Elise Labott, the 2024-25 Edward R. Murrow press fellow at CFR, discusses the shift away from traditional news sources to social media and the implications of segmenting audiences through outlets such as Bluesky and X on local communities. Bobby Allyn, technology correspondent at NPR, speaks about his experience covering Silicon Valley companies and the ways they are transforming society. The host of the webinar is Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at CFR and former deputy editorial page editor at the
New York Times.
TRANSCRIPT
FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Local Journalists Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.
CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of
Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
This webinar is part of CFR’s Local Journalists Initiative, created to help you draw connections between the local issues you cover and national and international dynamics. Our programming puts you in touch with CFR resources and expertise on international issues and provides a forum for sharing best practices.
We’re delighted to have participants from forty-two states and U.S. territories with us today so thank you for taking the time to be with us, especially as I know you’re probably under a deadline. I want to remind everyone that this webinar is on the record, and the video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org/localjournalists.
We are pleased to have Elise Labott, Bobby Allyn, and host Carla Anne Robbins with us.
Elise Labott is a 2024-25 Edward R. Murrow press fellow at CFR and a leading journalist specializing in U.S. foreign policy and global affairs. She has reported from more than eighty countries and is a former CNN global affairs correspondent. She’s also the author of
Cosmopolitics, a Substack publication focusing on U.S. policy and international relations; and the founder and editor in chief of Zivvy News, a nonprofit digital platform that engages youth on political and global issues, civic engagement, and media literacy.
Bobby Allyn is a technology correspondent at NPR. He reports on big tech, startups, social media, artificial intelligence, Silicon Valley, and other tech-related topics. He was previously a staff writer at National Public Radio, the
Oregonian, and the
Tennessean.
And Carla Anne Robbins, our host, she is senior fellow at CFR and co-host of the CFR podcast “The World Next Week.” She also serves as faculty director of the master of international affairs program and clinical professor of national security studies at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, and previously she was deputy editorial page editor at the
New York Times and chief diplomatic correspondent at the
Wall Street Journal.
So welcome, all. Thank you for being with us. I am going to turn the conversation now to Carla to explore new frontiers of local news.
So, Carla, over to you.
ROBBINS: Thank you so much, and thanks, Elise, it’s great to see you. And, Bobby, it’s lovely to meet you. I listen to you, so glad to meet you.
ALLYN: Oh. Good to meet you. Thanks for having me.
LABOTT: Same here. Same here. Nice to be with you and all of you.
ROBBINS: My first job, I was a researcher at NPR, so.
ALLYN: Oh, really? Oh, wow.
ROBBINS: Yeah. So—I was Deb Amos’ researcher, just—
ALLYN: That’s amazing. That’s back when we had researchers. So, wow. (Laughter.)
ROBBINS: Actually, I’ve hung out with Deb many times since then but she’s never—I’m always very deferential to her.
OK. So I thought we would start out with some very interesting data about social media news from Pew, one of my favorite go-to places for data. So they do regular research on—ask people about their news consumption habits so they asked people how—what are their preferred sources for news in 2024 and they said about a quarter of U.S. adults—23 percent—said they prefer news websites or apps as their sources of news. Eighteen percent said they prefer social media.
But the trajectory is always very important. Polls are snapshots, and that’s up 6 percentage points since 2023. So if we’re going to start being calm about the notion that news websites are leading they’re not leading for long. Twelve percent preferred search. Five percent preferred podcasts.
When they asked people where they got local news they found that they often or sometimes—70 percent of them said they got it from friends, family, and neighbors, 66 percent said they got it from local news outlets, and 54 percent said they got it often or sometimes from social media.
Age, of course, predictably, had a huge impact on how people answered the question. Seventy-one percent of U.S. adults age eighteen to twenty-nine get their news about local government and politics from social media, compared with 36 percent of those sixty-five and older.
And, finally, I thought this was really interesting about which platforms are most popular for sources for news. Facebook and YouTube—about a third of Americans say they regularly get their news from there. Instagram, 20 percent. TikTok, 17 percent. X, the site formerly known as Twitter, 12 percent. Reddit, 8 percent. Something called Nextdoor, which I’ve never even heard of, which is 5 percent. Snapchat, 5 percent.
And once again, demographics, political affinity, and the trajectory are all incredibly important here because people who said that they went to these sites regularly and which sites they relied on more or less for news 59 percent of people who say they use X say they get their news there. Fifty-seven percent of users who go to Truth Social say they get their news there.
Fifty-two percent of TikTok users say they get news there, and that’s up from 43 percent just in 2023 and 22 percent in 2020. So increasingly people are turning to TikTok for news. I don’t know if you find that comforting or not. I don’t find it especially comforting.
So given all of those stats my first question, which I’m going to pitch to both of you, is why do these stats matter for us as, shall I say, legacy media people other than depressing us about the future of our business?
You know, how does social media fit into the professional lives of those who do this? You know, is it because we should be covering this because everybody else is getting their information there? Should we be using social media to leverage to get our own work out? Should we be emulating it in some way? You know, why—we know they’re eating our lunch but why should we be paying attention to it?
So with that, I think I’ll throw it to Bobby first.
ALLYN: Yeah. I had a NPR editor who liked to say, we’re not only competing with commercial news on the radio but we’re competing with Taylor Swift too, right? It’s this idea that it’s the attention economy. If not consuming one of our stories whether on air or on the website you’re going to be doing something else.
