Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
We present the best case scenario over the next 25 years across different domains of life.
Kevin Kelly (00:00)
Hello. Welcome to the best case scenario.
where we present the best possible outcomes in the next 25 years? Like, what would the world look like if everything went right? I'm Kevin Kelly, and this is my co-host Dan Pink. And our guest this episode is Emily Bell. And we're gonna hear the most optimistic vision possible for the next 25 years in the future of journalism. What is the scenario we would like to see?
And we would use this vision to try to help make it happen. So Dan.
Daniel Pink (00:30)
Yeah, Emily was great guest. has a great perspective because she was a top journalist at The Guardian in London. She now teaches at Columbia Journalism School. She has some super interesting things to say. So in this episode, you're going to hear about AI whistleblowers. You're going to hear about
The fact that she projects that Substack will win a Pulitzer Prize in the next five years. We're we laid out a case for social media that actually works as well as a vision for two very different approaches simultaneous to journalism, large global distributed networks of journalists and hyper local journalists who are reporting on what's happening on your block. So there are despite the bad news out there, there are reasons to be optimistic because there is in the world journalism, the best case scenario.
area.
Kevin Kelly (01:13)
Yes, and Emily's passion for journalism is unmatched. And most heartening of all of the next 25 years, she believes that young people are picking up the same passion that she has to find the truth and report it.
Daniel Pink (01:25)
Yes, that's the people she's teaching in her journalism school seem to be very, she said they were very mission driven. They were very keen to get out there and find the truth and tell it to us.
Kevin Kelly (01:35)
So stay tuned, here we go.
Daniel Pink (01:36)
All righty. So before we introduce our guests, here's a quick rundown of our format. With some gentle prodding, even a little bit of skepticism, we're going to tease out the best case scenario for a particular domain. This one is a one that's very close to my heart that we're talking about today. Then we're going to have a lightning round, getting immediate responses to some common tropes about this field. Is there any chance that they're going to happen? And after that, we're going to see if there's a forecast.
that our guests feel certain enough about to bet real money on. And finally, we're going to get one recommendation where listeners can follow through. That's our format, Kevin.
Kevin Kelly (02:13)
Yeah, so Emily, would you like to introduce yourself to our audience? You probably do it better than we can.
Emily Bell (02:18)
Sure. My name is Emily Bell. I'm a professor at Columbia Journalism School where I run something called the Tau Center for Digital Journalism. Before that, I was a very long time as a journalist, principally at The Guardian in London, where I did just about every job ⁓ up to and including sometimes making tea.
But probably what I was best known for there was spending 10 years figuring out how we took everything that we did as a newspaper and turned it into something that was successful digital. I would love to take 100 % of the credit for that, but I probably can't. But it was a fun time. And Kevin, it was very informed by your work and writing and thinking of all those great people in the 90s who were showing us the
benefits of what we had in front of us. Little did we know.
Kevin Kelly (03:09)
Well, I'm so glad you're here now to think about the future. So Dan.
Daniel Pink (03:12)
So
we're going to take a, we're going to jump from the halcyon days of the 1990s and talk about what's happening today, Emily, because if you look at the world of journalism, as we speak here in early 2026, the big news here in my hometown of Washington, D.C. is that the Washington Post lost $100 million in 2024. It lost $125 million in 2025. It just, forgive the 50 cent word, defenestrated.
Emily Bell (03:19)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Pink (03:39)
one third of its newsroom, obliterating its sports department, crimping its international coverage, essentially annihilating all its local coverage. Since we know from Madill, since 2015, the Madill School of Journalism at Northwestern, forgive me, that competitor to Columbia Journalism School, we've seen, since 2005, have two local newspapers closing per week, and Pew reported a few months ago,
that four out of two out of five, four out of 10 people under 29 get their news from TikTok. So this is called best case scenario. You're gonna have to break a sweat on this one. Emily, give us your best case scenario for journalism.
Kevin Kelly (04:14)
You
Emily Bell (04:19)
We're starting from a pretty low base. ⁓ my best case, Dan, is that things are going to get better, which actually they, but they might get worse before they get better. And they might get a lot worse before they get better. But I think the best case is this, that in 25 years, we will still have journalists. That is a, that is a best case for me at the moment, because there are a lot of people trying to stop us having journalists.
Daniel Pink (04:22)
Hahaha
Kevin Kelly (04:22)
you
Emily Bell (04:46)
I asked my students about this last night. I teach them great undergrads. And they came up with a list, which is hard to beat. They said we want it to be rooted. Journalism will be rooted in its communities. It will be representing people and telling their stories and connecting them to what's going on in the world in a way that they trust and can see as being like real people doing real work.
Daniel Pink (04:49)
Mm.
Emily Bell (05:12)
That feels very old fashioned, maybe a low bar. But I feel like that's actually a really good place to start, which is so my best case is we will completely remake journalism from a corporate capitalist enterprise into a social good again. Well, actually, maybe kind of for the first time. It's always been an aspiration. It's never really been there. And I think that people will see that without journalism.
Daniel Pink (05:26)
Interesting.
Emily Bell (05:37)
you cannot have a democracy. And I think at the moment that's something that some people actually think is entirely possible. So I feel we're gonna go through some things before we get there, but that's my best case.
Kevin Kelly (05:50)
So let's take it again, we're looking at 25 years. So there will be journalism in 25 years. Would you think the definition of what that might mean would shift in 25 years? What do you think the definition of journalism? It's kind of right now, it's like where we get news or how we get news. That's primarily what we're focusing on rather than say entertainment or other things, if I'm understanding this correctly.
Emily Bell (06:07)
Right.
Daniel Pink (06:12)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin Kelly (06:15)
Would even the nature of news shift in 25 years? And again, it could, but we're trying the best case. So what would a good shift in the idea of news be in 25 years?
Emily Bell (06:26)
think a good shift would be it's not a commodity and it's not a commercial commodity. And I think that's how a lot of people think about it. When you say the news, even though we've already moved a long way from that, they think about CNN, they think about big bulletins, they think about huge websites like New York Times and I was going to say the Washington Post, but we'll come back to that. ⁓ So I think that that's...
Kevin Kelly (06:50)
Thank
Emily Bell (06:53)
already shifting. Unfortunately, I think the practice, Kevin, and the understanding of how it shifted is pretty absent from most places where people aren't really focusing on what is journalism doing and what is new. So I think the broad public are like, I don't know, is this like influencers? Is this what I see on my feed when I scroll through TikTok and there's somebody doing a great explanation of this story or that story that feels like is that journalism?
So I think that what's happening is we're gonna occupy a much smaller part of the information space, for want of a proper phrase. So at one time when I was first in newsrooms, it was quite a long time ago, everybody viewed what was going on in the world right now through the lens of journalism. That's how you got to it. And everything else was PR and it couldn't really reach you without somebody publishing it for you. We have now moved to
Daniel Pink (07:26)
Hmm.
Emily Bell (07:45)
place where journalism is not that lens that everybody looks through what's happening in the world. They are looking through so many different portals into that. And sometimes they don't know who's paid for it, ⁓ why they're being shown it, you know, why is my feed full of unusual animal friendships instead of what's going on in Iran that actually mine is full of both. So I guess that's it. But this idea that the news is something brought to you.
Kevin Kelly (07:58)
Thank
Great.
Emily Bell (08:13)
by a company, by a set of journalists, by Walter Cronkite. So that has shifted. So what is journalism? I still think what we know as the iron core of news or what Bob Woodward always said is, what are the bastards trying to hide from me today? That is still going to be the preserve of journalism. And I think it always will be because we've had so much innovation in this space and literally nothing has replaced reporters.
Daniel Pink (08:41)
Mm.
