Episode 35: Jessica Yellin on The Changing Ways We Get Our News

0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape podcast, I'm your host, Sean Carroll, and I'm gonna start with an apology if my voice sounds a little more rumbly than usual today. Apparently the punishing schedule of podcasting and recording does not allow you to take a day off just because you have a cold and your voice is not completely in good form. But the audience needs its content and I'm gonna provide it no matter what shape my pipes are in that particular day. And the content today is good. We're gonna be talking about the news. We all know that we live in a world now where there's all sorts of information coming at us from all sorts of places, but much of the stuff that we get, Twitter, social media, podcasts, blogs, it's commentary on the primary stuff, the news reporting that is telling us what is actually happening out there in the world. And I remember, I think that in my very first podcast teaser trailer for Mindscape, I talked about this issue of what we pay attention to. There are an infinite number of facts there in the world. Which ones do you notice? Which ones do you communicate to other people? You and I do that every day.

0:01:02 SC: But if you're a news organization, your choices in this matter are incredibly important. And as it turns out, as we will hear in today's interview, the news organizations that make these choices don't always do so for scientific data-driven reasons. There are some executives at a news organization and they have preferences, and those preferences decide what we hear. So today's guest is Jessica Yellin, who's been a very well-known reporter in various formats, perhaps most notably as the Chief White House Correspondent at CNN for quite a while. But now, Jessica has left that all behind. She thinks that we need a new way of delivering the news and she's trying to pioneer different efforts herself including an Instagram news feed that you can all subscribe to. She's also written a book called Savage News, which is a novel, a thinly disguised, thinly fictionalized account of various scandalous things going on in the news world. And this is a very important conversation, because we have to understand what we're learning about the world, how we should interpret it, and so forth, especially when there's so much information coming in. So let's go.

[music]

0:02:26 SC: Jessica Yellin, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:02:28 Jessica Yellin: Thanks for having me, this is exciting.

0:02:30 SC: Yeah, it kind of is exciting. It's definitely exciting for me, because we haven't had someone like you on the podcast before, but I know you personally a little bit and I'm interested both in kind of what the job is that you do telling the news, but then also, given how the podcast works, the theory behind how the news worked, and how you think about it. So you did various jobs for ABC, MSNBC, CNN political correspondent, Chief White House Correspondent. Let's help the audience out a little bit by just saying, what is it, the day in the life like when you're an on-air correspondent for big a news organization? How much time do you spend writing, reporting, being on air and stuff like that?

0:03:11 JY: So it's very different when you're at the White House versus being in any other role. When I was paying my dues, working my way up, I was in local news in Orlando, covering fires and murders and that kind of thing. And then I got to Good Morning America where I covered even more gruesome murders. Lots of tabloids, celebrity scandals. And that life is just non-stop go, it's your phone beeps and you're at dinner or you're on a date, I was young and you just have to stand up and say, "They booked me on a flight to Kentucky in two hours. I gotta go, sorry."

0:03:48 SC: Yes, I did interview for the podcast a chemist who works on forensic chemistry of murder, so she uses chemistry to help find murder victims. So there's a murder theme this quarter on Mindscape.

0:04:00 JY: Sorry if that's gruesome. But it was an excruciatingly difficult life in terms of travel and that kind of thing. When you get to the White House, it's different, and you have a hard pass, which is what everybody who works in the White House has and every... There's this class system about what color is your hard pass. We had the blue hard pass.

0:04:19 SC: Are there soft passes? I don't know what a hard pass is.

0:04:20 JY: It's so interesting. No, it is hard. So it's like a click, you can click it with your finger nails and you wear around your neck at all times, and so you get your hard pass and you swipe in every day and you walk through the Secret Service security shack, just like every other person who's working in the White House, and you go into what's called the Brady Press Briefing Room, you know it as... You see it on TV, only the part you don't see behind the scenes is where we physically work. It's a warren of cubicles in a windowless space with a basement where you have almost no room and it's a box. You work in basically a closet with four other people, four other reporters and producers in a box, taking calls and maniacally juggling everything that's going on.

