Commentary

The Future Of Media Round Table

Que sera, sera (whatever will be, will be).

The Panel:

Bant Breen
Executive Director, IPG Emerging Media Lab, Interpublic

Roland DeSilva
Managing Partner, DeSilva & Phillips

Esther Dyson
EDventure Holdings

Jane Friedman
Former President & CEO, HarperCollins

Bonnie Fuller
Former Editor, US Weekly

Bob Guccione Jr.
Guest Editor of "The Future of Media"

John Huey
Editor-in-Chief, Time Inc.

David Kenny
Managing Partner, VivaKi, a member of Publicis Groupe SA

Joe Mandese
Editor-in-Chief, MediaPost

Hon. Kevin Martin
Chairman, Federal Communications Commission

Brian Napack
President, Macmillan

Michael Wolf
Former President and COO, MTV Networks

It's something we've all given a great deal of thought to, in one way or another: Who knows what the future will be? We rounded up a panel of distinguished figures from all corners of the media world and asked them what's next. This issue's guest editor, Bob Guccione Jr., led the discussion through twists and turns, a bit of infighting, and plenty of creative brainstorming into some breakthrough territory (such as when Roland DeSilva apologized to John Huey - sans the "I love you, man" and beer-sharing, sadly). The panel convened at MP's secret underground bunker, where we often meet to plan the future of the industry (okay, it was held at Ian Schrager's Gramercy Park Hotel in NYC - there were buttered croissants on platters and coffee poured from sterling silver urns).

