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[MUSIC] Thank you everyone for being here, and thank you Jill for being here with us today.
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>> I'm so honored to be your final speaker, so thanks.
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>> We've chosen very, very carefully. >> [LAUGH].
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>> You've devoted your entire life to journalism, and you often tell your journalist to get the story behind the story.
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So, most people know your story as the first female executive editor of the New York Times.
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But, we are hear today and very honored to get to learn your story behind the story.
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And, in particular, I want to touch upon some of the early influences that shaped who you are. >> Sure.
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>> Your tenure at the Times, your management philosophy, and your thoughts on this very, very rapidly changing industry.
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So, I'll take us back in time when you were growing up in New York with your family.
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And you once said The New York Times took the place of religion.
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At the time said it, it was the absolute truth.
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Now, you might not have predicted that you'll be running this very publication years later. >> Certainly not.
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>> But, what were the early influences that got you interested in journalism?
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>> I actually got into a little bit of hot water for saying that The Times substituted for religion in my household, on social media.
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There were a lot of people denouncing my heathen comments.
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But, it had the virtue in my growing up of actually being true because my parents weren't religious, but they had a very reverential attitude towards The New York Times.
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And if some big story was published in The New York Times, that was the truth to them.
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And, I grew up inculcated with that same kind of admiration and belief in the accuracy and integrity of the information that was in that newspaper, which back then, of course, was just the print newspaper.
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To give you an idea, I grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan, how devoted Times readers my parents were.
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We actually had two home delivery subscriptions because my father liked to take his with him to work.
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And my mother, who was the most devoted puzzler I've ever known, she did the puzzle in pen, even on the hard days.
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She didn't like anyone kind of touching her New York Times.
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Like, she wanted a pristine puzzle.
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She don't like to tear the puzzle out.
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So, we had two home delivery subscriptions.
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And I can remember, at a very young age, when I was probably 12 getting real, I got very interested in movies, the old movies at that point.
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And just becoming so devoted to like the arts pages of The Times were sort of my introduction.
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If I wanted to know, culturally, what was happening in New York, I'd grab for the arts page of- >> Well, you went from an avid reader to launching your career in this industry.
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You started with the Legal Times, and spent almost a decade at the Wall Street Journal, as an investigative journalist. >> Right.
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So, most of us here probably don't quite have an idea of what exactly is the life of an investigative journalist.
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Can you tell us a little bit what that was like and some of the early challenges you had to overcome?
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>> Well, but the life of an investigative reporter is often the key if you want to get hold of secret, confidential documents to buttress your story.
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Sometimes it's lonely work, kind of green, old green eyeshade, kind of work of just sifting through piles of documents that you may have been given, looking for the diamonds in the rough, in those documents.
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It can be trying to locate people in remote places.
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I mean, a vivid memory of mine from back at the Wall Street Journal.
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It's not one of my daughter's favorite memories, but I was doing some Investigative reporting on overseas donations that had come to the Democratic National Committee during Bill Clinton's reelection in 1996.
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And these donations were being given through straw donors, the money hadn't really been the individuals who reported the donations.
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But their addresses were listed and many of these people lived in communities surrounding in suburban Maryland, suburban Virginia.
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And when I began driving to try to go to these addresses, I could see immediately that it was very unlikely that these were people who could afford to give $50,000 to the DNC.
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And my daughter at that point was playing on a rotating soccer team in that area.
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So I'd go to her soccer game and then make her get in the car and spend a couple of hours with investigative reporter mom like going up to these houses and knocking on the door.
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And I remember her saying to me, like, mom you can't do that.
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[LAUGH] You know, it's not polite.
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But, it's a little bit of that kind of work too.
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It's like old fashioned gumshoe reporting.
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That isn't the first reporting I did.
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The first job I got out of Harvard, I had been a stringer for Time Magazine while I was at Harvard, covering different stories and notable professors and other things on the Harvard campus.
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For you business students, that my most vivid memory of that early reporting was, I was constantly calling up John Kenneth Galbraith, and asking him over and over again, is the West in decline, Professor Galbraith?
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It got to be kind of a joke between us.