And I just think there’s this big credibility gap, right? I think increasingly young people find the most authentic way to consume news is through a content creator they already have a relationship with and trust over a legacy media organization, most of which are full of reporters who have been professionally trained to not put their personality first.
And I think—I mean, I started my career—my first ten years of my career, you know, I was working for local newspapers and local radio stations, and I think there is a real opportunity to after you file your story go to TikTok and do some version of it. Hit Bluesky and X and Mastodon and all the other social media sites you could think of to do other versions of it.
Now, that’s—you can see that’s sort of, like, unpaid additional labor and that’s really not fair. But, increasingly, if you do not do that somebody else will. I mean, I file stories all the time and then go on TikTok and see a twenty-two-year-old in Denver doing a video on it that went viral and it’s better than I could have done and it maybe reached a bigger audience than I would have done.
And there’s no reference to my reporting and that’s fine, but the point being if we’re not doing it somebody else will and often when there’s a content creator doing a video aggregation of a story for TikTok the details are wrong or there’s causation explained where the causation didn’t exist, and it just really pollutes the news ecosystem.
So especially with TikTok I really, really have been pushing my colleagues to just go and do a direct to camera two-minute explanation of breaking news when you have it because you just never know it might go viral, and if you don’t do it somebody else will.
ROBBINS: So mainly what you’re saying is if you don’t do it someone else will so if we do it we at least get it right.
ALLYN: Yeah.
ROBBINS: But it’s also cannibalizing our work. But maybe our work has already been cannibalized.
ALLYN: Yes and no. I mean, I don’t—there’s so many incentives on platform, on TikTok, so that people do not leave the platform. I don’t know that most people who are watching a TikTok of my explanation of some story would have ever gone to NPR.org or turned on the radio.
Our own internal surveys have found that there’s a huge distinction between our broadcast audience and our digital audience and I’d be willing to say that that’s also true on people who primarily get their news from TikTok, and it’s really difficult on TikTok to link out to a story.
So it’s just, like—I don’t know. I mean, I just think we have to be putting ourselves out there. We have to be hitting as many platforms as we can.
But, again, it’s really, really dicey because the ones who are the most popular tend to have the biggest opinions and the biggest personalities and sometimes that can chafe against the standards and the practices at legacy media institutions that really want you to surface the reporting before you surface your personality, right? So I think that’s caused some internal strife at a number of news organizations.
ROBBINS: I want to come back to that, but I want to go over to Elise because I want to talk about the different personalities of the different websites in a minute if we’re going to do this. But, Elise, why should we care about this?
LABOTT: Well, I think, you know, Bobby hit the nail on the head in a lot of ways but I think one of the big elephants in the room—there are two elephants in the room. Actually, one of them is, you know—let’s just say Bobby works for NPR. NPR is no longer just radio.
You know, it’s a twenty-four-hour digital organization, multiplatform, and I think journalists really need to think of themselves as if you’re with a newspaper, if you’re with the local TV station, you can’t think of yourselves as just that.
We are all multimedia journalists now and these are the places where, you know, we’re getting our audience. And it doesn’t matter if you’re listening to the story on the radio or whether you’re, you know, as Bobby said, doing a thing on TikTok.
Your audience is where you find them and sometimes we have to go where—we have to meet the audience where they are and if they’re not listening to the radio, you know, as Bobby said, maybe we can go on TikTok and get them to listen to the NPR or, you know, I really like this guy—and that goes back into the whole idea is that, you know, especially young people where I’m really focused now through Zivvy News and also through my—some research I’m doing at the Council young people are turning away from legacy media in droves because they don’t feel, like, a connection to the—these news organizations. They don’t feel that there’s enough authenticity.
And so I think this is a real way to get new audiences to meet them on TikTok, trying—you know, they’re looking for personalities. They’re looking for—you know, I like to say, you know, news—they call them news influencers now. We called them newsmakers back when. Influencers aren’t—nowadays they aren’t just, like, booty dancers, you know, doing that TikTok latest craze; they’re people on TikTok that are delivering the news. Some of them are journalists and some of them aren’t. And as you said, people have the greatest—you know, some of the people that have the greatest followers have the greatest opinions. That’s true in some ways but there are others that are just, you know, going on, being their authentic self, deliver the news and particularly young people are really identifying with that.
And so if we can go on and we can give—as you said, we know we’re going to do it I’d like to say with legacy media ethics and standard but animated by, you know, what’s new and what’s next.
So I think it is a real opportunity to gain new followers and also meet potential followers where they are and also show a little bit more of your personality because nowadays that’s what audiences are looking for.
ALLYN: And I’ll just add to that, Elise. I think you made a lot of really good points.
If you’re wondering how creators on TikTok may be explaining their stories, one very common way of doing it is talking in front of the green screen feature and they put up on the green screen the article and TikTok—
LABOTT: Right.
ALLYN: AI can actually read the byline. So you can go onto TikTok and just type your name in and you can see how people are explaining your story.
I mean, I did that. At first I was, like, oh my God. Like, there’s really, really talented people. I mean, they are—some people—some of the TikTokers are incredible entertainers, incredible performers. They don’t always get the facts right but there’s something that we can learn from them. I really think there is.