0:05:07 SC: I presume that what I've seen on The West Wing is more or less completely accurate, right?

0:05:10 JY: Of course. It's not far from reality, except now with social media. Everything is at super speed.

0:05:18 SC: Yeah, okay.

0:05:18 JY: So you have Twitter up, you have Instagram, everything up all the time, monitoring it. And especially when you're at a 24-hour channel when I was at CNN, you're constantly racing to the camera to get something on fast.

0:05:29 SC: Right.

0:05:29 JY: And so it's just fight or flight, all the time.

0:05:32 SC: And is... Your news, when you're the White House Correspondent, is your news basically what comes to you in that briefing room?

0:05:39 JY: I'd separate that. It's what comes to you. It's very hard to enterprise a story, which is when you generate a story that you find on your own, because the flood of incoming is so intense. However, what happens in the briefing room is usually the least relevant thing. It's Kabuki theater.

0:05:53 SC: That's what I would've thought, yeah.

0:05:54 JY: It is so much about letting me ask the best question that I can use on camera, far more than: How do I frame this to get the best answer?

0:06:05 SC: I see. So I would've thought that the Kabuki theatre is coming from the press officers giving you the briefing, but you're saying the reporters are just as much part of this.

0:06:11 JY: Everybody's in the game.

0:06:13 SC: Because there's cameras everywhere and you wanna be on camera. What is your goal? If you were playing this game, let say, let's say you were enthusiastically playing along, you wanted to become the highest-paid reporter on CNN, what kinds of questions would you be asking?

0:06:27 JY: Well, you ask the three-parter, that's: Why haven't you X? But so and so said this, is that really your answer? So that you keep cutting them off, so that there's a two-way. Because the way TV news is structured now, it's all about conflict. The powers that be have decided viewers want conflict. So you don't ask this long question or the even short question that elicits a substantive answer. You find the debate. Where's the friction? So the goal is, in that scenario, how do I get that me acting tough on camera?

0:07:00 SC: But you do a lot of reporting other than in that briefing room.

0:07:04 JY: Yeah, that's just the show part. And then you have to go back to your booth in your little cubicle and just dial. You call people, you're texting, you're emailing all day. The White House, each administration I've dealt with has become increasingly more difficult to cover, because they're more tightly held, until this one, which is everything's public.

0:07:24 SC: Special. [chuckle] Special in many ways.

0:07:24 JY: As long as it doesn't have to do with Putin. But everything's public. You'd purport, you're calling Congress. You need to triangulate. You find sources outside the White House who tell you what they know is going on inside. Then you call inside to say, "I know this, you wanna correct me?" Or you walk... Sometimes we have access to part of the White House. So you can walk into part of it, where the communications team is and linger and try to get information. And then there's the whole scene that happens on the driveway where everyone comes out and asks... You do questions. But the real reporting is stuff you don't see on camera.

0:08:00 SC: Sure. And you're in a room with four other people at least, are you listening to who they're calling?

[chuckle]

0:08:04 JY: Of course, always. It's the craziest thing, because you want to hold your information but you're in a space where you cannot. So one of the things that happens is you'll see a lot of White House reporters pacing on the driveway and...

0:08:15 SC: I see. That's when they're talking to someone...

0:08:16 JY: They're talking to someone and it's like sleeting and snowing, but it's your only privacy.

0:08:20 SC: Yeah, okay. Very good. But is there a lot of time outside the White House also?

0:08:24 JY: Well, when the president travels, you travel, or somebody in your team travels. So sometimes it's on Air Force One, you fly Air Force One. Sometimes it's on the support plane, the charter. And then, yeah, you're out about around town, you're back at the bureau. Sometimes you do go into the country to do a story. And then the White House Correspondent becomes the political reporter on the campaign. So then you leave...

