Transcript: I believe in the representative system of government and I think that if everything were uphold there’s a tyranny to that.  None the less I had an idea when the personal democracy forum asked me to write an essay, I was thinking about the idea of having my own disclosure page of politics and adding a little functionality to this where I could say “Here’s what I believe, if you think I’m wrong, you can tell me or here’s what I believe and if you want me to help you on your campaign I will” and I can change that constantly and if it’s searchable you can start to get a constant sense of the pulse of the people.  So I don’t think it’s a question of voting once, I don’t think it’s a question of voting and changing the structure of government which I don’t wanna do it works too damn well all in all.  But I think there is a way where we can constantly state our opinions and our fears and what we know and don’t know and our wishes and the more that we can capture that from the wisdom of the crowd and the wisdom of the people and I do believe the crowd is wise, the better off we’ll be as a country.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript: I asked on my blog who should be the next CTO for the next government because Barack Obama has said he’s going to have one.  I was surprised that no one suggested Al Gore, after all, you know the unfair joke is that he invented the internet.  I think that someone like that could be good but I also think that I would look to perhaps one of the founders of Google.  When I was at Davos this last year, I watched with amazement as there was a discussion about the environment with Al Gore and Bono at one session where Al Gore was saying “The way to solve this is through carbon taxes and prohibitions and regulation” and then I went to a session with the Google Foundation with Larry and Serge as they’re called and they saw the world very differently, they saw the world as engineers, rather than prohibitions they were talking about inventions.  If we can get the cost of electricity produced well down below that produced by dirty coal then we’ve changed the world and they have.  So their answer was not taxes and prohibitions their answer was investment and invention and it was a window to me on the engineers mind, engineers look for the problem and then look for the solution.  The seduction of the engineer’s view is that every problem has a solution and life is not sometimes so clean.  But I think that if we hire an engineer who thinks like that, not an Al Gore and a politician, god bless him but instead someone like one of the founders of Google to become the chief technology officer of America and they start looking at government as a platform and they start looking at it as a means to find and solve problems, not to make points.  I think it could bring a new DNA into the blood stream of American government.

Technology can and will open up government the same way it’s opening up media and every other industry out there, it’s lagging behind but it’s going to happen.  First and foremost because we can talk to each other now, second because we can coalesce around causes, I think we’ll become less of a two party country and more of a hundred thousand cause country where from left and right and anywhere we can gather around each other.  Third we demand transparency online, we’re gonna demand that kind of transparency from government and when we don’t get it, we’re gonna go find it, so we have projects like Congresspedia and efforts to bring your marks to the public and in the UK there are similar efforts going on where we can use the public’s knowledge to say “Well what do we know about these earmarks, what do we know about the activities of our congressmen and if you don’t expose it, we will and fourth I think that where I hope we go to with technology and government is not to dwell always on the negative, on the gotcha moments, on the scandals but instead to dwell on the positive and what we can actually do as a government.  Dell computer and Starbucks just started idea platforms based on its sales force software, so my Starbucks idea, you can go in and suggest you want a separate line for brew coffee because you’re tired of waiting for the guy with the really complicated order and then Starbucks comes in and they deal with that and they’ve gotta start to implement some ideas, same with Dell.  Why don’t we have that for government, why don’t we have a forum where we can go in and make suggestions and the good suggestions will gain traction and will gain votes and gain ideas and discussion and will improved and the government gets involved in it, that’s what we should be doing.  The bad ideas by the way will die on the vine and I think that you have to have some faith in the public.  The internet has made me a populist, TV made me a populist.  When I realized that good shows would rise in the ratings and bad shows would fall, it meant that the public had taste.  There’s a continuous line here from that realization I had in TV to the internet itself where the more choice we give people, the better choices they make and I realize that if you don’t inherently trust the people then you don’t believe in free markets, you don’t believe in democracy, you don’t believe in reformed religion, you don’t believe in all these things.  