Joe Germuska 0:00 back here or go to your other sessions. 0:02 Thank you very much for coming in, and we'll see you next time. 0:05 Cheers. 5:57 Thank you all very much for coming in. 5:59 My name is Chad Kohalek from Protocols for Publishers. 6:02 This is the last leg of our media and civics track today. 6:06 We have two presenters here to talk about journalism and the atmosphere. 6:10 I'm going to turn it over first to Joe Gromuska. Ben Werdmuller 6:14 There you go, Joe. 6:15 Thank you. 6:15 We're going to be three, and you'll see about that in a minute. 6:18 But, um, hi everybody, I'm really happy to be here with you. 6:21 My name is Joe Gromuska. 6:22 I'm the chief nerd at Knight Lab, which is the media technology and design studio at Northwestern University, just outside of Chicago in the United States. 6:30 Knight Lab is a— we build tools for journalists and storytellers. 6:33 We do design research. 6:35 We promote product thinking in journalism. 6:38 And of course, we teach students. 6:40 My professional background is actually more in internet software development than journalism. 6:44 But I got into this field at the Chicago Tribune. 6:47 I did a stint as a news applications developer there. 6:50 And then I came to Northwestern to join the lab. 6:53 And I'm super excited to be here. 6:55 I was super excited to see a whole track about journalism. 6:58 When we pitched this talk, I was like, OK, well, we're going to explain this people. 7:02 And now there's people all day have already been saying smarter things than I'm going to tell you today. 7:06 But anyway, and oh, by the way, I realized that I have had a cute or whatever avatar and I've been noticing, recognizing people at the conference from their— so I thought I should throw mine on there because it's not me. 7:18 So that's me if it is familiar. 7:21 Anyway, also I'm co-presenting with Ben Wardmuller. Speaker C 7:25 Thank you so much, Joe. 7:26 I'm so sorry I can't be there in person. 7:28 It's for reasons right outside of my control, which is why I'm a disembodied voice right now. 7:33 Coming to you like a Timu met Barry. 7:36 My name's Ben Werdmüller. 7:37 I lead technology at ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom in the US that investigates abuses of trust and power in the public interest. 7:45 I've also got a long history of building on and writing about the open social web, and I'm really excited to almost be here with you all right now. Ben Werdmuller 7:53 We'll hear more from Ben later. 7:57 So, but my— I have the first part. 7:58 So, I mentioned one of the things we do at Knight Lab is design research, and over the last few years, We've been involved in a series of projects that we call Next Gen News. 8:06 We partnered with Financial Times Strategies and were supported, I need to say, by Google News Initiative. 8:12 Thank them for this. 8:14 So the idea was to understand the news and information behavior habits of younger adults, 18 to 25 especially, seeing them as kind of the vanguard of where things are going and hoping that if we can characterize how they interact with information these days, maybe publishers can start to think better about how to meet them in the next few years and sort of rearrange their process to be better serving the needs of that audience. 8:37 So in 2023, we did about 4 dozen one-on-one interviews in the United States, Nigeria, and India. 8:43 And then last year we did another round of qualitative research. 8:45 We did about 85 diary studies in those 3 countries, plus we added Brazil and the United Kingdom. 8:52 We also did a quantitative survey, 1,000 people in each of those countries. 8:56 And the quantitative survey went from 18 to actually 101 years old, so we could do some analysis that sort of compared across brackets and buckets. 9:06 And so just some of the top-line findings from that that frame how we're thinking about this stuff and maybe might set up thinking about how news has to change. 9:15 These are things that this audience is probably familiar with, but not all publishers are. 9:19 And so just also being able to validate it, say we actually went out and found One of the huge things with this audience is a continued sense of content overwhelm. 9:28 The world has gone from finite content where you could start at the front page and know when you flipped the last page that you were done, and now we have an infinite stream. 9:36 We went from a situation where news was defined pretty narrowly and basically defined by the publishers to a world now where news could be anything. 9:45 There's so many things that are vying for people's attention. 9:48 Publishers have to recognize the very different landscape that they're moving into. 9:52 Another thing that we think is really interesting is the way that quality markers and trust, which we'll get to on the next slide, have kind of fallen away because now everything kind of looks the same. 10:00 It's all on a screen. 10:01 It's all in basically the same shape. 10:04 And so it's a lot harder now for people to just know what exactly it is that they're getting when they are consuming information. 10:12 And so that also leads to a very strong, over and over from these dozens of young people we've talked to, trust is understandably a big issue for them. 10:21 They have not been served well by a lot of media institutions. 