ROBBINS: When we talk about what makes them good performers and whether or not that fits within—and I’m not—I mean, Elise has known me a long time. I’m not stuffy despite the place that I work. I will tell you that when I was—I was at the edit page of the
Times and Twitter was really taking off I would say to people, you can’t get ahead of the edit page on Twitter.
You can’t stake out an editorial position that isn’t the editorial position of the
Times. I don’t think that was unreasonable of me. A lot of people hated me but that’s another story for another day. We can talk to my shrink about it.
But journalism, obviously, has changed an enormous amount. There are people who complain that journalism is too editorial. Usually it’s if they don’t agree with you. OK.
LABOTT: Right. Right.
ROBBINS: The people on the left don’t like right opinions. People on the right don’t like left opinions. How do we—what makes the people who are performing your articles, Bobby, or performing your articles, Elise—what makes them compelling, authentic, without—you know, that you could possibly do that would still be within the standards of journalism and that would be not playing into this notion that somehow you were overly politicizing your work?
LABOTT: OK. I’m going to give everybody a cautionary tale on this because it is a delicate balance. Some people on this—Carla may remember and maybe Irina does—but years ago in 2015—
ROBBINS: (Laughs.) I don’t like the Carla will remember years ago conjunction.
LABOTT: Well, you’ll remember—well, only because we are friends. We’ve been longtime friends so you’ll probably remember. (Laughter.) It has a lot of mythic proportions in my head, maybe not in others.
I was suspended from CNN for two weeks because I tweeted something that was deemed to be editorializing. And what did I tweet? I tweeted—you know, Bobby’s shaking his head. He may remember too. It was—it was about the Muslim ban or the Syrian ban of all refugees. And I said something like—you know, this was when Twitter was just coming up and just kind of gaining traction, and they were looking for us to be a little voicier—a little bit voicier. And I said someone like, oh, I thought it was un-American. It wasn’t—it wasn’t partisan, but it was a(n) editorial position. This is un-American. The Statue of Liberty is bowing her head in shame, I think I said.
Now, at the time it was a little bit provocative but it wasn’t what we’re hearing on TV today or what we’re seeing on Twitter today, and someone from the
Washington Post wrote this article on how dare she, she’s editorializing, and this was, like, a cautionary tale of what not to do.
And, you know, I felt at the time, like, when everything happened if I’m going to die defending defenseless serious refugees—defenseless Syrian refugees. That may be a good hill to die on but it was editorializing and I learned my lesson, and I used it as an opportunity to never do that again. (Laughter.)
Whereas we saw how journalism, especially in the Trump era and with this polarization we have—any journalist can talk about whatever they want. They say whatever they want. There were no guardrails and I really think the public is responding to that—that if you’re going to go to mainstream media you’re not looking for an editorial and you’re—except if you’re looking on the editorial page.
And I don’t want to hear an anchor say they’re outraged or I don’t want to hear their anchor say, I’m embarrassed to be an American. They want—they think that the bias is there and so if the bias is there why can’t I listen to the bias from someone who follows my bias? And I like that.
ROBBINS: But then how do you square the circle with going back to being authentic and entertaining and getting—pay attention to you?
LABOTT: Look—I mean, we’re doing it—we’re doing it right now, right? I mean, when I would go on TV and—you know, we like to say, oh, I’m not a performer but, you know, we’re performing. We’re giving our personality. You can show personality and you can show a little nod or a wink or a, you know, inflection without saying, you know, I feel this way about this person or I feel this way about this story.
Look, we’re all making editorial kind of choices based on how we write and how we tell a story so that—we’re already kind of indicating, and we don’t like to admit it, Carla, but the way we tell a story is indicating our bias. We all have biases.
The thing is to not, like, beat someone else over the head with it and, unfortunately, what we’re finding on, you know, a lot of these sites is that there is—it’s a free for all in terms of, like, that’s what it is. It’s people giving their opinion and if they don’t like your opinion then they don’t want to hear from you.
But there is a way of, I think, showing your personality and showing, like, how unreal this story is or this is crazy or, you know, kind of using emotion and using inflection without taking a side on the story. And I think that’s the delicate balance we all, everyone on this call, is trying to feel right now, and you can’t control what someone else is going to do about your story but you can control how you do it.
ALLYN: Yeah.
ROBBINS: Bobby, we’ve got a question from Leoneda Inge but—who, which fits in with what I wanted you to answer as well which is what did you learn from watching the person reading it that you should be doing differently and what Leoneda is asking is, I figured out years ago if I produce a story I want it delivered at least three different ways—what ways do you recommend under deadline.
So I’m going to kluge onto that my question which is if you’re going to do it three different ways you’re going to—obviously, you’re going to have to package it in three different ways, depending on the medium, and it’s—I would suspect all those three different ways are not going to be the NPR way. So—
ALLYN: Yeah. I mean, especially for, you know, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, TikTok audience it’s not going to be an NPR script where there’s, you know, a twenty-five-second host intro, a question that maybe confuses half the people, and then a very formal answer. Here’s—(laughter)—here’s what’s in it. You saw that thing on the news.
ROBBINS: (Inaudible)—public—(audio break).
FASKIANOS: We’re trying to get Bobby back on and I’m going to turn it back—oh, here he comes. OK. So, Carla, over to you and we’re going to send out a note to our participants that we’re back on.
So why don’t we continue and we’ll get everybody back on?
