a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Reinventing Media

Episode Date: September 17, 2014

Software, and the billions of transistors that power it, has brought about massive change to all kinds of industries, but none more so than the news business. Today, distribution doesn’t come from the back of trucks, but from Facebook, Twitter and all across the social web. Relationships with readers and viewers have become a two-way conversation. It’s not news that the traditional business model of news has come under extreme pressure, but there is growing evidence that the reach of media outlets -- and in many ways the opportunity -- has never been greater. In today’s unending news cycle, the latest story, video or graphic is only a tap away from a potential audience of billions around the world. Andreessen Horowitz’s Margit Wennmachers leads a conversation about the road ahead for good journalism and the business of news with Claire Cain Miller from the New York Times, Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic, and CNET’s Connie Guglielmo.

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Margaret Venmachos. I'm a partner here at the firm. And today we're going to talk about media. I'm joined by three outstanding professionals, Claire Kane Miller with The New York Times, which incidentally was founded in 1851, Alexis Madrigal with the Atlantic, which was founded in 1857, and Connie Gulliamo with CNET, which was founded in 1994, which in these days is almost prehistoric. Welcome all. You're all part of reinventing long-lived publications and media outlets. What does the change mean to each of you? Alexis, why don't we start with you?

Well, I think what's been really fun and exciting is that we're the group of editors who've had to do something that, you know, the previous 150 years worth of editors didn't have to do, which was understand the disruption of the internet and understand the successive waves of disruption that have come to us. And I think, you know, in any given six-month period, you could say, well, what does it mean to you? And I would have to say, well, it means this. Facebook right now has eaten the Internet.

That's what it means right now. And so how does the Atlantic play what is like the best possible interpretation of the Atlantic that works within the constraints of the current ecosystem? And speaking of ever-changing, Connie, you just became editor-in-chief at CINET. Congratulations. CINET was sort of the first. instantiation of a new media property and did really well, and yet I think you joined to help reinvent it. So what should we look for at CNET? So you're right. CNET was one of the first or

earliest online news organizations that was completely online, and it's gone through a very interesting evolution. Partly because of what Alexis said, media has changed so much over the past 25, 30 years, if you will, really since the start of the PC revolution, I think, with desktop publishing changing a lot of things. CNAID has had to embrace a lot of these new technologies first and before a lot of the print publications. And so they have worked to expand their expertise before there was even expertise available to find it. So moving into online broadcast quality video before that now is a staple online but a lot of people don't remember how early that was figuring out how to tell stories to an online audience it's different you

don't have the luxury of someone sitting down looking at your beautiful pictures flipping pages popping back and forth it's it's a different way of talking to people and so you have to grab them at the outset you have to give them the information in digestible bits for the most part. That's not to say there's no long form online. There absolutely is, but that has been a transition that has been coming. I think in the more recent years, as people have said, okay, I've gotten the quick sound bites. How do I get a fuller story online if print magazines are going away or shrinking? And so my role at CNET, I've been there now just four months or so, is to look at the kind of journalism that we're doing, the way that we're telling stories. We are

investing in long-form journalism again, which is something I don't think a lot of people associate with CNET. And so that's an exciting thing for people to realize that there is readership that people want to get all kinds of information in a variety of different ways. And yes, tech can bring that to you. But some of the things they want are the old things like long-form pieces. Right. And Claire, you know, the New York Times has been around for a while, as I mentioned, but then you launched and helped launch upshot this year. So, Tell us what upshot is and how it works in the context of the paper. It's a new section of the Times that is a standalone section online,

and it runs throughout the paper in different places. So that's something new before. If you were a business reporter, you wrote business stories that ran in Business Day. And this is an acknowledgement that a lot of these stories apply throughout the paper. But it's mostly online, and it takes a different voice. It's more analytical. It's more like the news columnists, not the op-ed columnists who are expressing opinions, but the news columnists who are doing reported pieces,

but they actually take a point of view based on their reporting and their analysis. And it's also a little bit more interdisciplinary, so I'm still covering tech like I had been, but really more like the intersection of tech and economics and the intersection of tech and work and the way that we live and work. And I think it's an acknowledgement, the upshot is an acknowledgement overall that people are looking for something new. The A1, the page one of the New York Times served a purpose for a long time, which is this is what happened today. Here's what one side thinks, here's what the other side thinks, and that's the news.

And people aren't looking for that kind of news anymore. That kind of news is almost a commodity. You know pretty quickly what happened, and people are looking for analysis of that news and deeper reporting. and it doesn't just mean a quick blog post that someone who happens to have an opinion shoots off. It still benefits from writers who have done a ton of reporting and are really steeped in the subject and know what they're talking about, but I think that readers want more analytical takes and a little bit more point of view in the reporting. Can I just add a tiny bit to that?

I think one of the fascinating things is how the distribution and our knowledge of that distribution, that distribution through analytics tools has driven some of these changes because what people have realized is that no one wants to share just like the straight news thing. They want to share that what used to be called like a second day story, but now is more like a second hour story or like a fifth hour story. That's an analysis of that news item that also speaks to their sort of identity. And what we have looked into within our analytics, this sort of what I've called dark social, and which increasingly is basically people coming out of mobile apps, largely Facebook, and coming to the Atlantic, and we don't know where they're coming

from. And so we've been able to sort of back into a bunch of different types of experiments and seeing natural experiments that are running, and find that basically Facebook is sending more traffic to us than the entire rest of the internet that we can see combined. Go Facebook. So all of the blogs, all of the media sites that link to us, all that stuff together. what it means that more than Twitter oh an order of magnitude um and so what that means for us is that for a story to succeed we need the people of facebook to distribute it for us right we don't have right

we don't online we don't have trucks that can make they can deliver it to people and therein lies the cracks right and so that's really what a lot of what we're talking about here is like how do you make things shareable in this way while still maintaining rigor while still maintaining journalism integrity while still like delivering on the brand promise of the Atlantic or, you know, the Times are seen it. Right. There's also a slew of new outlets that have come online, 538, Vox, you know, there's all kinds of property.

And they sort of seem to take a stance that it's less about beats. It's more about a method of doing journalism. So do you guys agree? And like, is the beat dead? I think the upshot is the closest competitor to those because, as everyone knows, we started it after Nate Silver left the New York Times to start 538, and it was an answer to what Nate Silver did at the Times, but taking it in a new and different direction as well. We look at it differently, though. The idea is that data is a tool, and it's a reporting tool, and sometimes it helps a story, and if it doesn't help a story, then we don't include it. then that's not the emphasis.

And I think 538 would probably take a different approach, which is that really data drives all of their reporting. And I think Vox, as these three were seen as competitors, and I think that in the three to six months since they've all been live, we've seen them take really different directions. I think that BEATs are still very important, if only because in order to do the kind of analysis that we're all talking about,

that people value, you really need to be steeped in a topic. It's hard to swoop in unless you have, you know, unless you write for the New Yorker and you can swoop in for two months. And that's basically getting steeped in the topic the same way that a beat reporter does. Right. And you don't have sources really if you're not covering an industry for an extended period of time. Exactly. Yeah, I just want to reinforce what Claire said. If you're expected to turn around a story in two hours, a story that in the past, the second day story or the third day story, but now people want those in two hours, if you don't have someone who already understands the so what, yes, you can get the who, what, where, why, immediately on Twitter and 140 characters or

less, but to have someone who understands the so what, that has value to me, to everyone, to you, to your readers. And the only way you're going to get that, so what, is to have someone who actually understands immediately what the news means, not what it is. but what it means and what the effect is. And so there are many different ways you can present news. Data is a great way to do it. My background at Bloomberg was all about finding data sources to tell news. Antiquotes and color are beautiful ways to tell stories.

That's why magazines, New Yorker thrives. People don't always just want chocolate. Sometimes they want vanilla. Sometimes they want Rocky Road. And so this idea that... French fries for me. French rise. And so this idea that journalism or stories have to be one thing,

and that's going to rule the day is kind of ridiculous. I wear on a chain all the time this typewriter key from a 1930s Remington. It reminds me that people used to write stories on typewriters. I mean, Shakespeare wrote them on parchment with ink. Technology is a means to an end, and the end for journalists is to tell a great story, to communicate something that someone didn't know

and tell them in a compelling way where you are fascinated or you learn something new. So technology is the means. It's not the end. It's interesting that you say that because, you know, there's this pitch that's floating around there where, you know, like, oh, it was clear to me that I need to go there because they have the tools. Nobody set that about the printing presses, right?

Like the Washington Post, they have the best one. So that's where I'm going to go work. But that said, how have the tools changed? Like what tools you use now that you love, what is missing that help you do your job more easily on the back end, that we're. we don't see as consumers. The only other thing I would add about that is that the typesetters, though, who worked at those places were quite, in some cases, well-known.

They were almost like fighter pilots and there were like races of typesetting. That must have been an advantage because you could get the paper out faster. So maybe that was Vox's chorus, but the 1880s edition. You know, tool-wise, I think the, you know, and I feel bad that I'm talking mostly about distribution and not really about journalism here, but I think it's, it's interesting. Interesting. I think just a lot of the things that have changed are, you know, the analytics and the tools that we use for distribution, whether that's, you know, I mean, basically it's coming down to Facebook as I've been saying, but also Twitter and these other things and people doing interesting experiments on Pinterest or whatever it is that they're trying to do. In terms of the actual tools, though, I don't think that much has changed except for the really easy availability and access and comfort that, lots of people have doing like light data analysis. Like, you know, I think it would be surprising to people of the 1970s how many people

can just like pull down a spreadsheet from the Department of Energy and like make some stuff out of it. And I just know so many reporters who can just, they don't even, they don't even think about that as something different, you know. They don't think of that. Or who can make a video or who can make a podcast. It's not even they don't think of it. I'm a multimedia journalist.

They're just like, this is what my job is, you know? And so it's just been naturalized. you know, in the course of, you know, five years or 10 years. But the job has expanded pretty dramatically, right? Like there's a, you have to have a Twitter footprint and a Facebook footprint, and you have to probably go do some speaking and all of that. And you probably could have gotten away without doing any of those activities a couple of decades ago, right? Yeah, I mean, I also just think having to think at all about distribution is a new thing.

Church and stay. You know, and I don't even think everybody is necessarily excited about that. I mean, I find it personally interesting, but I think that it's a dangerous thing to bring into contact with journalists of certain types. But I have to say, I mean, you can go to a cocktail party and ask anybody who has any job, you know, administrative assistant to a salesperson to whatever. And you can ask me, like, how does a company make money? And somehow you couldn't ask a journalist, like, okay, how do you guys make money? There was such a sort of disdain. And that's just normal business.

And I, for one, think it's kind of healthy to go like, all right, like, what stories work and how. The question is, like, what are the traps that are associated with that? Yeah, even from when I started at the Times, clearly there remains very much a church-state scenario, but we're thinking more about distribution. So for a long time, it was we didn't even see what was most popular. There's that little most emailed list on the side of the Times where you can see the most emailed,

but that means that they used that box to email, so it's not actually even that accurate. And other than that, we really didn't see what was most popular, what was most read at all. And the idea is that if a bomb killed six people in Baghdad and not that many people read the news story, are we not supposed to be covering that? Of course not.

It's still really important to cover that, so we shouldn't be determining what we cover based on what people are reading. And while that's still very much true, it's changed in that we're really aware now. Right before I left here, I got a note from someone at the Times telling me that one of my stories was doing remarkably well on Facebook

and had generated this huge debate on Facebook way more reader comments than on the Times and did I want to go and weigh in? And that's the kind of thing, just to be aware of, oh, well, we touched a nerve in this audience that we weren't even hearing about that stuff a few years ago. The last thing that I'll say about this

is just that, you know, that the attitude that you, what was popular was sort of like popular because of innate characteristics of the story is the thing I think that has really changed. I mean, even just, In an example from this past week, we had a story about tattoos and how tattoos work within your body.

It's like a health story. And we sold it once on Facebook, I think on Wednesday, and kind of nothing happened. You know, maybe we're talking a few thousand unique visitors to the site. Sold it a different way on Saturday at a different time. Maybe it's an algorithmic thing. It ended up a million people ended up reading that story over the next three days.

So when you say you sold it a different way? I mean, on Facebook, there was a different cell. I mean, through the Atlantic brand page. You know, it's hard. You know, you can't really distill the rules that easily. I think it's an art like everything else. It's a genre of writing that's very weird and very specific, but the benefits of it to individual stories

and to brands of the whole are really clear. It's called spin. Yeah, I mean, you're good. I just love that I got you to say that. That's amazing. But, I mean, that's an amazing. I mean, we're talking, you know, whatever that is, a 500x difference.

And same story, sold it twice on time. Everything is the same, except for, like, you know, 75 words at the top of the thing, right? Even headlines, I think a lot of publications now have a print headline and a web headline. And the print headline is the old school thing where people make fun of New York Times headlines because it is a certain style that might not really tell you exactly what's in the story. Sometimes they're puzzles, I have to say. On the podcast, Claire makes fun of headlines. And a web headline has to be something very different.

I think, though, the point that you're making, Lexus, is that because of technology and because of all these new ways of distribution, news has to be sold, which in the past it wasn't. People had magazines, they had publications, readers came to a brand. Who decided what news was and what you were going to read, and so you chose to affiliate yourself with a certain publication because that was who you were or how you wanted to identify yourself. And with all of the millions of stories that are generated each week, I don't know.

I'm sure they're in the millions. You have to rise above the noise. And so that is what's changed, I think, most dramatically. Headline is probably the most obvious way to resell or repackage or promote your story. And that's why people experiment with headlines all the times. I mean, we all know upworthy, what does 25 different versions of their headlines until it goes viral or however many it takes because that is what they are excelling in. They're producing news. They're not creating it.

They're figuring out how to produce and sell it. They're packaging it, essentially, right? Right. So how do you then withstand the pressure? There's sort of race to the bottom. I'll write one more Apple story, right? Because I'm guaranteed that much traffic and whatnot. And still stand for a respected news outlet that gives you the so what that has a point of view that can be trusted,

which is really the way to rise to the top over the long term. And then also that allows you to attract the right kinds of advertisers and rates and all that kind of stuff. How do you think about that? Yeah, I think it's, I mean, I've just started this new job, and one of the things that I asked before I came in is how do you view the journalism here? What are the metrics for how you define success? You know, I worked at Bloomberg and Forbes,

page views and reader numbers were a very key metric, but that's not the only metric. Influence people talking about it, sharing it, causing a company to do something because of your story. These are all ways that you measure the influence. of a story. And so that's very important to me. Would I love to have every story read by a million viewers? Absolutely. I mean, who wouldn't want that? But I'm also realistic that if a story is only read by a couple of hundred people or a thousand people and it changes something,

or it's read by the 1,000 people that have influence in that sphere, that's important too. I don't think a lot of news organizations, though, think about it in those ways because they're dealing with the pressures of selling advertising and making their revenue numbers. But I hope, and I do think that the outgrowth of some of these metrics will be that people start to rethink what are our measurements for success. They do not have to be one note, just like stories don't have to be one note. Exactly. So let's talk a little bit about tech.

You all have covered and are covering technology subject for the most part. How has that changed? How is that, you know, for each of your outlets, well seen at, being an exception? Like, has it risen in terms of, like, how important it is to the publication? Has the audience changed? Like, what are the changes? I think it's risen for everybody lately. There's all these new publications. There's startups that are tech, you know, tech journalism startups. That was not happening for a lot of years. It seems to be a huge topic again. I think one of the reasons, obviously it's because the

tech industry is doing very well. And when it doesn't do well, it's less important. But I think this time is a little bit different. I think that technology has so permeated all of our lives now that even if the tech industry starts to not do so well or VC funding goes down, we're all still going to have this iPhone in our pocket all the time. And it's really permeated our lives

so people have an interest in it that extends far beyond business coverage or really geeky coverage to more sociological and cultural coverage. So I think that's a big thing. I also think these companies that for a while were these little startups that were doing funny things out here and you could bring your dogs to work are now these huge monopolies in many cases with a ton of power. They all have these huge lobbying arms in Washington and they have, they really control a lot of our lives and or have influence, I should say, over big parts of our lives and over the economy. And so it has become a much bigger business story as well as a political one. I just think the mood is so much darker than it was five years ago around technology. I mean, you know, if you look at the rise of a place like Mashable,

it was basically all around like every single time. There's a new tweet record. There's a record number of Twitter users. There's a record number of Facebook users. The entire story of Mashable's rise was just these kind of like celebrations of the rise of social media. And then it got here and everyone's like, shit, this sucks. Like this isn't what I meant for, you know. And I think that has been.

Ben, generally speaking, the mood out there, you can't just write a celebratory story like that and have anyone want to read it. Like, no one wants to hear that. And so I think, you know, certainly the Snowden stuff, certainly like, yeah, I mean, just Facebook and Google essentially having hegemonic control over mobile advertising, which is where everyone sees things going. There are just a number of things where, like, both media companies and, I think, readers at large feel like a darker moods.

On the other hand, I think that there's a new kind of story that we've been doing a lot of or kind of under this rubric of kind of adventures with technology that are basically just like technology integrated in people's lives and they tell like a story in which the technology plays a role. And that kind of story would have been like totally weird to have, you know, what are kind of pure play human interest stories that revolve around a piece of technology. used to be a sector that was its own island. And now it's sort of

everywhere and pervasive and I think that's changing. Now let me ask you a question about the companies, the tech companies themselves. Do you think they're doing a good job keeping up with the changes in terms of like how to tell their stories to a broader audience? Because they're not necessarily

talking to other geeks, but they're talking to the world at large and talking to CNET may not be good enough to explain yourself. Feel free to be specific. Yeah, that's a complicated question, actually. I mean, companies do have various ways of telling their stories. And, you know, I started writing about tech a long time ago, more than 20 years ago,

which dates me, and I wrote for the first issue of Wired. And people were talking about how tech was changing things, right? Changing industries, and you could really see it. Instead of taking a box of equipment, you could take a camera to cover the war in Iraq. And so there was a lot of excitement and a lot of buzz about how things were changing. And I think people were able to tell a story then that was easier for people to understand because technology had played a predictable role in making something easier, more efficient, less expensive. With the technologies that we have now, they're solving all kinds of problems,

and some of them are problems that we don't even know that we need to solve. But the technology enables it for you to do it, and then you can get a startup going, and some BC will back it, and I've got a million Twitter followers now. So I think that, you know, just to play off that dark mood in Silicon Valley a little bit, just because you can do something with technology doesn't mean that you have a business or that people want to buy it. And so there is a lot of excitement around the tech, look at what I can do and how I can put these pieces together, right?

And I've got an app. But I don't know that companies, that every company has assessed whether that app is, worthwhile? What kind of a problem are we solving? I mean, I make this joke that Facebook has some of the smartest people on the planet working day and night to figure out how to serve me a better ad that I don't want. So that's a lot of brain power working on a problem that I don't necessarily see has an end game. That's not to say Facebook doesn't have utilitarian use and that people don't love it and it does some things. But that's a lot of smart people working on how to serve you a better ad. Is that really what you want all those smart people working on?

Got it. Got it. I think the companies, for the reasons I was saying before, that they have become such bigger players in our lives and in business and regulation and all of that, I think that they, I'm talking about the big companies here, like the Googles and Apple's and Facebooks. I think they've gotten a little bit scared

and have really sort of hunkered down. I feel like they've become extremely controlling, just in the past, a change even in the past five years about what story they tell and what message they're getting out. And you're the professional in this market, so you probably know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. But I get to ask the questions today. Well, for us, it is a very challenging thing

because they've become a lot more controlling. And on the one hand, I see that if you are a big company like Johnson and Johnson, there are not that many stories written about you every year. If you're a big company like Google, I was on the Google beat for the past five years, there could be four news stories a week. Every little thing that they did, every little thing that happened to them from a regulator, from a privacy advocate, whoever it is,

that's a news story now. And they're really under the microscope. So I see why they have taken this controlling stance, but it can be frustrating for reporters. The most interesting change seems to be a lot of them just do things on their own blogs and their own media sphere. I was waiting for that answer. Yes.

How do you feel about that? I'm, I mean, I'm interested. I mean, I wish I could get better access to lots of them, but on the other hand, like, I'm not going to cover that many things, you know, and I feel if I put myself in the shoes of any company, I mean, we're doing a podcast, here we are, venture capital firm, you know, right? It makes a lot of sense, and I think a lot of these companies can actually have a better sense of who they're trying to reach,

and so they don't have to, like, go, they don't have to lens through a reporter who's going to try and mass market it, right? Instead, they're just going to go, all right, there's basically 250 people who need to know about this. I'm going to put it on my blog. I'm going to tweet it, and those 250 people are going to find out about it.

And I actually, you know, if you step back from being a journalist or a media person, you think about an information ecosystem, like, that's actually okay. You know, let those people connect on the periphery and then we can focus on, you know, these are the types of stories. Yeah, no, I agree.

I mean, I'm usually in favor of, I think, a company or a firm or whoever is always better off explaining themselves, but then not everything that you actually need to explain to your users might meet the bar for someone to write about. So I think both channels are important, and I think companies and consumers and media should use all of those channels very effectively.

And I think actually that is something that is working. So companies, as much as they may want to exert control, there are lots of people on Twitter, on Facebook, and, you know, everywhere who can make their voices heard. And I actually think that's a great, you know, it's a great dose of sunshine that works well. So on the kind of how to part a little bit, I do want you all to talk a bit about what, how do you think about a story? You know, if someone's listening saying like, well, I'd love to tell the Atlantic about my startup. You know, you're probably not going to write down like, oh, here's what the startup does and here are the seven features.

But how do you think about what makes a great story? I just like when there's sort of an idea inside of it you know like there was a this is a tiny little thing that Google did recently that I that I found kind of interesting you know they started sending people instead of just they started sending people little stories that they had auto generated out of the photos that they backed up on Google Plus and and it's a little thing and like not that many people wanted to write about it but I kind of found it fascinating because it gets this idea of like how do you train Google to

understand the human world in ways that make it more helpful. And, you know, there's Google now, which many, many people have written about, but this is actually almost like more interesting to me at some level. It's sort of like the long-form Google, you know, auto story. Like, how do you actually get to that? And so I think a lot of what I want to hear from startups and the way that I end up working is just going like, you know, like Connie was saying earlier, so what? The idea that's embedded inside of these startups is usually more interesting than whatever thing, their actual app is doing.

That, and I also, I'm a huge fan of, although they're difficult to get, like, real process stories where we can actually get at what it's like to build something because these systems are incredibly complicated and they look really simple and smooth in your phone. And no one actually wants to talk about those kinds of real stories, like the difficulties. And I'm just like dying to just talk to people who are like, here's what's actually hard about building an app now, right? You don't need these startups don't want to talk about that. People go like, oh, I have an app, as if it's sort of a small thing.

All right, well, mental notes. You're like, these guys must be sitting at their keyboards for like, you know, 400 hours in a row doing something, right? And part of it is that, you know, it's difficult to explain the code to people, right? Yeah. But that's like one of the things that we've always wanted to do that we actually find most difficult to do is explain what it is to code and explain what it is to solve problems in code

because that kind of gets at the motivations of lots of these people. people at a deep level. They like solving problems in code, and yet they never want to talk to us about it. So what makes a great C-Net long-form story that you say that you want to do? I think it goes back to what Alexis was saying, the idea, the so what. You want to start with something that is real, that is not a fabricated idea of, oh, look, we're going to do something that will make it easier for you to do your laundry or, you know, that's been done. There's a lot of apps. I think legitimately sometimes companies struggle with this because when you look at, I don't know, it take Airbnb, you rent out a couch.

I don't know about the three of you, but a lot of people that are like that. It just seems silly. And it's a monstrous company and, you know, it has, it's a cultural phenomenon and whatnot. So how does one get past the like, okay, I have these seven features and do the bigger thing? So I had a short stint in PR, as you know, Margett. that, yes. And as a journalist going in, I would tell our executives who wanted to do a press release, because everyone wants to do a press release and put out a story. And I would say, give it to me in a sentence. What is the story in a sentence? Give me the headline on the story from my Bloomberg

Day, 63 characters. Tell me your story. Just you can't do that. They're like Tom's the executive vice president now. Or the titles get so long, it takes them all the characters, so I just can't even tweet it out. Yeah, or it would be very trite. Right. A new and revolutionary breakthrough, blah, blah, software. There's software that allows you to string those sentences together. It's really actually quite funny. So I would say that that is what a good journalist can do, is they can go through and do hours of interviews and research and investigation to get to that 63-word headline, a 63 character headline. But they don't have the luxury of doing that anymore, right? You have to look at something and assess it. So now the onus is on the company.

to already figure out for me what that 63 character headline is when they pitch their story because it's not about a pitch, it's about that they've figured out and distilled it down to that point. One thing I will say is that's not an easy thing to do. I'm not saying that you can just, you know,

this is why you have professionals. However, a lot of folks say, no, I could never do that. I could never figure out what my business model is in that few words. And then I would say, well, who's the number one competitor? give me their business model in a sense, and they could always do it. Oh, that's a good trick.

And so if you can do it about your competitor, damn straight, they can do it about you. So it's really just, you know, thinking, you know, everyone's special. But getting to what really makes you special, that's work. It's easy to write a thousand-word story. It's hard to write a 200-word story. Because you have to edit and you have to think and you have to rethink what it is that you're trying to say. But that's where the work is. That should happen before.

you go out as a company, because that's the story that you're going to tell ultimately. So anyone who wants to get to you, Claire, and be in the new section, what's their best approach? When I started at the times, I was covering startups and venture capital, and I got so burnt out on doing the quick, here's a new startup story, because it sort of felt like you're writing, rewriting a press release. Here's what it does. There's not a whole lot more to say about it. So I agree with what both Alexis and Connie said, which is that you really... You guys agree way too much.

have to have an idea. And especially now for the upshot, we're much more about ideas than about, you know, just the fact that this is new and it exists. I think the times, because it has a general readers, we all sort of have this person in mind, this anonymous reader, or it's non-anonymous reader. Everyone has one. For me, it's my grandma in Iowa. And it's like, how do I make this story interesting to my grandma in Iowa? And that is not against grandmothers or midwesterners. It just means someone who does that your only demographic because why do you hate america it just means someone who's not in silicon valley or in new york city and someone who you know might not have used a Airbnb before what's like the bigger idea and and then the other thing that i really like to be

able to do is to tell narratives and that's similar to what Alexis was saying also it's like if you really i remember in um in 2008 and 2009 when all the venture capital capital were saying, you know, we have to freeze everything and you really need to focus on profit. That's the most important thing. Or the famous slide decks that were coming out. Yeah, the slide deck. And actually, Sequoia did that slide deck. And I did a story with one of the Sequoia CEOs where I actually said, you know, what was it like that day?

What did you do? Not just like we cut costs, but like what did you do? What was your actual emotional reaction? What were the conversations you had? And I think those narratives are a lot better. And I've done a lot on women in tech recently where it's been really. reporting for months and months to tell a story. And to me, that tells a little bit about what it's like to be in this place and to live and work in Silicon Valley is a much more interesting

story to me. To me that, I mean, I get to live in this industry, but I will say like the best, the stories I most enjoy give me the feeling that someone's taken me inside, whether it's a war zone or a different industry or, you know, different demographic. And I sort of feel like I can actually be a fly on the wall. So I would love for you guys to all. keep doing those. So with that, thanks a lot, guys, for joining me. You're welcome. Thanks.