Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.

Thank you very much. Yeah. We were sad to see, Passcode move on. But, I I think about it that the lessons we learned there and how to, know our readers deeply and very well live on in all the things we do now at the Monitor. So while our cybersecurity section has passed on,

Yeah. At The Monitor, we've been wrestling with the issues in the media business that almost every media company is struggling with. Right? We are not unique in that way. We have a lot of we have diverse diverse business model. And as we started looking at the future, trying to figure out what can what how are we gonna keep this thing alive for another hundred and eight years? When you look at each of the business lines we were in, none of them were particularly exciting. When you look at digital web advertising, that is a game of scale. And unless you're playing the scale game with people like Google and Facebook, who have eaten up over 90% of the growth of digital advertising in the last few years, that's not very advertising. In my prior life in Passcode, we were selling, sponsorship, you approach a big brand and get them to write you a check directly. So not through those same channels as as as Google is giving you revenue, but that's really hard and really hard to scale. And over time, we imagine that's gonna, become more and more eaten up by the tech giants as well. We have a print weekly magazine. I don't need to tell you that, you know, that's not exactly a growth industry. And so we're looking around and saying, like, so what are like, how are we gonna how is this thing gonna going? Like, where where should we be focused? And we spent a lot of time circling that point of what can the monitor give the world that others can't, and how do we build a sustainable model to support that? And we aligned on two things. One is it's our distinctive voice and our, values and the values we bring to the news every single day, which we can talk more about. Sure. And that we really needed to be obsessed with our readers. We needed to love them. We needed to pay much more attention to them, their needs, their wants, their desires, and build a direct relationship with them. Because as long as we were indirectly, showing them love and attention through or they were indirectly showing us love and attention through advertising, or we we were waiting for a platform like Google or Facebook we were always weak. We were always one step away from our readers and not actually in a in a direct, relationship with them. And so that's how we landed on digital subscription is that we needed a product that could we needed a way to relate to our readers that was direct and that, helped us have a very clear exchange of value with them and we thought could be sustainable, going forward. So that's sort of where we've been is we've been in everything. Okay. We've touched everything in the in the digital media business, and we see see this as the most sustainable and,

Yeah. So subscription is how is it that media talk. Right? So, like, how do what does this mean for readers? Like, why should you care? Why should you come into the monitors orbit? Right. We are gonna love our readers better than anybody else, which means the following thing. We listen to them better. When you write to us, we write back. When you send in questions, comments, concerns, we address them. We put them into our product pipeline. You see those things manifest in our work, in our products, in our services, in our website quickly. We do a lot of testing in putting our products and, changes that we wanna make in front of readers before they become public so that we hear from our readers very directly. We're listening to them deeply and well. That's direct reader contact, but that's also building out your analytics in a way that you can, hear your readers in aggregate because they will tell you some things are important, but you can also see that other things are important by what they actually do on your site or actually what they do when when they're reading your journalism. And so if you talk to them and you listen to them extremely well, Vincent, those are that's sort of the the building blocks of this relationship. And then you need to so now now comes the product side of it. Now you have to have a product that rewards that sort of direct relationship. And so we have an email today, the Monitor Daily. Our product is an email delivered every day, 6PM Boston time Okay. To our readers. And we have we have something that that is a regular touch point with them. Right? We wanna be in your life. We are saying we want to be valuable to you every single day. We wanna hear from you every single day. We wanna be a part of your thinking about the world. And so the value exchange there is you let us into your inbox. Right? You want us to be a part of your existence. We are proving to you a daily value. And for that, you will support us. And that entire sort of leader responsiveness attitude from, insights coming in that go to the editorial team and shape the journalism that we produce that come to the business team and shape sort of how we think about our products and services to the product team with the features within the product. All of those things have to be working together, and that adds up to a an organization that is adept at one principal thing, which is solving reader problems. That's really what we're obsessed with. And the products and services will change. But that obsession with our readers, loving them the best, keeping them with us for keeping them loyal to us for a long period of time is sort of the the nuts and bolts of what we do every day. Okay. Very cool. So I I read an article,

Sure. So you see, so we've spent about eighteen months, training our organization in how to learn from readers. So that took a lot of time in doing two principal things. One is understanding how to test and and iterate and really make that word iterate mean something other than, well, this this edition is not very good, so deal with it, and we'll try to make it better in the future. Really working on building those institutional muscles of putting people from different backgrounds into a room with a problem written in the voice of a user, to go to work on it and see if the solution you come out with. When you show it to users, do they think to your readers? Do they think this solution on a scale of zero to 10, if it did not exist, would they be how disappointed would they be? And if you're not getting eights, nines, and tens for that answer, if you're getting fours, fives, and sixes, you haven't really gotten there yet. And then figuring out, okay, but what is really the pain point? What is really the issue we're trying to solve here? And just attacking that problem over and over and over again. And for us, it was, what is it about reading news online that we like, you really suffer with? Like, what's the challenges? And and they boiled down into a few buckets. One of them was, you know, it has to end. Like, I feel overwhelmed by the news. And so our monitored daily has five items. Right? It it ends. You will open this and it's not telling you congratulations. You owe me the next half an hour of your life. Mhmm. And you owe me the next five minutes. Right? Like, so that it ends. The second one is let me sort of sample before I have to invest myself in the whole story. So even as I'm reading through, you can read what we call the mini, just a short version of each story. It has a beginning, a middle, and end. It's not a teaser. It actually tells you the guts of the story right there in the email. And then if you wanna read more, but you can click the expand button, and it will give you the entire story there in the email. So you don't have to go away to another link. You don't have to have a million tabs open on your browser, which is something I certainly suffer from. That's a great thing. Email. So self contained. And the third is, where let me consume it how I want it. So that's we we think email is is the best of those mediums because it goes wherever you are. It adapts to many different screenings. You can read it on almost anything. And so if you that process brought us to a few key there are a few more, but a few key insights around what we needed to do for readers to solve the problem for them of some of some of their major problems around how to read news online. The question about 6PM is interesting because for for two reasons. One is, obviously, it is nontraditional. Lots of news organizations have decided they want to win the morning. And if you look at consumption patterns, especially on mobile, they pop up in the morning, they decline over the course of the day, and they pop up again at night. And so we see ourselves as claiming or getting in that space of mobile usage and and people returning to their devices in the evening. So you could see it as almost more competing with the evening news or, other podcasts or things you might wanna consume, after work, as much as it is a morning product. But the beauty of it is is that that stuff doesn't go stale from 6PM until 6AM. You know, the vast majority of the digest that are produced at, you know, in the morning are reported the day prior or end of the day prior. So if you wanna read it at 6AM, you may. You know, there's not we don't the the thing doesn't self destruct at 05:59AM or something. You know, it's still there for you in the morning, but we're in another daytime, part of part of the day where readers also show that they're active on mobile particularly. So that's sort of how that fits together. That's what we learned. You look at the reader behavior. You say, hey, would this how do we solve this problem? And then you could find some novel solutions around the edges to get it in front of people in in clever, rethink ways. Very cool. No. It sounds clever to me, and I must say that I I have tried to change my reading habits and not read as much in the morning because I feel as though I just don't need my my heart level to be, you know,

So this is sort of the core animating strategic concept of how we think about our business. The core concept of our whole business is loving our readers better and more every single day. Right? The way this fits into the broader media ecosystem is there are two economies active right now on the Internet. There's the information economy. And if you think about the information economy, think about, could I plug a USB into my head in the morning and download all the data I need to live my life? Right? That is traffic, weather, stock prices, facts, you know, who did Donald Trump meet with this week? What happened in Congress yesterday? You know, what happened in some far flung country that I care about? Like, that is information. And there are certain companies and in the media space that are excellent at giving you information. And that's what people think about when they say, I just want the facts. Right? You just want the facts. What happened? Alternative facts, but the facts. Right. Not the alternative facts. Not the you know, you know, I just We won't go there. What is actually right. What is actually happening in the world? Right? There are people it's just to say, like, I want not any editorializing. I just wanna know what happened. Right. That is actually that that is a very specific business. That is a very specific need that lots of news organizations fill. The Associated Press is excellent at the information economy. Right? They are super good at that. Bloomberg, amazing at that. All the other apps on your phone that are telling you all those various bits of information about your life, excellent at that. That adds up to the information economy. Facebook and Google, excellent at the information economy. Right? Facebook is telling you what your friends are doing, information that you need, and then you go from there to say whether that's good or bad. Google, very, very good at serving ads to you about products and services that you're going to want because of the information it knows about you and the things you need to buy. Right? Yeah. Information economy. Everything else beyond that, the the people that want to help you understand the world given based on your values and based on how you want the world to be is the trust economy. We are the we are your advisers. We are the people that say, this is how you might see the world. Let us help you see the world how we see it. And that will hopefully make you, as I've said before, more thoughtful, less neurotic, more calm, and seeing the world as one new progress. That's what the Christian Science Monitor's contribution to the trust economies. But you have to trust us. Us. Sure. You have to believe that I'm allowed to give you advice about what's going on in the world. And so that's what every other news organization and every other news organization is that's not in the information economy. We are in the trust economy, thinking about, am I a trusted partner for you and making sense of everything that goes on in all that information? And for us, that's about building that one to one relationship. Right? You have to think that the monitor has your back. That we are paying attention to the world, and we want to tell you not just what's true, but what's right. And that there are situations that we need to raise to you that you will not believe our rights, actually, that conflict with your bias, that conflict with where you come from. But because you trust us, you let us lay out another way of seeing the world, then that makes your life richer and better for being in a relationship with us. And that is fundamentally the value we think about every single day. But it it is in the space of trust and not in the space of information.

Christine George, love of my life. Yes. By the time you listen to this,

Thank you, Brian. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk. Take care. Take care.

So this is the first time that Congress is looking at section seven zero two since 2012. And since then, Edward Snowden released a lot of information about how these programs are used and in many ways raised more questions than answers. So we know that the program is broader than we ever thought. Right? We were told that there were select terrorists outside of the country that the government wanted to target, and we would just pick up the emails and phone calls to and from those we know now that there are over a 100,000 targets, and that they regularly pick up communications when American is on one end. We've also found that there are problems with the way the technology works. That means that they that they accidentally pick up communications where there's no terrorist at all. Purely domestic, Americans talking to Americans, and they're pulling down really sensitive information. It could be things like photographs or medical documents, and some of the peaks we've seen behind the curtain with these new documents show that, regular Americans are getting caught in this dragnet. So we wanna see, number one, is this really only about terrorists? The law is very broad on its face. It allows the government to collect information about the foreign affairs of The United States or the national defense of The United States, and that's incredibly broad. And we're worried that that is going to pick up activists, journalists, international business people, and we need to better understand, how often that happens. We also need to know more about what they collect. They often tell us it's about email and phone calls, but there's now so much information on the Internet. We need to know if they're tracking what websites people visit, chat rooms or other things that are incredibly, personal and reflect our behaviors. And we need to understand how they use the information. That's one thing that has been really hidden from public discussion. It's not clear to us if this stuff ends up in databases that is used for criminal investigations and prosecutions. Hopefully, after all these questions are answered, we will see a serious reform effort. There is a chance it could sunset if congress does not pass a new law, but there's seven months left before that happens, and there's plenty of time for congress to pass legislation that would build in better privacy protections and allow the core function of the program to continue.

That's right. They take time off to go back to their districts. They're really only in town maybe another three or four months this year. And it's complicated to get into the details of this really arcane law and draft meaningful reforms. And that is really done on the house and senate individually, and time has has to be spent trying to bring them together for a final product. We do have a lot of questions from the hill, from members who are very concerned about Americans' privacy. And so so there is sincere interest in building in better privacy protections both to scope down what the government is collecting and putting better back end protections on what they do get to make sure there's no abuse. This is a warrantless program. There's no judge making individual decisions at any point to make sure that this is being used properly. So that means we need just the tightest oversight and use limitations at all possible. There have been a couple of votes over the last few years in the house, specifically on this idea about how you access American information that ends up in the database. And there has been overwhelming support in the house by both Democrats and Republicans to put a judge in between the intelligence agencies and Americans' information. And so that is a good sign that we are likely to be able to pass a good bill if we can get everybody working together and talking about substantively how do we change this law.

So the president hasn't spoken specifically about seven zero two of FISA. There have been some communications

from the administration that they would like a clean

reauthorization, and they do not wanna consider privacy amendments. However, the president has been tweeting about personal privacy and concerns that people in his administration have been subjected to surveillance. And that is an ongoing congressional investigation, because it was part of the investigation into Russia's interference in the election. So we'll probably get more information on that. But what seems to have happened is that, there were legitimate wiretaps on foreign actors like the Russian ambassador and, people who came in contact with him were picked up in the meantime. And there are rules for how to deal with that information. There's actually a broader question here that, president Trump hasn't act yet, and that is whether his associates were picked up in 07/2002, the warrantless program. So it's actually possible that, there's information about the Trump campaign in there, and, it's something he should look into.

So it it will be both. We do wanna scope the collection of what they're getting on the front end. We want to make sure this is truly targeted at terrorists, spies, people working for foreign governments, and that would ensure that foreigners who just do business with The United States perfectly lawfully do not get swept in just because they have something to do with the so called foreign affairs of The United States. That's incredibly broad. So that would be the to the benefit of people overseas. To the extent we want something specifically for Americans, that's often when we talk about these back end protections. So once it's collected and put into databases that the FBI or the NSA NSA can access, that there'd be a serious procedural hurdle before they're able to put a American's name or phone number or email into the database and see what they get back. Right now, the rules are incredibly lax and, very explicit. If the FBI finds evidence of a crime, even if it's wholly unrelated to terrorism, they can use it and seek a prosecution. So we really need to make sure there is a judge in between the government and our data to make sure that, it is being accessed only in the strictest of circumstances.

So I think reform is possible. The public facing documents that the government has released have a few cases where they say it was used. But that's not the full question, not whether it is catching terrorists sometimes. It's can we catch the same guys by doing something less intrusive? Can we still target the bad guys with less of the collateral damage on innocent everyday people who might just come into contact with them or because of the way the technology works have literally nothing to do with terrorism or foreign affairs at all, but end up in that dragnet. So there's a way to balance this. And the proposals that CDT has put forth and some of the other advocacy groups don't fundamentally change the core program. Right? Back in the mid two thousands, we were told they did not want individualized probable cause warrants for people overseas. We're not proposing going back to that method. We are saying, though, really focus on terrorists. Don't use it in criminal investigations for the most part. And if you wanna go trolling through the data looking for Americans, you have to go to a judge. That's reasonable. There is definitely an audience for this on the hill, and, we're definitely optimistic that we are gonna get there before the 2017.