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Like, if it was Friday it was like, hi, Professor Galbraith, it's Jill.
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Is the west in decline this week?
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It was part-time reporting for Time magazine.
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At that point, the Boston bureau chief of Time was a woman named Sandra Burton, who had begun at Time as a secretary.
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And she had literally, through dint of being a great curious reporter and journalist, literally clawed her way out of the secretarial pool into the correspondents ranks.
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And she had become the first first female bureau chief at Time in Boston.
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And she was my first boss, and she was incredibly encouraging to me.
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And it was meaningful to her that even though I was a freshly minted Harvard student, I got a permanent job in their office right after graduation, that I get some meaningful experience and learn how to really report.
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And, do some hard reporting too, and She then went on to be based in Asia for a time, in Hong Kong.
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And when I became Washington Bureau Chief of the Times in 2000, I was the first woman to have that job.
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She sent me a telegram, it was long enough ago that telegrams were still being sent and her telegram to me said she could hear the glass shattering all the way to Hong Kong.
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She was my first boss, and the only female boss I ever had for the rest of my career, except for the period at the time when Janet Robinson was CEO of the Times and I was managing editor, I had a lot of interaction with her.
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>> I would love to talk to you more about the gender dynamics and working as a female in the journalism industry.
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But you mentioned your times at the Times now, and when now you're in a position where you have to decide on a daily basis what's fit or unfit to publish.
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On one hand, you have obligation to the audience to tell them the truth, and on the other hand I know there's been instances where the government told you, you'll have blood on your hand if you publish this article relating to national security.
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You had to make a lot of tough calls.
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How did you make these calls, and what's the framework you've used to do that?
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>> It's a great question, and one interestingly enough that we spent three hours in Professor Phillip Taubman's class, where I visited yesterday, his journalism class discussing just that.
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Because when I was managing editor of the Times and Phil was the Washington Bureau Chief, we had to actually consult on a number of those difficult decisions.
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And it's not like there's an editing manual that teaches you how to come to a perfect decision in those situations.
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And all of them are somewhat different, because when the government asks for either an entire story to be not published, or what is more common is the government will ask for certain details in a story to be withheld on national security grounds because they think disclosure of certain classified details may put lives in danger.
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It's agonizing every time you get one of those requests.
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I think what an editor has to do is, I don't wanna sort of get all heavy on you and start invoking the Founders, but what you have to do first and foremost is remind yourself that the Founders did give the press
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enshrined in the First Amendment, and it's first for a reason, these very special protections, because they believed so vehemently in the importance of our role in holding power accountable and making sure power in this country didn't become abusive and too centralized. Because that's what the Founders were so
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Because that's what the Founders were so deathly afraid of and felt they had witnessed happening in Britain.
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So you have to kind of take a deep breath and remind yourself that we're here first and foremost to inform the citizenry.
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To keep the public informed.
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And that to keep genuinely important newsworthy information away from the public goes against our wiring as journalists, but nor do we want to harm national security.
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And particularly after 9/11, the number of requests to withhold information from stories and in a few cases, hold stories back from publication, began increasing.
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>> Can you give us an example of how you weigh the tradeoffs?
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>> Sure, I mean one that is a pretty prominent case that in fact has been written about involved probably the most sensitive story about classified intelligence that the Times published when I was managing it in 2005.
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It was the first story that disclosed that the NSA was doing warrantless eavesdropping, which was actually illegal because at that point the NSA had to go to the FISA court in each of the cases it wanted to do eavesdropping, and they were bypassing the FISA court.
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They were just downloading telephone communications.
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And in that case, the Bush administration pretty immediately after the two reporters, Jim Risen and Eric Lishblam, began reporting on it said you cannot publish that story.
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That program, that eavesdropping Is the crown jewel in our anti-terrorism program.
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It has Michael Hayden, a very senior intelligence official, made assurances that the NSA eavesdropping had literally helped unplug some terrorism plots that were in the works.
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And in the Oval Office, the then executive editor of the Times and the publisher of The Times were told by President Bush if we publish the story we would have blood on our hands.
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And we held it for more than a year, but the legality of this kind of eavesdropping became ever clearer as the reporters continued to amass information.