0:08:48 SC: I was gonna ask about the campaign or the conventions. These are special events where your mode is a little bit different.

0:08:53 JY: Well, once the campaign starts, bye White House.

[chuckle]

0:08:58 JY: When I went on the 2008 campaign, I covered Obama, I left for that at the end of November 2007 with a suitcase. And the first time I came home to re-pack my suitcase was in March.

0:09:10 SC: Wow.

0:09:11 JY: And sometimes you're flying to a different city or state every day.

0:09:14 SC: And this is... Everyone does that. This is just what you've signed up for.

0:09:17 JY: Everyone does this. Yeah.

0:09:18 SC: And do people do this for years and years and years?

[chuckle]

0:09:22 JY: It gets really exhausting.

0:09:23 SC: Yeah, I can imagine.

0:09:25 JY: At some point you'll say, "This is my life. I'm gonna do this." For me, I said, "Okay, I've had that experience, [chuckle] I can't keep doing this."

0:09:34 SC: Who's deciding what counts as a story? Is this the initiative of the neutral reporters?

0:09:39 JY: Well, this is the question, isn't it? To me, that's one of the most important questions. Who decides what counts as news? My frustration in the news business in my experience was that the reporter who's on the ground witnessing the events has too little influence in deciding the story, has too little say in whether it should be covered and how it should be covered. And that's a function of how our organizations have changed, news organizations have changed, as profit became accessible, as they became extremely profitable, and as that became the priority.

0:10:17 SC: I imagine the profit was always the priority, but is it more? I always worry about doing comparisons between things today and things back in the past, 'cause we see things through rose-colored glasses.

0:10:27 JY: So here's how I see it, and people will disagree. When news first came along at the network level, it was a loss leader. It was part of the agreement to be able to use the airwaves. And so there was not pressure for them to monetize. And then, the way I understand it, when 60 Minutes came along and actually made money, it was the first time network executives realized, "We can make a profit off of this." And so then you got the morning shows, which are more entertainment, they started making a lot of money. But the news was still sacrosanct, evening news.

0:11:02 JY: Cable changed things, because they aren't regulated by the same... The same FCC equal time rules don't apply. And then for me it's partly about the fact that all of these companies were bought by publicly traded corporations.

0:11:18 SC: Right.

0:11:19 JY: Where it was important to show profit growth over last year to the shareholders all the time, and it really became a short-term... That short-term thinking impacted the news room, to the point that I was told it is your guys's job to increase our profit 10% over last year.

0:11:38 SC: And giving guidance to what that meant or just do something that will get more eyeballs.

0:11:44 JY: The way I took it was comply.

0:11:46 SC: Yeah. Okay, comply with explicit directions?

0:11:50 JY: Well, what happens is, I think when you're a reporter, you're a natural skeptic, you question authority and you're a little rebellious, right? To work in a news organization you can't be very rebellious because it's a very... It's a bureaucratic system, you have to be obedient, but you have that streak in you. And what happened increasingly is that management would tell us what the story is. And you'd say back, "Actually, it's this," and they would say, "Did you not hear me? I'm telling you, this is the story." Now, it's not they're making up facts, it's not a fake news thing I'm pointing to. It's a, "This is how we've decided is best to frame it, for our programming needs, AKA eyeballs, AKA ratings. And that's the story you need to tell."

0:12:33 SC: And so, let's sort of flesh this out maybe. I don't know if you have examples or when did you start noticing those feelings by? When did you start being a national reporter?

0:12:42 JY: Well, okay, so I got to the White House under Bush, and I can take it back further than that. When I was covering... When I first got to the national level, it was the Iraq war.

0:12:51 SC: Okay.

0:12:52 JY: And you remember with the way we...

0:12:52 SC: Sorry, the second Iraq War, the...

