Offline with Jon Favreau - Peter Hamby on Saving Journalism from Twitter

Episode Date: November 7, 2021

Snapchat’s Peter Hamby talks to Jon about why Twitter has ruined political journalism, how the internet transformed the media business, and what a healthy, sustainable model of journalism might look like.

Part of it is just not fucking going on the internet all the time. Can everyone just shut the fuck up about everything for like one second, right? Like, I must issue my statement on this news development. It's like, I, Jeremy Smith, have decided to make my endorsement. It's like, what? RT, if you agree. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline.

Hi there. Our guest this week is Peter Hamby, and he's here to talk about what the Internet has done to journalism. Peter's a good friend of mine who started out as a political reporter at CNN and now hosts Good Luck America, a show about news and politics on Snapchat that reaches nearly 6 million people per episode. He also helped found a new media startup called Puck, where he writes a column called The Powers That Be. Most of you know that I've been an amateur

media critic for a long time now. It's one of the reasons we started Crooked in the first place. But even though I spend way too much time yelling about bad headlines and annoying stories, I don't actually think that individual journalists and editors are the main reason so many people don't trust the media anymore. I think there are a lot of destructive incentives in media right now. Some of them are financial, and a lot of them have to do with the fact that most journalism now happens online. I think this pushes journalists to prioritize hot takes over actual reporting. I think it pushes them to focus on speed and brevity over accuracy and context. And since there's also an incentive to keep the outrage meter at an 11, we also lose a sense of proportion. How bad is this problem?

How much does it really matter? What can be done about it? Peter and I get into all of that. How bad is this problem? How much does it really matter? What can be done about it? Peter and I get into all of that. We talk about how the internet has transformed the media industry, how that's affected the way reporters do their jobs, why Twitter is especially bad for journalism, which Peter actually wrote a 95-page paper on, and what a healthy, sustainable model of journalism might look like. It's a conversation the two of us have had before, and one that could have gone on for hours, which is why this is actually a two-part interview that we've condensed into one episode. As always, if you have questions, comments, or complaints about the show,

feel free to email us at offline at cricket.com. Here's Peter Hamby. So, I am doing this show about the many ways that the internet is breaking our brains. And a big part of that is what the internet has done to journalism. And I thought you would be perfect as a journalist to talk about this because you are a lot less defensive and more reflective in your critique about the state of the media than many of your colleagues. I think that's like how we started to become friends, maybe. I think it probably is. But yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of journalists

are pretty thin-skinned, don't admit mistakes. And that contributes to a lack of trust. I won't name any of them here. No, I mean, there's plenty who are reflective. They just won't say publicly, you know, when they make a mistake or when they're critical of their colleagues. I guess my first question is like,

why did you want to be a journalist in the first place? Yeah, I mean, I love starting there because my parents were journalists. They worked in local TV news in Washington, D.C. That's where they met. My dad actually cued spiro agnew when he went on television to resign oh nice um i grew up with newspapers on the table watching tv news my parents friends were in television news i worked for the high school paper college paper went to journalism school took on an unfortunate amount of student loans for that.

And so despite the fact that I work at Snapchat, which maybe a lot of people listening to this don't use, I am also kind of a curmudgeon about journalism. I care in part because I put in a lot of hard work. I care about the old of old school values that go into journalism, making the extra phone call, being humble, listening, doing the research, you know, letting the facts speak for themselves. I don't necessarily believe in the kind of false notion of objectivity that you guys talk about a lot on the pod, but I do believe in fairness, the best version of it, at least. You started at CNN at a time when the internet and social media weren't just technologies that journalists were starting to cover, but were technologies that were actually transforming

the media industry, starting with the business model of journalism. Can you talk about what that transformation looked like to you and what you think that has done to the goal of journalism? Because look, one thing I think we both do is we can complain about individual reporters, but really, I think we both believe this is a systemic issue and that a lot of these individual reporters might be operating in good faith, but just there is an incentive structure set up by the fact that the economics of this industry have been so fucked up that leads to bad journalism. So when I started working in professional journalism, that was 2005. The internet, as you mentioned, was new ish. The original sin, though, of the collapse of the journalism businessth century, made the decision to pay for their businesses based on advertising. Remember Craigslist? Craigslist is still around.

