Panel Three: The New Journalist in Action
Moderator: David Doss, CNN Senior Executive Producer, Anderson Cooper 360°

Panelists:

Jon Alpert, Cofounder and Codirector, DCTV
Steve Grove, News and Politics, YouTube
Christof Putzel, Correspondent/Producer, Vanguard Journalism, Current TV
Paul Steiger, President and Editor-in-Chief, ProPublica

The summit’s final panel provided an opportunity for journalists on the cutting edge of new media to talk shop and share experiences about where they see audiences heading and opportunities opening up in these changing Times. The moderator, David Doss, a long-time executive producer for top network news shows such as ABC’s Primetime and NBC’s Nightly News With Tom Brokaw and now senior executive producer for CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°, jokingly pointed out “the tie and the non-tie” sides of the panel, with Doss and former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger in the former category, and documentary filmmaker Jon Alpert, YouTube’s Steve Grove and Current TV’s Christof Putzel in the latter. But as the conversation developed, it became clear that more united these five than divided them.

	Jon Alpert, Steve Grove, Christof Putzel, Paul Steiger, David Doss

Steiger, with four decades of experience at the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, is also the editor-in-chief, president and chief executive of ProPublica, the new, nonprofit news entity formed to produce “investigative journalism in the public interest.” ProPublica has received a promise of $10 million a year in funding from the Sandler Foundation and the support of other philanthropies; its board of directors includes the presidents of the Knight Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Jon Alpert’s hair has turned grey, but in his casual black knit shirt and black slacks—not to mention his black belt in karate—Alpert still looks very much like what he is: a pioneering, independent news documentary and filmmaker who started on the streets of lower Manhattan and built his nonprofit Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV), now housed in a landmark firehouse, into a powerhouse media center. DCTV has won 15 Emmys and three duPont awards and trained thousands of eager students on the techniques of storytelling and news gathering.

Three years ago, Steve Grove was a graduating Harvard senior who, in the year before the formal launch of News21, got to work at ABC News as one of the first ten Carnegie Fellows (an internship program created as a partnership between Carnegie Corporation and ABC News) on a team investigating lax security at U.S. nuclear facilities. Today, after reporting stints at the Boston Globe and ABC News, Grove is the head of news and politics at YouTube, where his duties include arranging the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate that aired on CNN and other joint primary election projects with the Des Moines Register in Iowa and WMUR-TV in New Hampshire.

Christof Putzel, a third-generation journalist, created an award-winning documentary about AIDS orphans in Kenya even before graduating from Connecticut College in 2002. As a correspondent and producer for Current TV’s Vanguard Journalism department, he has reported about the exploitation of child gold miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, examined the rise of neo-Nazi skinheads in Russia, and became the first American to report from Mogadishu, Somalia, after Islamic extremists seized the capital in 2006.

CNN hired Doss to team with Anderson Cooper just two months before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and devastated New Orleans and scores of other communities. It was reporting that grim story and its aftermath that Cooper famously challenged Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) over the slow federal response to the disaster. “It was a breakthrough moment for us. He found his voice,” said Doss.

He asked the panelists who in this new media landscape would pay the bills for in-depth reporting and investigative journalism, and whether this posed any ethical concerns. “What are the checks and balances we have to worry about in terms of idealism?” Doss asked Alpert.

Alpert, whose news documentaries have often aired on the major networks and HBO, said, “The problems are more with access, especially access to an audience.” In the old days, a few individuals and corporations controlled access to the airwaves. Even with foundation support, ProPublica will have “to find an audience” and find ways “to get your stuff out there,” Alpert said. He told the story of how DCTV—now an organization with a $3 million annual budget—got its start in 1972:

“We solved the funding thing basically by using inexpensive equipment before anybody else did. We used small cameras and I bought an old mail truck for $5 at a Post Office auction and that was my television station. I put two old black-and-white TV sets on the side, parked it on a street corner, and played the tapes. If people liked it they sat and watched, and if they didn’t like it, they went on to the subway. Over the years, we’ve gotten a new version, called the Cybercar, which is a 40-foot long bus with a TV wall on the side, one of these Times Square video walls. On projects for which we have difficulty finding a broadcast partner, we’ll take our TV station to the people, we’ll park it on the street corner, play our tapes, and we’ll have a town meeting. We’re just doing a bigger and better version of what we did 35 years ago.”

