nonprofits being formed as news organizations Uh, you know, we did the night foundation help create a a task force on this topic The seven or eight years ago to look at all the ways that the irs You know slows things down And you know, so there are a couple of important clarifications that ought to happen One is to let it be known to nonprofit news organizations that you can take advertising And you can charge for subscriptions and you can do earned revenue Essentially, we all want to get to the point where Nonprofit news rooms are thinking of donations as the third revenue stream Not the only revenue stream There have to be other earned revenue and and frankly the irs's muddiness has made it harder You know, there's as I'm sure you've heard this all the time like of well Can we even have advertising won't that endanger? Yes, you can have advertising, but it would be better if if the irs kind of clarified that made it clear you could do it so There's a number of irs. I'd say cleaning up The things that would help a lot Um, then there's a big idea related to this That we call replanting And it's the idea that you know, we shouldn't only be looking at creating new news organizations You know, the reality is there's 300 nonprofit news organizations. There's 6700 newspapers And there needs to be another front on this on this battle and that is the front about what do we do about these 6700 newspapers And until now honestly the choices have either been, you know, we create something new Or we bail out the newspapers that are a lot of which are owned by hedge funds Which is is a sad thing because like even though it's sometimes necessary We know how this story is going to end. It's not going to be good Like the way, you know newspapers that are owned by hedge funds have are in this downward cycle And there's no sign that's going to end so rather than just accepting that that's the fate Of those 6700 newspapers Let's aggressively attack the idea of replanting Some of these organizations and this is a metaphor that I've tortured beyond recognition by now But it's essentially as you know, like sometimes if a plant is sick because it's sitting in toxic soil If you take it out of that soil and put it into healthier soil It can thrive and what we're talking about is new ownership structures If you got it out of those ownership structures and put it into healthier ownership structures, could it survive? so that might mean Literally donating the newspaper to a nonprofit organization or a public benefit corporation And I think that there's a lot of there's some of this doesn't have to do with government policy Like I think it ought to happen that there ought to be a great big new nonprofit organization Uh well capitalized And we can talk about that that has its job Of replanting, but there are a couple of public policy steps that would really make it more likely to succeed And there's carrots and sticks the the carrots are what if we offered an enhanced charitable deduction to any owner that literally donated its newspaper to the community Or it's or or its assets And uh, you know because we know I mean this won't apply to all 6700 But we know some of these chains are thinking about shutting these papers down Entirely or milking them for another couple years and then shutting them down So wouldn't it be great if we could get some of them instead of saying oh the choice is either milking or shutting Wouldn't it be great if there was a choice of donating? And you have to give a real incentive So Steve, I just wanted to note for the audience As many people know In philadelphia, we have the lend fest institute Which is now the owner of the philadelphia inquirer, which Is a public benefit corporation Which was donated By jerry lindfest the late jerry lindfest who was an extraordinary philanthropist and believed passionately and the value and importance of Reporting that holds the powerful To account and then of course just recently in the past year paul huntsman turned salt lake tribune into a not-for-profit and with his effort did Did create a landmark irs ruling which Which we're hoping that other news organizations will use that ruling To follow in his footsteps but tell us about the other policy areas in addition to more charitable Tax benefits for making that decision and I also just wanted to note that That there are many many news organizations that remain local news organizations and independent family control and at night foundation We're looking toward working with these owners and these include owners Of black legacy newspapers and small newspapers across the Midwest These are people who have committed to serving their communities and delivering journalism in the in the public interest so so tell us how How the plan and how this piece of the plan might support independently owned family owned newspaper It's a really important point because we we do not this coalition and we personally did not Accept the idea that this is going to be solved only through the non-profit sector It's it is also going to need The the you know success Of the commercial sector especially the locally grounded commercial sector and as you said there are people out there They're doing incredible work In for-profit newspapers that are just as committed to their communities as the non-profits are we see this with report for america all the time that the The passion and commitment to public service among some of the commercial newspapers is just as strong as among the non-profits But their business models don't always let them serve the community that the way the way they want to do So so this plan also has a number of steps that would help help with that One of it has to do with the idea that federal antitrust policy Should have the concept of a localism As part of what they look at now This is actually already true in the broadcasting world Like the federal communications commission already looks at localism as a factor But it hasn't been true When the justice department or the or the federal trade commission or courts look at newspaper mergers And they should and they can So in other words, they could look at mergers and even if it's not leading to less competition But it is harming the community They could actually either disallow that that consolidation or put conditions on the merger This is something I learned that I didn't know anything about when I worked a while back at the federal communications commission That mergers when they consider mergers, it's not a binary. Yay or nay thing like yes, it's okay or not They will often say yes But you have to do x y and z and I got in there at one point where you know when the Comcast merger was happening It was an interesting thing. So yes, if you do these things to support local news So any any acquisition of a newspaper chain by a hedge fund Could have that kind of review to it, you know, that says either no or Only if you do x y and z to make sure that you know the commitment to the community Retains So there's other things like that that you could do remember the plant closing legislation that got a lot of attention in the 90s That is basically about You know, if someone's shutting down a factory, you should get some notice to the workers Yes Well, so we're suggesting essentially a a plant closing rule a newspaper closing rule that there has to be a six month notice To the community. This isn't just about the workers. This is so the community can organize And potentially try to acquire the newspaper So I'd always got to work out having the time for it may not mean you have the money or the newspaper may be too far Gone, but at least there should be a speed bump that would enable that to happen And then the last thing I would say for the commercial media Is that the the the ideas that we talked about at the very beginning of the tax credit for subscriptions And the tax credit for for businesses and there's a third one, which is a tax credit for hiring journalists Essentially that news organizations would get, you know, a little bit of help toward the hiring of journalists Those all would help those local newsrooms In a way in the the commercial newsrooms and what I like about it is that because it's it's kind of pointed at the subscriptions It it it It means that they're only going to get that benefit if they provide real value to the community You know at the end of the day, they're going to have to still make the case for why Even this tax credit is going to get pointed toward you So if you're a newspaper that's completely gutted your newsroom And providing no real value, it's going to be hard for you to benefit from that idea So steve, I didn't see mention of local television news organizations in the plan and at night foundation We have been focused as you said for 15 years in addressing the gaps in local news and information And most recently we've made significant investments in the american journalism project in the institute for not for profit news In the solutions journalism network in report for america all members Of this coalition and of course news match launch was launched by night in 2016 and we were like thrilled that so many foundations came to the table in 2017 And we are looking for more funders to join us To help support the national fund For this 2020 news match. So please get in touch with me if you would like to join the national fund But what I don't see are local television news outlets And yes local newspapers have traditionally Provided the original reporting But my colleague Karen runlet has been leading an initiative with local television news organizations around the country that are Increasing their commitment to public service journalism that are using data journalism in really smart creative ways to Deliver really important reporting not just via broadcast, but but on their online outlets What is the role of local television in the in addressing the solution for local journalism? I think it can be Huge and I also think it can and should be much bigger than it has been You know, I think the the reality is that the local news TV stations are doing better than anyone else right now largely because of campaign commercials and Unfortunately, most of them are not investing it back into great local reporting Some are And we should do everything we can to embrace and encourage Those that are and that's what night is doing and there's two things in this plan that could help with that One is actually the idea of expanding the national service model. This is going to sound very self-serving and in fact it is But you know report for america does place journalists into local tv newsrooms And part of what I like about it is is it's it's beat reporting Which is part of what we really want to encourage with local tv is beat reporting because it gets real This is real deep reporting. It's not reporting where you show up at 10 that morning and find out what you're going to cover In the city. This is where you're developing a