Kevin Kelly (08:41)
Let's see. So, yeah,
Emily Bell (08:42)
You know,
Kevin Kelly (08:43)
but we do, we have seen this sort of shift to bloggers becoming the reporters and the kind of like, they're used to be professional, they had a badge and now they're kind of like, well, somebody says I'm the reporter and they're a reporter. Do you think that continues to everybody's a reporter? And is that a good thing? Again, if we're taking the best case scenario, or do you think that there's a retreat back to some kind of certification?
Emily Bell (08:48)
Yes.
Kevin Kelly (09:10)
Or what do you think about that whole democratization of reporting?
Daniel Pink (09:10)
Hmm.
Emily Bell (09:14)
Sure, so I think first of all, it's never been a credential profession. anybody has, you've never needed a badge to do it. You're not like a dentist. You don't need to qualify to practice. But you were really credentialed by your association with institutions. So you work for the New York Times, it said something about you. So you're absolutely right that now you get independent investigative journalists. You don't really know who they're paid by.
Daniel Pink (09:29)
Exactly.
Emily Bell (09:38)
They're often, we do a lot of research on this at the Tower Centre, they're often paid by political action committees. They're sometimes paid by corporations. They just announce themselves as journalists. Big question, can you stop that and reverse it and say, well, you have to understand that even though these people say they are journalists, they're not really what we think of as journalists. You can't stop that. So what you have to do is you have to have a profession.
but recognizes itself and like a network. mean, again, borrowing from your work, Kevin, this comes organically from people who do work where they are thinking about what can I tell my community or the public, which is going to help them make informed decisions about how they live their lives, whether it's to take that road, not that one, because, you know, tree has fallen down or whether it's who to vote for. But we've
we've really got to recognize each other and build those networks. So I think that's the thing.
Daniel Pink (10:36)
Tell me what
that looks like in practice here. Because I feel like we might be conflating, there two different things going on in your analysis, at least as I see it. One of them is basically the practice of the profession. And the other is the business model of the profession. So you said that we're going to move from a corporate world, corporate entity to a...
Emily Bell (10:41)
Yeah.
Bye.
Daniel Pink (10:59)
something else. I saw you use the word social good. You use the word use the word social good. And actually, I think that that makes some sense. Because if you look at the trajectory of things, the iconic newspaper owners like the Grahams here in Washington, DC, they were not it was a business, but they also had a sense of stewardship of a public institution. And so what is it? let's see that that's the business model. And then there's the practice of journalism. What
Emily Bell (11:01)
Social words.
Daniel Pink (11:22)
reporters actually do. I think I'm hearing that you're saying that's not going to change that much, but the people who are able to do it will change.
Emily Bell (11:30)
Well, I think that we just have to have a broader, you we remember that kind of in the 2000s you had our friend Dan Gilmore writing We the Media. And this was seen as a very positive thing, citizen journalism movement. And then we've been through this phase which says maybe we open that floodgate a little bit too widely and the people coming in and not, they have some purpose which is not actually just informing the public or contextualizing or explaining or engaging them.
Daniel Pink (11:41)
Yeah.
Emily Bell (11:56)
I don't think it's the right way to see it to say there are too many people doing that. I just think it is the case that we need to define what actually is useful journalism. Now that could be done by a local civil society organization. It might be done by your church. It might be done by somebody with a sub stack down the road. If they are bringing forward verified useful information and they will stand behind it and be accountable.
Daniel Pink (12:13)
Hmm.
Emily Bell (12:24)
then that's journalism. All you have to do to do journalism is go out and report something and do it in a way which is accessible and real and true and where you can stand behind it and be identified as the person or people who are bringing you those facts and be legible to the public.
Kevin Kelly (12:46)
Yeah, so the legible part is interesting to me because in talking about who can be a reporter or a journalist, I wonder if you could move to something in 25 years of full disclosure of where all the money comes, full disclosure, full transparency, and that was part of it. then the second one is taking responsibility. So you have two parts. It's that full disclosure of your funding and then
Daniel Pink (13:09)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (13:14)
you're taking responsibility for whatever you say and making corrections. For me, that's one of the metrics I use for how much I trust a source is how often are they making corrections? I mean, that's, and so, and so I wonder if that might be where we could head to where we have the mechanisms for transparency, that's our disclosure, that's part of this new technology that we can make.
Daniel Pink (13:21)
Hmm.
Emily Bell (13:36)
I think that's right. And I think it's really interesting that you say part of this new technology that we make, because that's something that we haven't done. Or we used to own printing presses. We haven't built our own infrastructure at all effectively in the digital world. And really for that...
Daniel Pink (13:56)
When you say we, who
do you mean? We haven't built.
Emily Bell (13:58)
I mean, people
hear about, I was going to say journalists, but I actually, think kind of people who are really about public information with integrity and transparency. And we recognize that that's a problem. We recognized it when Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X. It was like somebody coming to your town and buying real infrastructure and then saying, you can't come down these roads. You can, you don't have the right to get these pots, potholes fixed, et cetera. So it's, it's really.
thinking about this as infrastructure. We don't have that, but we now know that we need it. So I think this transparency, legibility, is also the same thing as the part of a network, which is I see Kevin Kelly and I say, I've been reading his book since the early 90s. I know who he is. I can access him. I can send you a message. We have the technology now to be accountable.
⁓ And I think the other thing about this is that there's a scale issue here as well. So we've been really operating at a kind of a P to teal designed zero to one. Everything is about moving up in the scale and journalism has to move down in scale. We have to stop being abstracted from our audiences and our communities and we have to get much closer to them. You know, the Guardian, we have something called Open Journalism and this was 20 years ago.
And it was kind of a precursor to exactly this, is how do we make ourselves accountable to a broader audience? And that can be done in small ways and it can be done in big ways, but scale is kind of the enemy of that. And social platforms, which are advertising companies operate. They depend on scale. AI depends on scale. There's a way we have to figure out how to work against that.
And we should be able to do that because we're human communicators. The problem is, as you know, when you go from kind of phase A to phase B of innovation or disruption, often there's a lag in kind of understanding productivity and financing. we have to kind of, think, say, well, we need, we do need technology that enables us and we need people to do it. And I think that those people are emerging.
I think that people want to communicate. think we're in a very difficult democratic moment in America right now. And when you look at the past six weeks in somewhere like Minneapolis, you can see self organizing networks at neighborhood level. And you can see local journalists like the Saharan journals, the Star Tribune, et cetera, working out how to work with, you know, soccer moms with whistles and phones and how to actually
put together pictures of what really happened, not what the White House press office is saying, but what really happened. And we have these many models now emerging and people, I think, understand and recognize that that is the model that they want in their communities and towns.
Kevin Kelly (16:53)
Okay, yeah, so.
Daniel Pink (16:54)
Unpack that, unpack, what are the attributes of that model? Your students said, rooted in communities. is, tell me, that's a little abstract though. Tell me what that means.
Emily Bell (17:05)
Well, it sounds...
We talk about this a lot. I have podcast with my friend, Heather Chaplin, called Weirdly Journalism 2050. And we were talking about this concept of in-community and care and saying these are squishy terms, but they're hard to do. So what it means is that the old model of journalism, you'd have said, I'm in charge of who tells the narrative in Minneapolis. I'm going to come in with a great big camera and a bunch of people.
and I'm going to set up and I'm going to film it and I'm going to have somebody in front of the camera with a microphone. What we're now looking at is saying there are going to be hundreds of people with camera phones. You we saw this in 2012 in the Arab Spring. There was a kind of prototype model for it there. And as journalists, there are a couple of things that are going to help us leverage that and verify it and amplify it. One of those is understanding
Daniel Pink (17:44)
Mm-hmm.
Emily Bell (17:57)
that we are not part of that network, but that we have to work with it, that we're not going to dominate it. It's not our story. It is their story and they're there to help us with it. And we should be respectful of that. So that means really being physically present, not parachuting into a town or a government building or a kind of a set of like a professional practitioners, like being there, showing up.