ROBBINS: That’s great. Thank you.
Bobby, you were saying? The question, of course, was multiple platforms. The question different platforms, different, you know, norms—esthetic norms for them. How do you do that and how do you still sort of maintain your standards?
ALLYN: Yeah. I was just saying it wouldn’t really land if you did a standard NPR two-way, a Q&A for, you know, TikTok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts audience because they want you to cut to the chase faster and, honestly, NPR should probably do that more often as well. (Laughter.)
A lot of, you know, vertical video news videos that you’re seeing on social media it’s people very immediately just saying, you saw this thing in the news. Here’s what’s up. Here’s what it means. Here’s what I have to say.
Honestly, often the writing is really sharp, it’s really compelling, and the editing is really fast, and I think everyone in broadcast news has something to learn from content creators on platforms like TikTok.
And, again, when it comes to breaking news this does get a little hairy because as any reporter knows when a story is breaking and unfolding there’s a lot of key questions and areas that remain unknown, and when a sort of younger, you know, social media audience will see legacy journalists saying, we know A and B but we don’t yet know C, because of the environment that we’re all in some people automatically assume that the news is hiding something, right—that there’s a conspiracy, that there’s something happening from like, say, the masthead on down that wants a piece of information to be silenced.
We all know that is not true but there are many people on social media saying that and they often have very loud megaphones and you’re up against that. So sometimes the question that I’m often asking is do I entertain that to disabuse people of that theory or is that giving it more oxygen.
LABOTT: Yeah. I—
ALLYN: And reasonable minds can differ on that, right?
LABOTT: Yeah. I mean, I have been struggling that with myself and I say am I giving it currency, am I—by even, like, addressing some of the most ridiculous things, like—let’s go back to, like, the Pizzagate or, you know, what are those things where it’s just so utterly ridiculous and people are talking about it do I even start talking about it and say, oh, I—you know, and I find now CNN is or, you know, my former employer or others are engaging in mainstream media, like, they feel that they have to engage to be able to compete with some of the, you know, chatter on social media.
Are you covering the fact that there’s a phenomenon on social media or are you actually, you know, engaging and reporting out a story that we know is not true, and I do feel like sometimes giving things currency and, like, even having to say, like, I spoke to my sources and they say that’s not true gives currency to things that, you know, maybe we do have a—if we have a responsibility to kind of, you know, be the adults in the room in terms of some of the journalism that’s going on I think that’s a good way to start is not to go down the rabbit holes of some of the conspiracy theories that are, you know, having oxygen.
But, I mean, a recent one that we faced was remember with the dogs and the cats and they’re eating the dogs and they’re eating the cats, and that became such a thing that that became a news story in and of itself and I just—like, I had to disengage for a few days because I was really disturbed by this that it became, like—you know, we’ve talked about this before, I think, amongst all of us but in this age of, you know, where truth is even being questioned we’re having to engage in talking about nontruths.
So it’s not just about content, which I do agree with Bobby, like, there needs to be different kinds of content for different types of platforms. You can also play with, you know, kind of graphics and Canva is a great way to, you know, inject some, you know, color and things into some of your content.
You know, we could be a little bit more creative with the visuals, I think, on some of these social media platforms that we can’t do on others. But in terms of the stories that we select I think we still need to be, you know, what people look for. Then we’re just, you know, kind of what makes us different than some of these other creators that are out there if we’re not kind of animating our presence on social media with those legacy media ethics and standards.
ROBBINS: Well, I want to have other people ask questions of the group. So, please, either put questions in the Q&A or raise your hands so we can have you guys join as well as talking about your experiences with this because I’m sure you guys have questions as well and answers as well to share with us.
And while you do that and formulate your questions Andrew Bowen, who’s the Metro reporter at KPBS-FM in San Diego, you had a question which got wiped out when we disappeared. So can you voice your question? Because, I’m sorry, it got wiped out when we—when the gremlins took us away.
Unless Andrew had to go back to work. While we wait for Andrew—
Q: Yeah. Hi. Can you hear me?
ROBBINS: OK, great. Yes, absolutely.
Q: Yeah. I’m wondering what the—whether there’s any reason why someone—you know, a public media journalist making a video on TikTok shouldn’t include a call to donate in every single video. Because we already do this on the radio, we do it on TV, and if the news consumer is finding their way to donate to nonprofit media via TikTok instead of FM radio or linear television then what’s the difference?
ALLYN: Yeah. That’s—
LABOTT: Bobby, you want to take that?
ALLYN: Yeah. It’s an interesting idea. I mean, fundraising is a little outside of my bailiwick but I will say on TikTok if you start hawking something the authenticity meter is going to go off pretty fast I think. Even if it’s for, you know, something that we all think is—you know, has value like public media it gets a little dicey because it just looks like we’re sort of there to sell them something, and there’s already a lot of ads on TikTok.
So I really just don’t know that that would land. I’d be curious to see what the conversion rate would be. I would imagine it would be extremely low. But, I mean, why not experiment? Why not try new things? Why not try to, you know, make the case that there is value in public media?
But, yeah, I don’t—I just think there’s maybe, you know, potential for that to backfire if it becomes overly sales pitchy because that’s not really the vibe of TikTok unless you’re actually looking at an ad.
But this is totally outside my expertise, so I don’t know, you can listen to what I’m saying on this. (Laughs.)