real expertise and when local tv stations do that They can be just as good as the newspapers. They're they're fully capable of it So we so you know having a larger national service model, whether it's report for america or others That would be placing reporters into tv tv stations as well as others would be part of it The other thing that actually would help uh tv stations The good ones would be That notion of a tax credit to local businesses to buy advertising That could be bought on local tv stations And you know one would hope that it would go to the ones that are really investing in local reporting Thank you. Well, we have tons of questions from our audience. So let's get to them so How do you ensure? How does the coalition ensure? Uh that the money eventually doesn't wind up in the pockets of more partisan ideological newsrooms because as we were Discussing uh right before we went on air in the last campaign. The concern was the rise of national partisan negative partisanship Um at the national level, but now we are seeing so many hyperpartisan sites funded by The left and the right right well, you know My my meta answer to this that isn't goes beyond this is to flood the zone with real journalists Like a lot of these it's really shocking some of the the quotes from people who are doing these hyperpartisan things They've said right out front saying well, there's a vacuum No one else is there. So we're going to go in there and it's kind of true So the most important thing to do to keep the partisan local news from becoming The dominant form of local news is for real journalists to show up We that's the big picture now in terms of you know particular How could you craft policies to make sure you're not helping those that's pretty that's hard actually, you know Part of it is that the that the institute for non-profit news Has developed really good standards as part of the news match A formula for doing that and it tends to be about transparency That you know, if you're hiding who your donors are That's a kind of content neutral way of getting at So I think we you know, we need to look at things like that like transparency at the end of the day, I will say and this People might not agree with this if you look back at the postal subsidies that the founding fathers put in That was probably the most successful type of government intervention and local news It went to all sorts of media outlets honestly, you know, the ones that Attack jefferson and the ones that attacked hamlet, you know, and I think on a certain level It may happen that some of this goes to partisan sites I think that you would I think where we need to draw the line is they need to be doing actual local reporting You know, and if some local news organizations are doing local reporting, but it comes from a certain angle You know, I'm not sure the government should get into the business of saying Those, you know are off limits, but I'm curious what everyone else thinks on that because that's one of the toughest pieces of this Yeah, I agree. That is by far one of the toughest toughest question so we also Have a question about from steve hamilton I really like the idea of not-for-profit news Financial support of not not for profits is always a challenge How much is needed? And can you give us a better idea of what it costs to run a viable news organization the number of people salaries other expenses I like on a on a meta level. I I tend to quote John Thornton the the co-founder of the american journalism project who Probably pissed off a lot of ballet supporters by saying this is a ballet sized problem And he he wasn't meaning to disc ballet He was meaning to make the point that although the consequences to democracy are catastrophic In the scale of problems that the world are trying to solve this is actually solvable Like it's an amount of money that you can get your hands around You can look at a lot of different ways, but let's as a round number. It probably would need about a billion dollars To get pumped into the local news system from philanthropy and government To to solve it. I mean it wouldn't be everything we all would want You could do a little less you could do a little more, but that's the scale Which is actually very achievable, you know, honestly if you did if you did what was in this plan It would double the number of local reporters in america And the price tag would be a couple billion It would be less than the federal government currently spends in tax expenditures for uh, three martini lunches and other business Business and entertainment deductions just to give you, you know a sense of the scale and the question There's no real good answer for how much does it take to run a particular newsroom? It depends on whether you're covering a little neighborhood or New york city, but it is true that one of the ways in which Not only non-profit, but for-profit entities tend to fail is being undercapitalized And what happens is they'll take the little amount of money that they have and they'll pay the journalist because that's the heart of it But then they won't get around to hiring the business person Uh the the head of development or the head of ad sales and So any institution to any local news institution to succeed Needs to have both a business operation and a Journalistic operation to succeed if you're a two-person operation Then that's one in one if you're a hundred person operation. It's probably 50 and 50 But that's um, you know the the main point i'd make We have a question from Barbara rab one of our colleagues in the philanthropy space It's worth noting that the government already does subsidize support for news in the sense that foundation funding is tax advantage And is in your plan the government does not have a say in what news organization foundations fund So that's barbers comment and my question based on barbers comment is Is which you discuss how do you ensure? That the government is not going the government officials are not going to have a say in what uh What non-partisan news organizations committed to independent journalism get funded? Yeah, it's a great question and and barba has been a real leader in this whole sector of non-profit news so there's two ways you can Assure that and she and i'm barbers right that governments government involvement It persists like i mentioned the postal subsidies in the founding fathers era, but there's other subsidies now Including the corporation for public broadcasting, but also newspaper subsidies and tax subsidies and things like that So one is the type is is the type of policy remedy? um, there are types of remedies that involve discretionary decision making by government officials And there are types that don't you know the charitable tax deduction as an example Does not involve the government Deciding which charities to support it it basically amplifies Decisions that individual americans make about what consumers do So you want to look for ideas that are in that same category? As opposed to great big grant programs where there's a lot of discretionary decision making Now there may well be instances where it makes sense where there to be a more Conscious government role Kind of like the way there is with the corporation for public broadcasting There is a Private agency that's government charted that that does import really important valuable things So you want to when you do that you want to make sure first of all as much of it is formulaic as possible I know formulaic kind of has a bad name It sounds like you're on autopilot and not you know fine-tuning things But there's when it comes to a free press there's a lot of advantages to formulaic You know it it it it follow it takes political interference Out to some degree and the other thing I would say is Build in all sorts of firewalls the corporation for public broadcasting Has a bunch of firewalls It's been pretty good Not perfect So I would say here's a chance for us to even improve upon what was done with the corporation for public broadcasting And make it even more airtight the most important thing Is that if there's any entity it should have a dedicated revenue stream So that the people aren't having to go up to capitol hill every year and beg senators for money So steve there are More excellent questions here and we're going to get to them in just a second But at a time when We are in the middle of a national recognition on racial injustice and much of what Has been created existing organizations Came about during a time where systemic racism Capital really dictated who got money to build local news and and who didn't How does this plan or how might this plan address the real existing inequalities and equities? That is that currently exist for local journalism for communities across the country Right, and this is really important. So one of the the five planks of this plan is to create policies that um help marginalized better coverage of marginalized communities And there are several different things you can do but It partly just has to do with the consciousness in all of these different policies that we're talking about. So for instance You know, there have been efforts in the past for the government To say well, we're doing advertising Let's have the advertising go to local media and that has happened In fact, the federal government already spends a billion dollars on advertising and one of the things we suggest is Hey, how about half of that going through local media? Well in the past? What's happened is very little of that ended up getting to minority media So it you know lots of media got help but very rarely did did those publications that were covering Communities of color now in new york city the community The a program at the cuny graduate school of journalism went right at that In terms of the advertising that was being spent by the city of new york And they said this is great that you're spending advertising money But it's not getting down to the community level and they work with the city To make sure it actually got down to a community level And I think there are ways of constructing policies that make that more important For instance, you could say that if you're going to have government money go to local news That a certain amount of it needs to go to small media That you know because a lot of most journal publications covering communities of color are family owned and local Or tour specifically towards communities of color and when you're doing replanting That that that we make real effort to be conscious of the fact that a lot of the publications that are hanging by a thread Are black owned newspapers and hispanic owned newspapers And if we if we essentially say hey all we want to do is create new nonprofit things or all we want to do is help big chains One of the consequences is that the already bad system in terms of minority newspapers is going to get way worse Yeah, because we already have many newspapers around the country that have ignored Calls