10:25 They're concerned that news is gonna be false, that it might be sensationalized, that it's biased, it might be combinations of those. 10:32 And so what they really want is a sense from the sources for their news of credibility, affinity, and transparent intention. 10:42 Factoid that maybe we can sort of verify. 10:44 Probably fits everyone's assumptions, but we find that almost 76% of the youngest bracket of the audience get their news from social media, sometimes or often. 10:52 So this is a question where people could answer as many as they wanted to. 10:56 And, but more than 50% of people up to 50 get, often get news from social media. 11:02 So obviously this is a huge change in consumption and a big place to be conscious about where we're meeting audiences. 11:11 Another thing that this audience, maybe less when we realize how many people who are familiar with journalism are here, but still a lot of people from the @protocol world and the engineering world may just overestimate what newsrooms are working with or underestimate the scope of the problems. 11:27 The bottom fell out of advertising in journalism really 20 years ago, and it hasn't gotten any better. 11:34 Consolidation, layoffs, the threat of lawsuits are hitting all over the place. 11:38 Google search referrals to publishers dropped 33% globally in a single year from 2024 to 2025. 11:45 AI overviews are at the top of almost 10% of US search results. 11:50 When they— those show up, only about 1% of users click through. 11:54 Facebook referrals to news sites are down like 80% since 2020. 11:58 X referrals have dropped about 60%. 12:01 Small publishers have been hit the hardest. 12:03 Social referrals for smaller outlets dropped 98% over 5 years from 10.1 million page views to under 187,000. 12:12 And just 4 years— this is from the Reuters Institute. 12:15 Reuters does a lot of great research into the state of journalism. 12:18 From their journalism technology trends of this year, they found just in 4 years there's a 22 percentage point drop in people who were confident about the prospects for news. 12:29 So people are starting to realize that it is dire out there. 12:35 Obviously, economic sustainability is a key issue. 12:38 As I said, advertising has bottomed out. 12:40 It really only works at very large scale. 12:42 Platforms take a huge cut. 12:44 And of course, if the algorithmic winds shift, you're in a lot of trouble. 12:49 Membership works for a business model for a lot of organizations. 12:52 The Guardian, is one that's doing fairly well with it. 12:55 But it does really require leaning into relationships, developing that affinity that we talked about earlier, cutting through the content overwhelm and making sure that people value you enough to go to the trouble to join. 13:09 So there's promising signs, but it's a big question, especially about how large organizations that were built around a different economic model are gonna adapt to this world. 13:18 And then email newsletters were maybe gonna be the last way that you could really own your relationship with audience. 13:23 But as AI starts creeping into people's inboxes, the likelihood that people are reading at depth is even less than ever. 13:31 So that channel is also at risk. 13:35 So newsrooms most likely to lose their audiences are the ones covering the most underserved communities. 13:40 So Ben lives in Philadelphia. 13:41 As he observed, the Inquirer could run citywide ad campaigns and sort of keep their face in, keep themselves in people's attention. 13:48 But smaller places like the Kensington Voice, serving an underserved part of Philadelphia, can't do that. 13:54 So independent voices, while there's a lot more out there, really have a lot of platform dependency challenges and a lot of just sort of cutting through the noise to get people's attention. Speaker C 14:04 Centralized platforms, or silos, are unreliable partners. 14:08 At Protocols for Publishers in London this February, Andrew Widdensland documented what she called a brief history of algorithmic fuckery, a timeline of every time platforms pulled the rug out from under the communities they were supposedly supporting. 14:23 Here's an example: in 2015, Facebook launched Instant Articles. 14:27 The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and dozens of others invested heavily. 14:33 In 2018, Facebook announced a major algorithm change deprioritizing news, and by 2023, Instant Articles were shut down entirely. 14:42 Publishers who restructured their operations around the product were left with nothing. 14:46 Here's another: Infamously, if you mention the phrase "pivot to video" in any newsroom, people will physically shudder. 14:54 All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. 14:57 This repeats because the incentives are baked in. 15:00 The platform's customer is the advertiser. 15:03 Publisher content is the bait. 15:05 When the platform no longer needs that bait, the publisher is stranded. 15:11 Whew, well, uh, sorry for the jump scare, I guess. 15:14 So right now, platform algorithms are black boxes that prioritize business goals over audiences or society. 15:22 A small number of powerful people, like this guy, with vested interests own the major platforms. 