0:12:54 JY: Yeah, sorry, the second Iraq War, 2003. And you remember the way I got in trouble eventually because I later said on television that we were under pressure to cover it in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation.

0:13:07 SC: Yeah, it was a different time. Every time is different, but we... I think that you forget, given the highly inflamed political feelings everyone has right now, it was pretty darn inflamed back in the early 2000s.

0:13:19 JY: Well, it was right after 9-11. Everybody felt so... The sense of connectedness and nationalism, really, and patriotism and then we went to war and it was sort of, "Look at... We're gonna stand up for ourselves." And so everything was channeled into this sort of intense "rah, rah" sporting event show of force. Remember it was called the Shock and Awe campaign, right?

0:13:44 SC: Yeah.

0:13:45 JY: And what we did was consistent with that and so my experience, even from a remove, I was not at war, I was a junior baby reporter then. But I just watched what happened and there was a decision like the narrative here is, "We're here, we're kicking ass, we're the USA." And things that weren't in that vein really weren't prioritized. Didn't cut it.

0:14:10 SC: And I remember there was controversy at the time about how reporters were embedded with military units.

0:14:17 JY: Well, that's the way we do things now. Yeah, and now... But it was very much like a TV show. There were vans with reporters on them and cameras as they marched into... They're driving to Baghdad with the troops. It was a show and that kind of opened my eyes to, "Oh, we're producing the war."

0:14:34 SC: Right. [chuckle]

0:14:35 JY: This is not just, "War's happening, we'll air drop in and cover what's happening." It was, "Let's march in together with the cameras rolling and we're gonna kick some ass." And then it just... And then I got to the White House after that, under Bush, and saw that as the war was popular with the American people, we covered it in a way that was "rah, rah;" as the poll numbers started to fall, we began increasingly critical.

0:15:03 SC: Did you personally go to journalism school or anything like that?

0:15:04 JY: I did not.

0:15:06 SC: I presume that in journalism school, but maybe even in your tenure as a cub reporter, the myth, the self-conception is that there is an adversarial relationship between reporters and people they cover, even if it's a friendly adversarial relationship, you're not there to give them publicity, you're there to dig out the truth that they might be trying to hide from you. So, you think that at least at this time in the cable news world, this was not being respected.

0:15:33 JY: Well, it is hard when you're in a war zone, because you're dependent on the military, I'd imagine, for your own security. So that's a tricky relationship. It's much easier when you're back at the White House to be adversarial.

0:15:46 SC: Did you spend time in Iraq or elsewhere?

0:15:47 JY: I didn't, I didn't go for the wars.

0:15:49 SC: But they are, like you said, there was definitely pretty explicitly an attempt to stage manage what was seen and so, I guess what you're saying, which was not clear to me at the time, was that that was a profit-making thing from the point of view of the networks, they went along with that just for those reasons.

0:16:08 JY: Well, they crafted it in a way that would be popular with viewers.

0:16:12 SC: Yeah.

0:16:12 JY: So that they'd get more eyeballs is the way I see it. It was... They talk about news as programming, which if you live in LA, you know that's how TV executives talk about their TV slate. It's making a program people want to watch, as opposed to, "We are journalists covering events as they happen, and we cover what matters most." And that you make a judgement about, "This is what matters most and it might be less sexy than the thing we were planning, but we're gonna cover it anyway, because it's important and it's our job."

0:16:42 SC: And it's not necessarily a political thing, 'cause you're saying that this was pro-administration, the thing was popular, and then it changed.

0:16:49 JY: It's like Syria's more boring than Trump's tweets. So, Syria gets less coverage.

0:16:55 SC: Yeah.

0:16:55 JY: Even though potentially on certain days, it might be more significant.

0:17:00 SC: So one of my questions is, is the opinion of the corporate executives that a certain thing is gonna be popular, and make us money, are they correct or that's just their gut feeling? Or do they have data saying, "No, certain kinds of coverage gets us the profits we want."

