Grove said eight hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and hundreds of millions of videos are viewed each day. Grove added that some news organizations “use YouTube as a feedback system.” Reuters and Dow Jones both have their own YouTube channels. “They look at how people are responding to what they put up and they sort of adapt,” Grove said. “It’s like your own kind of polling system.”

	Questions from the Audience

Doss turned the conversation briefly to the polling debacle in New Hampshire where “we all blew it by predicting the wrong winner.” He asked Grove for his insights. Grove said, “I actually talked to somebody right outside a polling booth before she went in. I said, ‘Who is it? What are you going to do?’ She said, ‘I don’t know. I’m an independent. It’s between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.’” Grove smacked his head in frustration and added, “New Hampshire is a tough one to call” (The young woman came out and said she settled on Romney.)

Doss asked Putzel about how Current TV was doing financially.

“We’re profitable. In fact, we’re the fastest growing cable network in the world and in history. We were expecting to turn a profit, hopefully, in five years. We were profitable in one year,” the Current correspondent replied. “And we pay our contributors.” He told the journalism professors, “Your journalism students can have an outlet now and we will pay them cash” on a scale ranging from $500 to $2,000 for a four-minute piece. “We’re finding new ways to connect with our audience,” said Putzel.

Putzel, who confessed he didn’t read newspapers growing up, said he and his colleagues aspire to tell the “compelling stories” and pursue the type of investigations of which Steiger is such a master. He expressed confidence that those skills would “trickle down in some way” to a younger generation that communicates visually, not in print. “There’s always going to be a market for good stuff,” Putzel said.

Steiger welcomed the tribute and the suggestion that new journalists would find ways to carry on the tradition of in-depth reporting. “I respond to that very powerfully, because we’re coming from the other side,” said Steiger.” At ProPublica, he continued, “we need to find a way to use the best of the old ways of getting the information and the best of the new ways of communicating it.” He said he was “just blown away” by a recent demonstration that a young woman in the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau gave about how to plumb Facebook and Google to penetrate the ranks of big corporations. Given a company’s name, in short order she found 20 contacts (“a friend of a friend of a friend of hers”) who used to work there, Steiger marveled. “We need to bring those strands together—your ways of communicating, our ways of getting the information.”

Doss asked if the broadcast journalists no longer had to worry about reports that might offend corporate sponsors.

Alpert said his biggest worry these days is about paying experienced documentary filmmakers what they deserve. “Current and YouTube are very, very wonderful opportunities when you’re getting started, but if you’re trying to support a family or buy an apartment in New York City,” you’re going to need some other means of support. He explained the predicament:

“I’ve got four or five people that we’ve invested 10 years in training in how to do investigative documentaries, and it’s brutal trying to keep these people fed. Their skill set is such that they deserve to be rewarded, but there really isn’t the income from these things and a lot of these models don’t provide it. We’re really looking to see what the next metamorphosis is going to be. Is there going to be a higher level of support and an interest in something that is more highly curated and rewarded for the people that are making it? We don’t know the answer. This is the brave new world out there.”

Doss said CNN, like all the networks, is concerned primarily about ratings. Ads are sold across platforms, so advertisers cannot buy a spot solely on Anderson Cooper 360°. They also are charged for the ad to run on CNN’s web pages and other platforms. Doss, who has spent 30 years in broadcast journalism, said it is not uncommon to find that “five Times as many people read about it online as actually saw the program.” And that “is a good thing. Sponsors are happy that way.”

Doss asked Grove if YouTube might ever move in the direction of allowing “the—dare I say it—editing of citizen reporting?” Grove replied, “‘Editor’ is almost seen as a dirty word around YouTube, believe it or not,” he said. “YouTube is a platform. We see opportunities like debates, partnerships with mainstream media organizations as chances to amplify what’s taking place on YouTube and to help give our users more exposure and more access. That was really why I really wanted to do the debate. We thought this is a great way to give people from all over the country, all over the world, in fact, access to the next leader of the free world through video.” He said YouTube regarded this as “more of a public service” than an opportunity to generate revenues.

Christof Putzel, Paul Steiger, David Doss

Steiger questioned how YouTube polices content. “You’ll put up anything and then if it gets negative feedback that’s really serious, you’ll take it down or just not do it again?” he asked. Grove said, “The way YouTube works is our community polices our content. If offensive content is uploaded, users flag it. The longest anything lasts is about two minutes.” A YouTube team watches the flagged video and decides whether to yank it or let it continue to be viewed. “It’s an amazing system,” said Grove.

“So somebody could upload a snuff film and it would stay there for two minutes?” Steiger asked.
“If even,” Grove replied.

Doss opened the discussion up to the audience.

George Sylvie, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Communication, asked the two young journalists how their organizations define news. “At YouTube it sounds like viewers determine news. But what about those human beings behind the scenes?” he asked.

YouTube lets “people define it as they want,” said Grove. They come to YouTube knowing that they are not going “to get straight news all the time.” Putzel said that Current TV has had to grapple with this question since “a third of the content we have on the air is created by our viewers. We created two distinct brands. One is called VC2—VC squared—that is our viewer-created content. Another is called CJ, which is Collaborative Journalism. We try to make a distinction between the two.” Some are mini-documentaries about non-news topics, but others are real news, like the reports filed by a team of five CJs that Current deployed to cover the primaries. “We’ve got guys overseas finding themselves in the middle of war zones, coming back and getting the information to us very quickly so we can get it on the air,” he said.

Sylvie asked if the young journalists would advise the professors at the summit to consider “maybe teaching the definition of news differently, since you’re more plugged into the age level of people that we’re dealing with every day.”

Not at all, Putzel responded. He acknowledged that as things are changing so fast, “some of the older generation is, uh, a little not so cool with this.” Some journalistic elders are appalled at this trend to democratize the media. But he offered this advice to the academics at the summit:

“It’s probably the most important time in history to be a journalism professor because what students really need is that solid background that you have and those things you value. That’s not changed. The ethics haven’t changed or they shouldn’t change; the need for balance doesn’t change. All that’s going to be changing is the way news is being communicated and the way it’s coming out. The way that you have defined news and that made you want to be a journalist and teach journalism, that should all stay the same.”

Brad Flora, a graduate student and News21 Fellow at Northwestern, said he had considered uploading his stories to YouTube, “but I’ve been really worried about creator’s rights. Does Google own that if I put it up there?” He also asked if YouTube was taking steps to keep marketing companies from subverting its rankings. Grove assured him, “You own your own content. We are not a download service, we are an upload service.” He also said that YouTube has smart engineers keeping a careful watch for attempts to game the system.

Ryan Thornburg, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication, asked if YouTube has “people that look at your content for the accuracy of statements made.”

Grove said, “We don’t for a couple of reasons. That’s not really the philosophy of YouTube. We aren’t in the business of making determinations of truth. We let the YouTube community say what they think is truth.” As an example of how this works in politics, Grove said that the campaign of then-Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney posted its own video in response to one that aired footage from Romney’s 1994 debate with Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) that highlighted how his positions have changed on abortion, gay rights and other issues. Grove called that “a great moment in evolution of what we call YouTube politics—figuring out how to make sure your message is in the flow with everyone else’s. The Romney campaign [was] actually tremendous about this.” [Note: As of this writing, the attack ad on “The Real Romney” had been viewed 315,000 Times; the Romney response had drawn 33,000 views.]