Craig. Craig founded a list. And on Craigslist, you could put ads for, I'm selling a bed. I would like to meet someone because I'm lonely, personals, whatever. Those kinds of listings originally were the bread and butter of news organizations. They made newspapers rich. Here in Los Angeles, the LA Times became a hugely powerful, wealthy institution back in the late 12th century because real estate ads were what drove the revenue for that newspaper. And so when the internet came along and then hugely powerful, wealthy institution back in the early 12th century because real estate ads were what drove the revenue for that newspaper. And so when the internet came along and then social media later, you know, all of that news that we read every day, that was just flying around the internet for free because the decision makers at originally a lot of these news organizations thought of the

internet as a second tier property. As the internet and social media became bigger, they became a fabric of our daily lives. It became an expectation on the consumer side that I could click on the Washington Post or the Richmond Times Dispatch or, you know, any ex-local newspaper and get that stuff for free. And most of the audience eventually migrated to the digital side of things, abandoning television, abandoning print to a substantial degree. And so these news organizations were left with, holy shit, how are we supposed to pay for all of these reporters who are covering, you know, courts on the local side, crime, weather, but also like prestige things like politics, overseas issues, conflicts in different countries. And they started to have to make some difficult choices. And they lost the ad revenue to first places like Craigslist and then ultimately places like Facebook and Google down the road.

That's exactly what I was going to say. So they really started to bleed out when Facebook and Google basically siphoned every kind of advertising away from news organizations and media companies that used to depend on it for revenue. So that has really led to where we are today. Now, there are businesses that are retrenching and deciding to go fully subscription. And that's smart. That's a way to make revenue and good revenue. And so I imagine that one effect that has is that now, if you're a news organization, a media organization, you are in a competition for audience. Because even if you have a subscription model, even if you can sustain your business that way,

you're still looking to get as many customers as possible. And you have a lot more competition because there's a lot more media properties out there online. What does that competition for eyeballs do to the practice of journalism? So one, it does, well, it does two main things that I think about a lot. And one is more on the business side. When you log on to CNN.com and you see a pre-roll ad for a pharmaceutical and tons of display ads all over the website,

and some websites you see pop-up ads, those are big media companies still clinging to that advertising model in any way. If you scroll all the way down to those pages, you see something called Outbrain, and it's all of these weird pictures of cleavage and skin lesions, that kind of stuff, advertising weird things that'll take you to another rabbit hole of the internet. Mainstream media companies still use that and put it on their website. One of the reasons I don't go to those websites. Exactly. They're not very fun to read.

They're not fun. The user experience, the UX, as we say in tech, even on your phone is cluttered and clogged. And so there's that element of it, which is a lot of news organizations still depend on advertising. TV news specifically depends a lot on advertising. The corollary to that, which I think you're getting at is the individual behavior of newsrooms and journalists. Attention is what matters, the attention economy. And so traditionally, at least in the idea of hallowed ivory tower journalism, a journalist and an editor would get in the room and make the decisions about the front page every day. And it was less about necessarily what's going to sell papers and more about what's good for the American public.

Now, that's a mythology. Everyone always wanted to sell papers. But there was a kind of esteem in the idea of editors and newspaper journalists making grand decisions about what the American public needed rather than wanted. Now, it's the opposite in most ways. We just give people what they want. And that doesn't mean there's not great journalism being created all over the place. It's just that substantive journalism that has like six bylines and takes months of investigation and phone calls and lawyers. Those pieces of meaty journalism that win awards hit Twitter. They hit the Internet with equal weight to like, here are 21 cute corgis or

here. Look at this video of Trump's hair flying back on his head as he walks up Air Force One or like check out this video of Kamala Harris wearing Air Force Ones or a piece of bad reporting that gets a lot of attention. All of the things that get attention, those are the things that go viral. And so I do think that in some ways, subconsciously and not, that has impacted the behaviors on an individual level of both journalists and editors to create things that get attention because more eyeballs, more clicks equals more revenue if you have made the decision that you are going to be a purely advertising driven business. But also, you're right on the subscription side. I mean,