Bob Guccione: I want to discuss the issue of the future of media in a way that perhaps is not normally discussed, which is philosophically and culturally as well as industrially. But more than industrially, because I think the industry follows the reality of its environment, and the reality is that we are human beings and we are built a certain way. We are passionate a certain way and we consume life a certain way. Some of the things I want to discuss, first of all, and most obviously: What's it going to be like? How different is it? How can we tell? Will there come a point where we lose some or most control culturally? Is there a point where the average person becomes his own media generator, network, and in fact does a better job than an organized business in media? Is the genie out of the bottle?
What's the future of print? For that matter, what's the future of reading?
Jane Friedman: I spent my career as a book publisher, and do I believe that there will be hardcover and paperback books forever? Yes, I do, because I think that the library's something that identifies the individual. All of us have gone into friends' homes and, very often, the first thing we look at is what's on the bookshelf.
We are seeing in the book industry mainly what is just another form of reading, which is reading on the screen. And what that will do is make the kinds of books that are being published ones that can be read on the screen, and be read in book form, and put onto the library shelf. That's where the distinctions will come in.
Bonnie Fuller: Will we all be reading on a device?
Friedman: I believe so, because we all have generations behind us who do everything on a device and find nothing uncomfortable about a device. And I think that when we in the book industry face the fact that this shift is going to happen automatically, everything will change in the book-publishing world.
Michael Wolf: The Internet has largely been, up until now, text. And while there will be a great deal of images and video, it's likely for a very long time that people will be consuming the Internet on a text basis, or a combination of text images or video, and the basis for content will shift in that way. At the same time, there are a number of forms of print that will persist.
Magazines - especially large consumer magazines - are likely to persist because they're not just about the physical format. They're like drugs unto themselves. I mean Oprah's magazine or Vogue, or a lot of things that women read, just don't port over well to a screen. Books - while there's going to be a lot more of them either in an e-reader or online - there is this sort of tactile ability for someone to hold and read a book.
But there are forms of print media that will not persist. That certainly is starting with newspapers and with trade magazines, which have really been the vanguard in terms of going online. Professional publications and newspapers will be under extreme attack, as well as other forms of print media, like yellow pages, that are just more efficient online.
Round TableFuller: The book industry could actually change in a positive way, because, like magazines, they're very expensive to produce, publish and distribute. And of course, you can go online and get it right there. It saves an enormous amount of cost. But I agree totally that magazines have, especially for women, a very textual appeal. And I think that people want the ability to flip back and forth and go, "Oh, that picture caught my eye and I want to go back to that." Really, no matter how fast you scroll, you can't do it. It's just not the same. And there's the coziness factor, too, of being able to cuddle up on a couch or in the bathtub, and I don't think you're taking your device in the bathtub.
Friedman: I think the magazines that will prevail will be the magazines that have very special readership. I mean, what happened to The Saturday Evening Post? When I grew up, you had five newspapers in the house. Well, the newspapers went first, and then you have the magazines. I think there will be certain magazines that will still exist, and there will be certain books that will absolutely exist in the actual bound-book form. But then a lot of what is happening is we're giving the public what the public wants in the form it wants, where it wants it and when it wants it.
Esther Dyson: I think part of what's happening is that as more and more media becomes possible, different kinds of information find their most suitable venue. Yellow pages are stupid on paper and they make more sense online. Whereas a book, that's linear; you're supposed to read from beginning to end, so it's fine on paper. So I think they'll persist in those forms. And a sort of visual-display kind of magazine makes a lot of sense. Anything that is interactive, where the data changes, like stock prices, again, makes no sense on paper.
So a newspaper is going to kind of bifurcate into, on the one hand, a magazine with pictures, perhaps, and then something online where the news is actually up to date, and where you get news that's tailored for you. The big thing that's changing is the move from the mass publication. So I want to know what everybody's talking about. I want to know where Obama is versus McCain. I want to know what Oprah thinks, on the one hand, and then there's the atomization where I want to know what's happening in my own neighborhood. I want to know which of my friends broke up and that, again, belongs online, because the economics of mass distribution doesn't make sense.
Roland DeSilva: I disagree somewhat when you say the mass magazines are really safe and the trade magazines are not. I think exactly the opposite is happening. With mass magazines, the economics are so very difficult today. Any way you look at it, it's supported by advertising. When investors look at mass magazines, if one comes up for sale, they can't find a way to see an advertising increase. They also can't find a way to see a circulation revenue stream that is profitable in the market.
John Huey: If you can't find a profitable model in the magazine industry, you're not looking closely enough, because the profitability of mass-market magazines remains extremely robust. But most of the coverage of the media business seems to come from newspapers, which are clearly very challenged in their business model from all ends. Their circulation is falling rapidly. Their biggest enemy - or their sort of Trojan Horse, I guess - was Craigslist, which the newspaper industry sat and looked at for a while, and it took away not only their most profitable advertising, which was want ads, but it took away a lot of their readership that went to the paper for want ads. Nothing like that has happened in the magazine industry.
Circulation at the healthy magazine companies that produce real, viable consumer publications and focus on their audience remains high. It's not growing, it's flat, but it's high. There's not a big circulation challenge with the big consumer magazines. Where the challenge comes is in the advertising business model and in the costs associated with the various systems for producing and distributing magazines. But to compare magazines with newspapers is a big mistake. In the last 10 years, magazine advertising has grown more than $10 billion. Newspaper advertising is off some massive double-digit percentage. The problem right now is there are probably way too many magazines. There are probably way more magazine companies than there should be.
One of the things that's really changed, more than even the publishing business or the mass media business, is the advertising industry. The advertising business, about 10 years ago, underwent a revolution where all the power shifted to the quant people, who were concerned mostly with efficiency and acquiring advertising at the most efficient rate, and a lot of the creativity that had previously been in the advertising industry was pushed to the side. And the advertisers fell in love with the Internet, because it promised efficiency. And the clients turned advertising over to procurement, and turned it into a form of procurement. So a lot of the magic has gone out of the advertising business, but now you're seeing clients are having trouble selling things.
But if you want to look at somebody who we all think of as an avatar of marketing genius and consumer insight, look at Steve Jobs, and look at where he spends his money in advertising. It's very interesting, because he spends most of his money in advertising on very simple ads aimed at network television mass audience programs. It's very cheap. It's mass reach, and then he spends the rest of it on outdoor and magazines and throws a little bit on the Internet. Steve has not said, "Oh, all my advertising dollars should be spent algorithmically through advertising on Google." He talks about that all the time, but that's not where he spends his money. He spends his money on network television and outdoor.
DeSilva: From the investment viewpoint, the brand is the key. The brand is going to deliver information in all the different forms that we have. But those companies that have an integrated platform - magazines, face-to-face, an Internet or digital media presence - is where the value is and that's where the growth is. I think those consumer magazines that have that going for them, whether they be mass or specialty, are going to survive and dominate.
Huey: It's true that everyone can create their own media palettes. It's true that everyone can pick and choose everything they want. And it's also true that you can manipulate images and you can write things that are untrue on the blogosphere and it'll gain a life of its own. But in the end, if you're in the advertising business, you're going to be drawn to a brand that has a proven
40 million readers, plus another 50 million unique visitors. And here's the point: All those people on the blogosphere cannot get the pictures of J.Lo's baby. J.Lo's baby pictures are hard to get, and they only go to somebody who has a mass audience and a lot of economic power.
David Kenny: Well, let me speak for the advertisers. They invest that money to build trusted relationships with people, hopefully so the people will fall in love with their products and buy them. But fundamentally, the nature of brands is changing from authority to community. And brands that are endorsed by communities are much stronger. This, therefore, causes us as advertisers to look at where communities are the strongest. Social media will move advertising more than anything you've seen to date. Everything you've seen to date has moved transactional money out of the retail sector. The brand money is just beginning to move now to communities.
Those content providers and those people who can help us put the content in the communities and have a discussion are just far more productive for us than those who are just pushing authority, and this is why I think media will be much more community-based in the future than it has ever been. All of this trust is for real. Everyone knows you can't trust images. They do think they can trust other people. They will ask other people, and therefore, I think you're going to see all of the economics and all of the advertisers follow the consumer to something that's much more community-based.
Round TableDyson: To kind of give a tangible example of what David is talking about: When you go online, you see ads that are targeted to you based on your past behavior. What are the privacy implications of that? But what's really much more interesting is people don't go online just to consume stuff, whether it's media or products, and that's the thing the advertisers and the marketers really don't get. They go online to present themselves, and so the big argument is going to be, it's as if I'm presenting myself and then some vendor decides what logo's going to be on my T-shirt. So in the future of social media, consumers are going to be choosing the ads that they show, which is much more important to them than the ads that they see. And so the advertiser needs to win the trust of the community in order to appear on the pages of all those people presenting, and sending e-mail and the like to other people.
Friedman: Being in the book business, we didn't rely on advertising for our production, number one. Number two, we never had budgets to advertise, because books have very specific audiences; even mass-marketed books have a limited audience. So what we had was well before this world of community, which I totally embrace, but we had what was called word-of-mouth - the forerunner. Everything is typical. Everything comes back to the beginning. I want you, David, to recommend something to me. I don't necessarily want your product manager to represent that he or she thinks that that product is what I want. If you know me, you can tell me what it is that I want. I think that's what's happening here. It's interesting to kind of stand back a little bit, because my form of media, meaning book publishing, is very different than a lot of what we're talking about here.
You read an author's book. You like that author's book. You go to the author's backlist, where you look for his or her next book. Again, that's part of community and the new brand. And I think today the consumer is smarter, and great. I mean, there are too many books out there. There are too many videos out there. There are too many toothpaste products out there. The consumer wants to make his or her choice. My goal would be to influence those consumers from a marketing standpoint and give them what they want, when they want it and how they want it.
And the other question I had - now that I've gotten on my soapbox - how many of us here have ever looked at the 500 channels on our television?
Dyson: I don't have a TV.
Kenny: I did once.
Friedman: But what are they? They're a bunch of junk. I mean, why would anyone want to pay for all of those stations? If you do go to some of those off-the-chart channels, then we are potentially reaching a consumer that none of us really may want to reach for any kind of real impact.
Guccione: Are we witnessing Darwinism? We've got it, but do we need it, and is it going to be useful, and what will be the upshot of this Darwinism, which will curtail the lives of many?
Brian Napack: The fact of the matter is, in the business of serving an audience, aggregating that audience and serving the audience, to the extent to which we do that effectively, you give them not just the content they want, but the tools to manage that content and the tools to manage their lives. The form follows function. The form of media will follow the needs of the audience. As we look across our business, which is a remarkably large spectrum in technology, each one of those industries is migrating at a different pace.
The real question is not are they going to change, but how quickly, how elegantly, and is there a business model at the end? And so we look at the book business, which, thankfully, is migrating extremely slowly to the digital realm, and that's for one good reason: It turns out that a book is a pretty good way to read a book. A newspaper was a pretty good way to read an article, but there are lots of other, better ways to get that article faster.
The textbook is an appalling way to deliver information. It's extremely time-intensive to develop. It's extremely expensive to produce, extremely expensive to warehouse, extremely expensive to load to the marketplace. The students don't like it. The professors don't like it. It's bad access of information. You never have it where you want it. You have a bunch of students in K to 12 and in college who have right shoulders that are lower than their left shoulders. Everybody hates it. We hate it because we sell it. It goes into the marketplace and it comes into the used marketplace. So every time we sell a textbook once, it gets sold three or four more times, and I don't make any money on it. So, I'm looking forward to a digital transition.
But in this case - and this is why I'm dwelling on education - education is migrating in a very elegant fashion, a methodical and elegant fashion not just toward new and additional products, but toward products which are better for all parties involved, with the exception of the used-book industry. So what we're moving from is from a content metaphor, where the content is king, to online where you have, yes, the content, but more important, you have tools, you have community, you bring students together with teachers, students together with each other.
Kenny: From the advertisers' perspective, we do not think there's too much media. We're delighted to have more media, because we're delighted to have more media. We're also very excited from an advertising perspective about moving to more open and transparent models, because media inflation has risen faster than the economy for a long time, and that's been great if you're the owner, but not so great if you're the advertiser, and there are reasons for that. There hasn't been enough supply. That's the reason the prices have gone up faster and the markets have not been as transparent.
I know it's disruptive to some models, but from the advertising perspective and the economic perspective, on a global basis, we're delighted to have more innovation. Those who win will win. Those who fall off will fall off. But competing in an open, transparent market for the affections of consumers and for our investment to reach those consumers is a good thing.

Round TableWolf: From the perspective of this discussion about à la carte and about more media or less media - there has been a flight to quality across all media. So the hit movies are bigger hits than they've ever been. You think about movies like Pirates of the Caribbean or Indiana Jones, and they're much larger. They have thermonuclear openings. We can talk about the death of the music industry, but a big album like Coldplay's comes along and people are buying it, and so - magazines like O or GQ or Cosmo, people can't live without them. So overall, consumers are going to the biggest properties. Yes, there's a value to the long tail, but that's where consumers are going.
Dyson: But you need to make a distinction between their going to the major properties - a movie, it's a single piece of content that reaches millions - whereas, Facebook is an embodiment of the long tail. And so they're two very interesting phenomena, but they're fundamentally different.
Wolf: I don't agree with you. It's the long tail, because the reason why people go to Facebook - versus going to some other small site - is because it's where they think all their friends are.
Guccione: It's just an innate instinct of human beings. That's the success of instant messaging. That's the success of texting.
Bant Breen: This actually goes back to your first point, right, which is, is text dead, are people not communicating? Actually, I would argue that they are writing a hell of a lot more than they ever used to write.
Kenny: The quality of writing, perhaps, has changed, but there is absolutely - there's no doubt that text is at the center of the digital-level issue. For an example, when people talk about social media and doing kind of contextual targeting or social media monitoring, all the systems today are predominantly text.
Fuller: I would agree with you on the one hand; however, I would also say that the democratization of media, which allows new, small voices to grow because the cost of entry is so small and they don't have to grow as big to be successful.
David, you said that you're welcoming more media. How do you welcome more media and bring in the new opportunities to reach audiences when you've got long-range planning?
Kenny: I think big organizations and clients take a little bit of time to get there, but I think we're moving to a different model, which has to have a better way of buying that media that is more fluid, that is more real-time, that works more the way other markets work.
This is why I think - and they're not here - but it's why the Google platform and the Microsoft platform are actually quite essential, because I think we need some platforms so that we can buy audiences. We're increasingly moving to buy audiences, not content. We're increasingly looking for people who can put their content in a way that we can target the audience within the content so that it works. So, obviously we're trying to build our systems, change the planning and buying process to make that happen, and get clients more comfortable with it.
What will help us, oddly, is the current economy. Right now the car business is 24 percent of advertising. The car business is going through some big disruption right now. Fuel prices are not good for the car and truck business. All of them - General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota - they're all moving to a more fluid model. That's going to change, and they're all going to want media to be real-time, based on what's happening. And we're going to get there.
Guccione: I think there's a trend very in the present, and has been for a while and certainly in the near future, that advertisers are actually beating media content deliverers down to the point where it's not really good economics for them to take the ad. You've done your job very well to get economic value for your client, but haven't you now done that job too well, and to the point where you're damaging the host? Have you become parasitic?
Kenny: It is a question we think about. And it's very different around the world. There are parts of the world where the editorial and the advertising are much more blended than in the United States, which is good and bad. And there are things that are wrong about it. It's a cultural issue. So, net net, we have to invest our clients' money in the best possible way and there are better - it's all fungible. If we can't get good value in one medium, we can go to search and get it more directly, or we can go to a different form and get it directly. Market forces, more than agencies or advertisers, are moving in this direction. The real challenge if you are a media owner is, how quickly are you going to adapt to present yourself in a way that's of greater value? And those media owners who are giving it to us - even if by audience and not content - are going to win.
Napack: It really is Darwinian. I mean, a magazine like Scientific American has a very focused mission in life. Our audience is not in the tens of millions, and we are defending our space, because it is a unique, credible, believable presence, and if you want science information, and if you are a science junkie, which more and more of the population is, you go there. Therefore, our rate base was increased twice in the last year, which doesn't happen very often in magazines. Our published ad rates have gone up significantly each year, as everyone's have, but our realized ad rates have gone up every year for the past - well, for as long as anyone can remember. Why is that? It's because we win a certain type of audience. We're not going to win the Us Weekly audience, by and large. It's going to be a different set of people who tend to want to participate in our brand, but we're winning - the point is, we're winning that battle.
Huey: I think in the coming months, we're going to see a lot
of hysterical coverage about the death of mass media broadcasting and print. The coverage is going to get very intense because of the current state of the advertising dollars that are being spent, and I really hope someone is intelligent enough to sort out the difference between all this secular transition that we're talking about today - all of which is real and very important - and the fact that a great deal of what you're seeing in mass media right now, and even in Internet advertising, is the fact that the automobile industry, the financial services industry, the housing industry and many other industries that have traditionally supported all this media business, are really in dire straits themselves, and they don't have a lot of money to spend on anything. In fact, a lot of them are just worrying about their jobs or their companies or their products.
It turns out that a $140 barrel of oil is not good for most of these services - most of these companies and most of these industries are in a very serious state in the economy right now, whatever you call it, and I think a lot of it is going to wash over the media business. But I hope we won't throw the baby out with the bathwater on this thing, because a lot of media, including network television and others, have done a lot of things to get themselves in a much better position. They're just not in a place of benefit at the moment.
Dyson: You're right. This is temporary. But if you look at the percentage of time people spend online versus the time they spend reading magazines and watching TV, advertising hasn't yet caught up with the allocation of time. The dollars are still mis-allocated, and, I think, the coming bloodbath, if you like, is going to force advertisers to become much more concerned with efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and when we wake up and it's over, I think the allocation is going to have to be shifted dramatically.
Kenny: I'm worried that this burden and this conversation are lopsided. At the end of the day, advertisers invest money to build their brands and their products in the best possible way they can. It is not the purpose of the advertiser to support a free press. It's not their job. With the fact that this industry built itself addicted to media inflation, it deserves Google.
They deserve to get broken down, and they need to find new models. Maybe the consumer is going to have to pay more. Maybe with subscription rates - if it's really valuable, they'll pay more. Maybe there will have to be more consortiums, and I do not think it is practical to believe that the advertiser is going to think it's their job to sustain the press.