LABOTT: Yeah. Or another thing you could do is say, if you like this video follow me or link in bio, and then in the link in the bio that’s where you could, like, go to—like, people have a link tree now, which is like a link tree is all of the different platforms that you’re on and that’s where a lot of even creators are asking for, like, here’s my Patreon or if you want to donate.
So instead of doing it in the content and being like, hey, how about a few bucks, like, you can say, if you like this follow my, you know, link and bio and that’s where you can find it. So it is good to put it there. Probably maybe not in the video.
ROBBINS: Can we talk about the different—I mean, the different platforms, which are all very—you know, three platforms, potentially but many of them have different political coloration to them and we all seem to be splintering into different—into our different ecosystems themselves.
Bobby, have you—or Elise, have you ever posted on Truth Social?
LABOTT: Never. I don’t even read it.
ALLYN: I have an account that I’ll use to confirm that something Trump, you know, supposedly wrote there—he actually wrote but I don’t really go to Truth Social. I mean, you know, X has basically become so extreme that when I occasionally lurk on X I feel like I’m getting some flavor of Truth Social. There’s been a bit of a migration from Truth Social over to X.
So I think I’m definitely getting a window into that world just by going through my timeline there, and there’s just such a link penalty on X. People have noticed that—I mean, Elon even admitted it recently that if you tweet or post, I guess, we say now and have a hyperlink in your post it’s going to be—the algorithm down ranks it.
So that’s why you’re seeing people write something, they put the link underneath it. But even then there’s a penalty, and the whole—I mean, the whole point—because the whole play in the world of social media is engagement so whenever you have a hyperlink that is basically asking people to leave the platform. The less time on the platform the less advertising revenue they could bring in.
So I spend a lot less time on Twitter than I used to. I would say I spend now about 80 percent of my social media time in terms of looking for and sharing news on Bluesky—I really like Bluesky—maybe 10 percent on Threads and 10 percent on X.
But Bluesky has been great for journalists in terms of engagement, in terms of—a bunch of news organizations have come out recently and said they’re actually getting more referral traffic from Bluesky than they are X.
So I think there’s a lot of hope with Bluesky. A lot of people are excited about it. But it’s still very young, it’s still very small, but I think it has potential.
LABOTT: You could offer—
ROBBINS: One second, Elise. I just want to follow up with both of you about Bluesky, which is that Bluesky is where people go when they’re fed up with X. So it’s a very self-selected political audience. So, I mean, aren’t we basically just putting ourselves into a news ghetto if we’re just posting on Bluesky?
ALLYN: I think that was maybe true in the beginning but Bluesky is becoming more diverse. You know, the so-called shit posters—you know, the kind of people who just post nonsense all day—are increasingly coming to Bluesky. I’m seeing more, you know, right-wing provocateurs on Bluesky. It is a lot of folks part of the so-called exodus—you know, people like you’re saying, people leaving the Elon Musk ecosystem.
But increasingly it is not just one type of person. There are other social media platforms that are more ideologically striped but—I don’t know, I find that I’m getting a pretty wide range of opinions and reactions to my posts on Bluesky.
I’m not using it as much as I use used to use X but, yeah. No, to your point that’s why sometimes there’s this sort of fallacy in talking about social media and that people just use one. You know, we’re just on this one place. We’re talking to people on this one platform. We’re sharing links.
But what you should do is share your link everywhere you can. I mean, I have some colleagues who are now sharing all their links as their first social media site to LinkedIn because they noticed—
LABOTT: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I was going to say.
ALLYN: —lots of engagement on LinkedIn. I mean, why not just share it everywhere? I mean, what’s the downside of just trying every single platform? I guess the downside is it’s just really exhausting. (Laughs.) But if you have the energy for it put your link everywhere and see what works and just constantly experiment and iterate, right?
LABOTT: Yeah. I would say that I’m using LinkedIn a lot more. Can you hear me?
ROBBINS: Mmm hmm.
LABOTT: OK. I’m using LinkedIn a lot more and I feel like LinkedIn now—it used to be kind of about getting a job but now I think it’s a lot more of a professional—a place where professionals are discussing and people that want to have a little bit more thoughtful of an engagement are discussing on LinkedIn. So I’m using that a lot more.
And then also Substack, you know, isn’t traditionally necessarily a social media platform but I have a Substack. A lot of journalists are moving to Substack to put out their content and they also have a new kind of Twitter-ish feature where it’s called Notes where you can have thoughtful discussion.
So I think, you know, Bobby is right that we need to, you know, kind of move out a little bit beyond the Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok and, you know, just post everywhere you can. Usually, I just have a thing is where I’m going to post something I may tweak it a little for each different platform. I’m going to go to Twitter, LinkedIn, Threads, you know, Instagram and TikTok, you know, and, you know, Substack is my primary platform so obviously I’m going to do that.
I would also love to know what everybody in the audience is using. If you want to put it in the chat what you guys are using we can—love to hear about that.
ROBBINS: Thank you, Elise, for asking that question, which is what—I would love to hear this as well what people are using and I’d also love to hear—
LABOTT: And why. What do they like about it.
ROBBINS: Yeah, or tell us. You know, speak up. I’d love to hear from you all, and I’d also love to hear whether or not your editors, or if you are an editor, does anyone still have a conversation whether there’s a potential to monetize the use of social media or has everyone just thrown their hands up and said, forget it, we’re not going to be able to monetize this? They’re too big for us. They’ve overwhelmed us. We give up.