That's number one. That's what it really looks like. And then the second thing is really understanding what it means to publish in this incredibly chaotic environment where you have actors who don't disclose who they are, where you have people who are paid by companies and politicians to tell a different narrative, to disrupt your narrative, to have you kind of discredited and understand how to build a network of resilience, which is, OK, I know that I need to
keep my words streaming to the cloud or my pictures going to the cloud. And I need a number of people to have access to that in case somebody takes my phone. You know, just like these are things which actually just so many people now understand that if something urgent is happening in their environment, they need to do this. You know, we see it in Iran. We see it in Gaza. We see it. We saw it in the Arab Spring. We see it in Minnesota. These are learned behaviors. And I think that
You know, what does that mean if you are a journalist in small town America or in central Europe, in Ukraine? It means that you've now got a kind of a community of people who've done this before globally in different, but in different geographies, but very similar situations. And so this network can be built through individuals comparing notes, sharing skills.
And also providing a kind of resilience in publishing. Do you know what I was reading this morning? was reading about, you know, I was reading about mesh networks. I don't know if people know what mesh networks are. You know what a mesh network is. And I think we got very excited about these in 2000. We did a whole report on them in like 2014, 15, 16. And people were like, yeah, sure. know, kind of whatever, sense of boxes on trees. But, you know, we're always going to be using.
Kevin Kelly (19:54)
Yeah, I remember that idea.
Emily Bell (20:10)
are Apple phones and you know what have you. Well, now we're in a position where you're back to this and saying, improvisation and learning about how these technologies can sit outside a centralized control is going to be really vital. And journalists have always been outsiders. So I think we're going to go back to that. As they've always been. For 50 years, they've been insiders. It really only works as a profession if you are outside structures of power.
Daniel Pink (20:33)
Thanks
Emily Bell (20:37)
part of that structure of power, you're not going to be a I don't think you're going be a very effective journalist. You're not counteracting it.
Kevin Kelly (20:42)
So, yeah,
I want to go back to the scale a little bit because for me in the broadest sense of journalism, I would consider like science news, the magazines Nature and Science, are now have become kind of global. mean, 25 % of the revenue, let alone the papers in Nature are now coming from China. so you have these kind of, it's a global, will become even more global. I'm trying to, I mean, I could easily imagine in 25 years,
They're being a global news source. And so you, mean, you kind of do want to have something that's in common with all the inhabitants where there is some commonwealth or is some common touchstone. I, yes, I mean, I think there are some advantage to having these very hyper-local things, but at the same time, you do want to have a global touchstone where people are interested in the news at the planetary level. And so.
Emily Bell (21:11)
Absolutely.
It's.
Kevin Kelly (21:34)
What do you, what's the best case scenario for that?
Emily Bell (21:36)
Well,
I think that you touched on something that's really important, which is what is our understanding of scale? And like a lot of our language in this has been set really by the technology industry, which is adding plus one for zero cost for plus revenue. So this idea that you scale, know, it really interesting talking about publications like Nature, which is I would be really interested in what size they're.
newsroom is and how many journalists they have and editors. These are probably not like tremendous, it's probably pretty much the same size. I, you know, I was talking to the publisher of the New York Times a while back and he was saying, everyone talks about how dominant we are now. We are nowhere near the size we were in 2005. You know, like just in fit, like in the numbers of people that we have employed doing this. So this idea of scale is also one of reaching connection, I think. And I think
Daniel Pink (22:20)
Mm-hmm.
Emily Bell (22:29)
You know, that connectivity is really, important. But the idea that you have one huge company that oversees or controls all of this. So you have like a Stafford B control room version of journalism rather than this distributed network that can actually kind of like interconnect and talk to each other.
I think it's a different way of thinking about the scale. I'm still heartbroken about what's happened to say Twitter, which was never perfect. But if you talk to a journalists who use Twitter, which I don't think have really, you they haven't been looked at enough and neither have science journalists and other specialists who say, you know, it's really great to be able to connect with experts on climate in Norway and in Alaska and talk to people who
go to conferences that you could never afford to meet because you're doing journalism in a completely different place and you don't have a lot of money. And that's what I mean, I think, about building infrastructure for that kind of. So I guess you're right, which is, you know, we still want this sort of idea of global commonality and an idea of shared sense of what it is we're looking at. ⁓
Kevin Kelly (23:38)
Right. And
there is actually an example in the science arena for the kind of decentralized global thing, which is archive.org, right? mean, the archive, the preprint, which is decentralized in the sense that there is not a big company with a whole staff of people doing this. is, ⁓ it's much more of a peer, well, because no peer review, it's a decentralized thing. There's actually one guy, I think, running the whole thing.
Emily Bell (23:47)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (24:05)
out of his, as a side project. But that, but that maybe is a little bit closer to how you could have a global coverage, but you're not doing it with a centralized mammoth organization.
Emily Bell (24:21)
I think you're exactly right, Kevin, in using the word distributed or decentralized. So you can have networks at huge scale that operate very locally. maybe 20 years ago, somebody was telling me that the Global Investigative Journalism Network, GIGN, which is kind of an informal kind of gathering, not super.
professional thing that no, but it's, it's kind of one those networks again, peer networks that used to be like, I don't know, sort of like you could meet in a modestly sized meeting room. And now it's got two or 3000 people in it because you have journalists who are in Belarus, you have journalists in who are in Korea, you have journalists who are in Alaska, you have, they, and they can use global networks to find
distributed strength and resilience. And I think that, you know, I really think that that is something where I see journalism as having been successful actually in using that capability of the internet to get round the other problem of the commercial web, which is that unlike the vision a lot of us had, I think in the early 2000s, the commercial scale and centralization.
of whether it's the algorithm, whether it's advertising markets, has worked very specifically against the interests of journalism and groups of people who want to do things for in the knowledge economy. I think archive is a great example. think the internet archive is a great example. Wikipedia is a great example. And so that, think, is why I'm optimistic, because I think that there's been a chafing against that model by big commerce.
And some of those places, yeah, some of those places.
Daniel Pink (26:05)
So, so.
Is the is the
is the best case scenario is a best case scenario kind of we're looking in that we're looking in the wrong place So essentially we're looking now if you follow the headlines back when people fight, know again I might be using archaic terminology here, but when you follow that you follow the headlines, you know that CNN CNN is imperiled You know, I remember when you know Ted Ted Turner came along He said we're gonna have a 24-hour news network and people said you're crazy there That's that's completely unsustainable, but he's a global 24-hour news network and Ted Turner came along and
Now CNN, it was this incredible innovation and now CNN is imperiled. But what I guess what you're saying is that while we watch that demise, what we might be seeing happily is the emergence of essentially an unnamed CNN without a Ted Turner, without an Atlanta headquarters that is decentralized and distributed. And that could be emerging right now.
Emily Bell (27:00)
I think that's right. think it is emerging right now. I think it's rough. know, think journalism at one level...
Daniel Pink (27:02)
Okay.
Yeah. Rough meaning
difficult or rough meaning not fully realized or both.
Emily Bell (27:09)
Well, both. And I think that rough and difficult is journalism is a team sport. You you need to see other people and you need to have people have your back if you're doing difficult work. So doing it by yourself from your kitchen table is rough. You know, you can feel very lonely out there, even if you're doing amazing world changing work. I see it every day in people who are on Beehive or
Daniel Pink (27:17)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Emily Bell (27:34)
post or sub stack, you know, and yeah.
Daniel Pink (27:36)
Can we
come back to the communities because we can define communities based on communities sort of an interest. We can also define communities geographically. And I do think that if we look at models, actual models that are working right now, they're sources of optimism. So when you're talking about rooted in communities, there is something you're probably familiar with that maybe you're sending your students there in Chicago called Block Club. ⁓
Emily Bell (27:59)
love,
love block club.