to have their newsrooms reflect the communities they cover and Which has presented big big big challenges for those communities today and newsrooms Let's go back to some of these excellent questions We have a question here from steve hamilton Why not just declare not profit journalism as a quote? A religion of truth and transparency end of quote and piggyback on existing protections and tax privileges for religious organizations That's clever. That is a clever idea Well, I would rather go even more more frontally at this because right now what happens is that non-profit news organizations try to piggyback onto a different existing provision, which is the educational Tax deduction and say hey, hey, we're really educational institutions and sometimes it means saying Hey in addition to providing information we train people and we're kind of an educational institution Why not just go straight up and say public service journalism is a tax exempt function? I would rather do that than you know, I sort of wouldn't object to you know getting it through the door However, we can but I think the best thing would be to just straight up say this is a public interest function And what about how might the plan benefit? That Super local news initiatives, namely neighborhood news in urban areas. What ideas are floating around for For this purpose. I think steve one thing that You know, those of us who are not living in this space every single day Think the solution alone might be more local news organizations when you and I are both working With organizations around the country like resolve Philadelphia which is increasing the volume of quality news and information and and addressing real problems around around equity and an inclusiveness by By fostering collaboration among not just the mainstream news organizations in philadelphia But on many of the smaller outlets Serving serving Communities that have been traditionally underrepresented in the mainstream organizations also look at outlier media in detroit Which is it's not that they're using text. They have created a new way to inform detroiters on One-to-one Interaction and of course city bureau in chicago Which is involving members of the community to cover local meetings meetings the documenters project. So how does your How does the plan address not just more reporters more? For profit online sites newspapers But some of these other new ways that are not so new ways but different ways of informing and engaging communities One of the things I love about the this this refundable tax credit Thing and the supersizing news match idea Is it really works well with hyperlocal community organizations and collaborative? Because instead of if you had like a big federal grant program You'd have to apply to the federal government or the state government and You know that has a big bias towards big organizations This is where you're essentially putting money in the hands of people in the community No matter what their income is and then the local news organization has to raise their hand and And say yo, we're valuable. Here's what we're doing. They still will have to do that. It won't happen automatically But if they can convince the people in their own neighborhoods that they're offering something of value Then that money can go to them and it can happen down to the block level You know, it's like just the people on that block who all are going to get would get $250 to basically Put toward local media could put it toward a hyperlocal site And you know same thing with with the news match So that's that's why we became very fond of these sort of bottom up types of policy approaches Because it's it's also kind of future friendly, you know, that's this is always a like This is always a problem with policy making is people tend to make policy around the existing players partly because those are the people who hire lobbyists and they you know make sure that the the policies reflect, you know Have them be winners And so you want to make sure that your policy is future friendly that it will adapt along with the marketplace So if five years from now, it turns out that Actually, it's collaborations like reveal Philadelphia That are transforming that they'll be able to get more and more Great And what about the role of technology companies? We know that That technology has disrupted the traditional business model That we have what 80 of all new digital ad revenue going to two zip codes in california And those are the zip codes that house google and and facebook so what what What role do you see technology companies playing in the solution? and and does the plan call on government for example to address 230 to address the The the claim that google and facebook have maintained for years that they are not publishers So therefore they should not be responsible in the same way a news organizations are for what is published On their on their news sites on their platforms Well, we didn't dive deep into that one part of it because it's those are huge issues that affect local news for sure, but Lots of other lots of other things the one way that it most directly potentially affects local news Is as a revenue source for funding this You know, so there are proposals out there that to tax the digital platforms in some way and use the money for to help support local news And the you know the problem with those proposals in the past has been It didn't say what you do with the money, you know, it's a we'll we'll raise the money and that's there's a you know Rough justice to it, but if it's not spent in a way that's actually constructive It'll just make things worse. So I would look at this plan as here's what you could do with the money If you go about that there's other ways of raising the money as well You know, I like the idea of when the government auctions off spectrum that belongs to the public Some of that money could go to help local news, but I'm certainly open to the You know the idea is that that you know public policy Remedies around the digital platforms could help finance some of this So one of our listeners viewers Notes that providing a credit to small businesses is nice, but if small business doesn't see results They will not continue to advertise in the local news organization And so and evans here is recommending that small businesses get a Get a better chance of competing with facebook and google on the ad side and that means That means developing and and using the capabilities That a lot of large companies that every political campaign in america is doing right now. They're using facebook. They're using Google to get in to people's news feeds so There certainly needs to be as an evan suggests here solutions to help make sure that the that the Small businesses see results from their local newspapers because we can't not change the way The people are consuming news and information just so differently um now So what technologies do or could reduce overhead? To help boost local news organizations, I guess that you and I know there's lots of funded efforts now including an effort by wordpress Knight foundation has made a multi-million dollar commitment to help small publishers With their content management systems and their crm and news revenue hub Is working with many outlets? to Really develop that capability To generate revenue. What are some of the other? Solutions out there steve that you see that philanthropy while we're waiting for this um For movement on this ambitious plan you have outlined. What ways do you think philanthropy and and all of us can? Do you right now to support local news? Well, you know, I think more of of what we're already doing in terms of when we're spotting There's a lot of wonderful organic activity going on out there And when we see it helping to nurture it and fund it and enhance it is is the right thing to do because there's different models in different communities And uh, it's if you look at it from like a capital Financial point of view like the way that you know venture capital would world look at it There needs to be sort of mezzanine financing the middle tier financing That helps get to the next level it's it's a lot of what american journalism project is doing but it needs to be you know More more more more The the other thing I would say is that the um This idea of a replanting fund One of the riddles that you saw with the consolidation of newspapers Is they would say oh, we all have to keep merging and merging and merging because there's economies of scale And honestly, there was some truth to that there are economies of scale But it also kind of became an excuse after a certain point Or the benefits of the economy's scale were way were outweighed by the negatives Of having a chain that's owned by a hedge fund and say But but there was some truth to the idea of economies of scale So we need to try to replicate that for smaller entities So if for instance, we were to create a great big new entity that would help with replanting one of the things they could do is create or Create or license from the existing things tech platforms that could help all these different players to succeed Without having to reinvent the wheel every time they start Well, thank you steve so much for joining us just a couple of days after this bold ambitious and exciting announcement and we hope to join you on this journey at Everyone here at night foundation and everyone listening to help strengthen local journalism to hold the powerful to account Thank you in the next couple of weeks We'll be hearing from elizabeth hanson He's the author of a new report that was just released today by the shornstein center And we'll be talking about other solutions to help ensure That we have informed and engaged communities served by robust nonpartisan independent local journalism Thank you, steve and thank you for your commitment over so many years To helping get it right. Thank you Thank you so much for having me


My name's Pooja and Raju and I am the medical director for the Interstitial Lung Disease Program as well as Pulmonary Hypertension for the central region for Hackensack Meridian Health. We treat pulmonary hypertension, pulmonary fibrosis, sarcoid, anything that would affect the lung tissue. My one and only principle when I treat people is to treat them as I would want to be treated or as my family would want to be treated. Coordinating care for the patients, speaking to their specialists, speaking to their primary care physicians so that everyone is on the same page, making sure that their tests get done in a timely manner, just making sure that they don't feel like we order something and they're abandoned. I want to create that environment of knowing that they can count on you. They can talk to me about their family, their friends, their situations. It's wonderful for patients to call and say, how are you doing? My favorite doctor. I think it's very important to keep them comfortable and know that they are well cared for.