Because you—both Elise and Bobby said in the beginning of this that somehow as you were saying about the downloading the links in X. But is there any way to create followers to get them to come back to our sites or is this really our job here is that at least we’re depolluting—we’re cleaning up the bay?
We’re correcting misinformation. We’re getting more information ourselves to see what people are paying attention to. We’re using this because it’s better to depollute the ecosystem. But there’s no way we can monetize it and even though it’s basically gobbling up our space.
ALLYN: Yeah. Again, when it comes to the business side of journalism it’s just really outside of my expertise. I mean, I have thoughts on that but sometimes those thoughts come against, like, institutional priorities.
I mean, NPR we’re obviously public media and so because of our public—you know, public interest is supposed to drive our newsroom and, you know, we’re a nonprofit. We don’t have a pay wall.
But, you know, my colleagues at other publications who do have hard pay walls because, obviously, journalism costs money they’re constantly up against this question of, do I go to all these social media apps and give a summary of all my reporting and that does actually create a bit of a cannibalization because you’re creating a disincentive for anyone to ever become a subscriber to your publication if you’re doing that for every single story.
But it’s a matter of tradeoffs because not doing it means you’re missing a huge and growing audience so what do you do, right? I think one of the questions we’re kind of trying to strike at here is how do we get social media passive consumers to become active participants and people who will pay for our news product, and I think lots of people are trying to figure this out.
I don’t have any perfect answers. But it’s a tricky one. It is. I mean, I know myself I’ve been in the news business my entire life, which isn’t that long. I’m thirty-seven. But it’s the only career I’ve had and I sometimes—
LABOTT: Me, too.
ALLYN: —I’m sent a link and I see a pay wall and I don’t pay. This is what I do for a living. So I have some sympathy with people who see a pay wall and say, well, I want to read this article but I don’t want the publication for a year. (Laughs.)
So, I mean, obviously, that’s how it is for a lot of people.
LABOTT: Well, yeah. I would say, I mean, it’s—you’re going to—if you’re looking for, you know, people to look for your content it’s going to be on the quality of your engagement on social media.
So if people really like you on social media and they want more of you they’re going to go look for your content wherever they can find it. If your content is good people will find you. So creators are making—and by the way, you know, each individual is going to be different with each individual news organization. But people are monetizing on social media and creators are making a lot of money on social media through the platforms.
And we’re—you know, someone just asked whether we’re—YouTube is—I think YouTube is a little bit more for an older audience and there’s not as much engagement as some of the others. But certainly I also, you know, put my stuff on Facebook and those—people are making money on Facebook. There’s also YouTube.
So, you know, I think if you want an audience it doesn’t—there are two things. You either want an audience and you want to—and/or you want to monetize. If you just want an audience it shouldn’t matter. You’re Carla with the
New York Times or Bobby with NPR or
Wall Street Journal or whatever, and wherever it is—wherever they find you that’s where it is.
If you want to monetize you have to give a little bit of yourself to kind of, like—you know, and in your—maybe we don’t want to say, you know, please donate to NPR but you could be, like, if you really like my work come visit me on NPR.
ALLYN: But then—
LABOTT: You know what I mean? And that’s an authenticity that, you know—
ALLYN: There’s another tension, too, from the institutional perspective because we want legacy media, public media, to be encouraging reporters in the field to become social media personalities. but if they become too good at it they won’t need their institutions and they could probably make more money without their institution.
So from the sort of management perspective do you give them a really long leash and then they say, actually I can make more money by monetizing my videos—goodbye? I don’t know.
ROBBINS: I don’t think that’s happened to a lot of people. I think most people who’ve ended up on Substack have, shall we say, their newsrooms have been shrinking.
ALLYN: There’s also people on Substack making many millions of dollars, so it just depends—
LABOTT: Well, or they didn’t like or they didn’t—or they felt—they left mainstream media because a lot of the reasons that audiences are leaving because—you know, like I said, mainstream media has this, like, cachet but let’s not pretend that most of them aren’t as biased as the rest of them anymore.
They all have an agenda and, like, some people are more—you know, some of the creators online are more honest about it. So, again, I hear from a lot of young people and, you know, I’m doing this research at the Council on this very topic.
I had a focus group with a lot of young people about where you’re getting your news, social media, and they say, look, you know, I—what is—you know, the mainstream news media is biased so what does it matter if I get my content from a biased creator or a biased
New York Times?
Like, you know, when—again, when truth is—and facts are not really the primary driver people—these young people, a lot of them even know that some of the stuff they’re reading on social media isn’t true. They don’t care.
So I think that we need to go. We need to be able to be—we can still be ourselves—accurate, informative, vetted sources. But, you know, as we’ve been talking about we can learn a lot from, you know, some of their creators and what they’re doing.
ROBBINS: So John Allison from—he’s the news editor of the
Tribune Review. John, you raised a question about Facebook. Would you like to talk a little bit about that or anything else about your experience with social media as an editor?
Q: Unmute. Hello.
ROBBINS: Hey.
Q: Have I reached you? Yes.