Daniel Pink (28:00)
Okay, so Block Club in Chicago is,
it's not the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Tribune is toast. A general interest daily publication.
covering this massive entity called Chicago is toast. However, what Black Club is doing for our listeners is essentially covering neighborhoods. So instead of having a beat City Hall, the reporters, their beat are the Lakewood neighborhood, the Rogers Park neighborhood. Do you think that that is the kind of model that we're going to be seeing?
Emily Bell (28:30)
I did some local experimentation when I was at the Guardian and we were trying to do this on a very small scale, but in bigger cities and we got it slightly wrong. But there was something there which I didn't think it was gonna work and now it is working and it's really the best news. And Block Club is one, I think we saw it with, as I say, if you just look at Minneapolis and places like Sahan Journal, et cetera, which is operating really, really...
They're hyperlocal, they are able to stitch together communities around the city. So that's the really cool thing I think about Block Club Outlier doing the same sort of stuff in Detroit. And you have these phenomenally smart people, often women, I'm going to say, know, I talking to Kansas, Fortman the other day, who is, well, she's a founder of Outlier, which has done a very similar job to Block Club, but in Detroit. And I think that...
Daniel Pink (29:11)
Who is that?
Emily Bell (29:19)
we've learned so much from saying you have to put aside this idea of theatricality and scale to some extent to do good work in journalism. And it's not always gonna work. seen, you know, we see new outlets like I think the Baltimore Banner do phenomenal work in Baltimore. We see...
All kinds of, I think, of these local outlets that understand the complete recession of reporting in their cities, their towns, or even on their streets and blocks has had real impact and harm on their communities and on the civics. And it's quite motivating. And I think that they have a lot in common. They're not activists, but they have a lot in common with social organizers and with activists.
Some people see themselves as activists. still think there's a distinction if you're a journalist. Yeah, we miss a lot.
Daniel Pink (30:10)
I think there's a danger to see yourself as an activist. think that, you know, unless
activism is defined in the Woodwardian way of what are the bastards trying to keep from us today.
Emily Bell (30:20)
Yeah, but that's not really what activism is. Activism is about, have a goal and I'm going to reach it.
Daniel Pink (30:22)
Yeah.
I have a policy goal, a political goal. Yeah, I actually find that somewhat, I find that somewhat dangerous. But what you have is you have, you have bright spots, you have green shoots out there, whether it is the Baltimore banner, which won a Pulitzer Prize, whether it is San Francisco standard, which is doing some good coverage in, doing some good coverage in San Francisco, the rise of Substack, I think could make us.
Emily Bell (30:28)
next.
That's a great answer. Yeah.
Daniel Pink (30:50)
optimistic about reporting on communities, not necessarily geographic communities, but communities of people who have an interest in something like in a particular topic or a particular domain. So maybe the best case scenario is simultaneously a massive decentralized, unnamed global network and these hyper local places that are covering things that matter to me.
you know, on my block.
Emily Bell (31:19)
I think that's right. And I think the other thing is we have to get away from the idea that there is one model and one way that this is going to work and that there's that we need to really get away from the binary, which is you need a hundred different ways to do this. And you may well need connective tissue, which is a given, which is instant access to information, which is, which could be hard.
Daniel Pink (31:24)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Emily Bell (31:45)
Right? So the internet was that. That was this is for everybody. This is all the World Wide Web. This is, you know, Tim Berners-Lee. This is for everybody. That's what you need. But then how you make use of it, which models work. We, you know, the corporate press, mean, the Guardian is not really that corporate, to be honest. It's a it's a charity. But the model that I grew up with and reporting on was the press baron, was the centralized, godlike figure, the Rupert Murdoch of this world.
And we're seeing that replicated in really worrying ways in the technology platform space. And to me, that model is just toxic in terms of people's understanding and knowledge and freedom to learn. But it's also a model that I think governments increasingly want to impose on us. So journalists have to get around that. And it's going to take a lot of
thinking about different ways and different models. And I think that that's exciting thing about where we are.
Daniel Pink (32:43)
So 100
different models, ⁓ most of which haven't been invented yet, most of which we might not imagine right now. Now, what advice do you give your students? They come to you and say, know, Professor, Emily, I really want to be a journalist. feel, you know, a lot of young journalists who I talk to, and I happen to have one of them who's a son, are very mission driven. They feel like they're doing something
You know, my son ⁓ is a reporter for a large city newspaper in Texas, making very, very little money compared to his friends, but is doing it out of a sense of zeal, out of a sense of like doing something for the world. And a lot of his colleagues are that same way. And yet when I talk to, when people say, hey, what does your son do? What does your 23 year old son do? I say, he's a... ⁓
newspaper reporter, whatever newspaper means, newspaper reporter, people are like, oh my God, you know, as if he has some kind of like horrible disease. so what do you, so you have, I think you have this youthful zeal and then you have this kind of this view out there that the profession is a dinosaur, the business and the profession are a dinosaur. I'm curious, like, what are your students saying? What are they saying to you and what are you saying to them about the future?
Kevin Kelly (33:38)
Thank
Emily Bell (33:59)
So our students...
Daniel Pink (33:59)
Because I mean, if you're going
to enroll, if you're a student, you're enrolling, you're paying whatever the exorbitant tuition is at Columbia School of Journalism, and you get a master's, all right? So chances are you've taken one other path in your life and you say, you know what, what I really want to do is dive deeply into a dying, reviled profession and pay huge amounts of tuition to learn the craft, all right? What are you telling them? What do they want to do and what are you telling them to do?
because I feel like those are the seeds of a best case scenario. Those people are seeing an optimistic future.
Emily Bell (34:31)
So,
So, we are seeing unbelievable mission in our students. know, 15 years ago, I had somebody who's actually now a great photojournalist, but he came into my office and he said, why am I here? I've just learned what a videographer makes at the Wall Street Journal. And it's like only, this is 15 years ago, only $50,000 a year. And I said, the world of the golden ticket has gone.
Daniel Pink (34:37)
Interesting.
Emily Bell (34:56)
You know, even in 2010, I caught the tail end of it in the 80s, but it's not tech, it's not finance. You're not going to get rich. But it is this mindset. So our students want to know how to make their mission stick. You know, they want to know how to pursue these passion projects, which are creative and important and impactful.
and hard to do. You we're not discouraging people from going into film or poetry or what maybe we are, but I mean, I wouldn't, I would say these are things that society really needs, but it's self-selecting, think, Dan. It's now, my son too is a journalist, like your son, but writing about private equity. And I was like, there is no more important job right now than to understand the levers of power.
Daniel Pink (35:46)
Yeah, I think it's,
yeah.
Emily Bell (35:47)
And the other thing is they love it. this is the other thing.
Daniel Pink (35:49)
What are they doing? Like, have, we're talking now in February, we're gonna have,
you're gonna graduate a class of people with master's degrees in journalism in May or June. What are they doing next? Like, literally, where are they going to work?
Emily Bell (36:04)
So there are still quite a lot of jobs out there actually. are a touch. So first of all, there has been amazing self-organization around the idea that we need money, non-profit money in different models going into local journalism. So first of all, you have things like the American Journalism Project, have this coming together of funds, and press forward, which is putting money first and foremost into local newsrooms. And that's a great place to earn a trade.
Daniel Pink (36:07)
Yeah.
Right.
Emily Bell (36:32)
You know, the big places are still hiring. The Guardian is still hiring. The New York Times is still hiring. There's a lot to be done out there and people are paying. They may not be paying transactionally, but they're paying because they understand that it's important. And, you know, I think that what we're saying to our students is you can see the world out there and you can see that there is work to be done. I think there's nothing more.
depressing than thinking you're going into an over bloated profession where nobody really cares. It's all about the money and you can get away, you know, with kind of, and you're on a kind of career ladder. There's a shock when you realize that's gone. And I think it's like the law, right? The law is a big village of people who are very motivated now, but not necessarily to be partners in white sheep law firm. Sure. There are a few of those, but, but it's about really
Kevin Kelly (37:07)
and
Emily Bell (37:24)
grabbing the world as it is and remaking it how you want it to be. And I think that our students understand that they need to do that, that a lot of them come from places where they have already experienced people trying to stop them do their jobs. They come from Pakistan, they come from Texas, they come from all kinds of places where they've already had adversity. But it's...