0:17:15 JY: So they do have the analytics. So they have a framework and within their framework, of what works with viewers they have all these analytics and measurement metrics to decide what's gonna be popular to... So there's boards in the newsroom showing what's on dot com that's doing well, and you'll see one story start to rise in clicks, right? And so that becomes the top story. And so more people are then assigned to cover that top story because it's getting more clicks.

0:17:44 SC: Okay.

0:17:45 JY: There's also eyeball meters, so that people can now tell... Executives can now tell as viewers are turning the channel. So, "Oh, they were watching for that topic, but they're turning for this topic. Let's go back to that topic." That kind of thing. Now, the flaw in this from my point of view, is that this is all based on their framework. Which is news needs to be told like sports. Viewers want news that feels like ESPN. So it has to be all that conflict jargon competition and outrage. And they program everything through that filter. I can get into how it got to be that way. But the bottom line is, I know for a fact, because I've done the research, it leaves... That leaves a huge audience unaddressed, because so many people feel alienated by that sports-like coverage, they just turn it off, and so they've already limited their audience to the people who want news that feels like sports and yes, within them their metrics and their analytics can measure how many they're getting, but I believe that there's a massive unaddressed audience out there, and they're just missing the opportunity.

0:18:56 SC: I even are alienated by that in the context of sports, these shows on ESPN, where there's two people shouting at each other. I'm like, "This tell me nothing about anything."

0:19:05 JY: Bingo.

0:19:05 SC: So how did it get that way? You said you have your own theory. So, lay it on us.

0:19:08 JY: So here's my theory. When all these news executives who are running the networks now came up, everything was about the ad dollar, it wasn't really subscriptions. And the people who paid the most for an eyeball were the car dealers, and car dealers wanted a young man.

0:19:24 SC: Sorry, when do you think we're talking now?

0:19:26 JY: Late '90s, early 2000s.

0:19:27 SC: Okay.

0:19:28 JY: And car dealers wanted the young man, right? 'Cause he's gonna... They thought he makes the car purchase decision and he owns the car... Your brand for life. PS, we've now found that's untrue, women make the car purchase decision, and this generation isn't buying cars. The future is car-less or Uber. Anyway, so flawed assumption now. But the idea is that 18-year-old man isn't that interested in the news. But he likes... He wants conflict, if you tell it like conflict it'll feel more engaging. And so everything you do when you're in the news business, I would always constantly hear, "How did we do with the demo?" And that's the demo, it's eight... Men ages 18 to 35.

0:20:10 SC: The demographic, yeah.

0:20:10 JY: Yeah, the demographic. The demographic refers to people ages 18 to 35. But the most desirable eyeball is the guy, because he's the hardest to get. I joke news is run by the rules of dysfunctional dating. You have to chase the guy who doesn't want you. [chuckle]

0:20:26 SC: Right, right, but I would like to think that in this... So let me be idealistic. We have a big, elaborate ecosystem of news. There's many different ways people can get the news now, has any one of the major cable networks said, "Well, everyone else is doing that. Let's try something slightly different."

0:20:46 JY: I would disagree that within the traditional news field, we don't have that many choices. It's much more like the old studio system. You've three networks, and you've three cable channels, you've six outlets for TV news, right?

0:20:58 SC: So, not that many.

0:21:00 JY: Not that many. And they all compete with each other and they play by the same rules. The exception is CBS, which has tried to differentiate itself by being calmer, more substantive, less fast switch. And they've been rewarded for it. But I do think... I think the other piece of this, which is worth noting in our moment, is the background of everybody who's a news president until recently has been the same. They're all, mostly all, white guys in their 50s, who grew up in Upper Westside of New York, and they have the same values and the same backgrounds, they all went to the same schools.

0:21:33 SC: Went to Ivy League schools, yeah.

0:21:33 JY: Right, and this is what they think works.