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And it seemed, everything is a balancing test.
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It's that, is the information so compelling and important for Americans to know?
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Does that outweigh the possible risk to national security?
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And in the case of that story we felt that the public in whose name the war on terror was being waged, they needed to know.
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We weren't sure the public would be comfortable with those kinds of programs, which of course kind of lead us now into the area that Edward Snowden has made his disclosures about.
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But these are difficult cases, and I think in all of them and that this would be true at the Washington Post or any other quality news organization, that when you get requests from the government, you hear it out.
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You don't just get a leak and then slap it into the newspaper without hearing out those arguments and giving them careful consideration.
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>> You have a really tough job.
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>> [LAUGH] >> And with that I want to talk to you about your leadership philosophy because, as we know, the Times is an extremely complex organization.
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You have many different stakeholders.
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You have the publisher, the journalists, the audience, and the government sometimes, as we talked about.
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And unlike most other companies where they would have a longer product cycle, the Times put out a new product every single day. And it can't be buggy.
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>> And now with the web- >> It's constant. >> It's constant, yeah.
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So how do you manage such a Complex organization, with so many moving parts under so many constant deadlines?
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It's a difficult organization to manage. There's no question.
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It's also a thrilling organization to manage because they have the best journalists in the world who are expert in so many subjects, doing the highest quality work.
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So on any given day, I'd be reviewing a piece of multimedia on the restored Islamic wing at the Metropolitan Museum.
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And then doing a close reading of a story involving corruption of Chinese princelings and China, a long investigative story.
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It was an incredibly varied menu of journalism that I dealt with.
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And journalism I think over time, it's almost, I think, so unlikely that I would have become executive editor because my background was in investigative reporting.
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And typically investigative reporters are lone wolves.
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You're used to sort of hunting and going after stories by yourself.
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And journalism now, especially in a multimedia world, has become so much more collaborative.
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The lone wolf story is the exception now.
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I mean, now most big stories at the Times and other places involve teams of journalists, data experts, graphics editors, obviously, photographers, videographers.
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It's a team sport, and for someone whose background was investigative journalism, I'm not sure I would have been the natural manager of these large team.
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>> But you did lead as a manager. >> Yeah, sure.
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I think that probably my best leadership quality was just my passion for going after ambitious stories that were gonna have high impact.
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And that I was talented at being able to think up ideas for my colleagues that would be those kinds of high-impact stories.
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But the creative side of storymaking was my background, and obviously, as I rose up in the organization, I had to learn on the fly all of the things that you are studying here at Stanford Business School, which is business models.
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Journalism is under stress, i turns out that's the least well-kept secret in the world.
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>> Well, we will get to that.
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>> The whole time that I was managing editor and then executive editor, it was the business model is under stress.
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Also, it's a thrilling time because we're making the big digital transition from the print past into the digital present.
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And that presented its own challenges.
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>> You clearly had to learn these skills as your role changed from being an individual reporter to now running the newsroom.
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>> Right, I wish maybe that the Times had sent me here for a year.
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[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] >> Derek Bolton should take note of that.
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So, talking more about your management philosophy.
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I want to talk about your management style at the Times, and I read in other media outlets as well that you were described as, and I quote, abrasive, too pushy, polarizing, impossible.
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Did these come as shock to you when you first read them?
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>> You know, I was obviously not happy to read those.
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I wouldn't say I was completely surprised.
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I was aware that my style is hard-charging, I hope you can tell, fairly direct and direct in the way I talk.
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I guess that, through the eyes of some people could be seen as brusque.
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I was always very ambitious for the Times to have the best story, and whether that sometimes translated into pushiness, that wouldn't surprise me.
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If that's so, I felt the bottom line is that for many journalists that I had worked with, I inspired their best work.
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And that that was very important and my major strength.
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I think that so many of the words that you have just read are so personality-focused, and I'm certainly aware and have read quite a lot of literature on the fact that when women are in leadership roles, often it is those stylistic personal issues that just get outsize focus, and are kind of picked over to death, but- >> Well, do you think, on that note, women are scrutinized in an unfair way?