Daniel Pink (37:40)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Emily Bell (37:51)
when you're you cannot, there's no antidote to being bitten by journalism.
Kevin Kelly (37:57)
So we've kind of slight print bias and we talk about journalism, newspapers, magazines, journals, and we've kind of gone a little ways with cable TV. In fact, it took me a long time to understand that when people talked about mainstream media, they were talking about cable TV, they weren't talking about newspapers. But I think this is...
Daniel Pink (38:00)
Yeah.
Emily Bell (38:12)
Right.
Kevin Kelly (38:17)
only halfway and that we're going to in the next 25 years continue to shift the center of gravity of the culture away from text to moving images, including immersive versions of that in the games. And what does that look like as a best case scenario where there may not be as much text based?
reporting or publication. So we could imagine people whose reporting is joining them in some virtual way. They're actually at the front line of something and you are standing next to them and they are maybe telling you about it. I mean, what does that look like in 25 years to you?
Emily Bell (39:06)
I
think it, today it looks like it's happened. So I think that, you know, these vertical videos, whether you're on, if I talk to my students, they get a tremendous amount of material from Instagram or TikTok or whichever, whichever the platform is, because that scrolling is a learned behavior, which has already changed the audience. So if you're going to reach people and you're going to tell them things that is going to help them.
or entertain them, you have to do it in that format. Doesn't mean that text has gone away entirely. There's also, instantly, a real boom in things like literary magazines and zines and people wanting the craft of print and writing. People like writing. People like reading. Book clubs are off the hook. So it's not going away, but you're right, Kevin, that it's shifted. So what I think it looks like is a version of what we have today where you really have the of the visual, the visuals first. And also you have to
I think this, you have to see it to believe it is also something now which is having a meaningful impact on reporting. So in other words, if you don't have the visuals, you're always gonna have your story challenged. But also people are gonna be producing their own visuals. And we're already seeing this with AI and how difficult it is to actually tell the difference between something that's happening and something that didn't happen. Look at Mexico a couple of weeks ago where...
the cartels, know, the head of the cartels was killed and they reacted in a very sophisticated way with a disinformation campaign suggesting that Puerto Vallarta airport was on fire and Americans were being taken hostage. So 90 % of the visual material that came out of that was actually turned out to be just false or fake or repurposed. But it had the effect of stopping
flights in airspace for a certain amount of time. So I think that it's here. But that visual language again and how we use it and we mix it, I think it's also mixed with text, it's mixed with audio. It's thinking about every possible way that you can provide access to people. But it also drives the backlash. think that young people like, they love printed material.
Daniel Pink (41:12)
Yep. Yep.
Emily Bell (41:19)
not in the same way that they did but you know they really did.
Daniel Pink (41:21)
Yeah,
I'm skeptical. I think there's a difference between text and paper. I think that paper as an information medium is, I love paper, all right? But as a medium, I think it's waning. In the same way, it's like, yeah, the people are starting zines, and then also some people are buying vinyl record albums. But it's still like Spotify is where all the action is. I actually think that there might be...
Emily Bell (41:33)
Hmm.
Right.
Daniel Pink (41:47)
and I think you're seeing it perhaps, Emily and your students, there might be a generational thing going on here in that the people who are in their 20s who are starting out as journalists who, and it's probably good, there's probably some self-selection there because only talented, mission-driven people are gonna go into this profession now. And so I think you get really, really good people going in there. But they're going in not like me. I still get print newspapers in my house. But I think that...
Emily Bell (42:02)
I'm sorry.
Daniel Pink (42:13)
The 20 somethings, I don't know if they make this distinction between text and images and the whole thing. It's like basically, I'm gonna tell you what's going on and I'm gonna use the tools that are right before me to tell you what's going on the best. And again, forgive me for sort of making this thing too pink, but I look at the way my son does his job. He will go to a, so he's covering local government, all right? So quintessential local journalism.
He's covering local government. But it's not like when I was an intern at the Washington Post 40 years or 30 years ago, where I would go with my little notebook to a meeting and then come back to the office and type something up in time for the six o'clock deadline. know, he's like, his generation is like, okay, I'm going to a public meeting. I have my phone with me. I'm gonna take a picture of what's going on there. If there's an interesting picture, I'm gonna send it in right now. I'm gonna write the first paragraph of this story.
Emily Bell (42:51)
night.
Daniel Pink (43:06)
right now on my phone and deliver it so we can go up on the web immediately so people know what's happening. And then maybe I'll come back later and write a bigger story about something else that might be illustrated with images that might have data in it. And then maybe I'm going to do a video to accompany it. And I don't think that that's like, it's like a native language, I think. And so if you look at the, so I think that like a reason to be optimistic,
is people who have less to, young people who have less to unlearn about what journalism and truth telling and storytelling is, and are just going out and doing it. And having incredibly powerful tools to do it. And then perhaps being part of a large decentralized global network of people who are doing this, and possibly doing things at the hyper local level. And maybe that is a reason to be optimistic about this. And
Emily Bell (43:57)
I think
it's everything.
Daniel Pink (43:58)
And,
you know, 100 different models, 97 of which the three of us can't imagine right now.
Emily Bell (44:05)
think that's right, but I also think that journalists are really actually inventive. We get a bad rap for not really being very innovative. But when we were doing all this stuff in the government, we had newsletters, which are now the thing, in 1999. We had podcasts in 2005. Even those look very different today. We had video 20 years ago.
But it looks different. think that what gives me optimism is that when these new tools change, there is a journalistic use for them, which we see people adopting and really having an impact with. So I think that's great.
Daniel Pink (44:41)
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (44:42)
Wait.
Daniel Pink (44:44)
In a decentralized way. In a way that might bypass ⁓ journalism schools. ⁓
Emily Bell (44:46)
Yeah, and I think
I think it could do but I think you also need a network and you need community I think, you know, as educators, we provide that there's also safety. Honestly, it's a much more dangerous profession. I think global kind of global networks of people that they can go and sleep on their sofas, you're going to need that in the future.
And also I think, know, some kind of we have to rethink as institutions the role that we play, which is you don't just educate people and then like off you go, or you're not trying to make them into something that fits a job tomorrow. You're trying to instill in them the importance of doing journalism on, you know, whether it's investigating Vladimir Putin or the town council and understanding that we have a role to help people.
and protect them and keep them effective as part of the field, not just as kind of the beginning of the chain. And I think that that is changing as well. And you can't charge like what people are charging for what we're charging and expect that to work. But that's why our focus at the moment is to try and really drive that to zero through scholarships. But we need resource to get to this, I think. So there's a lot of optimism.
And I think we can see it now. don't think we could see it 10 years ago.
Daniel Pink (46:08)
Should we move to tropes,
Kevin? yeah, go.
Kevin Kelly (46:10)
Well, yeah, I have one other ⁓
minute here. So we mentioned earlier about the fact that young people are getting a large amount of their news from TikTok or maybe others. And one possibility for the 25 years is that rather than declaring that social media is some kind of virus or disease, we actually reform it. And you could
you could see versions of it, particularly like an open source public version of it that worked, that actually was a vehicle for sharing of news and information. And so is there any thought about what that might look like? Like what if you had a social media thing that really worked? You removed some of the incentives for monopolizing your attention.
and you repaired the things that weren't working about it and you tried to emphasize the parts that were and maybe you a different economic model. Again, going back to maybe it's an open source, collectively run like a public library. And so is there any thought about trying to mend and fix and improve and evolve social media?