So the internet to me is about hearing from the people and being able to trust the people more, so the internet becomes kind of a shadow government that will cross over boundaries and cross over ideologies and cross over party lines.  I’m very hopeful about the impact of the internet on government.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript:  No, it’s a rather scaredy cat way to look at things, so what if it’s online, so what if it’s on the phone, so what if it’s on the street, it’s life and what we forget about the internet is that it actually I think makes life in some ways more intense and more social.  You know as I was testing search engines through the years, I would use like other guys the friends of my old girlfriend’s name and I would go through and search my girlfriends, most of them didn’t have any Google shadow.  I have a long Google shadow because I have a blog and a big ego but one of my old girlfriends found me.  Now that could not have happened before Google and we had conversations and I apologized for being a bad guy in the old days and that was kind of a gift.  But as I thought about this

I realized that living online with these constant connections could even change the nature of friendship.  If I were 17 years old today and I was bad to my high school girlfriend, that’s gonna live me because she’s gonna know where I am, I’m gonna know where she is, I can’t get away from her and I almost wonder whether that changes the way I behave.  The President of Google has said that perhaps we need to have a law that allows us to all change our names at age 21 so we can forget the past.  But we won’t be able to, so our past will stay with us and I think that will make us better behaved and when we’re badly behaved well you know what, we have mutually assured humiliation because I had my drunk picture and you have your drunk picture and that’s life, so what’s the big deal.  Inhaling or not inhaling won’t be so important in the Presidential campaigns as we go forward.  So living online means we’re living with people, it’s a mistake to think that the internet is a medium, that’s media people projecting their view of the world on the internet.  The internet is not, it’s a connection machine, Doc Searls the blogger says it’s a place where we talk.  So when you realize that the internet is really about connecting people with information and people with each other.  It intensifies life, it’s better to have it, I get to meet people around the world I never could have met, I get to stay in touch with old friends I couldn’t have done, I get to do more business, I get to hear more ideas.  The internet is a distilled life, it’s a wonderful life, it’s more efficient, I’m not, you know, worrying about what the programmer put on TV today, I’m choosing my own stuff.  So living on the internet I think is living much better.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript: If I knew I’d be rich and so I don’t know.  I think that it’s constant surprise, Twitter is a simple little program that lets you put in a 140 character messages from your phone or from the web, it’s micro blogging.  I looked at it and I kinda dismissed it but my 16 year old son and webmaster and the genius behind me said “You know Dad no you gotta look at Twitter again, stuff’s going on there” and he was right, it’s really amazing because it’s social blogging, you choose whom to follow and who follows you.  It’s public conversation, it captures a kind of zeitgeist  of the time.  I just saw that Reuters and the BBC are trying to do constant searches on Twitter for words like explosion and evacuation because Twitter becomes the canary in the news coal mine, telling you that people are writing about their lives and if there’s an evacuation right now, they’re gonna tell you that and they’re gonna tell you that before any news reporter would ever know this.  So Twitter, this silly thing of 140 characters, what did you have for breakfast, I don’t care what you had for breakfast, suddenly becomes a whole new platform for understanding what’s going on in people’s lives.  Who could have predicted that, now the fact that it came from Evan Williams who also was a co-creator of blogger which popularized blogging and changed my life and the world means that I do pay attention to Twitter.  But I wouldn’t have guessed it, I think that’s what the internet is about is that when you put out a platform and you see how people use it and when you get surprised you’ve won.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript: I don’t see anything on the horizon that can stop Google and that’s our own fault in the industry because we’ve just really let Google have everything.  In the ad industry we’ve said “Okay” they have almost half the ad industry now online.  They’ve taken over search not because they’re evil or nefarious but because they’re damned good.  The only water to the witch of Google that I can see is openness.  Google is not fully open, it is opaque and so if you look at Google’s response to Facebook and its sudden dominance of the new “Friend” market, they responded by trying to create with others an open standard for friend relationships online.  