0:21:35 SC: Right, and they can convince themselves that is perfectly objective and scientific, right? [chuckle]

0:21:41 JY: Well, it's making money for their companies, so...

0:21:43 SC: Right, right. So, we mentioned, I mean, we painted this in the context of the second Iraq war, is the same story told in different ways, just in more conventional political coverage, conventions and races and?

0:21:57 JY: Yeah, I mean... So, my take on the way this is expressed is, first of all, yes, political coverage, the problem with it is that's it's all horse race. It's literally, "This one's up, this one's down. What are the poll numbers?" And I think this is eroding our democracy. Nothing short of that, because it is the news's job to inform the public and we are failing to do that by constantly covering this game, without telling people, "How does this hit you at home?" And I'll be more specific. Constantly, if you watch the news, you know that at the end of the election, it's all about the undecided voter. We spend four months chasing these people. And when you get into the granular stuff, you find a lot of these undecided voters are women and the conventional wisdom is, "They're not paying attention so they decide late and they often do what their husbands say they're doing."

0:22:47 JY: But if you probe them more closely, what they say is, "No, no, I'm reading things, I'm watching the news, it doesn't speak to me." And when I looked more closely at that, 'cause I did research, what they're literally saying is, "If this candidate wins, how will it change my life? If that candidate wins, how will that change my life?" We're not breaking it down in a way that connects on a level that's personal. And part of that is we're also not explaining what the thing is. So we talk about tax reform, without saying it specifically means this, or we talk about trade wars, without ever saying what a tariff is. Not everybody knows. Just take a minute to explain.

0:23:26 SC: And is that because... Why is that? Why do we not take a minute to explain?

0:23:31 JY: Well, I always tried to, and people were like, "Jessica, no one wants to hear that," 'cause it's considered boring and it's not a game. If you're there explaining what a tariff is, you're not in a fight. That's not conflict, you could lose one of those demo eyeballs.

0:23:44 SC: I still, I have this feeling and maybe it's 'cause I'm just completely biased, but if there were a concerted effort, even on one of these six news outlets on TV, to give people good explanations of what was going on, to explicitly pander to people who wanted to understand, rather than just follow the horse race, that would be a big hit. Maybe I'm crazy.

0:24:03 JY: Well, I love you for saying that, because that's the business I'm launching, which is news that's focused on the viewers' understanding, and we can talk about that in a bit, but I just... It's not what they're in the business of doing.

0:24:15 SC: Yeah.

0:24:15 JY: Part of the other piece of this is, when you're... In political journalism in Washington, you get consumed with breaking the thing first. There's a lot of reporting for each other, right? So you're in the bubble and you're really talking to your sources on Capitol Hill, while you're on TV, or talking to your sources in the White House and showing off your colleagues who you got to give you a scoop. And so it's so in circle, it leaves the viewer out and part of the reason... So part of the reason we're not explaining is because we're moving too fast to impress each other.

0:24:48 SC: So let's take it from the angles of different people who are in the game right now. So if you were giving advice to a young person who had just been appointed Senior White House Correspondent, like, how would you want them to behave, to try to make things better?

0:25:01 JY: Well, I mean, in the ideal-o-vision...

0:25:04 SC: That's where we are, we're in ideal-o-vision now.

0:25:05 JY: Okay.

0:25:05 SC: We're in the happiest timeline.

0:25:06 JY: Okay, I love that. You have a vibrant editorial debate in the morning with the smart people you work with, because these networks are filled with unbelievably talented journalists. Decide what you think the three most important stories are, and start asking questions about those and ignore what's trending on dot com right at this minute, because you're the Chief White House Correspondent and if you decide this is a big story, you can make that story trend.

0:25:34 SC: Right.