Doss asked Grove where that fits into the YouTube world.

“That’s a really interesting story to hear,” replied Grove. “Can you imagine if you were a YouTube user and to get your content out you had to put a TV on a side of truck and drive around town? I think you’d be in rough shape.” YouTube offers people an opportunity “to show your content globally on a platform that a lot of eyeballs are on,” he added. As for idealism, Grove said the Internet has made the barrier to entry so low that lots of people now can reach a large audience with videos expressing their ideas and values. “I mean, Jon was probably seen as sort of a kook for going around with a truck with a couple of TV screens on it trying to get people to watch his stuff. There are millions of Jons today who have a message, have a story, and they want to tell it, and the Internet allows them to do that a way that just didn’t exist before,” Grove said. But this is not journalism in the traditional sense. “Is YouTube journalism? Does somebody from YouTube belong on a journalism panel right now? We don’t consider ourselves a news organization,” said Grove, answering his own questions. He explained:

“In some ways, we’re sort of like a giant video source library for what’s taking place around the world today. If you’ll forgive a military analogy, someTimes I like to say YouTube is sort of the first in, and the last out when it comes to any breaking news story. Cameras are everywhere. Broadband access has proliferated across the world. YouTube has a very low barrier to entry and has a high audience in terms of video. People who are covering news can do so with their cell phone cameras, their video cameras, get it online right away, with many more eyeballs on it than maybe traditional journalists could do. Then, when traditional journalists in certain situations are kicked out, YouTube can be the last vestiges there with people who are still reporting on the story. We saw that recently in Myanmar when the military junta there essentially kicked out most traditional journalists. It was citizens and a few plucky reporters with cell phone cameras who essentially continued to cover the protests and use YouTube as their platform.”

Grove said it is hard to know how accurate the words are in a blog, but with video footage, “you can see George Allen call his opponent’s campaign worker a ‘macaca.’ You can see a fellow being tased at a Kerry rally. That doesn’t really lie. That is truth.” As far as YouTube is concerned, if network reporters want “to turn the camera on themselves and add some commentary, that’s great,” he said.

Turning to Putzel, Doss said that it appeared that Current TV—the collaborative cable network aimed at 18-to-34-year-olds created by former Vice President Al Gore and Joel Hyatt—was trying to “go one role past the citizen journalist.”

“Yes, we’re not YouTube,” agreed Putzel. Current is “trying to democratize the media and we are embracing the idea of people making content with us, but we are very, very careful, because we want that content to be accurate. We want to be telling those stories the best possible way we can and the closest to the truth. But we want that coming from not just me as the journalist who happens to be on TV; we want that from the user.” Current is “like a filtered YouTube sometimes.”

Putzel said there “absolutely” was still room for idealism in journalism. “None of us should be here if we don’t believe that. But we just have to proceed with caution.” One of his biggest stories sprang from watching raw videos that Russian skinheads had posted on the Internet [Note: not on YouTube] showing themselves beating up immigrants. “I didn’t understand it. I went there and found out who was doing what, what was happening, and how they were using the Internet as a way of spreading propaganda. That took a lot of effort and a big team to actually tell that story correctly, and tell it the best way we could,” said Putzel, who spent part of his childhood in Moscow where both parents were posted as foreign correspondents. But it started with “these guys running around with video cameras.”

Grove said television can “amplify” the impact of mere videos. “TV is still by far the best experience to consume news. We saw that in the debate with CNN,” he said.

Doss asked Steiger where he fits into this new media world.