I brought up Facebook because it feels like the old folks home of social—(laughter)—media and it seems also to be hostile to media. You know, you talk about link death. You put out a news story on Facebook—very little reaction. Put a picture of my cat having a crème brulée
, boom—you know, great activity.
But are we just chasing one thing after another? Is it—are we just looking for the coolest place to land and is it a mug’s game or are we going to really find a real—we, I say we meaning a traditional newspaper publisher here. Are we really going to find a partner in social media or do we have to build something ourselves again?
And I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m raising it. I’m not—I’m puzzled by it.
ALLYN: Yeah. I think with Facebook I just know from NPR’s internal numbers on digital story traffic it long ago cratered and that was a decision, you know, made at the executive level to downrank and deprioritize news links across the board. And you know, Facebook justified that by saying this is not why people log on to their apps. They want to know what their friends and family are doing. They don’t want to learn about what’s happening in their city council or what’s happening in Washington.
You can quibble with that but it had a huge effect, at least at NPR and probably other places, in terms of the amount of referral traffic that we get from Facebook. But, I mean, it’s still a platform with billions of users. It does skew a little older, John, to your point.
I’m reminded of—again, I’m not sure some in this room remember this—my first newspaper job at the
Tennessean I started there around 2010, 2011 and the—you know, the now famous sort of pivot to video and it’s, you know, a Gannett newspaper.
We were all given these stabilizers for our iPhones and we had a mandate to do four videos a day regardless of quality, upload them to Facebook. They were terrible, right? But we had a grant at the time for Facebook and we were trying this new experiment out.
But the news leadership there—I don’t think it was true of just this one newspaper—didn’t take social media seriously. I think a lot of the industry kind of dropped the ball with social media and thinking it was a fad and thinking it was cute and just having a little too much confidence in their own delivery methods and a little too much confidence in the idea that people are always going to log on to NPR.org to find out what’s happening, and look what happened, right?
I mean, I think we kind—that ship has sailed a little bit. We should have been thinking about building our own digital platforms and delivery methods a long time ago and I think we’re so kind of screwed at this point, honestly.
And we saw what happens when we become overly dependent on, you know, the Silicon Valley companies. They realize they can make more money elsewhere and they say, screw you. So it’s—not to be overly cynical but I think there was an opportunity a long time ago and we didn’t take social media seriously.
LABOTT: I think that the
New York Times, the
Washington Post, the
Wall Street Journal, and some others are doing a very good job at kind of transitioning to digital. The
Washington Post, for instance, has an excellent TikTok account. I think it’s a little—you know, at first it was kind of funny. Now it’s a little gimmicky. But it’s got a million followers.
And as, you know, I think, like, people know the guy—they call him the
Washington Post TikTok guy. So every time they’re saying
Washington Post TikTok guy the name
Washington Post is coming up. Are those people going to the
Washington Post?
Some of them are, you know, and I think now more and more people are getting more referrals from digital than they are from, like, you know, traditional kind of marketing.
But, again, I just think we need to think of ourselves as multimedia organizations and nowadays—and, I mean, the thing about X and the link kind of notwithstanding, you know, the name of our media organization is our brand but the distribution is wherever we can get it.
And I think as opposed to finding new ways of, you know, distribution we need to find new ways of—our news organizations—the business model needs to change. For instance, the
New York Times is making a lot more money now off games or off cooking, and kind of news is more of a public affairs function that’s subsidized by cooking or games or things like that.
And so if news is, like, the kind of, you know, haute couture of publishing or broadcasting or news and information then some of these other business models are going to be what subsidizes it and there—and look, there’s a lot of money right now in local journalism to figure these things out and I think—I’ve, you know, been trying to talk to people at some of the foundations and one of the things they’re specifically looking at are business models—sustainable business models.
This is what we should be thinking about right now. We shouldn’t be thinking about whether we should be on TikTok or Social or this or that platform. We should all be on all of them, if you feel comfortable.
ALLYN: Yeah, I—
LABOTT: But we should be thinking about what the business model is.
ALLYN: Yeah. No, I agree. But what’s really in vogue now is not even social media but it’s large language models, right? Increasing—I mean, Google search is—has been declining for some time in terms of quality and overall usage, especially with young people.
Lots of people now go to ChatGPT, they go to Perplexity, they go to Claude, and they say, what’s that bill that just passed, and they get bullet points, right? So we learned a lesson as a news industry that we didn’t take social media seriously. We let all of these Silicon Valley companies eat our lunch.
We should be building our own large language models and the
Washington Post, to their credit, unveiled one recently where it is trained on the data of all of our articles and there would be a little pop-up and you can ask it a question and it just pulls from
New York Times stories,
Washington Post stories, you know, NPR stories. So we know it’s valid. We know it’s vetted.
Otherwise, these large language models really are the future. You’re getting analysis. You’re getting, you know, the facts. You’re getting information rapidly, right?
So I really think there also needs to be an emphasis on should news organizations be building their own large language models because, as we know, AI is a huge part of the future when it comes to how people are going to be informed and how people are going to, you know, learn how to sort of navigate their world.
ROBBINS: I would—we’re almost done. I would make one further argument which is this is—yes, monetizing is sort of an essential notion here. I’m not sure that smaller papers are going to be able to do that. Certainly, smaller papers can’t monetize games. Smaller papers can’t monetize cooking. Smaller papers can’t do the things that might—
LABOTT: I just said it to, like, say that we need to be thinking of new—
ROBBINS: Yeah. No, certainly I—but I think that this other question here about social media is can we in some way take lessons from them about their definitions of authenticity. I don’t know. I think that’s something that we have to sort of figure out that sort of balance here, particularly because of the lack of trust in institutions generally and how we find that balance and that’s really a hard thing for us. That’s one thing.