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>> I think sometime they're scrutinized in a way that is a double standard.
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That qualities that are seen in a negative light, when applied to women leaders, are sometimes seen as successful traits in men.
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>> As we- >> I want to also just kind of pause here to say, I don't anyone to misunderstand and think I'm trying to say that I was fired because I'm a woman.
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I totally don't think that.
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I think that some of the perceptions of me were colored by some of these issues.
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But I think that there were many issues that came into play in terms of the denouement, and me getting fired, so, just wanted to say that plainly.
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>> What, if anything, do you think you could have done differently?
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>> I think that, I've thought lots about that and things that if I could do over, I would do over.
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I definitely would have spent more time listening and less time talking myself.
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I think because of the period of time I matured in my career that I had so often been in the situation in a meeting where I was the only woman, where I felt I wasn't heard or listened to that I think perhaps by the time I got into the big leadership jobs at the Times I was overcompensating by making sure I was heard in a way that I think probably didn't help me. So listening more.
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I think that because this was a period of economic stress in the newsroom, and I was so determined to fight to preserve every job of every journalist in that newsroom that I probably was not the easiest person for some of my business side colleagues to deal with all the time.
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I was very protective of the newsroom of the New York Times and it's prerogative.
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There had, for my whole career, been a very clear Chinese wall, it was always called then, between the news and the business.
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And I had sort of been trained to be very protective of the newsroom and to somewhat keep the business side at bay on certain matters.
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And I think that in a digital world, and now I see the Times has more jobs that are joint reports to the business side and the news side.
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>From my period of time I was very anxious about that and probably pretty resistant to it because I thought that the journalism was best served by being at arms distance from.
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The advertising and circulation sides of the paper.
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And I think maybe looking back on it, I was too protective.
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>> And as we all here today walk out of the auditorium to strive to change lives, organization in the world, what are the things that we can do as both men and women to change the situation at our workplace?
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>> Well, I think you have to be clear and focused in what you want to change, first and foremost.
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I don't think it's effective always to have ten things that you wanna change in your workplace.
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But if there's one transcendent issue that you really think needs to be transformed and if it was that it would make where you're working so much healthier.
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I think being direct and not necessarily being overly political, or stepping on people's toes and bringing that issue to the attention of the people who run the company.
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I think you should be pretty forthright and kind of kick ass about trying to make change. I really do.
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>> You've definitely made a lot of change in your life and at the organization that you've been at.
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And even after you got fired from the Times, Dean Saloner mentioned that you were giving a commencement speech.
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>> Yeah, it wasn't two months after though.
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>> It was almost like- >> It was just a few days after.
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It like the Sunday, I was fired on a Wednesday, I think it was the following Sunday I had agreed to be the commencement speaker at Wake Forest.
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And they were worried that I was gonna withdraw, but I had said yes and I was gonna go.
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>> And I love this quote you said, which is I'm talking to anyone who has been dumped, have not gotten the job you really wanted, or have received those horrible rejection letters.
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You know the disappointment of losing.
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When that happens, show what you are made of.
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So what are you made of, Jill?
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>> [LAUGH] >> Well, I think I'm made up of, I am a resilient person, I think.
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And I think anyone, who, when a lot of you, I hate to tell you even you wonderful Stanford business grads, some of you are gonna get fired in the course of your- >> [LAUGH] >> Career.
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And work on that resilience thing. It really helps.
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I think I'm, I love to read, I get a tremendous, I just think the Times is still the best, it's the most enjoyable thing to sit down and read.
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And I'm made up of someone who just has tremendous appreciation for a beautifully crafted story.
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I'm a very involved family person. I have two children.
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I met my husband my sophomore year at Harvard.
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We've been together since we're 20. I'm a big dog person.
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[LAUGH] >> In fact you wrote a book about your dog.
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>> I did, I wrote a whole book about my dog.
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>> [LAUGH] >> Silly though that may seem.
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But I think that what I'm made of, it goes back to my parents.
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And my mother was very influential in making me love reading so much.
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But I had a father who really thought he had two daughters that if we set our mind to something, we could do it if we worked hard enough.