Emily Bell (47:20)
Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I feel as though this, we move in cycles. And I think in the open source and the of movements of the early 2000s, there was this idea that we could build our own technology. And that was pretty quickly swept away by places like Google and Facebook and anyone who had access to large funding sources. I think we're going back to that now.
Kevin Kelly (47:41)
Mm-hmm.
Emily Bell (47:41)
where
the idea that we build things which actually don't have advertising and surveillance at their core, but have truth or verifiability, accountability, accessibility at their core, that has become a lot cheaper. So doing all of that is going to become ever cheaper. And I think that the next thing we're going to see is
A platform like Substack, which is kind of built for journalism, not actually built for journalism, could be bought tomorrow. That is the next phase of this, which is we will just do that ourselves. And it won't be, we won't be gatekeepers of you can only be a professional journalist and be on here, but it will have that thing where the values of the technology and you know, it's here already. We just haven't, I think, thought imaginatively enough about.
Daniel Pink (48:09)
Hmm.
Emily Bell (48:30)
adapting it. you know, people look at Wikipedia and they go, well, that's not going to be like, you know, it's not visual, it's not video. It's like, no, no, no, but the principles of it are really sound, you know, this is, this is something that you can just think you have to think about the values of what you do and how you create technology that actually reflect and operate at the level of those values.
Daniel Pink (48:52)
Interesting. Let's move to some tropes. Now, typically what we do here is we take ideas, images, concepts, often from science fiction or from futurism, it. Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (49:03)
Hollywood movies, the kinds of things that
you expect the future to have.
Daniel Pink (49:07)
Here, here it's a with journalism. It's a little tougher, but I put together a few and I just will do this quickly Robot reporters and Here's what that would mean. All right
I'll give you an example again from literally from my neighborhood. So here in Washington, DC, we have a strange quasi-governmental entity called advisory neighborhood commissions. they're essentially, they actually have no legislative authority. They are advisory, but city council members look to them and they're divided, they're very divided, very, very small geographic territories. And there is like group of
of like five or six citizens who serve on these advisory neighborhood commissions. Now, what if you had a robot go to those meetings and record the audio transcript of the meeting and then use AI to say, here's what happened at the meeting. Robot reporters. Okay.
Emily Bell (50:02)
already happens and
already happens, you need a human in the loop. So I'm not dismissing it. I think it's here. It's here. It's happening. a person in the room changes the temperature of the meeting. And I think that, they say put a ring on it. I say put a reporter in it. Just like we need humans. I also have this theory that only the rich get real people. You know, we have a massive press full at the White House and people
Daniel Pink (50:07)
Okay.
Emily Bell (50:27)
fighting to get into it and you have robots at the local town council, you need real people, real people, know, everyone deserves a real person in those situations. So, you know, it's possible. I don't think it's desirable.
Daniel Pink (50:38)
Okay.
Kevin Kelly (50:41)
So another trope is the idea that everything is filmed all the time, that we all wear cameras on our eyes and that there is sort of this surveillance ultimate pedopticon where everything is being filmed, everything is being recorded, and there is sort of like everybody's a journalist in that sense. What about that? Are we headed there?
Emily Bell (50:59)
Well,
so again, I think that's here. It's a challenge for journalists because when you can survey everything, and you can now, what do you report? So in other words, and where do you draw that line of dignity and privacy and all those things? And how do you recognise that actually that control of surveillance, but also the control of connectivity is now the key prized asset for authoritarian governments?
Daniel Pink (51:25)
Yeah.
Emily Bell (51:26)
and shutting it off is the thing that we have to really be aware of and guard against. So I think it's, again, I think it's here, think control of that, and I think understanding of what it means and how to operate ethically and humanely within it is one of our biggest issues right now.
Kevin Kelly (51:45)
I worked as a futurist on Minority Report. And so pre-crime reporting, are we going to have that in 25 years?
Emily Bell (51:48)
Right.
Daniel Pink (51:53)
Hahaha!
Emily Bell (51:53)
pre-crime reporting. I don't know. mean, the Epstein files, I feel there's lot of pre-crime. I've just been listening to 97 episodes of the fully automated investigative podcast on the Epstein files. have to say, I know it's like, would not reckon. So that's what I say about robot reporters. need an editor. ⁓ But pre-crime reporting, again, this is like, but we have it. We have predictive policing, which, you know,
Kevin Kelly (51:58)
Yeah
Daniel Pink (52:07)
my God.
Kevin Kelly (52:12)
Yeah, but pre-credits.
Daniel Pink (52:12)
Yeah.
Emily Bell (52:21)
the great job you did with Minority Report, it's kind of here. know, it's like that's no longer science fiction in some ways. It's like you can see versions of that. So if you have predictive policing, it really is predicated on a kind of a level of surveillance and intrusion that you have to be careful. In short, making things safe for everybody. That is what journalism should be about, helping make things safe.
Kevin Kelly (52:44)
you
Emily Bell (52:47)
But over each, I think publishing is so easy now, but the decisions that we make around it are so complex. And if we have anything to teach as educators in this, I think it's going to be that judgment and decision-making amid that sort of complexity and ease of publication.
Daniel Pink (53:04)
Hmm, The other, when we go to the business models, I mean typically for years media entities have gotten their money, made their money two different ways. One of their...
Kevin Kelly (53:05)
Okay.
Daniel Pink (53:15)
audience pays for it, the subscription, or the media entity sells the audience to somebody else via advertising. And yet for years, mean truly, for a long time, 25, 30 years, I keep hearing about micro payments, where if I want to read this article somewhere, I click on that article and it's going to somehow magically cost me three cents or something like that. And that's going to be, and it's one of those things that has always been around the corner, but the corner's never come.
I mean, can we get to a point of micro payments where we're not paying a subscription? We're actually paying for what we consume.
Emily Bell (53:44)
I'm
about macro payments. go a hundred dollars. I'm 180 against that, I want. Micro payments are never going to happen because they're transactional. They're stupid and small and transactional and annoying. What you're going to have, I think, is people who will match the button and give you a hundred dollars, not
Daniel Pink (53:50)
⁓
Good. All right, good.
Okay.
Emily Bell (54:10)
10 cents to support to support a particular talk of knowledge a bit of the knowledge economy and it might come with access it might come with kind of you know improved bells and whistles and functionality but I think that's and that is like the GoFundMe you know the GoFundMe model which goes this is good I want to give it $100 I do not want to be bothered every time I want to look at article
Daniel Pink (54:26)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. And that might be where we are. mean, it's basically a, it's a, I mean, when I look at the stories from The Guardian, I get a little pop-up that says, hey, do you wanna contribute some money? It's a, it's a kind of, it's a non-profit model, and you're inevitably gonna have some, you're inevitably gonna have some free riders.
Emily Bell (54:39)
I think so that's my push on your.
Listen, it's...
It's
paying the New York Times for its puzzles, which I do gladly, and I pay for their recipes and it's 50 % getting off 50 % of their revenue drives that. And people say this is a crisis for news. No, it's not. It's like people want to pay for something they enjoy, but they know it's supporting something that they value. And I think that's the key thing.
Daniel Pink (55:22)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So and maybe it just it's a it's I mean, like I like just to be transparent here, like I've given money to ProPublica because I believe in investigative journalism and. ⁓
Emily Bell (55:37)
One of,
yeah, I'm on the board of the Guardian. I have to say one of the great optimistic things of the past 10 years is just how we're seeing people who don't have to give money, giving money for the annoying pop-ups, but there's no paywall. You know, it's like, it's, and it's people going, know, actually, yes, I like this. I want it to continue. I need to give it some money. And I think that that's something which I feel very optimistic about.