For our final day looking back at Tiskey Sour in 2020, I'm taking a bit of a risk. That's because we're filming this on the 18th of December. It's our last day in the office. And at the moment we still don't know, whether Britain will be leaving the transition period with or without a deal. You will. This is being released on the last day of the year. So you should be pretty clear whether or not Britain is going to tumble out of the transition period with or without a deal. What I'm going to show you now is my prediction from the 11th of December. You are now in a position to judge whether or not I was correct. But we're always hopeful. And as you know, the negotiations are continuing. We've got our teams still out there in Brussels.  Unfortunately at the moment, as you know, there are two key things where we just can't seem to make progress. And that's the, it's kind of ratchet claws they've got in to keep the UK locked in to whatever they want to do in terms of the legislation, which obviously doesn't work. And then there's the whole issue of fish, where, you know, we've got to be able to take back control of our waters. So there's a way to go. We're hopeful that progress can be made. But I've got to tell you that from where I stand now, here in Blythe, it's looking, it's looking, you know, very, very likely that we'll have to go for a solution that I think would be, you know, wonderful for the UK. We'd be able to do exactly what we want from January the first day. Obviously it would be different from what we'd set out to achieve. But I've no doubt that this country can get ready. And as I say, come out on World Trade. So the headlines Boris Johnson was looking for in that clip and which he got was him saying that a no-deal Brexit is now very, very likely and that it would be wonderful if it were to happen. We'll talk in a moment about how much he really believes those statements or whether this is all bluffing. What I want to focus on first though is the more concrete claim he made there. So he said that EU, and I quote here, want to keep the UK locked into whatever they want to do in terms of legislation. Now the legislation he's referring to here is obviously in terms of environment and labor standards, a little bit of state aid. And whatever the EU says they think is going to affect competitiveness and the impression he is giving is that if he signs up to this deal, we will be forced to introduce any relevant law that the EU introduce. Obviously that would be a bit of a threat to our sovereignty. So is he for real here or is this a little bit misleading? Ursula von der Leyen thinks it's the latter. She's the president of the European Commission and here she is again speaking today. On the level playing field we have repeatedly made clear to our UK partners that the principle of fair competition is a precondition to privileged access to the EU market. It is the largest single market in the world and it is only fair that competitors to our own enterprises face the same conditions on our own market. But this is not to say that we would require the UK to follow us every time we decide to raise our level of ambition for example in the environmental field. They would remain free sovereign if you wish to decide what they want to do. We would simply adapt the conditions for access to our market accordingly the decision of the United Kingdom and this would apply vice versa. So what von der Leyen there is saying is correct. If Britain signs on to the deal is I mean we haven't seen the deal it's important to say that but as we understand what it currently looks like what the EU are demanding we wouldn't be forced to adopt any legislation that was introduced in the European Union but if they introduced legislation environmental standards, labour standards which rose them on the continent then we would have to decide either we raise them to equivalent levels or we face some tariffs. So it's very much the same decision we're facing now do we let our policy be constrained or do we face tariffs it's the same decision that we make now and the same decision we make later if we sign on to this deal you know that hasn't changed we have the same amount of sovereignty. So what is going on here is this you know this it doesn't force Britain to adopt any law that the EU does but it's saying that if you adopt or if you don't follow us in certain laws you'll get tariffs is this going to be the sticking point that means Britain hurtles towards a no deal. Now there are free possibilities here sorry I'm going to lay them out what might be going on here not the substance of what's in the deal but what's the motivations and what is this performance or this grandstanding from both sides all about and the three possibilities are one he's committed so this is Boris Johnson is committed to unrestrained sovereignty and he is so committed that he's willing to go for a no deal so that's the first option that's really what Boris Johnson is presenting publicly that's the official line number two Boris Johnson is bluffing to try and get a better deal from Brussels so what he is what he's putting all of his effort into is to say look I am ready to walk away and the reason he's saying that is because he thinks that increases his bargaining power in Brussels and they might say okay look we'll get rid of this ratchet clause we can sign a trade deal and you don't really have to worry about your your environment and your labour regulations following ours we didn't we didn't demand that from Canada so we won't demand that from you is he grandstanding to try and get that out of them or number three is Boris Johnson just ramping up the drama here for the domestic audience he's kind of already got an idea of what deal he's going to agree to which he knows that the EU will be satisfied with but he needs to make it look like this battle is going to the wire he needs to make it look like he has achieved some sort of concession from the European Union so he can sell himself as a winner you know he likes a dramatic moment I think it's the latter but we'll go through them in turn sort of a process of elimination so why I don't think it's it's the first one why I don't think that he genuinely wants a no deal here is because as I've said if you sign up to this deal the negatives are that if the EU introduces certain environmental or labour regulations that they think makes them less competitive than ours we would have to introduce similar environment or labour regulations otherwise we would face tariffs now why that's not a good reason to not sign a deal is because if we don't sign the deal the only thing that happens to us is tariffs so it's a choice between tariffs or certain tariffs now or possible tariffs in the future so if Boris Johnson is being rational here I don't know why you would pick certain tariffs now instead of possible tariffs in the future remember he hasn't even specified why he would want to you know not not follow the labour and environmental regulations of the European Union that's left unspecified so either thought he might as well put off that problem until he actually knows what divergence he wants the second possibility why I don't think it's likely that what he is doing is bluffing to try and get concessions from Europe is because I don't think that's going to happen Britain has fewer bargaining chips than the European Union at this point in time it would be damaging for certain industries on the continent if Britain were to leave with no deal and there wouldn't be tariff free access to our markets especially for things like the car industry but it's very clear that the EU's priority is to defend the long-term interest of the single market they don't want a big close economy to have proper access to the single market and be able to undercut it they seem to be quite consistent on that point which leaves the third option that this is just a show Boris Johnson is is well aware that he is going to sign some kind of deal which gives the EU some kind of right to impose tariffs if we end up in a situation where we can undercut them in the production of manufactured goods but he needs to make it seem like a battle is going on so that he can then sell it to a domestic audience and one of the reasons I'm so convinced it's this which is not just because I think it's you know in the rational self-interest of Boris Johnson for it to be at this is that if this were what Boris Johnson were to be you know desiring to say ah that the EU are being so unreasonable I'm going to get a concession out of them but it all be basically a bit of a farce it'll be a bit of a pantomime then he would be feeding Britain's political editors a claim that what the EU are demanding is so unreasonable I can't possibly sign it he needs them to tweet that out to say that on television for the next week or so and then afterwards he gets to walk back and say ah I agreed to something that wasn't quite as unreasonable as what it what I initially made out that it was is the important detail there so let's go through what these political editors are saying their role in the pantomime this is Robert Peston this week so he says as I said on hashtag Peston and ITV news at 10 last night I can't see the landing zone that delivers a free trade deal between the UK and EU talking to both sides it is clear that the gap on the level playing field is ideological not pragmatic no deal is overwhelmingly likely so he's very much repeating Boris Johnson's official line this is ideological this is about sovereignty it's not just about sort of technocratic detail this is a political issue of principle and a no deal is very very likely sounds almost you know indistinguishable from Boris Johnson Laura Koonsburg political editor at the BBC is unsurprisingly playing along and I suppose the question is is he just trying to show the EU that he's really serious and he's not bluffing they're worried in Downing Street that the EU thinks they haven't been serious about the prospect of walking away or is he really saying to the country the public businesses all of us everybody watching and listening tonight this is really serious in a couple of days I might pull the plug now when you talk to people in there in the bunker their view is that it is the latter this is a serious moment where he is making a serious statement and wants everyone to clock on to the fact that their view now is the most likely outcome is that we're going to be leaving the departure lounge of