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And he even, when Daylight Savings Time would come on the East Coast, he would take a bat and a ball, I was never a very good athlete, out to Central Park and he'd have me hit.
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And I'd be like I can't do it and he'd be sure you can Jilly, sure you can. He was very encouraging.
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And the morning that it became public that I'd been fired my sister called me up.
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And she said to me, you know what?
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My father passed away in 1992.
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But she said, our dad would be as proud of you today as he was when you became Executive Editor of the Times.
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And that was very meaningful to me.
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And it made me all the more wanna go to Wake Forest and give that speech.
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And that morning I had an appointment. I'm also a gym rat.
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That's what I'm made of, and that's right.
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>> I saw that on Instagram.
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>> So that's what I was gonna say.
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The next thing I did, I had an appointment to do personal training.
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So I went to see my trainer, and when I got there, he had these big red boxing gloves and he handed them to me and he said you need those today.
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And he had on his big red boxing gloves, and for the next hour, I just like whacked at his big red boxing gloves.
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>> [LAUGH] >> And it was incredibly therapeutic.
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I hadn't brought my phone, but I said to Gene my trainer I said, do you have a phone?
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Cuz I want to send my kids a picture.
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I was worried that my kids would think I was crying in bed or something.
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So I wanted to show them mom in the cool red boxing gloves.
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>> [LAUGH] >> And so he sent me a picture from his phone, I sent it to them.
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Then I went home, and about 11:00 in the morning, my daughter who is a surgeon in Boston, I didn't know, she put it on Instagram. >> She did.
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>> She called me up and she said Mommy, that picture's going viral.
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>> [LAUGH] >> And it was the wood, which is the big top picture on the next day's New York Post.
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I must say it wasn't the most flattering picture of me in like a.
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Shirt but I guess that's me, too. The fighting person.
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>> Absolutely, and we also sent that picture around to the GSVS. >> Oh no!
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[LAUGH] That picture in the Quad is so much more attractive than that.
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>> Before we open up the questions for Q&A for the audience I wanna take some time to get your thoughts on the future of the journalism industry.
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In five to ten years how do you see people consuming media?
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>> In every way possible.
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I just was reading a story today that the editor of USA Today was predicting in five or six years that they wouldn't be a print paper anymore.
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But I certainly think the Times is going to be around in print for quite a while longer.
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There's just a pretty robust, I think something like 800,000 home delivery print subscribers to the Times here in California.
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Evidently, that costs you who like to get it in the blue bag, more than $900 a year, I think.
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So but, there's a healthy number of people still who love the serendipity of reading in print.
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But news, like I'm actually, I'm writing a book about all the changes in the news industry.
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And you know Snapchat just hired away CNN's, one of their top political reporters.
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Snapchat is going to be covering the campaign.
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Facebook is obviously one of the largest distributors of news.
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So many people, their exposure to news stories is coming in their Facebook feeds.
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And increasingly, I think the media business and the tech business are kind of merging in an odd way.
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I don't know that the tech companies are entirely comfortable stepping up and taking some of the responsibilities like we were talking about, like having to think, do you hold the story or publish the story.
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They're relying on places like the New York Times or Buzzfeed to make those decisions for them, but I don't know that that will last forever.
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>> There's a recent deal with- >> Everything Vine is a way, these very short videos is a major way news is spreading.
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I think that broadly, rather than just rattle off like a zillion changes, I think the most interesting change that's happening is that in my lifetime, the power to decide what people read resided in the editors' offices of the major newspapers and broadcast networks.
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>> It resided in your hands.
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In the beginning of me having those jobs, it was in my hands.
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I picked, in consultation with other editors.
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But the six stories that would be on the front page of the New York Times.
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And that those would automatically be the most important stories that the world would be reading.
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But now we have gone to a social model where more readers are actually looking at news that is picked by their friends, by people that they know, not by Jill Abramson, the editor of a newspaper.
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And fewer readers are actually going to a single destination to get their news.
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They're reading links from all over the place, so these are huge, huge changes.
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And the thing that interests me most of all, because I think we can agree we're living in an age that I might call the age of too much information. There's so much news.