the New York Times is constantly creating, quote unquote, content that will get them to add subscribers, too. So it's just, you know, because we are on our phones all the time every day and not just sitting down in the morning to read the paper and watch the six 30 news every night, people are on their screens all the time. We like, uh, media companies are trying to fill that void. If you're a journalist trying to figure out what, or an editor trying to figure out what the audience wants. How do you go about doing that? What's the decision-making process like when you're thinking like, I kind of need some clicks on this? Yeah. So that's a good question. I wouldn't even call it

not an exact science because it was never science in the first place. It's more, it's still kind of a very gut driven editorial philosophy. You know, at CNN, obviously, they look at ratings and compare, you know, how did this story do versus the story in the previous five minutes versus the story in the previous five days or the previous five months, you know, they would ratings get released all the time. You know, also, when I worked at CNN, and this is true of every TV news organization, the bureau chief, the president of the network, they have other TV channels on in their office, right? So if you work at ABC News, you're watching CNN, MSNBC, Fox, you're watching NBC, you're watching CBS. And if you're the cable channels in particular,

you respond to what the other person's doing. So it's just this collective conventional wisdom is forming. And journalists at all different media outlets are all seeing what each other's doing. They're all kind of coalescing around the same stories. Correct. And obviously, Twitter is a huge... I was just going to say, now we introduce Twitter into the equation, which, what does that do to the whole equation? Yeah, and it's also funny

because back in 2006 when Twitter launched, people in D.C. where I was working, most people didn't get it. Like most things, D.C. is like the last place to figure stuff out.

Like D.C. was the last city to get rid of Blackberries and trade them in for iPhones. And that carried on even through like 2008, 2009. And then finally there was a, I'm pulling this out of my, the deepest, darkest recesses of my brain right now. I just remember this,

but I think there was a Mike Allen edition of Playbook one morning that just said like, Twitter has arrived. And like they quoted like Gloria Borger and David Gregory and, like, Chuck Todd. And everyone's like, this is fun. I'm doing it. And I do think there was a fun and useful element to it at the time. One of the first big scoops I got was in 2009, Mark Sanford, who was then the governor of South Carolina, famously disappeared and was supposedly hiking the Appalachian Trail when in reality he was off in Argentina visiting his lover carrying on an affair.

And it was a huge global story. Everyone descended on South Carolina to cover it from all over the world. It was a total zoo. Because I had lived in South Carolina and done reporting there previously, I had a lot of good sources. And I broke the news that Mark Sanford's car was not, his official government car was parked at the airport, which suggested he wasn't on the Appalachian Trail. I did that, though, by just tweeting it. And I remember just tweeting a bunch of sort of incremental scoops around that story and got like a following pretty quickly. And that to me was useful for me and my personal brand, which is very important to journalists now. used Twitter to elevate their careers in a positive way because it's been able to, you know, break this glass ceiling that used to only be for people who climbed the ladder and ended up on the Sunday shows.

All of a sudden in 2009, you had a lot of younger reporters who were embracing these platforms and breaking news and hustling and writing cool stuff. And you could accumulate a following. And then because I was able to do that, CNN was like, oh, this kid's like a, you know, he's a pretty good reporter. Like, let's put him on TV. And that's sort of an avenue that didn't really exist before for a lot of journalists. And so that's a positive aspect of Twitter.

You know, this is before, not to fast forward too far, but this is before a lot of these platforms were just swallowed by hate speech and disinformation and all of that stuff. So there was still a kind of like a fun element to it in that 2009, 2010 era where if you were a political junkie, you could come to Twitter and get all kinds of stuff. Polling, scoops, campaign manager fired. And at the time, it felt like a very essential place to be if you lived in Washington. So then talk about in in after the 2012 campaign, you write this opus about Twitter called Did Twitter Kill the Boys on the Bus? The Boys on the Bus was a famous work of journalism about that came out after the 1972 presidential campaign by Timothy Krause, who was writing for Rolling Stone. And basically he turned, you know, his eyeballs and his pen on the traveling press corps,

the people who covered politics and wrote a book about, you know, how politics gets covered, how the sausage is made. You know, again, this is before the internet. This is when people were filing stories over pay phones. There's just a bunch of old white guys on the bus the whole time that get to be the gatekeepers for the whole, all the coverage. Exactly. It's not something to like celebrate. No, not at all. And I think a lot of younger people think that older journalists hold up the boys on

the bus is like this wonderful time. And I wish we could go back. That's not the point the book makes. You know, they are off the record with politicians. They're carousing with politicians. They're sexist. Like they sleep in, they're carousing with politicians, they're sexist, like they sleep in, they're alcoholics, whatever. And so Twitter, when I say did Twitter kill the boys in the bus,

when I wrote that, I was doing a Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard, which focuses on press and politics. It was after the 2012 campaign, I had covered that. And during the course of that campaign, it became apparent talking to my friends who are Republicans and Democrats and reporters, that Twitter was just this obsession, that as much as the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign tried to shape narratives in traditional ways, the front page of the Times and the Post, the getting in the front block of the Today Show that's stuff that mattered in 2008 by 2012 the assignment desk for all of politics was just Twitter and has been ever since it has been ever since and I don't want to say that it ruined journalism because again

there are good aspects to Twitter but it did really narrow the focus on just process things on optics. I remember they did an event at Ford Field in Detroit. I forget about what. And like it was there like in the field, but like the stadium was empty. And so all the embeds were just tweeting pictures of the empty stadium. It wasn't even supposed to be a rally. It was just like an event in Ford Field. And so things like that made the Romney campaign furious. And I remember talking to Matt Rhodes, who was the campaign manager for Romney when I was writing this paper, and he cited a famous quote from Roger Ailes. Fox News. Fox News, used to work in politics.

And Ailes had this theory about politics called the orchestra pit theory of politics, which is that on a stage you have two political candidates and one of them proposes a solution to Middle East peace and the other one falls in the orchestra pit. What do you think the media is going to cover? Obviously the guy falling into the orchestra pit. And like, that's basically what Twitter is. It fetishizes what's happening right now. It is obsessed with scandal and outrage and reporters, individual reporters, you know, are incentivized, whether they are doing it intentionally or not, to get those retweets.

And, you know, you will get those retweets when you write stories that are primed for, you know, sharing and outrage and not the deeply reported piece about the climate legislation that's moving through a Senate committee. And it creates a sort of a collective wisdom of its own and sort of a hive mind. Like my experience on the other side of that in 2012 is I can remember being at that first presidential debate between Obama and Romney. And it was the first, you know, we had done the debates in 2008. So I had experience with presidential debates. But in 2012, like Barack Obama, 10 minutes into the debate isn't doing that well. We know that from backstage. We can see that we usually you wouldn't be able to tell if the rest of the country thinks that yet or how if journalists think that or anyone else thinks that because people would you'd hope watch and make up their own mind

but on twitter people started freaking out and journalists are freaking about like oh barack obama's not doing good and the conventional wisdom hardened in about 10 minutes into the debate that it was that he'd done something that he was having a horrible debate i think ben smith put up a story on buzzfeed before the debate was even over that said Barack Obama bombed this debate. And it was our first experience with, okay, the entire collective wisdom or the conventional wisdom from the Washington press corps was just hardened within 10 minutes of a presidential debate. And there's nothing we can do to shape that now. Correct. And it kind of killed off the notion of a spin room after the debate because like when the when the cw is hardened in 10 minutes there's kind of no point for axelrod

or pluff to come in the spin room and spin reporters when they've already been spun up by what their colleagues have been saying on twitter so twitter and social media and the Internet in general incentivize for journalists speed, brevity, takes over reporting prediction. Like, what does that do to, you know, you're a journalist who's just trying to report the news. What does that do to that practice of journalism? It makes it sloppier. It perverts the ideal of what journalism was supposed to be, at least as I was taught it and my parents who were journalists were taught it. And what was that? Or what is that? Hard work, research, patience, frustration, playing the long game in terms of this story might take a while and I've

got to dig into it. Journalism, in part because of revenue issues, can't fund a lot of journalists traveling anymore. And so when I was getting into it, I was traveling around the country a lot and I was very lucky for that. And unfortunately, today, a lot of journalists don't have the ability to get on the road, an expensive flight in a hotel and travel and meet people and spend time. And often, like some of the great writing out there, people are paying for it out of their own pockets. And that means a lot of reporters are just writing from their desk, which means you're looking at Twitter, you're texting people on iMessage, you are making phone calls, but maybe even not. And anyway, you'll see a line in a lot of news stories that are about controversy or gaffe.

And I think the listeners will recognize it. It'll say, so-and-so did not immediately respond to a request for comment. So, you know, back when I was in journalism school, not that journalism school is the best, but, you know, sometimes they taught you, you couldn't publish something until you had a response or you had to wait at least a day, maybe six hours. You know, now the incentive, as you mentioned, is publish this fast so we have it first and we get the clicks. That doesn't mean that's not, you know,

sometimes those articles aren't rigorous, but very often they're not. And so, again, I don't want to be, like, priestly about how journalism used to be compared to where it is now. Like, media always changes. And as a consequence, the formats change. But, you know, I, you know, I'm grateful.

And this is true even at CNN. I've had editors and bosses who have pushed me to be like, hey, like you need one more source on this. Hey, let's let standards and practices take a look at this. We need a lawyer to look over it. And I, as a reporter, would be pulling my hair out, being like, we gotta publish, we gotta publish. And now that I'm older with a little more hindsight,

I'm just glad that I had editors like that because I don't think a lot of younger journalists are coming into the business right now with those sort of values that I and the people that taught me how to do this stuff cared about. That's the thing I remember a lot from 2008. When I was on the plane or at a rally, I'd be next to John King, who, you know, came up working at the Associated Press. And I think Providence in the very beginning, you know, he like covered statehouse stuff.

You know, Adam Smith, the St. Pete Times in Florida. There were older reporters who had done the work and had a career and had perspective and had sources. There were reporters in local markets who understood the texture and the people that mattered in these markets. And especially by today, you know, partly because local news is withering. You just reporters don't often have those touch points to get that kind of perspective because of the Internet. You know, you can you can graduate from Cornell, go straight to BuzzFeed, go to Politico or The New York Times. And you've never Never done local news, never talked to a voter, never done... Yeah. I mean, again, this is where I sound like a journalism curmudgeon, even though I work at Snapchat. I do think that 10 years ago, if you spent some time, not that local news is perfect or great, You spent some time in a local market, either in television or print slash digital. It just gave you some cultural and political perspective that is not obvious in Washington and New York. Today, one in five newsroom jobs are in New York, Los Angeles, or D.C. News has become a object of, you know, center left college educated urban culture.

Which we should say, by the way, you know, there's very common saying Twitter is not real life. Right. And the reason people say Twitter is not real life is what they mean is, or at least in the best sense of this debate, wealthier, more educated, whiter. Because Twitter is the media's assignment editor, and because Twitter contains the views of people that don't represent the views of most Americans, there is a disconnect between the conversation and the views that are happening on Twitter and that happen in the media with the rest of the country, right? Yeah, no, I mean, that's 100% correct. There is a book that I've been reading called News for the Rich, White and Blue written by Nikki Usher, who is a academic at the University of Illinois, but she writes somewhat critically about the news industry in some of the same ways

we're talking about. And when she says rich, white, and blue, she's talking about blue. News is consumed now a lot by people on the left and not the right. White, in that newsrooms are, even though more diverse than they were five, 10 years ago, still mostly white people. And to this conversation about business, rich, and that doesn't mean wealthy, wealthy, but news now has moved behind paywalls or a subscription that's proving to be the best business model now that the ad model has collapsed. The people who are willing to pay for news is really not that much. I mean, obviously, the New York Times is a great success story in that sense. But, you know,