And I think that the response to Google would be not another company but an open network, so I argue it for instance that we should have an open ad network out there that is more transparent than Google’s that provides some competition to Google and that provides more real value in the market place.  Unfortunately the rest of the industry just doesn’t have its act together, they don’t know how to cooperate and so Google will only grow bigger and bigger and bigger.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript: I think we’ll see tons of different business models for media in the future, one that I think will dominate is networks.  Not the idea that everything that is produced has to be owned by one conglomerate but instead there’s a network loosely joined.  If you look at the old media model exemplified by any publishing company or media company or for that matter Yahoo.  The old media model says “I own or control or syndicate this content, I’m in a market to bring people into me and then I’m gonna show you ads and then I’m gonna wave goodbye” and that’s where Yahoo and so on have gone.  The new media model I think is more of a network where I have my own blog, I don’t necessarily wanna sell it to anybody, I wanna publish it myself but a site could come along and say “Oh I like that post, let me take that post from you” or “Let me sell your ads because you’re okay” or “Let’s promote each other, some different relationship.  The idea of a network I think is the way that journalism and media can in fact expand.  A local newspaper, a city newspaper could never have afforded to cover all the towns and neighborhoods in the market.  But with the help of its public they can now.  So what’s the relationship of that big newspaper to those individuals who are going out and maybe reporting the school board meeting or the kid’s soccer game.  It maybe a financial relationship where they sell the ads, it may be a content relationship where they curate the content, it may be an educational relationship where they help them understand how to do it better.  It may be a promotional relationship where they send traffic to each other.  If you think more like a network, you’re thinking more like Google and that is how Google has expanded greatly.  Google unlike Yahoo does not own tons of content, it wants to own none, but it wants to organize it all and so I think if you think that way and say “Okay I’m a newspaper, instead of trying to own the content and own the market, if I instead enable the market to know as much as it can about itself and use as many means to do that as I can,” I think that then media companies will be able to grow bigger at lower cost and less risk and we’ll have a better relationship with the public they serve.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript: I think objectivity was a lie, objectivity was an effort to say “I have no opinions, I’m kind of not human and I can turn off all opinions that I have and I don’t need to tell you anything about myself because I decree myself objective.”  Well no, I think the public has a right to know your background, your perspective, your influences in big and little ways.  Maybe you should put in a box of all the links that you saw before you wrote a story so that they know what sources, what influenced you.  I think the transparency is a matter of respect and trust to the audience.  Now then comes intellectual honesty, then if you say “Well yeah okay I’m a Democrat, I’ve told you I’m a Democrat but I’m gonna tell you something that’s gonna hurt the Democratic Party because it’s the right thing to do.  You’ll respect me for doing that, I think you’ll respect me more for me having told you that I’m a Democrat.  So transparency is about the trust and the relationship with the public you’re serving.  That I think is an ethic that we can learn a lot from.  Objectivity is about hiding stuff, objectivity is about saying “No, no, no, no, I’m not gonna tell you my opinions because that’s somehow gonna make me more objective” that’s a lie of omission.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript:  A code of ethics doesn’t solve anything, it might be a guide but at the end of the day individuals have to make their own ethical decisions every time they face a question and a quandary.  I have had editors who’ve stood by me and defended me when I pissed off somebody in the company and I’ve also had editors who’ve come after me and said “Oh you can’t do that because it’s gonna piss off somebody” and no code was gonna deal with that.  I think that I’ve learned new ethics in the blog world online, now it’s not to say that they’re better and it’s not to say that I reject the ethics of journalism that I learned before, I don’t, I teach them.  But I’ve learned an ethic of transparency online and my blog now I tell the stock I own and who I vote for and all kinds of things, things that I wouldn’t have done back in the days when I was a full time reporter but I think are very important now.  So I’ve learned an ethic of transparency, I’ve learned a new ethic of the correction.  On blogs if we make a mistake, we don’t erase it, we cross it out, we fess up, we admit it was there and if we don’t do that very quickly, we’re gonna lose credibility.  I’ve learned an ethic of openness and collaboration.  When I’m working on a story, I’m working on an idea, I ask my readers to help me and they are very generous if I just ask.  Those are new ethics that I’ve learned online that I think old media can learn from.  At the same time there are ethics of the old world that live forever, that are immutable, fairness, accuracy, balance, not objectivity but I think those are things that we can do a better job of helping to teach from old media from our experience.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript:  I think if we actually budgeted how much resource in the newspaper industry goes to investigative journalism and did 10 years ago, we’d find it’s not much and maybe it’s declining.  I would argue that in fact newspapers should invest more in investigative journalism because it is uniquely valuable.  The problem with newspapers and TV stations is that they give too much resource and time to commodity news we already know thanks to the internet and so there’s no reason for newspapers across the country to all have their own movie critics or golf columnists or whatever, get rid of them and get investigative journalists on and break stories that’s the way we used to make this business work.  I think it’s also true that we can do investigative journalism in a collaboration with the public, the News Press in Florida got a Freedom of Information Act request for some botched hurricane federal relief, pre Katrina, huge amounts of data and they realized that their audience really knew what happened in their neighborhood.  So they put up a search box and said put in your address, hit search and find out what the Feds said happened on your block and then you tell us what you know.  In 48 hours there were 60,000 searches, they got tons of stories out of this, they also got a cadre of experts, it being Florida they all have white hair like me but experts who were willing to constantly help the paper, an architect, an engineer, an accountant.  This idea of collaboration with the public, I think allows us to look at investigative journalism in new ways.  Sometimes it’s about a reporter with contacts, shoe leather that lives forever.  It’s also about seeing data as news and the fact that the public knows more than we do and if we can find ways to mobilize them and to draw what they know out of them that will yield more truth.  I think it’s also true that we have more of an ethic of transparency online and that we wanna try to bring that ethic of transparency to government and business and journalism itself.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Question:  Is the Internet killing the newspaper?

Transcript: It’s not the internet that’s killing the newspaper, it’s that newspapers are trying too hard to hold onto a past.  The problem here is that there are new opportunities, newspapers have not seen, what they’re seeing instead is fear of change.  Every other industry in this country, in this world has to change because the internet, why shouldn’t newspapers.  Other industries that are smart are embracing this change and newspapers are out of fear only beginning to.  It doesn’t make any difference to me whether or not the printing press is getting used as long as the journalism continues.  I met Alan Rusbridger the editor of the Guardian not long ago and they had just spent 150 million dollars on new presses and he said very calmly “Oh yes those are probably the last presses we’ll ever buy.”  Now I can imagine an American publisher would say that and keel over at that moment but Rusbridger realizes that what he’s continuing is the journalism and he’s gotta find ways to make it continue in this new world.  It’s not gonna be the same as it was, newspapers were one size fits all monopolies.  Those days are over, the business has changed, the scale of the business has changed.  But if they start thinking more collaboratively, if they start thinking more flexibly, I think journalism can actually grow.

Question: What advice do you have for the New York Times?

Transcript: If I were running the New York Times company today, I would use the Boston Globe as a laboratory to do all kinds of new and brave things and figure out what to do.  Maybe it shouldn’t be in print, maybe it should go hyper local, maybe it should go multimedia, maybe it should be 5 different products, I don’t know but I would try them out in Boston.  At the New York Times itself, their strength is their weakness because they are this incredible institution and they’re trying to protect that and for good reason.  But that protectionism is not a strategy for the future and that realize that, I’m not saying anything to them they don’t know, they are trying to do new things but they’re constantly saddled with being the New York Times.  So what I hope really happens is that in newspapers across the country we’ll see experiments about new ways to do things.  The Madison Capital Times, an afternoon paper and a two paper market has just gone out of print except for a two once a week supplements and they’re now gonna go solely online.  We’ll see how that works, I think every paper in the country should be looking at new experiments and seeing new ways to do things.

Recorded on: 3/30/08