And the other thing is I think that we need to consider that there is a whole world out there of conversation going on in social media that we as journalists have to cover and that goes back to your question, Elise, about the cats and the dogs.
I mean, when do we get to that—
LABOTT: When does it become a news story.
ROBBINS: Yeah, and when do we—and also when are we missing it? Because I—certainly, if you go back to something like Trayvon Martin, I mean, the Trayvon Martin story was going on for a quite a while on social media before all the big papers and the small papers even noticed it. And I know most organizations can’t afford to have a full time reporter just monitoring and trying to make assessments like that but we are all intuitively on social media anyway and it’s our responsibility to raise this question.
There’s a world boiling on out there that we’re not part of quite often—that there is a news conversation and some of it sounds wacky and some of it’s absolutely, utterly legitimate news, and because it’s couched in language that doesn’t sound like news we have a responsibility to translate that into news, and it’s not easy.
LABOTT: Yeah. No, it’s not easy at all and my question to you would be on this cats and dogs thing is how do we cover that. I think the decision is—I mean, not how to—
ROBBINS: J.D. Vance made it very easy for us. He started talking about it. So, you know, once a politician is talking about it—
LABOTT: Well, you know, I mean, but—
ROBBINS: It was Vance, wasn’t it?
LABOTT: —to me the story was not whether dogs are—whether they’re eating dogs or cats. I mean, it was pretty quickly kind of debunked and then it became about the phenomenon of it, like, with this—with the story of—and I covered both this and the story I’ll get into with the killing of the health care—the United Healthcare CEO.
Like, it was a legitimate story that he was killed but the conversation—and it was—and it’s a legitimate thing to talk—you know, it became, like, this whole conversation about, you know, the pitfalls of health care in this country and, you know, people were saying that he deserved it and things like that. That conversation was, I feel like, legitimate news.
There was a whole other conversation on social media about how hot the shooter was and that he became this kind of big celebrity on social media. Now, that’s a conversation. I thought the phenomenon was very interesting about it but, like, how do you—that’s a conversation. Like, I think we—it is a real conundrum of what—at what point—like, what are we discussing about these big conversations that are happening.
And I think it’s going to be—I think the jobs of editors on what we cover for social media is going to be one of the most important jobs as we continue to work on social media.
ROBBINS: We’re running out of time but I did want to—since we did lose a little bit of time I’m going to go a tiny bit over. But I did—wanted to ask Bobby and I wanted to ask everybody else who’s with us how many of you actually covered the phenomenon of the hot shooter, you know, of how it was being experienced particularly with young people. Because I also teach and that’s the way my students were talking about it.
Bobby, did you cover that?
ALLYN: No. I’m on NPR’s business desk so that kind of was outside of our lane a little bit. But, I mean, sort of zooming out from that I think culture happens on the internet. As some people like to say, the internet’s going to internet, right?
There’s going to be outrageous and over the top, things that go viral, the meme-ification of everything. Often this is tawdry. Often this is inappropriate. Often it causes legacy media to clutch their pearls.
But look, increasingly culture happens digitally. It happens online and I think we have to grapple with that and incorporate that into our reporting but in sensitive ways, right? I mean, only focusing coverage, obviously, on people who think the shooter is hot or some of the really, you know, lurid assessments of that case is missing the story.
But that’s not to say it’s not part of the story, right? It just has to be dealt with sensitively. But I don’t think we can look away from digital culture.
ROBBINS: And it is not a culture separate from us and that’s sort of the challenge of it, and how we balance that is really challenging.
Well, I want to thank Elise and I want to thank Bobby and I want to thank everybody else. I don’t think we’ve answered—we certainly raised—(laughs)—it’s a conversation we could come back to.
Irina, I want to turn it over to you. Thank you.
FASKIANOS: And I second the thanks to Elise Labott, Bobby Allyn, and Carla Anne Robbins. We will be sending out the transcript and the video. We’ll splice it together for the part that we missed for our technical glitch to you all so you can share it with your colleagues.
I’m not sure whether I should share your X handles or not but I will @Elise Labott, @Bobby Allyn, and @robbinscarla, and, of course, I’m sure other social media sites, and you should subscribe to Elise’s Substack and Zivvy News.
ROBBINS: I signed up to Zivvy News this week.
FASKIANOS: I did, too, in advance of this.
LABOTT: Thank you. Thank you.
FASKIANOS: And listen to Bobby for his great reports on NPR.
And as always we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and how they’re affecting the United States.
We welcome your suggestions for speakers and future topics we should cover. You can email
[email protected]. We appreciate your being with us today, for the work that you’re doing, and happy holidays, and we will reconvene in 2025.
ROBBINS: Thank you, Irina.
LABOTT: Thank you.
ALLYN: Thanks, everyone.
LABOTT: Thank you, everyone.
ROBBINS: Elise, thank the—thank the Panera. (Laughter.)
ALLYN: Thank you very much.
LABOTT: (Laughs.) Thank you.
(END)
Council of Councils
Think Global Health
Online Store