who in, you know, Youngstown, you know, was willing to pay for news like at the Youngstown Vindicator? Not enough, apparently, because Youngstown Vindicator is dead. And, you know, paywalls

aren't going to keep local news afloat. And so, yeah, I mean, the news is feels like a lot of people to spinach and homework and people liked it when it was free and it was easy. And now that news has put itself behind a paywall in a lot of senses, politicians and bad actors are willing to flood the zone with information that's free and fun and entertaining um but also in many cases malevolent dangerous and leads to people rushing the capitol and uh you know killing capitol police officers on january 6th yeah i mean i was going to

ask that too it's like how does a journalist today or a news outlet compete with both propagandists who are operating in bad faith and sort of amateur journalists on Twitter who may be operating in good faith. Right. But it's like, how do you compete against all these other news sources at a time when trust in journalism is at its lowest level? And there's just just an internet full of garbage you know this is a hobby horse of mine but format becomes incredibly important um the creators of news people in the media business people in journalism need to be more thoughtful about what kinds of formats can reach people and compel them uh and compete all of the entertainment that's out there. What are some examples of that? Podcasts are a great example. The Daily from the New York Times

is a journalism object where all of the constituent pieces of journalism, the fact-checking, the interviews, the research are sort of reorganized like a deconstructed guacamole or something you'd order at a restaurant and presented in a new way that is portable, that is entertaining, that feels dramatic, but is still serious. My Snapchat show or a Snapchat show that NBC News does, it is fast and to the point and efficient and you can share it with your friends and you can watch it whenever you want, but it's still credible and doesn't abandon all the values of journalism. What I'm trying to say is that you can create news in a way that competes with the entire menu of options you have out there on Netflix, Hulu, Twitch, Crooked, Dan Bongino. And it doesn't have to be outrageous and stupid. You don't have to dumb down the news. You just have to realize that the audience is really important here. You have to consider their time. It's about meeting people where they are. Yeah, their attention spans

and what they want to do. And I'm sorry, a lot of people aren't really going to want to sit down. Even news consumers don't read past the first couple paragraphs of the story. So what conversations did you have with Snapchat that made you think, OK, this is a place where I can actually bring some serious journalism into a tech platform that is reaching millions of mostly younger people? Yes. So today, Snapchat has almost 300 million daily active users, which is, for your listeners, substantially more than Twitter, which dominates the Washington conversation. We reach 90% of 13 to 34-year-olds in the United States, which is more than Instagram, Facebook, and Facebook Messenger combined. And so it wasn't like that when I first had my conversations with Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat, about going to work there. But the potential was there.

And more importantly, from my earliest conversations with him, from various executives at the company working on the content side, this is 2014, 2015. It was clear that they saw where social media was going. These open platforms that were driven by algorithms were, you know, again, this is right before the fake news sort of disinformation stuff popped in the mainstream press in 2015 or whatever. But it was just clear they had a different set of values around how a platform should operate, the architecture of it. And before they got too big, I very much got the sense that Evan and the company wanted to get ahead of some of the problems around fake and misleading content, around privacy, safety. And I just liked the way they talked about news when I came over there because they said, you have a huge audience here of young people.

And those very young people are not watching TV news necessarily. They're not subscribing to newspapers anymore, obviously. But that doesn't mean they're not smart. They're just they're spending their time in different places. And we want to be able to create a safe news environment for this generation that's using Snapchat. platform like snapchat has such a bigger audience a user base than twitter um handles disinformation pretty well compared to this other platform despite all these things the the cable news voice and twitter as the assignment editor still influence most of the journalism and most of the political conversation that we have in this country today,

does that not drive you fucking nuts? Like all these, you know, we have this conversation about Twitter all the time. Everyone's like, oh, well, yeah, Twitter doesn't actually have that many users. Like, yeah, compared to a lot of these other platforms. And yet Twitter is this platform that dictates most of the national conversation we have and shapes politics to such an extent that like we can't get away from it. Yeah. I mean, it's it is infuriating. I think one of the things that's made me a better journalist, a better political journalist, to be honest, is simply leaving Washington because you start to realize not that I live in

I live in Los Angeles. I don't I don't live in Cincinnati, you know, like, but you start to realize that people generally go about their everyday lives, not spending all day on Twitter, not reading Politico, not watching cable news all day long. And once you start to like experience that every single day, you know, you start to pay a little bit less attention to that stuff. And then you start to like, almost think like a normal voter, you know you start to pay a little bit less attention to that stuff and then you start to like almost think like a normal voter you know like do you feel like you're missing anything when you're not paying attention to it as much like do you feel like if you're not as plugged into the conversation on twitter then somehow it's making your job as a journalist tougher or more challenging no i used to think that even six months ago. And I have been more deliberate, I think since the election in managing my time on it.

I put a time limit of 15 minutes a day, which you can do on iPhone. You do on Twitter? On Twitter. And it- That would really change my life in a big way. I should maybe do that. I'm hoping good.

Hoping good, okay. But I think, was the beginning tough? I feel like the beginning would have been tough. Yeah. I want to, if Emily, if you're listening,

let me know what you think about this. It was a little bit. You do sometimes feel like you're missing something. There are moments, for example, like January 6th,

where you're watching the TV and you, like big moments, it feels important as a political journalist or just someone who's interested in policy to be on there. And, you know, bad stuff spreads, but you also see good information and good reporting and you glean incredible insight to things like that because camera phones add so many different perspectives to real time events.

Another reason I joined Snapchat because everyone has their camera out and they're providing great pictures and images that we can use for our stories. So, you know, but I, my experience isn't necessarily what will work for everybody. I have just been more deliberate about the news because I do think news can be an addiction for people in an unhealthy way. This is certainly true in the Trump era. And I listen to a lot of NPR. I subscribe to LA Times. I read that when I can, not that I do every day. And then I go on Twitter a few minutes a day. Sometimes I blow through that 15 minute time limit and spend all day on it. But I not being on there, it just allows me to read more. I feel like my brain works a little better. I've heard that one of the reasons Snapchat is different than a lot of other platforms is it's a walled garden. This is Tanya said this phrase to me and I nodded and pretended that I

knew because I wanted to sound hip and smart, but I have no idea what that means. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. I mean, Crooked Media is a walled garden. You guys make editorial decisions about what shows you will produce, who your hosts are going to be, and sometimes you reject pitches for those things because it's not a right fit. When we launched Discover, which is our content platform, we started small with trusted, you know, not just news, but ESPN, Comedy Central, like just media companies that were interested in creating new formats for the generation that's using Snapchat. And so, you know, when it comes to news, The Washington Post is on Snapchat.

The Wall Street Journal is on Snapchat. Breitbart is not on Snapchat, you know. So it's about curating. Yeah, it's about curation. You create a walled garden of safe and credible content. And you said earlier, we have a zero tolerance policy for disinformation, for hate speech. Again, Snapchat, before any other big platform, we last summer downranked Donald Trump's

feed during the height of the protests and the violence in Washington. And so one reason that Snap is a healthier ecosystem than these other platforms is because Evan and the company got ahead of it when we were still growing. I mean, it's almost like Facebook woke up one day four years ago and there's a genocide in Myanmar and they're like, oh shit, we have to do something about this. And once the genie's out of the bottle, it's very hard to have an entire team of people editing and fact checking and removing content you know not just in the united states but in nigeria in indonesia in canada like then it's then it's then it's out of the bag i was gonna say also yeah horses out of the barn at that point yeah that is a tougher one right um you're also a

founder and contributor to a new digital subscription site called Puck. What differentiates Puck and the kind of writing you want to do there? Is it similar to the writing that you did for Vanity Fair and have done in the past? Yeah. I mean, I think Puck is, first of all, Puck aims to cover some of the same things that Vanity Fair covers. The sort of nexus of power between Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, et cetera. And I will continue to write about politics in the media for Puck. The differentiator with Puck is they, one, it's subscription-based, as we were talking about, and that feels like a healthy model to carry forward for news organizations. We are starting out without

all of the layers of bureaucracy and payroll that a lot of big media companies like Condé Nast, like Time Warner, whatever, are dealing with now as media changes. But two, importantly, Puck views the journalists as the creators, right? We are building the company ourselves. We each have a piece of the company, and we believe that certain journalists have followings and that we can provide content for that audience that they can't get anywhere else. I mean, journalists give away a lot of stuff for free. Every day when I tweet, if I tweet an insight about an exit poll

or something I'm seeing in Michigan or whatever, I'm giving away knowledge for free. And journalists do that probably too much. And I think some of that can be put behind a paywall. You made the decision not to go in-house and try to change an existing media institution, but to sort of both at Snapchat and then now at Puck sort of do a new thing. What do you see, like, what's a sustainable, healthy media ecosystem in one year, five years,

10 years down the road? How do you see that? Do you think that like sort of existing media institutions can change to sort of deliver high quality journalism and not just sort of the fast, quick takes that we see online all the time? Or do you think that something completely new needs to be built? I don't think anything's necessarily going to get much better. I mean, like, I, again, I care about journalism. I want to succeed. I'm working hard in my own job and other side hustles to figure out ways to connect regular people with journalism more and make it less of an elite college educated product. But it's hard. I mean, there's like fake websites out there called the Orlando Dispatch.

And you're, you know, you're low information, everyday person. If they see that on Facebook, they don't know the difference between the Orlando Dispatch and the Orlando Sentinel. Like people. The Orlando Dispatch told me that the vaccine would magnetize me. What am I going to do? Right? Yeah. I mean, people, I think people, again, that work in journalism need to spend more time with regular people and watching how they

consume the news, how they consume information generally, what screens they're on, what platforms they're using. And hopefully that will inform how they create news and new formats in the future. Trusted media isn't just going down among Republicans. It is by a higher margin, but it's still going down among independents and Democrats, too. And just think about the generation that I speak to on Snapchat who didn't even come up with newspapers. Like I talk to people all the time and it's like my kid doesn't even know what channel CBS is on. Like they don't have cable, you know, and that's not just like children or Gen Z. That's adults at this point. People are watching YouTube TV.

There are just so many people coming into political sentience who don't even know what news is. And I think that we need to be more humble about that and have some awareness that we have a better job to do educating people about what news is and what it can be. Last question I'm asking every guest, what's your favorite way to unplug uh and how often do you do it um if you mean making cocktails with katie every night is the answer that's good that's good as long as you're so you're when you're making cocktails with katie you're not looking at your phone correct i mean we cook a lot cooking and cooking cooking i know i know sometimes i actually told her recently i was like none of my friends cook.

No, we don't. No, you like to order. Emily cooks. Well, if you cooked more, you would get less mad at Postmates delivery drivers, which I know is one of the only things that puts a frown on your face. It's just when I forget to order. Yeah, it's a whole thing. I've, mom and dad taught me and my brothers how to cook.

It's always something I've done even before I got into news. But the idea of getting your hands dirty and putting your phone down and chopping and like putting your hands in a mixing bowl or whatever, like that, that doesn't sound like a, like, I don't know, everyone does that, but it's really valuable. I get it because I don't cook, but especially during the pandemic, when Emily was cooking a lot, I would always clean and cleaning, you know, I finally put my phone down because my hands are wet and I'm doing dishes and all that kind of stuff. And I didn't think I'd want to clean.

But then after a while, I was like, it actually is somewhat soothing to just do some dishes, clean up the kitchen, not look at your phone. Like, I don't mind that. Yeah, household chores get me away from my phone. And that's okay. Sorry, that's not a super adventurous answer. But it and that's okay. Sorry that's not a super adventurous answer but

it's an everyday answer and that's what matters. Peter Hamby, thank you for joining Offline. Thank you. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. Our producer is Andy Gardner-Bernstein. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show.

Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Somanator, Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, and Sandy Gerard for production support, and to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Milo Kim, and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.