Daniel Pink (55:44)
Yeah, it's ProPublica, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, Kevin mentioned this, something like this, where what journalism is, is essentially a version of experience design. So instead of a raging, you know, there's a raging flood ripping, the Rio Grande River is flooding. And instead of a person with a notebook and a camera telling you what it looks like when it's flooding, they essentially bring you there.
and you stand on the virtual riverbank of this flooded river. Sounds kind of cool.
Emily Bell (56:33)
It sounds cool. I say the opposite, which is ⁓ I said the future is actually in the dirty fragments trailing on the floor. It's in the two second video clip. And now what you might get is one of those, you know, kind of visual splats where you can make a immersive picture from everything around it. But I feel that journalism, there's a reason that
Daniel Pink (56:37)
Okay.
Emily Bell (57:00)
Um, virtual reality, I mean, it's not there yet. The technology is not there yet. It might get there. I don't know. I mean, I'm not going to put anything on my face in order to experience. I say it's the dirty trailing edge, not the finished cinematic experience.
Daniel Pink (57:09)
Okay, that's sort of about it. okay. Maybe it's a niche thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (57:22)
So there's another silly, trivial Hollywood trope of the holographic news anchor.
Emily Bell (57:27)
Yes. No, I just think that we've had that. say, well, we've got it again now. it's like, is this person real or are they AI? Is it Sora? And actually, the rise of the influencer, the real person, the kind of real person rock star who is basically just somebody with a mini mic and a not particularly great iPhone.
Kevin Kelly (57:28)
25 years.
Emily Bell (57:51)
telling you something in a way that makes you want to be their friend. You know, that's the anchor. So the anchor has actually got more real. The anchor is already distributed, but they're kind of The ones who are good at it, the ones who...
Daniel Pink (57:54)
Hmm.
that's interesting. Yeah. So
Kevin Kelly (58:01)
Okay.
Daniel Pink (58:02)
we don't, we don't need it. We don't need a... If people are willing to get their news from a 25 year old in her bedroom with a pin mic, you don't need a hologram of Walter Cronkite. Right.
Emily Bell (58:04)
I need them. I need them.
Kevin Kelly (58:16)
You don't need Max Headroom.
Emily Bell (58:17)
You know,
I nearly said Max Hedrick when I was like, no, I'm talking about it. But yeah, we don't need that.
Kevin Kelly (58:20)
Yeah, so
yeah. So Dan, do you have any others? ⁓
Daniel Pink (58:30)
The only other one that I have would be, it's not quite a trope, but it's something, is that, you know, in the Washington Post had a column written by guy named Glenn Kessler for years, which basically...
Emily Bell (58:41)
I
know Glenn, yeah, he's of course, a badge bomber.
Daniel Pink (58:42)
that's he got fired of course. That
was basically kind of fact checking claims by politicians. Do you think that AI could serve that role? Basically we have know, Kessler.ai so that you could put some kind of AI screen on things and say okay this is BS, this is true. that?
Emily Bell (59:01)
⁓ One
of my students last night said, why don't we have AI whistleblowers? Which I thought that's that's great. is that. I think that spotting the flaws, I have to tell you AI is going to have to get a whole lot better than it is at the moment.
Daniel Pink (59:06)
Interesting.
Kevin Kelly (59:07)
Thank
interrupt, it's going to get better.
Emily Bell (59:19)
I know, but it's, I know, but it's still smart.
Daniel Pink (59:21)
It's gotten, Emily, it's gotten better since we started talking 45 minutes ago.
Emily Bell (59:22)
It's well, I wish it would get better in ways that did not like really annoy me. Like going what time is it? he goes, I don't know. I can't tell you. Okay. There's literally a compute. There's a plot on the computer. It's like, so yeah. So I kind of think we're all again.
I think that actually, you look at the verification tools now, can have, know, the AI is producing. We're already seeing a version of that. And so I think that's pretty optimistic. I think, you know, it's not there yet, but it's really changing feels like.
Daniel Pink (59:58)
And
it's helpful because I remember early in our conversation, you said, what journalists should be doing is offering information that is verified, useful, and for which they can be held accountable. so AI can possibly help in the verification of that, and maybe even the accountability of that.
Emily Bell (1:00:16)
Absolutely,
and if we are building our own, if we're building our own models, which I think in the agents of world we can absolutely afford.
Daniel Pink (1:00:24)
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting
Kevin Kelly (1:00:25)
Yeah, I think this
is actually one of the strengths of AI is that kind of formal logical proof of going step by step through things. And that could get very, very good and fairly, fairly reliable.
Emily Bell (1:00:31)
Bye.
Yeah, I think what's missing with, and this is a problem with fact checking kind of full stop, which is contextualization. know, still, sort of, we cultural contextualization, it always struggles with, you know, this bit is right. can verify it, but you know, the rest of it.
Daniel Pink (1:00:37)
Yeah.
Right. mean,
there's an epistemological question there, too, of like, when is something true? And so that's so there's like, but we're not going to go there here. I've already used, we only allow one reference to epistemology each episode, and I've already expended it. So should we?
Kevin Kelly (1:01:09)
Yeah
Emily Bell (1:01:09)
That's a shame because I like
epistemology on deadline is the best description I've ever heard of journalism. there you go. You can use that. It's yours. I'm not, I'm not.
Kevin Kelly (1:01:16)
Thank
Daniel Pink (1:01:19)
That's good, I haven't heard that one. That's actually solid. That's solid.
Should we go to the bet and then one for the road?
Kevin Kelly (1:01:25)
Yeah, yeah.
So, So, so Emily, is there, as you think about the next 25 years, is there anything that you feel strongly enough or certain enough that it will hurt, will happen that you'd be willing to make a handshake bet on? It's like something, something that you say, I don't know about this, but I'm sure that in 25 years, X.
Emily Bell (1:01:41)
Yeah.
So I'm a reckless gambler. There's all kinds of things that I will put my foot in. Luckily the door is shut, my husband can't hear me. Thank you, stupid best. I don't know, kind of like, so first of all, was like, well, the sub stack is going to win a Pulitzer like within five years. I will put a hundred
Kevin Kelly (1:01:49)
Okay. We'll make $100 in.
Daniel Pink (1:01:49)
Ha
Yeah, yeah, I win.
Okay, that's a good one.
Kevin Kelly (1:02:05)
Alright.
Daniel Pink (1:02:07)
That's a great one.
Emily Bell (1:02:10)
dollars on that right now without even being on the jury for the Pulis. I would just say 100. That's it. More reckless one. I think that there will be a very successful news organization that makes a virtue, Kevin's going to hate this, of having zero artificial intelligence.
Daniel Pink (1:02:14)
Fantastic. That's a great...
Kevin Kelly (1:02:32)
Yeah, no,
Emily Bell (1:02:33)
the production process. would also put
Kevin Kelly (1:02:34)
100%.
Daniel Pink (1:02:35)
Yeah, yeah.
Emily Bell (1:02:35)
100 dollars on that in the next 10 years, or even five years. I would also put money on that. I'm going to stop now because I don't have that much money to lose.
Kevin Kelly (1:02:38)
Yeah. Yeah. No, I, yeah.
I mean,
I, for the record, I think there's going be a lot of that kind of deliberate opting out of AI as, part of the stance that would be the counterculture. It's like, it's like vinyl again, right. Or digital, you know, dark room. Yeah. For sure.
Daniel Pink (1:02:51)
Yes.
Emily Bell (1:02:55)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel Pink (1:02:57)
Yeah. It's a differentiator in a crowded marketplace. mean,
Emily Bell (1:03:01)
Hi,
Daniel Pink (1:03:03)
it's like
these packaged food that says non-GMO.
Kevin Kelly (1:03:07)
Right.
But the thing is, it's probably only to be one or two of them.