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But I haven't seen a lot of great data on whether that has made society, and particularly younger people I care about, now that I'm teaching, whether it's actually made them more deeply informed than they were before.
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I'm very interested in exploring that question.
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>> We'll see that with time.
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And with that, I want to open up the floor for questions. There are two mics on.
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Nino has one over here, Caroline has one over there.
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Please raise your hand and make sure they see you.
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We're also taking questions from Twitter, #gsbvftt.
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Let's start with a Twitter question.
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>> Hi, I have two tweets actually.
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The first is in response to your desire to spend a year at Stanford.
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The MSX program tweeted that you're welcome to come anytime.
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So the second is- >> But I'm not on top anymore, what will I do with all of those management skills?
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[LAUGH] >> They've made the offer.
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The second thing is a question from the crowd about you talked about the future of media.
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And there's a question about whether there's a place for smaller regional, more localized coverage either in print or digital.
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And whether you're seeing any business models out there that are in that space and that are working.
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>> Yeah, the question about local news is one that really has troubled me.
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Because as regional and local newspapers, which have been dependent on classified advertising as their business model, they have been just hammered.
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And there are literally state legislatures and city councils going uncovered now.
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And that is just the press not living up to the role that the founders had, for us to keep power accountable.
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But I do see rays of hope.
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And as I've been distressed at the atrophying of local and regional publications, there are some great digital news rooms that have arisen focused on local news.
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I was very supportive when I worked at the Times, we partnered with the Texas Tribune, which was started six or seven years ago by a guy named Evan Smith, who was editor of the Texas Monthly Magazine and it covers Texas politics.
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And they have I think a newsroom of 50 reporters focused on that, it's fantastic.
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There's a digital publication called MinnPost, in Minneapolis, that's fabulous.
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The Texas Tribune's business model, it's a nonprofit.
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So Evan Smith has to go out and raise money constantly, but it's a successful model, and they do The highest quality kind of journalism.
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I just wish that could be replicated in more localities.
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>> They have a question over there. >> Is it on? Yeah.
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So kinda along of the same lines I was interested to hear that.
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So if your book is about shorter hits of news yet your background is in investigative journalism.
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And I know you were looking at- >> Why do you think it's about shorter hits of news?
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>> Sort of this is what you said around six seconds from Vine or SnapChat. >> Oh well that. Yeah. >> Right.
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And then that's sort of being an increasing way that we consume, but I know that you were sort of working on a venture around investigative journalism >> Of long form, right. >> And one big story.
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So I wonder how you sort of square the two, especially sort of thinking about the younger generation and how that fits in. >> Right.
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I think if you have a whale of a story that's long, it finds a big audience.
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I mean at the Times we found some of the most challenging, long, investigative stories zoomed to most shared and most emailed.
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So I don't believe everything has to be short and catered to the short attention span or the size of a smart phone screen.
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And I think just in the past year we've seen a lot of great examples whether it's the Time's recent investigation of nail salons which went viral.
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That was a long two-part series where the popularity of Serial.
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I mean Serial was 12 one-hour installments.
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It was a true crime type of story.
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But, that debuted on This American Life and by the second episode their audience had ballooned to over a million listeners.
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It very much brought about a renaissance in podcasting, which I think is very thrilling.
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But, that long story, even though they chopped it up into chapters.
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I think there's like a human desire for the long, engrossing, fabulously reported, elegantly told story.
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And it takes us back to the time of Charles Dickens, when kind of like Serial, Dickens' novels were shipped out in chapters.
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And there would be Londoners standing on the docks waiting for the latest chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop to be delivered because they were on pins and needles.
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Is little Nell gonna be okay?
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And that's fiction, but I felt a real-life example of that was a story that I championed at the Times where for an entire week we did a close-in series on a homeless girl named Dasani, who lived in Fort Green, Brooklyn, and against all the odds, was battling to be a great twelve-year-old who was learning a lot in school.
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And it was readers were on the edge of their seats because of the way those stories were edited and reported.
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They were like page turners and I just think that there's a demand for that journalism now, even along with the short stuff.