the European Union the status quo will come to an end and there will not be arrangements there ready in place unless something really quite dramatic happens in the next what's what's four days it's more than 72 isn't it 96 you saw there Koonsburg gave two options she said he's either bluffing to try and get a better deal from the European Union or he's deadly serious and what he is going to go for is a no deal you'll notice she completely ignores this third option maybe this is all pretend to try and sell his deal to a domestic audience I'm suspicious the reason she doesn't want to admit that could possibly be the case is because then that would out her as a pawn in this in this game fundamentally there was a there was a statement that she made there that I thought was so you know such a pure example of ideology here in the role that political editors play in these controversies their view is that this is a serious moment where he is making a serious statement and wants everyone to clock on to the fact that their view now is the most likely outcome is that we're going to be leaving the departure lounge of the European Union the status quo will come to an end and there will not be arrangements there ready in place unless something really quite dramatic happens in the next four days now again you can see she's absolutely repeating that line that Robert Peston gave she's repeating the line that Boris Johnson said on on the BBC earlier he said on all of the the media outlet she's saying look a no deal is very very likely and unless the EU significantly changed their their offer there's not going to be a deal now what I want to focus on there is the way she says their view is that so what she's commenting on it is the view of people in in number 10 and she says their view is that this is a serious statement and that if the EU don't properly change their their position then it's going to be no deal now that could be their view or it could be that that's what they want the public to think is their view which is why they told Laura Koonsburg that that's what their view is right has she never heard of a spin doctor so so what is quite possible here if and if I'm right and it is that option three that I've talked about that this is all a bit of a charade to start try and sell a deal to the British public then what would you what you would want to do as a number 10 advisor is you would want Britain's journalists to be talking about how serious the government is about getting real concessions from the EU now Laura Koonsburg hasn't mentioned that there is a possible third option and again I could be wrong I could be wrong it could be option one or two it could be that he's bluffing to try and get the EU to cave or it could be that he seriously wants an no deal but she doesn't seem to have even considered that maybe she's being used here that there is a third option that actually the reason they're telling me their view is that a no deal is very likely is because that's what they want the British public to think is their view and I just think that the lack of self-reflection there is concerning I want to go to one final example of why I think Britain's political editors are basically spinning the government line and are basically all part of their pantomime knowingly or unknowingly now this is a comment piece in The Times today it's Britain's paper of record very significant and it's by James Forsythe and it says the EU has dangerously misread Britain too many in Brussels wrongly believe Johnson will cave at the last and fail to realise how sovereignty underpins Brexit this particular person James Forsythe is again a political editor he's political editor of The Spectator the magazine that Boris Johnson used to edit and what The Times don't mention anywhere near that article which I think is quite significant is he happens to be married to Boris Johnson's spokesperson so you've got a comment editor who is basically writing exactly the article that Boris Johnson wants to be written Boris Johnson wants the British public to think that if we get a deal it's because Boris Johnson threatened no deal and got a significant concession from the EU that's what this to my mind is all about he needs journalists to be writing exactly this guff and the ITV political editor the BBC political editor and well his spokesperson's husband are now all writing that and not even considering that this could all be a façade to try and get the British public on side I'm going to go to Dalya in one moment first of all I've got just two more pieces of evidence for you as to why I don't think Boris Johnson is really planning a no deal I could end up looking really stupid in two weeks time if I do I'll put my hands up but I'm pretty sure there is going to be a deal and this is a bit of a pantomime now my my first reason is that whilst Johnson says that a no deal would be wonderful of course he calls it an Australian style arrangement an Australian style arrangement would be wonderful not many people believe this and fairly embarrassingly for the government one person who doesn't believe this is a former Australian Prime Minister this is Malcolm Turnbull who was on BBC Question Time last night well it'll be pretty disappointing I think you'll find out where we have obviously a deal with the EU on WTO terms and there are really some very large barriers to Australian trade with Europe which we're seeking to address as we negotiate a free trade agreement with Europe but Australians would not regard our trade relationship with Europe as being a satisfactory one I mean we do have it's our third biggest trading partner I guess collectively because it's such a big economy but there are very big barriers to Australian exports of agricultural products in particular you know there's a lot of friction in the system in terms of services so you know there's a lot to to aim for and you know I when I was Prime Minister we started formal negotiations over European Australia free trade agreement and but that will take some time so you know be careful what you wish for I mean Australia Australia's relationship with the EU is not one from a trade point of view that Britain I think would want to would want again making the point very clearly the reason Australia have an Australia style relationship is because they've been unable to sign a trade deal they want to sign a trade deal even Australia doesn't want an Australian style arrangement so I can't really imagine why our government would want one it's it's not a good well it's not a deal to have no deal is not a good arrangement people want free trade deals with big markets the EU is a big market it's our closest market we're obviously going to want a free trade deal so it's either we have one now or we have one later I don't see why we'd have more leverage in the future than we do now the other reason or my final reason why I think probably no deal is is pretty unlikely is because Boris Johnson himself has been on record ruling out no deal saying it will basically ruling out no deal I should be clear so if it were to happen now it would be pretty easy to paint this as a political failure this is what Boris Johnson doesn't want he doesn't want to be seen as a failure he wants to be seen as a winner which is precisely why I think we're having this last minute grandstanding where he can come back a victor because if he comes back with no deal then this clip from the 2019 general election might come back to bite him Mr Johnson this morning you absolutely promised your words to leave the EU by January the 31st if we get a working majority government if you get a majority but we all know everyone here knows that a robust economy doesn't just depend on January the 31st it depends on a trade deal with the EU by the end of December so my question to you is do you hear absolutely promise that you will get your trade deal done by the end of December well Beth we already have a deal and we can come out on January the 31st in a state of perfect equilibrium and grace with the rest of the EU because we have we have a zero tariff zero quota position now and I've absolutely no doubt at all that we'll be able to make sure that the EU protects its own interests and has a deal with us that ensures that that continues for the future because after all in spite of the heroic exports of John Smedley and other companies the EU has a 65 billion pound trade surplus with us in goods alone it's very much in their interest to do a deal with us and I've no doubt that they will and if you say if you say can I absolutely guarantee that we'll get a deal I think I can and I'll tell you why look at the look at what we achieved in which I think your question look at what we achieved in three months with the the new deal that I did everybody said it wasn't possible everybody said it would never happen people you remember I think I think you may even express skepticism yourself there uh as it well quite right quite right no quite right but uh we did it and it's a great deal and it will take this country forward and I'm very proud of it so just poor poor I am guaranteed is it in front of all these people I I see out that we already have a fantastic deal and the the the possibility you allude to simply will happen Boris Johnson and his you know all of his entourage have been pushing back very strongly and actually quite reasonably against the idea that they promised an oven ready deal and they haven't got an oven ready deal and how they push back is to say no the oven ready deal was the withdrawal agreement and they're quite right the oven ready deal was the withdrawal agreement that did pass parliament but you can see there in that clip he's not just saying the withdrawal agreement is done and asked it he's saying the trade deal is going to be really easy right and and and you have seen sort of some of the government ministers sort of saying ah it could have been easy if the if the EU played ball but then the question is why didn't you see that the EU weren't going to play ball either their economic analysis is wrong or their political analysis is wrong either way they promised the public something which they now can't deliver well I think they will deliver it but if they were to get a no deal they wouldn't have delivered it


The act of moving an object in 2D or 3D space is called a transformation. It's an umbrella term that covers translation, rotation, and scaling. We'll start off with the math for these operations in 2D, then in the next video we'll go over some conventions of 3D coordinate systems before introducing the math for transformations in 3D. In this and the next video, we'll stick to the methods that utilize simple algebra and trigonometry, but in a later video, we'll explain how to perform transformations using matrices, which is a less intuitive approach, but more expressive and hence the preferred approach in 3D rendering. Start with the simplest transformation, translation of a point in 2D. If we want to move the point in a direction for a certain distance, we express the movement as a vector, a coordinate relative from the starting point, and simply add the vector to our starting chord. So here if we start with a point at chord 5-3 and wish to move it right one unit and up four units, we simply add the vector 1-4 to 5-3, yielding 6-7. Expressed as a formula, x' our new x equals the original x plus x of the vector, and y' our new y equals the original y plus y of the vector. So notice that we can think of the translation as two separate movements along the axes, first right along the x-axis, then up along the y-axis. Or we could think of it the other way, first up along the y-axis, then right along the x-axis. It actually doesn't matter because as this illustrates, translations are commutative, meaning we can perform a sequence of translations in any order, and our point ends up in the same place. We might also say that translations are cumulative, given any number of translations to perform in sequence, we could just add them together into one translation. So translations are by far the simplest transformation, simply add the vector to the point. If you have an object made up of many vertices, you give the object by simply adding the same vector to every vertex. Rotations are far trickier. We'll start with a simple case first of rotating a 2D around the origin. The question is, for some point x, y, which we rotate by an angle theta, what is the formula that gets us the resulting position x' y'. We can derive this formula by first observing that the distance from the origin to the new point will be the same as the distance from the origin to our starting point. We call this distance r for radius. We can compute the value of r from our starting point using the Pythagorean theorem, because x, y, and r form a right triangle with r as the hypotenuse. With the value of r, we can figure x' y', if we just have the angle from the x-axis, and we can find this angle by adding theta to the angle from the x-axis to the starting point, which we'll call phi. To get the value of phi, we simply use basic trigonometry, taking the arc tangent of y over x. If your memory of trig is hazy, recall that the tangent of an angle equals y over x, the arc tangent is the reverse operation, which given y over x tells us the angle. So now we have phi, which we can add to theta to get theta prime, the angle from the x-axis to the line of x' y'. Recall from trig that the cosine of an angle equals x over r, and the sine of an angle equals y over r.  Solving for x, x' equals r cosine theta prime, and solving for y, y' equals r sine theta prime. So now we have a formula for rotation. Note that our formula holds up when the starting point is in another quadrant. Here the starting point is in the fourth quadrant, but even if phi is negative, adding phi to theta still yields the correct angle for the line of x' y', so the formula works out the same. Even if here we treated the angle to the line of xy as positive instead of negative, e.g. phi equals 340 degrees instead of negative 20 degrees, the trig still works out the same. Anyway, now with our formula for rotation in 2D around the origin, we can rotate not just single points, but whole objects made out of multiple vertices. If you want to rotate an object around the origin by some number of degrees, simply apply the rotation formula to each vertex. Now actually, the formula we just derived is not commonly used because there's a more efficient formula. The efficient formula starts with similar reasoning, but takes advantage of the trigonometric identity for the cosine and sine of two angles summed together. According to a proof we won't go over here, the cosine of two angles, a and b, added together, equals the cosine of a times the cosine of b minus the sine of a times the sine of b. Similarly, the sine of a plus b equals the sine of a times the cosine of b plus the cosine of a times the sine of b. With these two given facts, we can simplify the amount of work we must do to perform a rotation. Starting from where we left off, we know that x prime equals r cosine theta prime and y prime equals r sine theta prime. But let's break theta prime back into its components, theta plus phi.  Now by the definition of sine and cosine, r cosine phi equals x and r sine phi equals y. So we can simplify both of these equations, removing all references to r and phi. We end up with x prime equals x cosine theta minus y sine theta and y prime equals x sine theta plus y cosine theta. And that's our simple formula for rotation, which conveniently doesn't require us to compute either r or phi, making it more efficient. Seeing this in action, say we have a point 4, 1, which we want to rotate 60 degrees around the origin. Plugging the values into our formula, the new x equals 4 cosine of 60 degrees minus 1 sine of 60 degrees and the new y equals 4 sine 60 degrees plus 1 cosine of 60 degrees. Translating the formula into code, we define a function rotate point, which takes a point parameter specified as an array of an x and y value, and takes an angle as a value in degrees. Inside the function, we first unpack point into x and y variables, then convert from degrees to radians by the formula degrees multiplied by pi divided by 180. With the angle and radians, we get the cosine and sine of our angle, which we'll call c and s for short. Then plugging the values into our formula, the new x equals x times c minus y times s, and the new y equals x times s plus y times c. Lastly, we return an array with the rotated chords of the new point. Once we can rotate around the origin, the next question is how to rotate around some other pivot point. The solution is a simple trick. If we first translate our point such that it sits in the same place relative to the origin as to the pivot, we can rotate around the origin as normal if we afterwards undo our first translation. What we're doing here is effectively temporarily changing the frame of reference, doing a rotation, then just shifting the frame of reference back. We simply subtract the pivot point chord from our point chord before the rotation, then add the pivot point chord back in after. So in our formula, we subtract x to the pivot from x of our point and y of our pivot from y of our point, but also add x to the pivot to the x prime and y of the pivot to y prime. It's actually a bit easier to understand in the discrete steps of code rather than as a formula. In our rotate function here, we've added a third parameter which takes a pivot coordinate, another array of an x and y value. We then unpack this coordinate as x, p, and y, p, subtract them from our x and y, but then at the end add them back into our new x and new y values. With this function, we can now rotate a point around any pivot point. It's very important to understand that rotations, unlike translations, are not always commutative. A series of rotations around the same pivot are commutative, but rotations around different pivots are not. Here, for example, we have a starting point, the blue dot with white outline, which we first rotate 60 degrees around the orange dot, then 180 degrees around the green dot. Notice the end position of the blue dot is to the left of the green dot. If we start with the same starting point and pivot points, but reverse the order of rotations, rotating it first 180 degrees around green, then 60 degrees around orange, the blue dot ends up in a totally different place, way off to the left and further down. So once we start mixing rotations around different pivots, we have to be careful of the rotation order. Similarly, translations and rotations are not commutative with each other, so we must be careful about the relative order when we mix them together. Here, for example, if we first rotate 180 degrees around the orange dot, then translate downwards, we end up in a very different spot than if we reverse the operations, first translating downwards the same distance, then rotating 180 degrees around the orange dot. Lastly in 2D, what about scaling, changing the size of objects? Well, most commonly, we wish to scale around the X and Y axes, such that we simply multiply all coordinates by our scaling value. For example, if we wish to double the size of this triangle, we simply multiply all of its coordinate values by 2. So, coordinate negative 3, 2 becomes negative 6, 4, coordinate 2, 1 becomes 4, 2, and coordinate negative 1, negative 1 becomes negative 2, negative 2. In other cases, we might wish to scale an object non-uniformly, such that the object stretches or contracts more along one axis than the other. For example, we might stretch this triangle by a factor of 2 along the Y axis, but stretch it by a factor of 1 along the X axis, which is effectively stretching it not at all along the X axis. So for this purpose, the Y values would get doubled, but the X values would remain the same. Another thing we might wish to do is scale an object around axes other than the cardinal X and Y axes of our coordinate system. To put it another way, we might want to stretch an object around a center point that doesn't lie on the origin. To accomplish this, we use the same trick we used to rotate an object around a pivot point other than the origin. We temporarily change the frame of reference by translating then perform our operation before changing our frame of reference back. Lastly, in other cases, we might wish to scale an object around axes that don't run parallel to the cardinal axes. And again, we can do so by temporarily changing our frame of reference, this time with a combination of translation and rotation. Here, for example, we would translate our coordinates down and left, then rotate about 15 degrees before applying the scaling operation. Having done our scaling, we then undo the change of reference by applying the opposite transformations in reverse order, first rotating our coordinates by about negative 15 degrees, then translating up and right.


We are going to be getting started here with the final session in the assessment methods. And first off, we're gonna have Chase Christopherson. Chase is a PhD student in the Soil Science Department at NDSU. His primary research interests are in long-term recovery reclamation projects in range line ecosystems. He is particularly interested in determining ways to increase reclamation recovery success in soil environments and native vegetation communities based on site-specific planning. Additional work and research interests lie in the inclusion of traditional ecological knowledge in reclamation methodology and land planning initiatives. Chase received his master's from NDSU in natural resource management in 2022. During this time, he served as the intern on the Intertribal Forest Management Assessment Team as part of a nationwide project aimed at assessing current conditions of forests and forest management on tribal lands. Following the completion of his master's degree, he worked for a nonprofit as their natural resources and agricultural specialist focused on efforts on tribal land management, planning, and data sovereignty. So with that, I'm gonna pass it over to Chase and we're gonna learn more about traditional ecological knowledge assessments.  It links to a survey I'm doing that's looking at trying to understand how people in West North Dakota interact with the land around them and sort of how that has changed in response to oil and gas activity out this way with the intention of figuring out how to maybe incorporate some local knowledges in reclamation, planning, and site selection. Now that that's out of the way, yeah. So like Erin said, I'm Chase Christophson. I'm a PhD student and graduate research assistant at North Dakota State University. And today I'll be talking about, as you can see, a conceptual look at traditional ecological knowledge and this application to reclamation planning. This is gonna be a very much so, a 10,000, 30,000, 100,000 foot of view of what traditional ecological knowledge is. We're not gonna get into the nitty gritty weeds of it. So let's get started. So terminology I think is an important place to start. I don't know if maybe just by a show of hands how many people are familiar with TK have heard the term. Okay, thank you. So it's gaining a lot of, I don't wanna say momentum, but it's building popularity in kind of the land management, reclamation, restoration field. But a lot of people don't fully know what that all encompasses. They just hear sort of, it's sort of become a buzzword, a buzz phrase. It looks good in a plan, it looks good in a project, but what does this mean? So terminology first and foremost is important. Here are some examples that you see people say pretty interchangeably. So we got the standard traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous knowledge, place-based, local knowledge. TK, the top one there with the little asterisks by it, that's pretty much in the vernacular. That's in the zeitgeist if you wanna say, that's what everyone knows. It's the accepted term in academia and any kind of report you're doing. So if you say that, everyone is gonna know what you're talking about, generally speaking. And so it doesn't matter. Yes and no, without getting too far into terminology and breaking down the definition of words, it does matter. The bottom two here, I would not say are good substitutions or placeholders for TK, indigenous, traditionally ecological knowledge, indigenous knowledge. Any of those, just given the differences in definition of the words and sort of what TK encompasses. So here is just some, I'll let you read them.  Just different definitions for what TK is. You'll see the top one here. This is the White House's stance on what TK is. They call it indigenous traditional knowledge so that no one gets confused about what they're talking about. And this, based off this here, you can see just this happened in the last two years around the time that Deb Haaland took over the position of Secretary of Interior. So this is really sort of gaining a momentum in the federal agencies a lot, especially. So there's that. And then this one right here is the one that I wanna draw probably your attention to if you're gonna take anything away from this slide. It's this one. It's the most cited. It's the most referenced in any sort of academic textbook or text or journal that's looking at this field. It's going to be this Burke's definition of TK. And so basically what it's saying at the very gist of all this is that it's a cumulative body of knowledge that's been passed down from generation to generation, not solely on ecology, but on sort of where people fit in their environment and sort of the role they play amongst everything else. It's more relational. It's talking about stewardship and not so much management. Again, I'm not gonna get too deep into it, but there's a difference between those two terms in terms of land management in this context. So we'll move on from that. What is it? So what are some examples of what TK could be? It's not going to simply be, over that way we, this plan grows. We would gather this plant, done it for hundreds of years. That's an example of it, but it's not simply that. It can come from stories and traditions that have been passed down through the generations. Stories, a lot of times they're filled with metaphor. They're filled with such sort of things that on the surface seem very much so difficult to believe. However, there's going to be some sort of, sort of cultural context, historical context that's passed down. It's meant to be a metaphor for, I guess, a lesson. You could call it a moral of the story, bless you. And so that's sort of an example of TK where you're trying to say, this is what happened. This is how we got through it, but it's gonna be cloaked in metaphor and simile and things like that. I have tribal members out there just because TK's thought of being sort of, you go talk to the wise elders, you talk to the elders, they're gonna know what's best. And that's, of course, they are gonna have more knowledge than most community members, but the youth are also gonna have knowledge that they've gotten because it's an intergenerational passing of knowledge over the years.  And it's just sort of incorporated in a lot of the life for these indigenous communities in just, whether they are aware that that's exactly what they have or not. Cultural and traditional sites, so that's gonna be historic village sites. There is some observational knowledge out there that I've heard from around the country that the prevalence of medicinal, cultural, traditional plants and vegetation aren't gonna be found in higher percentages and in larger numbers around historic village sites. I don't know how accurate that is, but again, it would be something to look into further because I've heard it echoed around the country. But so that's also a ceremony sites, it's gathering sites, it's fishing sites. It's all these things that sort of go into, these places that hold meaning over the generations, it's not just a one-off, it's understanding sort of where we, as people fit into the environment and sort of the role we play as a, and not just our imposition of our will on it, but more so how we interact with everything in the environment. And then traditional location names. I was having a pretty tough time finding examples in North Dakota, South Dakota, that aren't just translated English names into say Lakota. So I went with some stuff from Minnesota. I didn't get into this in my background. I took several years of Dakota at the University of Minnesota during my undergrad, where we sort of learned about these traditional names and sort of what the context they hold for the culture. So Minnesota, just the state in itself in Dakota and what they referred to it as was Minishota Makoche. And what that means is the land where the water reflects the sky. So if you think about that in terms of the landscape, Minnesota has a lot of lakes. A lot of them are cloudy, they're not the clearest in the world. So they're going to reflect the clouds, they're gonna reflect the sky. You're gonna see these things. So another example, Minneapolis, that area in Dakota is called Bereota, which means many or a lot of lakes, Sobere, Lakes, Ota, many, a lot. And there's a lot of lakes there. St. Paul, Imanija scott, Imanija cliffs scott white. If you've been crossing from Minneapolis, I guess Bloomington into St. Paul over the Minnesota River Valley, you'll notice the cliffs kind of by the river there and they're sort of a whitish tan. And so that's what they're referring to. So these, there's other names, there's other locations. You start to notice it more kind of once you have it pointed out to yourself. Oh, there was probably some sort of historical context here. And what these do is they sort of describe ecological features historically that you would find in that location. So they're descriptive tellers that can be used as maybe historical reference for a reference site for you're doing reclamation or restoration work. And then ecological signs on the landscape. So it could be, knowing where certain things grow. It could be understanding that this area over there for some reason every, so often it sinks a little bit. It gets, it floods not every year, but every five years or after a rain this early, it's gonna flood. So just things like that in the landscape that maybe wouldn't be extremely obvious on the surface level that after having that information passed down is going to be fairly pertinent and prevalent in your planning. So TK and reclamation, I sort of touched on it a little bit on the last slide. So I think a big area that we can bring it in is site-specific planning and reclamation. So sort of using that knowledge of people who have been in the area for a long time, they've got all this knowledge passed down.  