“Well, we’ll find out,” said the veteran newspaper editor. “I think that what is happening now is nothing short of miraculous in terms of the ability of people to communicate with each other and to communicate with masses or audiences they find—or that find them. That’s very powerful and very positive.” At the same time, metropolitan newspapers and, increasingly, broadcast networks, have seen their business models destroyed, Steiger said. “Those business models rested on the control of the audience that Jon was talking about. That control has been obliterated. In general that’s a good thing,” but it doesn’t bode well for coverage of news overseas and for investigative reporting. It is very expensive to put foreign correspondents in the field, Steiger noted. “You can fill in a lot of the gaps” with existing transmission mechanisms and citizen journalists, but not all of them.

“I’m not troubled by the fact that so much of what goes up now is either idiosyncratic or partisan, because they compete for attention in the marketplace of ideas. I think that’s all good, and you get important facts adduced,” said Steiger. The saga of the Russian skinheads is one example. But as big city papers retrench and cut their staffs, what you won’t get “is the kind of sustained, well-trained digging that produces something like the Wall Street Journal’s coverage in 2006 of backdating of options.” That expose, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, required the Journal “to crunch enormous amounts of numbers” and exhibit the backbone to withstand threats of lawsuits by companies that flatly denied doing anything wrong. “They just said it was luck. It wasn’t until the Journal kept pounding away at the story for week after week after week where you had chief counsels or independent directors saying, ‘Do we have a problem?’” Steiger said. Eventually 150 companies ‘fessed up to the Securities and Exchange Commission that they had backdated options, and dozens of executives lost their jobs. That is the sort of journalism “that produces change,” said Steiger. It will continue to be done by the Journal, The New York Times, the Washington Post and other major papers, as well as Sixty Minutes and other investigative television news shows, he added, but other papers may not have the resources or will to do this work. That is why he has turned to the philanthropic world to support ProPublica.

Doss asked Alpert how the proliferation of voices and outlets affected the work he once did alone. Alpert has lots of experience in making hard sells. He told of one instance when he lined up the MacArthur Foundation to pay for commercial time to show a report of his on Uganda during the Today Show. The network “got cold feet,” and the show did not air. More recently, he enlisted outside support to pay for a trip to Russia, where he reported on the Putin regime’s crackdown on the independent press. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS aired his piece, but only after getting assurances that Alpert’s funders had no hidden agenda. ProPublica may encounter similar difficulties placing its investigative reports, Alpert said.

More recently, a partnership with the Discovery Channel fell through, and DCTV is still searching for a broadcast partner for a series of national town meetings it wants to hold on the 2008 elections “We have a foreign broadcaster who will put up enough money to actually make it happen, but I want Americans to see this,” said Alpert. He has come to the conclusion that “the only place we have to go is the web. It’s a realization after 35 years that if I continue to knock on the same doors, nobody’s going to open them.” When Alpert added that he was now looking for “the proper web partner,” YouTube’s Grove piped up, “I’ve got a potential partnership for you.”

Asked if YouTube can tell whether the videos uploaded to its site are “true,” Grove said, “We don’t vet content. Our community vets content.” He continued:

“They can rank it, they can discuss it, they can share it, they can embed it, they can blog about it, they can respond to it with videos and everything else. We really have a ‘wisdom-of-crowds’ situation going on where people point to what they think is interesting. SomeTimes that’s news. SomeTimes that’s dogs on skateboards. SomeTimes that’s kids falling off trampolines. But all of that content is on one chaotic sea of video.”

In the political arena, YouTube tries to create opportunities “where both news partners from the world of journalism can display their content and also where citizen journalists can post content and have a chance of being seen and heard, to find their voice and to kind of rise up through the ranks. One who did that was James Kotecki, the Georgetown University student who started posting political video blogs from his dorm room in early 2007. His feeds proved so popular that candidates Ron Paul and Mike Gravel came by to do interviews. Grove said he recently crossed paths in New Hampshire with Kotecki, now a reporter for Politico.com.