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You may be surprised to here, but BuzzFeed has a very large investigative reporting unit, which does long series, some very good pieces and they have 15 full-time investigative reporters.
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That's almost as big an investigative reporting unit as the New York Times has, so I'm very, very bullish on long form and I think what I would leave all of you with is I think the ability to write a gripping, clear narrative that that talent, because you need it in business too, you need it in every field, it's never been a more marketable skill than it is now.
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I think narrative hath incredible power and that it's a skill that can be monetized. >> One more question? >> Hi Jill. >> Hi.
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>> Janie Lorber, New York Times, Washington Bureau, 2008 through 2011. >> Wow, yeah.
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>> [LAUGH] I'm really concerned about the monetization because I went into journalism to be an investigative reporter and came here because I was worried those jobs wouldn't exist.
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How can you elaborate on how BuzzFeed is supporting such a large investigative unit?
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Can you elaborate on whether we will have public service journalism, investigative journalism in ten years? And how will we fund it?
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>> I said I'm bullish on it and I really mean it, Janie, because I think obviously investigative reporting isn't where BuzzFeed is making most of its money.
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I mean it makes, I believe, most of its money on branded advertising, and of course, on the humorous listicles that run every day that people love to look at and share.
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But I think that many of these new places, almost as a prestige thing, or to be taken seriously, or let's give them the credit that actually do want to help perform a public good and inform the public, that as they mature and become real institutions, they want to be doing quality journalism, too.
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And it isn't that different from like back in the 1920s when the comics help support the coverage of World War II.
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But it's gonna take some years more for us to know whether there is a stable business model for journalism.
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And I guess where I've come out is, you know.
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Marty Barron of the Washington Post was out here recently in California and gave a fabulous speech and said, the important thing is to stop mourning what we have lost.
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And I really believe that's important.
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But he and an academic named Clay Shirky, who I'm very smart, kind of ascribed to it there isn't going to be one business model answer.
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It's not like there's some great mega solution sitting out there for just someone really smart to discover.
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You have to try a lot of different things.
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So, I think for instance in New York some people have said it doesn't make sense for the New York Times which is trying to have a digital subscription model to suddenly be putting its content on Facebook.
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But by being on Facebook they are increasing the distribution of their story, they're getting a bigger audience, and maybe they will get some subscriptions that way.
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But I think you kind of have to do it all.
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And that somehow being an optimist, that's gonna bring quality journalism to safe passage.
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I really believe that because it's a societal necessity.
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>> One more question from Twitter? >> Sure, yeah.
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So you've been in an industry where you've had to set your personal biases aside for a long time.
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And not the- >> So, what are they?
48:12
[LAUGH] >> Well, you knew it was coming.
48:15
No, the question is now that you're no longer part of a journalism organization and can speak out on issues that you care about, whether it's ones more personal to you or ones you see going on in society, are you gonna start doing that in your future?
48:28
Are you planning on doing that, or?
48:30
No I actually, the book I'm working on is a reported book.
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It will be reported narrative and I want to go out a reporter.
48:40
I mean one of the really, if you can say there was like a nice side to being fired.
48:46
It was like almost immediately I went to reporting and writing some pieces myself and kind of rediscovering Jill Abramson the individual journalist, the lone wolf, I guess, which I always was.
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And I want to hue to the journalism standards that I always have.
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So you're not going to see me giving big donations to the Clinton Foundation.
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[LAUGH] >> Thank you so much, Jill.
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I'm gonna have the honor to ask you the last question of the day, which is a View From The Top tradition now.
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What matters most to you and why?
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>> What matters most to me now is having an opportunity to give back and to help younger people discover a love of story telling and being able to write and report stories.
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So my teaching that I've begun is very important.
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I'm very Interested because I do think we live in an age of narrative.
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I'd love to work with like a girls club and teach even younger girls to write.
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My family is vitally important to me, I'm gonna become a first-time grandma pretty soon. >> Congratulations.
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I can't wait to start a new generation, with the love or reading and writing.
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So that's what matters to me.
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>> You can take your granddaughter to go and hunt down the different houses. >> Yeah, right.
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[LAUGH] >> Well, with that, thank you so much, Jill Abramson. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC]