Speaker 1: It's eleven am in the newsroom of the Bourne Myth
Speaker 1: Daily Echo, a local newspaper in the south of England,
Speaker 1: One More Lucky, which which is a very strong story.
Speaker 1: The editors are trying to decide which stories to run
Speaker 1: in the newspaper and on the echoes website, which these
Speaker 1: days might be more important. Technology is changing all of
Speaker 1: our jobs, whether we like it or not, and journalism
Speaker 1: is certainly no exception. There are now far fewer jobs
Speaker 1: in local news right to put them mildly, the internet
Speaker 1: has pretty much busted the media business model. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: journalists they are left. I've had to learn new skills.
Speaker 1: When you're in you have to you you adapt or
Speaker 1: you don't surve. The Echo has worked hard to take
Speaker 1: advantage of new technology. But is the editor Andy Martin
Speaker 1: told you, Jeremy, the paper is struggling financially. You know
Speaker 1: me know that revenues walked out the door to a
Speaker 1: lot of other places in the last ten years, and
Speaker 1: we haven't quite got our business model right in terms of,
Speaker 1: you know, getting people to pay for online news. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. Faced with collapsing budgets, the Echo has had
Speaker 1: to let go about of its staff that's made it
Speaker 1: harder for the paper to fulfill its traditional role of
Speaker 1: holding people in power to account. Now, the founders of
Speaker 1: a service funded by Google say they can help local
Speaker 1: journalists produce more stories without adding more people, but it's
Speaker 1: raising new fears even as it tries to solve full problems. Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm brad Stone and I'm Jeremy con and this week Undercrypted,
Speaker 1: we're taking a look at how one local newspaper is
Speaker 1: grappling with new technology and its struggle to survive. There
Speaker 1: are only about twenty editorial staff left now at the
Speaker 1: Bournemoth Daily Echo, a paper that want it close to
Speaker 1: a hundred journalists when Andy, the editor, first started. That's
Speaker 1: been a painful transition for The Echo, and one that's
Speaker 1: played out around the world as journalists have watched jobs disappear.
Speaker 1: Artificial intelligence is one technology that could help newsrooms like
Speaker 1: The Echo survived with shrinking budgets, but could automation, which
Speaker 1: initially looks like an added convenience, ultimately end up taking
Speaker 1: even more jobs stay with us that deminate So jar me,
Speaker 1: you actually went down to board with recently. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: took the train down from London on a chilly morning
Speaker 1: in February. So I'm imagining sort of the Cleveland of England.
Speaker 1: What's born With like, Well, it's not quite Cleveland. Um.
Speaker 1: It's on the south coast of England and it's a
Speaker 1: summer tourist destination, has a boardwalk and a fair ground
Speaker 1: along the seafront. Um. But the city also hosts the
Speaker 1: back offices of some big banks like JP Morgan, and
Speaker 1: it's got the headquarters of a few industrial companies and
Speaker 1: the born With Echo that's the region's main newspaper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, and it's published from this big Art Deco
Speaker 1: building with a small clock tower in the heart of
Speaker 1: the city. And he did, hey, Jerry, Yeah, Andy, the
Speaker 1: Echoes editor came out to meet me. He looks like
Speaker 1: a grizzled newspaper writer you've seen a film, with the
Speaker 1: steely gaze and a shock of white hair. He led
Speaker 1: me through the bowels of the building and up into
Speaker 1: a big conference room with glass windows that look out
Speaker 1: over the Echoes newsroom. How many years have you you've
Speaker 1: been here at the Echo? Well, this embarrassing. I'm being
Speaker 1: here about thirty years in April. Wow, Um, what was
Speaker 1: your first day here? Like? I can really remembered the
Speaker 1: old style smoke field newsrooms, people you know, slamming your
Speaker 1: phones down and the saner time writers at the time
Speaker 1: in the late eighties, the newsroom was big. Years ago,
Speaker 1: there would have been a hundred editorial staff here. We
Speaker 1: used to have the print depressors. You hear the wrong
Speaker 1: of the primes going up for the first edition of
Speaker 1: the second edition to go down and get a couple
Speaker 1: of paper. We get your boak in sandwich come back
Speaker 1: out of paper. This was a different time for the
Speaker 1: newspaper industry. The born With Daily Echo had a small
Speaker 1: number of district offices and it would send reporters like
Speaker 1: Andy on international assignments too, for about twenty years, so Cyprus, Kossovo,
Speaker 1: the Balkans, Bosnia, Belize, Northern Ireland. So I'd got a
Speaker 1: lot of tours of you know, not tours of duty,
Speaker 1: but at at with the boys, you know, sort of
Speaker 1: week two weeks long. After a few years he became
Speaker 1: an editor on the news desk and as Andy was
Speaker 1: climbing the mast out of the Echo, something happened the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen nineties that would change print journalism forever. The
Speaker 1: Internet back in the glory days local papers had four
Speaker 1: main revenue streams newsstand sales, subscriptions, display, advertising and classified.
Speaker 1: The Internet undercut all four. For example, news Quest Media,
Speaker 1: which owns the Bournemouth Daily Echo, made a profit of
Speaker 1: a hundred and sixty seven million pounds in two thousand
Speaker 1: and three. By that number was just twenty three million
Speaker 1: pounds ouch, so one seventh of what it once was.
Speaker 1: That's right. And as profits slumped, the Echo has had
Speaker 1: to shed staff. So you're talking reporters, you're talking photographers.
Speaker 1: Some of those cuts happened through attrition, people who left
Speaker 1: or retired simply weren't replaced, but there have also been
Speaker 1: deep rounds of layoffs photographers, probably five or six reporters,
Speaker 1: a couple of support staff. Um. So yeah, that's been
Speaker 1: it's been the toughest part of the job, um, in
Speaker 1: the last few years. I've been here from very long time.
Speaker 1: I started at ninety fours up twenty three years. Corn
Speaker 1: Messer joined the Echo as a dark room assistant. At
Speaker 1: that time the paper had six staff photographers. Now Corren
Speaker 1: is the only one left. The last he's seen the
Speaker 1: staff was left in September, which increases one of those.
Speaker 1: He was here the day that I started. He you know,
Speaker 1: I gave the speeches leaving the was that that was very,
Speaker 1: very upsetting. Often Andy has been forced to let go
Speaker 1: of staff he's been working alongside for ten fifteen years,
Speaker 1: and his own role has had to expand to fill
Speaker 1: some of the gaps. Well, I'm the editor, I'm also
Speaker 1: the head of news, but i'm also well today I'm
Speaker 1: essentially the content manager. So I'm doing all the pages today.
Speaker 1: So it's um this sort of about four or five
Speaker 1: jobs rolled up in one to be honest, these days,
Speaker 1: in a in a regional news room. Despite that, Andy
Speaker 1: has tried hard not to cut essentral areas of coverage.
Speaker 1: Role first and foremost. First and foremost is the whole
Speaker 1: people's account, whether it's hospitals, the police, fire service, local authorities,
Speaker 1: any public institution. That's what we're here for. But he
Speaker 1: admits there are some things he can't do anymore. You know,
Speaker 1: we can't now say to someone, Okay, go off and
Speaker 1: research that, investigate that story for two or three days.
Speaker 1: Be off diary and at the echo, as it's so
Speaker 1: many newspapers, the threat of more layoffs still looms in
Speaker 1: the background. You know what what what's the next thing
Speaker 1: that's going to be thrown at me, you will have
Speaker 1: to make more savings. So I think it's kind of
Speaker 1: just made. I think that keeps me awakenizes really keeping
Speaker 1: all the plates spinning and the finances. I think Rooney Now.
Speaker 1: A few months ago, one of Andy's bosses told him
Speaker 1: about a new type of technology that could perhaps help.
Speaker 1: It's an intelligent software that could provide Andy the kind
Speaker 1: of low news stories that he desperately needs, but that
Speaker 1: in recent years he hasn't really had the staff to report.
Speaker 1: And right at first, Andy was wary. Until now technology
Speaker 1: has been more of a job killer for the news
Speaker 1: industry than anything else. Well, I mean, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: obviously naturally skeptical about everything and even in our own industry,
Speaker 1: but Andy was also curious. I'm always open to looking
Speaker 1: at new ideas of new ways of getting information. The
Speaker 1: Echo has had no choice but to embrace digital technology
Speaker 1: and social media in recent years, and now it's become
Speaker 1: one of the first British newspapers to participate in something
Speaker 1: called Project Radar. That's how I ended up in another
Speaker 1: news organization, this time in London. The Press Association was
Speaker 1: built to provide national news coverage for the UK's local papers.
Speaker 1: Here in Britain people call it the p A. I
Speaker 1: went to see Peter Clifton, the p a's editor in chief.
Speaker 1: The PA is facing its own battle to adapt to
Speaker 1: changing times. Now that most people get their news online,
Speaker 1: local papers need less national coverage. I think they've all
Speaker 1: become increasingly focused on trying to serve their local audience
Speaker 1: with more and more local content. Then through in All
Speaker 1: the Queens, Peter heard about a London startup called Herbs
Speaker 1: Media that was founded by two news industry veterans, Alan
Speaker 1: Renwick and Gary Rogers. Here's Gary. I started my career
Speaker 1: in local newspapers and I did that for three years
Speaker 1: of my life and then took a attorney to television.
Speaker 1: Between them, they've got more than fifty five years of experience.
Speaker 1: The consumption of news has changed dramatically and radically, but
Speaker 1: if you looked at the business of how news is produced,
Speaker 1: actually very little has changed. It still requires a journalist
Speaker 1: to go and find a story and go and meet people,
Speaker 1: and it requires phone time and shoe leather, and good
Speaker 1: journalism requires that. In Alan and Gary had a brain wave,
Speaker 1: but we were looking at whether there was another way
Speaker 1: to produce good journalism that would be a little less
Speaker 1: labor intensive. They decided to focus on large government data
Speaker 1: sets that had figures on things like bike theft and
Speaker 1: childhood obesity, and so we were quite interested in sets
Speaker 1: of crime data at the time. They thought they could
Speaker 1: take a single data set and get dozens or even
Speaker 1: hundreds of local stories from it. I can't remember whether
Speaker 1: it was me or Alan come up with this smart
Speaker 1: idea of why didn't we do a snapshot crime profile
Speaker 1: of every borough. Borough is a city district, London has
Speaker 1: thirty three of them. So we started with the humans
Speaker 1: otherwise known as Me and Garret. But the amount of
Speaker 1: data they had to crawl through soon became a problem,
Speaker 1: and I wrote about ten and I started to lose
Speaker 1: the will to live. Each story was basically the same,
Speaker 1: but every neighborhood had different numbers. It became extremely repetitive
Speaker 1: and very boring. We both began to think there must
Speaker 1: be an easier way to do this, and we came
Speaker 1: across something called natural language generation, and as a way
Speaker 1: to try to turn data into texts. Natural language generation
Speaker 1: is a kind of artificial intelligence that can write whole
Speaker 1: reports based on data the way Gary and Allen have
Speaker 1: designed their program, a human journalist still needs to write
Speaker 1: the basic template for a particular data set. Then the
Speaker 1: software fills in numbers and tweets the language so that
Speaker 1: each story can make sense. I don't know, Jeremy, can
Speaker 1: the software really convey the nuance and the perspective of
Speaker 1: of an actual human journalist. Well, these stories that will
Speaker 1: see later are kind of dry. I mean, they're they're pretty,
Speaker 1: They're written pretty straight. That sounds like it can't potentially
Speaker 1: solve a problem for newspapers. Yeah. The idea here, and
Speaker 1: what Peter thought is that this new way of writing
Speaker 1: stories might help his newsroom create more local stories. Um
Speaker 1: and he decided he was going to team up with Herbs,
Speaker 1: and together they created this thing called Project radar. Okay,
Speaker 1: why project radar, Well, it turns out it's an acronym,
Speaker 1: not a very great one. It stands for reporters and
Speaker 1: data and robots. The project received a seven thousand euro
Speaker 1: grant from Google's European Digital News Initiative to help it
Speaker 1: get off the ground. Interestingly, Peter's own team got nervous
Speaker 1: about this robot taking their jobs. I am probably and
Speaker 1: wisely made a speech at the Society of Editor's conference
Speaker 1: last year where I this This was only really a
Speaker 1: glimmer at that point, but all I said at that
Speaker 1: conference was that we would be looking at automation. One
Speaker 1: of the industry websites immediately had a headline of about
Speaker 1: robots taking over at p A And by the time
Speaker 1: I got back to work, they've built a robot cardboard
Speaker 1: cardboard boxes and put it in my seat. Peter and
Speaker 1: the guy at HERBS insisted that nobody's job is going
Speaker 1: to be lost because of Project Radar. Just like your
Speaker 1: world process. I can just sit on your desk as
Speaker 1: a tool you used to write what Gary is saying.
Speaker 1: It is probably true today. I wonder they'll cheremy if
Speaker 1: it will be true tomorrow as the technology inevitably evolves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that is how you consider this kinde of technology
Speaker 1: has a tendency to get more capable over time, and
Speaker 1: what it can do it keeps improving. Okay, well, after
Speaker 1: the break, the Bournemouth Daily Echo starts receiving stories from
Speaker 1: Project Greater and it raises an old fear for Andy
Speaker 1: as he starts trying to use the automated stories. Back
Speaker 1: in Bournemouth. I walked through the video arcade on the
Speaker 1: Bournemouth Pierre Jermy, why were you in a video arcade? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a good question. These arcades tend to be a
Speaker 1: fixture of British seaside towns and I was actually on
Speaker 1: my way to visit another beloved British institution, the local
Speaker 1: fish and chip shop. My name is Chloe and I'm
Speaker 1: the assistant manager here Harry Robson's. And it says on
Speaker 1: the science of world famous fish and chip shop? What
Speaker 1: is it? What is it famous for? It's famous for
Speaker 1: us secret recipe that we have hair in staff, which
Speaker 1: you can't tell me what it is, I suppose unfortunately
Speaker 1: I can't. Chloe said she's a loyal reader of the
Speaker 1: Bournemouth Echo and she especially likes the traffic updates on
Speaker 1: its website, especially with the amount of roadworks that we
Speaker 1: haven't borne from the moment. The online one is always
Speaker 1: up to date, so you knew where they are, what
Speaker 1: times are happening and stuff like that. So is that
Speaker 1: a big issue of roadworks and congestion? And I think
Speaker 1: at the moment yes, because there's quite a lot so,
Speaker 1: especially recently, the Bournemouth Echo ran a storytelling readers just
Speaker 1: how much of their lives were wasted in traffic jams
Speaker 1: in an average year. So the congestion one, which showed
Speaker 1: us just how long emotives would spend in a traffic
Speaker 1: jam in an average week or an average year in
Speaker 1: the context of the restructure of the local area, is
Speaker 1: one that was particularly interesting. That story, and he's talking
Speaker 1: about it came from Project Radar. I think it's been
Speaker 1: a help um in terms of, you know, statistics that
Speaker 1: we wouldn't ordinarily be able to access or have have
Speaker 1: the time to assess. I guess, But he says, some
Speaker 1: Project Radars computer generated stories still require a bit more work.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't necessarily say yes, I think that's been written
Speaker 1: by a computer. I would just say it's been written
Speaker 1: really straight. So he might ask one of his staff
Speaker 1: to get reaction quotes from a local official or from residents,
Speaker 1: or to punch up the writing to make it more lively.
Speaker 1: Should we do you have an example about one of
Speaker 1: these Project Radar stories. Actually sounds like yeah, sure, here's
Speaker 1: one about juvenile crime that Project Radar produced, and the
Speaker 1: Bourne Meth Echo actually ran. Young people in Pool are
Speaker 1: significantly less likely to be cautioned or convicted for a
Speaker 1: first offense than they were ten years ago. Changes in
Speaker 1: police policy and overall fallen crime has seen an eighty
Speaker 1: four percent drop in the number of youngsters entering the
Speaker 1: criminal justice system. According to statistics from the Ministry of Justice.
Speaker 1: In the two thousand and six oh seven financial year,
Speaker 1: two fifty two children between the ages of ten and
Speaker 1: seventeen were convicted or cautioned by police for the first time,
Speaker 1: but by seventeen there were just forty one. We are
Speaker 1: well should have had you read that in your Alexa voice,
Speaker 1: But you know it's it's interesting, but certainly not brimming
Speaker 1: with writerly sensibilities. But it's interesting because this is probably
Speaker 1: not the kind of thing that the Andy Ors reporters
Speaker 1: could have done on their own. Okay, so Andy is
Speaker 1: using these stories of the Bournemouth Echo and finding them useful,
Speaker 1: Yeah he is, But out of a d twenty five
Speaker 1: stories that they publish every week, only about to come
Speaker 1: from Project Radar. Oh wow, Okay, so that's not much
Speaker 1: at all. No, and Andy told me he's worried about
Speaker 1: using the service too much. Well, we to be looking
Speaker 1: at doing them, or that it would it would It
Speaker 1: would for people if you use too many of them,
Speaker 1: that you'd worry that your bosses or somebody would say
Speaker 1: you may not need that many staff be a little
Speaker 1: bit a little bit worried about about them. So even
Speaker 1: though the p A and Herbs insists the Project Radar
Speaker 1: is about helping us do our jobs better, Andy is
Speaker 1: still worried that in his newsroom this technology could take
Speaker 1: away even more jobs. Yeah. I think that's always a
Speaker 1: concern with AI because it gets better and better all
Speaker 1: the time. As we said earlier, how good is it
Speaker 1: the writing podcast scripts, Lucky for us, is not that
Speaker 1: good yet. But the fact is this is a very
Speaker 1: new and interesting area of technology and it's maturing fast.
Speaker 1: But the specter of even more job cuts hasn't deterred
Speaker 1: the news industry from experimenting with computer generated articles. Lots
Speaker 1: of organizations are trying versions of this now, like the
Speaker 1: Associated Press here in the US, which is working with
Speaker 1: a company called Automated Insights on writing simple financial stories.
Speaker 1: That's right, and the Washington Post has a software called
Speaker 1: Heliograph to write stories on everything from high school football
Speaker 1: games to US congressional elections. And we should also say
Speaker 1: that even here at Bloomberg, our own team of Quotas
Speaker 1: has created software that can take corporate earnings reports or
Speaker 1: stock price movements and automatically generate news stories from them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's pretty crazy what this technology can do. But I'm
Speaker 1: pretty happy we don't have to write some of those
Speaker 1: earning stories anymore. Yeah, me too. And actually, on that point,
Speaker 1: I mean, I hope I'm not expressing the hubrists of
Speaker 1: a human here, but I do wonder if the AI
Speaker 1: can kind of replace the you know, the creativity and
Speaker 1: the storytelling of an actual journalist. Yeah. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot that these these types of programs
Speaker 1: are never going to be able to do. They're not
Speaker 1: really going to be able to do investigative reporting and
Speaker 1: narrative storytelling, right articles with the beginning of middle and
Speaker 1: an end and that the you know, convey some nuance
Speaker 1: about a character. Yeah, I think that would be very difficult.
Speaker 1: It's certainly the way some of these programs are set up.
Speaker 1: But they are getting more sophisticated all the time. And
Speaker 1: I know that there are some researchers working on on
Speaker 1: this type of technology and academia who think you could create,
Speaker 1: you know, a narrative structure, at least teach these programs
Speaker 1: to create a narrative structure. Now you're getting a little
Speaker 1: too close to home. But let me ask you, Jeremy,
Speaker 1: I mean, is there a reason to worry that if
Speaker 1: the AI is doing the kind of grunt work stories,
Speaker 1: that some perhaps young reporters aren't getting the kind of training,
Speaker 1: you know, being able to cut their teeth on these
Speaker 1: kinds of stories because the AI is taking over. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's a bit of a double
Speaker 1: edged sword. On the one hand, it means that those
Speaker 1: those entry level reporters don't have to do a lot
Speaker 1: of that grunt work, and maybe they don't get his
Speaker 1: board with the job and maybe they get to move
Speaker 1: on to higher value added skills earlier. But but they
Speaker 1: also might not learn the basics. And I think that's
Speaker 1: an issue in a lot of professions as AI kind
Speaker 1: of takes over, is you know, all of that stuff
Speaker 1: that's being automated was how people learn the basics of
Speaker 1: their job, And there were a lot of important skills
Speaker 1: that they might have learned that they're now gonna have
Speaker 1: to learn some other way. Right, But the big issue
Speaker 1: here is of course fixing the business model does the
Speaker 1: does Project Rador do that? I mean, do you get
Speaker 1: the sense that this technology can solve some of the
Speaker 1: problems at a newspaper like the Born withth Echo? Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's helping the echo just at the margins, really,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's helping it fill in a few stories
Speaker 1: a week, but it's not solving that the underlying business problem.
Speaker 1: And I don't think any of these automated soleations really are.
Speaker 1: I mean, they help newspapers produce a little bit more
Speaker 1: with fewer people. Um, they take away some of the
Speaker 1: grunt work, which maybe frees up people to do some
Speaker 1: some higher stuff. But but it's not fixing the fundamental problem,
Speaker 1: which is if you don't have advertisers willing to pay
Speaker 1: that much money to to run ads against something online,
Speaker 1: you're just not gonna be able to pay for what
Speaker 1: you produce. Yeah, and articles like the one that you
Speaker 1: read about juvenile crime. It's probably not solving the other
Speaker 1: basic issue, which is kind of preserving that relationship, that
Speaker 1: very powerful relationship between the local newspaper and the reader. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: not at all. These programs aren't going to know about
Speaker 1: the local community. They're not going to have that sense
Speaker 1: of place at the Bournemouth Echo. The staff who remain
Speaker 1: have tried their best to adapt changing times. Yeah, take
Speaker 1: Cora and the last photographer on staff. He told us
Speaker 1: he's moved from taking still images to mostly shooting video video.
Speaker 1: It's been costizing, it says, it's more of a challenge,
Speaker 1: you know, learning Learning video is something that really really
Speaker 1: interested me. In fact, Coran's video skills were in such demand.
Speaker 1: The Connett that's the company that owns news Quest Media,
Speaker 1: tapped him to shoot video for USA Today and the
Speaker 1: rest of the Ganet papers at the World Economic Forum
Speaker 1: in Davas, Switzerland. You know, if you were going to
Speaker 1: stay static and say I'm not learning this, I'm not
Speaker 1: changing this is not something I'm going to do that
Speaker 1: you are. You know, you're probably playing the last pan
Speaker 1: in your career. Cora and has helped train the rest
Speaker 1: of the Echoes reporting staff and photography skills, and he
Speaker 1: oversees this thing called the Echoes Camera Club that's a
Speaker 1: group of readers and amateur photographers who contribute images to
Speaker 1: the paper. While he's had to adapt, Coran still enjoys
Speaker 1: his job. Mari Hart is with the Woman Dirt Echo.
Speaker 1: If there's if there's a massive news story going on
Speaker 1: in town, I'm going to get some to it. If
Speaker 1: there's if there's an interesting, you know, photographic assignment to
Speaker 1: go to, I'm going to get to go to it.
Speaker 1: In many ways, Andy says, the Corn's story is really
Speaker 1: the story of the Echo in microcosm. I can't think
Speaker 1: of any other business though, where it's such a short
Speaker 1: space of time. People have to learn a whole range
Speaker 1: of new skills, and they do it day and day out.
Speaker 1: They're the phenomenon. The paper has managed to build a
Speaker 1: decent online readership. The Echoes Content and Audience manager Katie
Speaker 1: Clark walked me through a few of the numbers. So
Speaker 1: monthly we're looking at like one point two to one
Speaker 1: point three unique million uniques um and page views are
Speaker 1: somewhere anyone, kind of anywhere monthly between like ten million
Speaker 1: and like thirteen million, depending on how much breaking news
Speaker 1: we've had. The Echoes sports coverage has also helped it
Speaker 1: to attract online readers. Bournemouth has a Premier League soccer
Speaker 1: team now Louis Cook Cook Well, that might be a
Speaker 1: brilliant ball. It is. It's Calor Wilson, It's laid off
Speaker 1: rid first. It's a historic win for they're nicknamed the Cherries,
Speaker 1: and fans around the world go to the Echoes website
Speaker 1: to follow the team. But as we said, the problem
Speaker 1: is that advertisers pay a lot less per click than
Speaker 1: they do with print ads, and many sites have become
Speaker 1: dangerously dependent on third parties, especially Facebook, to drive readers
Speaker 1: to their sites. We are looking at kind of how
Speaker 1: we're talking to people, engaging with people on Facebook. We're
Speaker 1: putting a lot more emphasis on Twitter coming in the
Speaker 1: last kind of month or so. Facebook recently tweaked its
Speaker 1: algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and family in users
Speaker 1: news feeds. That's making it harder for publishers to use
Speaker 1: social media to promote their stories. So you've gotten used
Speaker 1: to seeing a slight decline last year because of the
Speaker 1: Facebook and trying not to panic about. To be honest,
Speaker 1: if you panicked every time Facebook changed their algorithm their
Speaker 1: user if you're screwed. And finally, print circulation continues. It's
Speaker 1: long decline. Meanwhile, in Bournemouth, and he says he has
Speaker 1: no choice but to stay optimistic about the future of
Speaker 1: journalism and the future of the Echo. To my point
Speaker 1: of view. I love the paper, I love what we do.
Speaker 1: I love seeking it to people and holding people's account
Speaker 1: and you know, getting things done. Um So I think
Speaker 1: by large you have to be in this business. You
Speaker 1: have to be an egoistow wow. And that's it for
Speaker 1: this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We always
Speaker 1: want to know when you think of the show. You
Speaker 1: can write to us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 1: I'm on Twitter at Jeremy a Con and I'm on
Speaker 1: Twitter at Bradstone. Please consider leaving us a rating or
Speaker 1: a review on Apple Podcasts or any of your favorite
Speaker 1: podcast apps. It really helps us find new listeners. This
Speaker 1: episode was produced by Pia Gutkari Magnus Hendrickson, Liz Smith,
Speaker 1: and Christie Westgard. Francesco Levie is head of Bloomberg Podcasts.
Speaker 1: We'll see you next week.