Emily Bell (1:03:11)
Well, wait a minute. I'm going to put another bet on. I'm going to put another, sorry, I did warn you. You started something there. I'm going to have to attend a meeting after this podcast. I would put a hundred dollars on the well coming back as a cultural phenomenon, except it's a real well. Well, what I mean is that I think that there will be a counter-cultural movement, which is entirely about offline.
Kevin Kelly (1:03:13)
Okay.
Daniel Pink (1:03:16)
That was great.
Kevin Kelly (1:03:17)
Yeah, keep going.
Daniel Pink (1:03:26)
Whoa!
Kevin Kelly (1:03:31)
⁓ What do mean?
Emily Bell (1:03:39)
kind of like, just think that, I think the physical space, I think the physical space of culture is going to be huge. was, and you know, kind of what people say, well, it's kind of started with when people started to pay for vinyl again, you know, again, it's just one of those things. It's not that overtake where we are, but it will be the counter, the counterculture is in the real, I think.
Daniel Pink (1:03:40)
meeting in physical space.
Kevin Kelly (1:03:40)
⁓ Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, we'll
go into this idea of zines and we're, yeah, if we take 25 years and I was, uh, Dan is I think paper will disappear, except there will probably be, uh, paid magazine printed on paper. That's very expensive. Um, that you have to be invited. You subscribe. No, no, no, no. Here's the thing is you have to be invited. can not just
Emily Bell (1:04:04)
Yeah.
I got.
Daniel Pink (1:04:19)
As a hobby, as a hobby, as a community, yeah.
Emily Bell (1:04:21)
Yeah, Yeah,
Daniel Pink (1:04:25)
okay. It's a club.
Kevin Kelly (1:04:27)
Right, it's a club. It's where the club is. You have this on your coffee table. So how'd you get that? well.
Yeah.
Daniel Pink (1:04:36)
Yeah,
zines are cool.
Emily Bell (1:04:47)
But not with people who want to work at content. There was people who want to do their own scenes. They want to do their own found things. They want to do something. You know, it's like, I kind of think that that's what I think that's kind of maybe already over. I think we've been through that one. But I think paper, I think Papyrus might come back. think some.
Kevin Kelly (1:05:02)
Bye!
Daniel Pink (1:05:03)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. mean, there's always, there's always, there's always going to be, there's always going to be niches. Like there's, there's no reason for me to, there's no reason for me, like I don't need to go to the market via a horse. And yet there are people out there who still ride horses. There are people out there, they're just not in the...
Kevin Kelly (1:05:04)
You are insuring-
Emily Bell (1:05:10)
Thanks.
There are, yes, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (1:05:21)
Well, the Amish, there's
more than just a few. There's an entire community.
Daniel Pink (1:05:24)
Yeah, yeah. there are
Emily Bell (1:05:25)
Yeah, my take.
Daniel Pink (1:05:26)
people who are doing it in a clubby, hobbyish way as well. All right, so let's wrap up here. What is, so we've talked about the future of journalism. Emily, you've been pretty optimistic about this. And I think that there are many reasons.
Emily Bell (1:05:43)
I'm so
not optimistic, I'm such a pessimist that I've now had to be counter-cultural with myself and be super optimistic.
Daniel Pink (1:05:48)
Good. Well, we're here
Kevin Kelly (1:05:49)
Good.
Daniel Pink (1:05:49)
to stretch you. And so thank you for stretching with us. I think that there are reasons to be optimistic. They're weaker signals, but I think that they're there. so as listeners think about this and debate it with their friends and family, what is one thing that they should be reading, listening to, watching to help get some context and some background on this topic?
Emily Bell (1:05:53)
Let's see, it's been touching.
Kevin Kelly (1:06:13)
Or
is there an action that they should be taking? Or is there a question that we should be asking ourselves?
Daniel Pink (1:06:15)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah,
exactly.
Emily Bell (1:06:20)
So I would say read a history book. I've just read, actually I read about six months ago, a book called the Munich Post, which is about the last independent anti-Hitler newspaper left. It's not very optimistic, I have to say, but I was like, you can see repetitive patterns. So I would say it's all there. I hate to see to my history professor friends, but they like,
Daniel Pink (1:06:34)
Huh.
Emily Bell (1:06:48)
it's all there you just need to go back and look so I think that's the first
Kevin Kelly (1:06:50)
Is there another,
if person had to read one book about journalism, what might it be?
Emily Bell (1:06:55)
I really love my friend Margaret Sullivan's Breaking the News, is just about it's, and I love the book about British tabloid journalism called Stick It Up Your Punta, which may now be, which is I honestly believe is the best book about journalism ever written and it's so entertaining. I also think
Daniel Pink (1:07:06)
No.
Emily Bell (1:07:14)
I know that it's like Ezra Klein kind of recommended this, so I'm really loathed to, but, you know, amusing ourselves to death is right back there is like kind of Jacques Ellul and, you know, everything he wrote, et cetera. The one thing I would say is go and subscribe to 404 Media. I love 404 Media. They are young journalists who totally get the technology, how it fits into human rights, and they do it.
Daniel Pink (1:07:24)
It is.
Okay.
Kevin Kelly (1:07:41)
New, interesting business model
as well too.
Emily Bell (1:07:44)
And, and, and a business model that as one of the founders said to me, we couldn't have done this five years ago. We can, we can do this now. And I think that they are terrific and are my students all want to be them. They are like, they are the best. So give them some money and follow them and, and, and subscribe. They can have a great podcast. Not as good as this one, obviously, but it's pretty.
Kevin Kelly (1:07:49)
That's right. Yeah.
Daniel Pink (1:07:57)
How interesting.
Kevin Kelly (1:08:05)
You
Daniel Pink (1:08:06)
So those are some great suggestions. Yeah, and very useful.
Kevin Kelly (1:08:09)
Yeah, thank you so much for those. We'll put those in the show notes and any
Emily Bell (1:08:11)
No, sir.
Kevin Kelly (1:08:15)
other information about for people to follow you as well. Thank you, Emily.
Daniel Pink (1:08:20)
Because you're issuing reports at your center.
Emily Bell (1:08:24)
Yes, so CJ, I would say you can find us at Columbia journalism review and at the TOW Center and I'm findable on blue sky mostly and occasionally linked in which I absolutely hate but I do acknowledge that you kind of have to be there. ⁓ I'm all too discoverable at Emily Bell usually. Don't try and follow me on TikTok because I haven't quite got that. ⁓
Kevin Kelly (1:08:35)
Okay. Yeah.
Alrighty.
Emily Bell (1:08:47)
But yeah, and also kind of like, you find me, want to ask me something, just, just ping me. I would say DMs always better than the emails.
Kevin Kelly (1:08:51)
Alright.
Okay,
Daniel Pink (1:08:56)
All
right.
Kevin Kelly (1:08:57)
we'll have all those in the notes. And Emily, thank you for this wonderful, fantastic look into the next 25 years. I love your passion for.
Emily Bell (1:09:07)
I
it's such a privilege Kevin to meet you albeit through a screen and I'm such a longtime fan and Dan, you know you your son the kind of God bless the people who want to be journalists God bless the 20 something year olds who want to be journalists and I have to tell you it is the best fucking job or somebody said to me I don't feel I swear on this podcast but
Kevin Kelly (1:09:13)
Yes, well.
Hahaha
Sure.
Emily Bell (1:09:34)
It remains the best fucking job.
Kevin Kelly (1:09:36)
Yeah.
Daniel Pink (1:09:37)
Excellent. All right. Thanks, Emily.
Kevin Kelly (1:09:37)
Well, thank you.
So this is one in the series of best case scenarios. If you'd to hear more future ones, share your enthusiasm with others. The best way to help this show is to share it with your friends and share it on social. That word of mouth is really the best way to keep this future episodes coming. So we'd love to have your feedback. And if you know of a radical optimist in a particular field you've not covered yet, let us know in the comments and anything else.
that you would suggest that we could improve. So thank you.