DeSilva: In all of the deals that I've done, the quality of content is the No. 1 value driver. I don't care what the delivery system is. The advertisers will go where the audience is, and the only thing that will aggregate that is quality content. What's happening in the world is you're getting more niche-y. We have so much population. We have so much communication. People are finding themselves niched down to what they want to see in quality, and if you own that reader, that user, that viewer, that's the value, and that's where the advertiser is going to put their money, and that's where the value of your content is going to go, and that's the future of media.
Dyson: Something really fundamentally is changing, and it's not in the media. It's in the advertising itself. Suddenly, the kinds of things marketers need to do are much closer to public relations than to advertising, because people don't want these intrinsic messages, even if they're insinuated. I'm on this site called Dopplr. I published my travel plans to my friends so they can find out when I'm going to be in Amsterdam. I'd be very happy to have British Airways and American Airlines also be my friends on Dopplr, and I'd expect them to know where I was traveling. I wouldn't consider it a privacy violation, and I'd expect them to give me better offers, but suddenly the marketer becomes a member of the community, not infiltrating the community by pretending to be a friend, but by being part of the community, just the way the guy who ran the butcher used to be part of the community in the village square.
Guccione: As conglomerates absorb more and more media, and they become larger and larger, such as when News Corp. bought MySpace, does this prohibit, in the future, the independent and the entrepreneur from having a meaningful impact or entry to the marketplace?
Fuller: Well, I think that's what's great about the new digital world. Because the cost of entry is so much lower, individuals can have a point of view, or feel if there's a need, it's so much easier just to go out there and get their point of view across and even open up new marketplaces.
Napack: Historically, in the media business, scale has always been a good thing. Now, in some ways, scale is still a good thing, but in many ways it's our enemy. And it's an enemy in a number of ways: most of all, the innovation that you can generate from within a big organization. It is almost impossible to change human behavior. And when someone drives us to the top of the big company with a team of management, it's very hard for them to incorporate new ideas. I think that this is the best time ever to be starting new media properties, and as the systems get better, those people will be able to tap into the business models that were once exclusively reserved for us.
DeSilva: I agree. It is the best of times for entrepreneurs. Absolutely. I can give you a very practical example with a site called yappr.com. It's a translation site. It teaches English as a second language. It takes news, music videos, clips from shows and translates them automatically right on the screen, and the user learns languages that way. It's done in Chinese, it's done in Japanese, it's done in Spanish, as the main languages. It's only been in existence for about nine months. It's aggregated huge audiences around the world. What's happening is that the audience now is translating and putting content up with their own videos. So you have citizen journalism, you have education, you have video. You have worldwide reach, and that is something that you'd love to get to. That's what's happening.

Guccione: Let me ask a two-part question to everyone in the room. What is the next great innovation? And will media be the medium or the message in the future?
Dyson: I think it's not so much the technology innovation than it is a cultural innovation. I call it the quantification of everything. Or user-generated data. User-generated content is people "expressing themselves," but a lot of what's happening now is users' data is being generated by their activities. There's now a site called Wesabe, and another one called Mint, where people share anonymously [their financial information]. How much do normal people spend on groceries versus hotels? What's the average price of a meal? This information is fascinating. It's like a mirror. People are much more interested in the mirror than in the finest painting in the world. The sharing of this information and the technologies let people compare it to their own behavior - and occasionally invite vendors in to help them make better purchases, to help them find the stuff that they would really like to see. This mirroring back to the users of their own behavior and a lot of different content is going to be a really big thing.
Breen: This is really something that just blows me away. I sat down with the mint.com guys, and the success of this company has been one of these just unbelievable stories. Here's a company where you give them access to your bank accounts, your investment accounts, your 401(k), everything - and then they take that data, your financial, credit card information, and give you kind of opportunities to reinvest, get better interest rates, so on and so forth.
Dyson: But they also show you your own spending.
Breen: Wow. From a marketing standpoint - wow. This is it. This is the holy grail. I now have everything about everyone, and they're giving it to me. My God, I sat there and I was blown away, because this shows in a decade where we have shifted our mindsets on privacy.
Dyson: But the other interesting point is, I now have the tools to figure out whether you really are giving me a better deal, because if you try to give me a worse deal, the Mint analysis tools are going to show I'm actually paying a higher percentage rate. So it's going to force vendors to offer better deals.
Kenny: This is going to separate advertising from the media, meaning that fundamentally, people will allow more and more information about themselves to be known. They will allow their servers to know it and their desktop boxes to know it, and they will choose what advertising is relevant to them and not the others.
Friedman: I think what I am finding now is that there is nothing that we can't do. We can dream of something and simply make that a reality. Now, what that dream is, I don't know. How much more information do I want? I actually want less information. I want filters.
I know who I am, and I know there are a lot of people out there who know who I am. I want it filtered. I want fewer magazine articles. I want fewer magazines. I don't want 500 channels. I think that we are getting to a point of eclipsing and exploding how much a human being can absorb and process. So, if I like Toyotas, then I kind of want to know where everything about Toyota is, but don't give me Maserati. Give me Toyota only. Don't try to change me or try to fit with me. Really come to me as me. Less is more - simple. And I think that that is where we're headed.
I do think that less is more, and we, as the intelligentsia of a certain world and of a certain age, have to help streamline, and that's going to be the newest innovation.
Napack: I think the media is irrelevant somehow. I think at best it disappears, and at worst it gives away the tools, and I think that the more tools, building on what Esther and Jane were saying, the more tools we give to those people out there in the world, the better and more successful we can be. I think content is one byproduct of the whole thing, and I think the media, itself, is completely irrelevant and if we cling to it in any way, we're wasting them.
Kenny: I think the challenge is the future of communication. And what you really have to get through is inherently how people communicate, and a move from authority to community, secularly. And therefore, it would reinforce the same point, which is, ultimately, content that enters the communication is useful, and content that does not enter the communication falls off. And everybody's going to have his own communication circle, which is small and tight. We're seeing it already. People are choosing new sources that fit their worldview.

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