15:29 Journalists are being doxxed, news organizations are leaving. 15:32 NPR left X because of bad treatment, for example. 15:35 In the worst cases, these platforms are culpable for genocides and the undermining of democracy itself. 15:42 And these platforms don't just control the reach. 15:44 They control the money too. 15:46 They can change the terms whenever it suits them. 15:49 It's all in their control. 15:51 But as everyone in this room knows, all is not lost. 15:55 While links are suppressed on many platforms and sharing them is impossible on others, forcing newsrooms to optimize for vanity metrics that don't help their businesses or really inform anyone, many newsrooms have found that AT Proto users are disproportionately engaged. 16:11 Referral traffic, click-through rates, donations from Blue Sky are all much higher than from legacy platforms. 16:18 This audience already acts differently. 16:22 Feeds on ATproto are open infrastructure. 16:25 Anyone can build an algorithmic feed, and users choose which to subscribe to. 16:30 People have built custom feeds that surface journalism and ensure real reporting reaches real readers. 16:36 Publishers don't have to be passive consumers subject to platform decisions. 16:41 They don't have to let technology happen to them like an asteroid. 16:45 They can build. 16:47 And of course, the open social web is bigger than one protocol. 16:51 Flipboard has federated via ActivityPub since late 2023, with over 100 publishers like Axios, The Verge, Semaphore, Smithsonian, Fast Company, The 19th federating their content through it. 17:05 A commercial company looked at the trajectory of centralized social media and bet on open federation. 17:11 It's your identity, your data. 17:13 Your relationships belong to you, not a platform. 17:16 Nobody can pull the rug. 17:18 This is the future of media. Ben Werdmuller 17:22 Thanks, Ben. 17:23 So of course there's so much more we can build. 17:26 This is really what this talk is about, and that's why we're actually not going to be— I'm not going to be talking that much more. 17:30 I really want to have a conversation. 17:31 Our whole goal with coming to AtmosphereConf was to say there are some people in the news industry who are recognizing that there is a lot that needs to change. 17:40 And we want to think about it, talk about it, and work with this community to build. 17:43 I'm especially lucky working at Northwestern that I can just sort of say I should be spending my time on this initiative. 17:50 And if there's things that we find that we can cooperate on to help make happen, that would be great. 17:55 So we came up with a few sort of design provocations, some things that maybe especially people who are more on the engineering side and less familiar with journalism, maybe this will plant some seeds, help you think a little bit about the problems that journalism has. 18:07 That have not been in the front of your mind. 18:08 And once we talk through a few of these, you can have questions now, we can talk more later, because what we really want to do is solve problems. 18:16 So one idea is what if you could have like a membership card on your PDS? 18:21 You know, it's an old tradition that people who are members of public media, at least in Chicago for example, you get your WBEZ card and then maybe you get a discount at a restaurant or something like that. 18:30 So what if we could take advantage of the sort of cryptographic trustability that a person is a member and the news organization can put a thing on their PDS that says so, or otherwise wire things up. 18:41 Maybe it would unlock different paywall treatment. 18:43 Maybe this would be a way to bundle subscriptions. 18:45 A lot of people talk about the risk of subscription fatigue and people just not being comfortable making so many different financial arrangements. 18:52 So maybe something like this card could give you privileged access to a partner for a period of time. 18:59 Your membership travels with you across the protocol instead of being locked up in an app. 19:04 Another huge question, how can we build more censorship-resistant journalism? 19:10 In a world where social is powered by open protocols, platforms can't exactly suppress a newsroom's reporting, and they can't exactly turn off the algorithm to fully bury a story just because that's inconvenient. 19:21 But governments can attack a PDS provider, an individual application. 19:26 We need platforms to be resilient. 19:28 So this matters right now, of course, and it's only gonna matter more in the near future. 19:32 What are some things that we might do to help improve the resilience against censorship for media? 19:39 Now for Ben. Speaker C 19:40 And what if publishers and their allies could create and share algorithmic feeds designed to surface good journalism? 19:50 Andre Winnen's land's news-specific feeds on Bluesky are a fantastic proof of concept. 19:55 And the tools already exist. 19:56 Graze lets anyone build and publish custom Bluesky feeds. 20:00 Flipboard's Surf app also lets you build custom feeds, and it's a social browser that pulls together Bluesky, Mastodon, and RSS sources into curated feeds organized by content type. 20:12 These tools are fantastic. 20:13 Imagine newsrooms using them to release their own vetted algorithmic feeds built from sources and topics they trust, operating over long-form content as well as short posts. 20:24 Readers subscribe to the feed, and the newsroom's editorial judgment becomes the discovery layer. 20:30 And then projects like standard.site are doing fantastic work getting full article content into the protocol layer so multiple apps and algorithms can surface it properly. 20:40 But how do you let an algorithm read the article so that it can recommend it while still preserving the publisher's right to get paid for their work? 20:49 This is a problem we can work on together. 20:53 And then let's talk about micro-communities inside— Ben Werdmuller 21:03 I can read slide notes. 21:05 The Bristol Cable, a reader-owned local newspaper in Bristol, built a new app with the Newsmast Foundation that combines news delivery with a full Mastodon-powered community layer. 21:15 Members get integrated stories and podcasts alongside a single— Speaker C 21:18 news apps, news platforms, and news websites. 21:21 The Bristol Cable, a a reader-owned local newspaper in Bristol, England, built a new app with the Newsmast Foundation that combines news delivery with a full Mastodon-powered community layer. 21:33 Members get integrated stories and podcasts alongside a social following section where they connect with Cable staff and each other, plus curated topic-based channels. 21:43 Because it's built on the Fediverse, the community is interoperable. 21:47 Members from other newsrooms or anyone on the Fediverse can participate through their own apps. 21:52 A Bristol Cable member and a member of another local newsroom can be in the same conversation. 21:57 The community builds trust and the Cable aims to double its membership by 2030. 22:03 The community app is absolutely central to doing that. Ben Werdmuller 22:07 I forgot that I meant to go through and cache all the audio before, so it's probably— sorry about that. 22:12 Anyway, so the gap between what open protocols can do in theory and what a non-technical publisher can use today is really the problem to solve. 22:20 And so if you were here for Glenn's talk just before, there's interesting things happening in the Oakland area about ways to apply these things. 22:27 If you stick around for Andrew's talk, there'll be even more about things we can do. 22:32 But it's still too hard right now for a newsroom to set up and run community on the OpenSocial web. 22:36 Community management at scale needs moderation tooling. 22:39 That really doesn't exist yet. 22:40 There's promising signs, but there's work to do. 22:43 Publishers need analytics for community health. 22:45 This is really important when you're trying to make a going business concern, even if you're just trying to be sustainable, not rich. 22:51 You need to understand how your community's health works. 22:53 And those metrics are different from traditional web analytics, which are also really important for these audiences. 22:59 So again, our ask here is for the AT proto development community to work with publishers, not just building for them. 23:06 This is real— there's real mutual interest between the publishing and protocol communities, and also gaps in the understanding. 23:12 Publishers often don't know what's technically possible. 23:15 Protocol builders don't always know what publishers really need. 23:18 So sustained collaboration is really where both sides shape the project together. 23:21 That's going to be how this works. 23:23 So let's work together. 23:25 So that's it for the slides. 23:27 Now I would just love to hear from folks, either ideas you have, questions you have about how journalism works if you're less of an insider. 23:33 What can we make together? Joe Germuska 23:40 Excellent. 23:41 Thank you, Joe. 23:42 And thank you, Ben, wherever you may be. 23:45 All right. Ben Werdmuller 23:45 Ben was so sad not to make it. 23:47 He was really sad. 23:48 I'm happy. 23:49 Hopefully it wasn't too weird to have him disembodied. 23:51 Glad we could do it. 23:52 So I saw some hands. Speaker C 23:54 Yeah. Speaker D 23:54 Excellent. Joe Germuska 23:54 Let's open up the floor for questions. 23:57 All right. 23:57 We got one right back there. Speaker D 24:01 Hi. 24:02 Thank you. 24:03 I— you mentioned community primitives. 24:06 In like a couple of slides back. 24:08 I'm wondering if newsrooms have any specific vision of what an incredible community around their work looks like. Ben Werdmuller 24:18 Oh yeah. Speaker D 24:19 Hi, I'm Celine. 24:20 I work on Leaflet. Ben Werdmuller 24:22 Oh yeah. 24:23 Hi, Celine. 24:24 I doubt that there are a lot of newsrooms who have done that. 24:28 I don't recall being in conversation with them about it. 24:31 There's definitely been I think more than just anecdotal evidence about the value of, for example, journalists showing up in comment threads and participating there. 24:39 You know, comments, the way they have traditionally worked on, especially directly on news sites, tend to be pretty bad. 24:47 But there's a lot of value to them showing up and engaging. 24:51 It helps to add credibility. 24:52 And again, if we're talking about this sort of sense of affinity and belonging, that we are, we want to be a member because you're our people, we want to give you money. 25:00 But I'm not sure what those parameters are. 25:01 If anyone else wants to chime in on that, we can hear, or just sort of noting that as a topic for future exploration. 25:08 I think one of the things that I think is, and I've heard this in other talks here, it's a balancing act because I don't think that most of the challenges for journalism are technical. 25:19 I actually, I came into this field at a time, this is in the early teens, where everyone was like, oh, the internet has destroyed the news industry, so let's get the computer people in here to fix things. 25:30 So my background's in software. 25:31 And I'm glad that I got in. 25:33 A lot of really cool people joined the community. 25:37 But also it didn't take that long to realize that that wasn't really the place to put it. 25:41 And that's why a lot of times I sort of— I don't know if I say it, but I really think about the problem more as a design problem than a technology problem. 25:49 But it is awesome that we have these technology building blocks. 25:52 Coming up. 25:53 The short answer is, that's a good one, I don't know. Joe Germuska 26:06 Thanks for the talk, Joe. 26:07 I missed the beginning, so apologies if I ask you something you already touched on. 26:13 How do you deal with the threat of AI? 26:15 What are some of your thoughts on Cloudflare's Paper Crawl program? 26:19 I know Microsoft has a similar content marketplace for publishers. 26:25 Would be keen to get your perspectives on those. Ben Werdmuller 26:28 Yeah, that's a good question. 26:29 I think there was one piece, maybe before you came in, where we acknowledged that instant AI on Google Search is really hindering click-through. 26:38 This is well understood. 26:41 There are people, including friends of mine in the industry, are like, people are just going to turn to ChatGPT or whatever, and that's where they're going to get their news. 26:48 They're not even going to go to a page. 26:49 I'll say, and I am known to be a dyed-in-the-wool idealist, but I really think that the human— knowing the human factor is one of the secret weapons here. 26:59 I think that one of the earlier slides that was at the beginning is the desire that especially young audiences, but really everyone has, is trust and a sense of affinity. 27:09 And so I think that there's a lot of value to knowing where your news is coming from. 27:14 And I also think, I feel like I haven't heard this that much, and I don't have it perfectly articulated, but I feel like the problem with asking an AI for your news is not that different from the problems with letting an algorithmic feed direct your attention. 27:26 It's like, well, what decisions have they made, and how is that interfering with what you're getting? 27:30 Are you actually getting what you want? 27:32 And I think because of just the mystery of AI, it's going to take the general public, I think, a little while to to really see that as a risk. 27:41 But on the whole, I guess I would just say we have to lean into— there is a market for this. 27:47 And there's, you know, one of the big challenges is also, you know, I worked at a big news organization. 27:53 I think our partners in this next-gen news research are mostly thinking about big organizations. 27:58 That's not personally my stake. 27:59 I am interested in anything that helps audiences and people who have a thing that they want to say, who want to make their living being a person who makes information, to have them connect with less interference, which is why I'm so excited about App Protocol. 28:13 And I think so, it may not be replacing the biggest feeds, which is gonna be our biggest industry organizations. 28:22 There's always gonna be a mass audience that chooses kind of the easy route and so on. 28:27 And I don't know that we can do that. 28:28 But if we can make it sustainable enough for the people who choose a different path, to be able to do their thing, I think that's a win. 28:34 So in short, I think that there's a market for people instead of AI. 28:39 And there's also lots of not just hand waving about how AI might make it more efficient to do the work, but AI-generated content I'm not long on personally. Speaker D 28:54 You mentioned community engagement tools, and I'm asking because I used to work on an open-source commenting tool called Coral that was adopted by a lot of newsrooms. 29:04 Where do you see the incentive for publishers to adapt their existing tools to like the open protocols versus adopting new tools that are getting created? Ben Werdmuller 29:16 Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. 29:19 Coral has done great research. 29:20 Thank you for whatever part you played in that. 29:22 I mean, I love— I knew a lot of people on that team and was proud of it. 29:26 The sponsors of it don't really seem to have even bought into it that much. 29:31 The motivation is, it's a good question, and I think it's another case where there may be a little bit of dinosaurs and small mammals thing where we're in a phase change and some of the big people who don't want to change don't, and they may not make it through. 29:48 I think that especially when you're a large organization, you have to balance So where was this? 29:55 It's been a full day. 29:57 People were talking about the Washington Post and how hard it is to get them to try new things. 30:05 And oh yeah, it was Lauren. 30:09 I forgot to mention, part of the next-gen news research was interviewing news creators, including Lauren Sachs, who was on stage in an earlier session. 30:17 She works with Local News International. 30:18 And they were kind of the offshoot of Washington Post's briefly quite lauded TikTok presence. 30:24 And then the Post was like, we can't pay you all. 30:27 And they took the buyout and they went and did their own thing and they're doing great. 30:30 And they can experiment and they can switch. 30:32 So if the big guys can't switch, I don't know. 30:37 I mean, there's something to be said for making the case clear, you know, for them to make changes. 30:44 But especially if you have the experience you have at Coral, if you were unable to persuade people that this is a better way, you should follow it, then I'm not gonna say that I know a better way than that. 30:53 So there's a lot of shaking out happening. Joe Germuska 31:00 So you talked about kind of how we design for getting readers to trust the news sources. 31:10 But it kind of seems like at this particular moment in time, one of the biggest threats is how do you make news organizations resilient to somebody with just a shitload of money coming in and saying, I don't want you to do it this way anymore, which seems to be more of what's kind of hollowing out news in general. Ben Werdmuller 31:25 You mean like Alden Publishing buying the Chicago Tribune shortly after? 31:29 Well, that was a little while after I left, but yeah. 31:31 Or Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post. 31:35 There's not much you can do when people with money can buy things. 31:42 In my heart of hearts, enough people will know that that is a lesser product. 31:50 And I mean, the Washington Post bled hundreds of thousands of subscribers when they decided not to do an endorsement in 2024. 31:55 The audience that expected them to be sort of adhere to all these old-fashioned news ideals saw that they were like, oh, we can't put an editorial up that is against the guy who's probably gonna win, and if he wins, he's gonna take it out on us if we did. 32:10 And I mean, I canceled my subscription then, and again, hundreds of thousands of people did. 32:14 So I do think that that will out. 32:16 Again, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool optimist. 32:19 But I think that, and I mean, a lot of this buying is happening at like the broadcast level. 32:23 I mean, CBS News is tanking. 32:25 It's like all over the headlines. 32:26 It's not working. 32:30 Money is powerful. 32:32 They may be able to do more than I wish they could. 32:34 But what I really want to see is the people who have the ethos that I believe in, again, be able to sustainably do the work. 32:41 I take a lot of— 404 Media is one of my favorite stories, because they just do brilliant work. 32:46 And it's like 5 people. 32:47 And they are making a go of it. 32:49 And they had, I think, their second anniversary recently. 32:52 The story they tell is that they're doing all right. 32:54 And there's been a lot of other ones like that. 32:56 So I think that's more what I'm interested in, not only small, but basically make it possible to do the work without having to have the money already when you start. Speaker D 33:11 Hi. 33:12 Thank you. 33:13 So my question is somewhat related to these two, for example, and I'm a son of a journalist. 33:21 So when the Iran War worked out, I actually used AI to create an entire ebook on things. 33:28 But that's only because— Ben Werdmuller 33:29 I'm sorry, create an ebook? Speaker D 33:30 An ebook about what's happening in Iran and the Battle of Iran and a whole bunch of things. 33:36 But I was only able to create it in 2 days because A, I had an unlimited Claude 4.0 subscription, and also years of my father telling me how legitimate journalism works. 33:48 So I already had that baked-in knowledge in my head. 33:52 So my prompts were much different. 33:58 The other one, again, with my father, I come from Mexico City where we have a famous saying of journalists there were offered lead or silver. 34:12 So you're like, which one would you prefer? 34:16 For what you were saying about Washington Post, I used to be a very proud subscriber to the New York Times. 34:23 Unlikely I will ever give them a dime again because they just lost my trust completely. 34:29 So what I'm wondering, what I'm putting all this together is, for people like 404, which I also really like, How can these kind of tools allow a small team or a small journalist to use tools like AI that can use them as a professional journalist and not asking ChatGPT for whatever randomness? 34:53 How can people in this room and things like that support? 34:57 How do we build those kind of systems to be like, yeah, this person is a really brave moral courage journalist, I want to support her in doing that kind of work. Ben Werdmuller 35:09 Specifically, is your question specifically about AI or more broadly? Speaker D 35:12 No, more like how do— my question is more like how all the stuff that you talked about, how do we create those kind of systems to support independent journalists to do