So it's not just where you're gonna put the pipeline. It's not just where you're gonna put the well pad, but also how is that disturbance just in the activity level alone offsite going to impact some of these areas that might seem like they're sort of, you know, they're offsite, they should be okay, but you know, maybe dust is gonna settle on a, on some vegetation that's not gonna work or it's gonna drive out the migration of some sort of animal that is pretty prevalent to the ecosystem there because they just don't like the activity, things like that for site selection. I guess that kind of goes into the site determination. Cultural sites and traditional sites are probably something I'd like to highlight there just because they're not always going to be extremely obvious on the landscape, but cultural site could be just a place where people have gone to harvest maybe bitter root for generations. That's their harvesting spot, that's where they go. That's a cultural site, that's a traditional food, that's part of their food sovereignty and sustainability as a people. So things like that are important to consider and to kind of have some input on that as well as migratory corridors. So just how birds kind of fly through as well as, you know, just animals and mammals that might be on the ground in general, they might avoid areas that they historically were found in abundance that people hunted, you know, for a long time, they're just not seeing them anymore, they're getting pushed out by noise, activity, lack of vegetation and food, whatever it might be. Yeah, and then species preference. So when considering the reclamation work, you're going to do the seeding type, you're going to do the vegetation, kind of what you're planning on doing after the disturbance. There could be, you know, seed like species that you'd want to have in a seed mix that maybe is struggling in the area due to invasive species or, you know, they're being outcompeted by the seed mixes that are being applied right now that maybe we would like to see brought back into more prevalence, just things like this that again, I don't want to get too far into it and dive too deep, but just sort of on a base level, these are some areas that we could incorporate it. Why is this being talked about here? Why is this important? Why does it matter? Why did you come listen to me? I'll be asking that for days, but this is an excerpt from the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. It's really the first treaty that was signed by tribes in this kind of upper, upper Great Plains region. And it outlined, if you go through the whole document, it outlines all the tribal territory for all the tribes that were here. So you got the Lakota, you got the Kroi, you got the Cheyenne, all these tribes that outlines based off of geographical features where their territories are that the United States acknowledges. So this one right here pertains to, you know, the Mandan, the, I think it says Groban, but that's the Hadatsa and the Erykara. So it kind of is the basis for what has become the Fort Berthold Reservation. So this probably, most of it probably doesn't mean a whole lot. I'm sure you're not all, you know, topographic geographic maps in your head, able to just tell me exactly where this region is. So I helped you out. This is the map. This is what it's describing, this area in the dark here. So if you're looking to get some sort of historical context and reference for these sites and sort of, you know, gain some information on the ebbs and flows of the ecosystem out here, these tribes in these areas have, you know, not just from their point of view, longstanding histories, but also from the point of view of the United States as well in acknowledging that this is the territory that they're from, they have been on this land. They know what they're, of what they speak in this area. So why it matters, it's just, it's good information to have, you know, it doesn't hurt anything. So why continue? Like I said, longstanding history of interaction, knowledge of the land resiliency, I think we touched on that already. If you want to get super technical, tribes are always considered stakeholders. So anytime you do a restoration reclamation plan, anything that affects the ecosystem in general, they are going to be stakeholders that need to be contacted, consulted with before you do anything. You read an ecological textbook, this is one of the first things they say it. And then also, why not? What does it hurt? What does getting, you know, working with tribes, maybe acquiring some of this traditional knowledge that they've passed down that they might know about the area that might not be super obvious from just a site assessment. What does it hurt? A six minute phone call, six minute conversation can save you six months on the back end. So, you know, why not? That's kind of all I got. I'm open to questions. If we have time, I don't know what we're sitting at. We've got 10 minutes. Do you guys want me to riff a little bit more? Just kidding. Do we have any questions? Question. So if I were the reclamation planners that would be in the room, what is a good first step? I mean, as far as building that collaborative relationships with the folks that have the knowledge, it might be a stretch for each one of them to be able to acquire this themselves. And so just opportunities in your mind for building those bridges to help bring some of these things into the planning process. Yeah, that's a very good question. It's something that I spent a decent amount of time thinking about and this isn't something that can just be incorporated and changed and brought into the process overnight. This is gonna be a work in progress. There's gonna be mistakes. There's gonna be successes that maybe happen accidentally just by the grace of God it worked out. But you just, I think starting the dialogue and knowing, trying to just figure out who to reach out to if you're looking for tribes. So, you know, MHA Nation, they have a tribal historical preservation officer department. They'd be a good place to start. They have a cultural resource department. That'd be a good place to start. They have a natural resource department. These are all just people who are familiar with the land that are at least a good go between to maybe either they're gonna know or they're gonna know people that know. And quite frankly, you're never gonna get the information upfront. There is too much history to overcome for them to always be for tribes to just be always extremely open with their information to strangers. And so that's something that is just gonna sort of, if you're looking to incorporate this, it will have to be worked through over years. It's not gonna be tomorrow. It's not gonna be next week. Most likely it won't be next year, but slowly, but surely that trust will be built. I think the most difficult part is gonna be capacity on both sides, which I'm not an economist or anything like that. So I couldn't tell you how that works out, but I'm just talking hypothetically.


The aim is to identify potential risk factors for external apical resorption, EARR, of maxillary incisors. This article was authored by Rikshan Vahid, Natigian Nazanin, and Ordebizari Mortiza.


Next we have ClickFunnels 2.0. Now we're really starting to see whispers of what the future will look like. ClickFunnels actually just recently announced that they've built AI in to their landing page editors. So if you're there on a headline and you think, you know what, this isn't quite the best headline or I'm gonna split test the headline against this one.  You don't have to call up your copywriter on the phone. You just get AI to make you a new headline, split test that against yours. And we're gonna see a lot of amateurs out there actually sort of have a lot better looking pages, which thank God, right?  So hopefully those people that are good practitioners, they're good at what they do. They're not good copywriters. This is gonna get them so much further ahead than before.