0:25:35 JY: We follow too much, we forget the power we have. You are the media, you say what matters. There's too much of this, "Well, we gotta go along with what the conversation is," and not enough, "We define the conversation." And then, when you approach... The thing I try to do when I approach each story is, think about what assumptions I'm making here. What assumptions am I making about what the audience understands and even to the lingo I'm using. So we talk about Michael Cohen's going to testify, but when he goes before Congress, everything he says related to Russia will be in closed session. So, we'll still get the transcripts and we'll see... Know, eventually... Most people don't know what closed session is.

0:26:16 SC: Right.

0:26:16 JY: So you lost them.

0:26:17 SC: Yeah.

0:26:17 JY: Take a minute. And I know that doesn't seem revolutionary, but it is, because when you start to do that, you pick up people who feel left out by the news and they start to engage and care, and literally that's how you inform the electorate in a democracy.

0:26:33 SC: And, you know, it's... Everything you're saying is very much like science communication, right? Where you have so much jargon, so many... The people who are experts are very often used to talking in a certain way, taking certain things for granted and then they are baffled as to why people are not more excited by what they're saying.

0:26:48 JY: And how do you unpack that, how do you reverse that?

0:26:51 SC: I think that, yeah, we do it in a lot of different ways, different people have different strategies. Very often, it's simply a matter of talking to people to figure out what it is they don't understand. No one is born understanding physics, you learn it, but then once you learn it, it's very easy to forget what you knew or what you didn't know back in the day, right? So talking to people, just seeing "Oh, that's what you don't understand, okay. I'll try to explain that." Using analogies with things, trying to relate to things that they're familiar with in their everyday lives, right?

0:27:22 JY: But I imagine this is similar in science, there must be a group of scientists who don't care, they're like, "If you don't know what we're talking about, you're not in the circle, we're not speaking to you."

0:27:31 SC: Yeah, that's called almost all scientists. Yes, that's right.

0:27:34 JY: And that's how I think political coverage is now, it's like you're either in the game, like you're a sports fan, meaning politics fan, or you're not, and if you're not, we're not gonna get you, we know that. My belief is that's not true.

0:27:47 SC: Right. And so, if you were then, rather than giving advice to the cub reporter, if you were giving advice or even were granted the position of boss of a network, how would you change things?

0:27:58 JY: It's about thinking all the time about how does this impact this viewer at home. How do I make this relevant to their life? What is the piece of this that matters to their life? And how do I get outside of the studio and outside of Washington? One of the worst things that's happened in coverage lately is they're always in the studio. The job is to leave the studio, the news is out there.

0:28:20 SC: Is it a money thing? Is it just cost cutting, it's easier to sit in Washington DC, than go out into the world?

0:28:25 JY: I think reasons one through three are yes. It's way cheaper to have people on set, than to send a satellite truck, a producer, a cameraman, a sound person and a reporter. Five people who you're overnight-ing and paying their per diems and etcetera. So that's one piece. The other is news executives increasingly like to produce the news. I'm saying, right? And if you've just deployed me to the border, but now some big Russia thing breaks, you're stuck paying for me at the border, but you... You wanna change topics. And so, when everyone's in studio, they can rapidly decide what... They can control the story much more effectively, and they can also get in the person's ear and tell them, "No, no, stay on Russia, stay on Russia."

0:29:11 SC: Yeah. What is your take on the whole... I wanna say the Fox News phenomenon, but very broadly construed. The idea of media outlets that are more or less explicitly partisan one way or the other?

0:29:24 JY: So I'm gonna probably piss off a lot of your listeners by saying this.

0:29:27 SC: Go for it.

0:29:28 JY: But I kind of think that's our future. We're dividing into red and blue as consumers. It's not just in news. When you look at how people spend and shop and live, we're clustering into communities of like-minded people. We are shopping in the same ways based on your politics. I'm not surprised that this is happening, and it's a little bit like Napster, you can't put it back in the box, it's there. What's important is to now be transparent. I would like these networks to be a little more transparent. "This is where we're coming from... "

0:29:57 SC: So what does that mean? Oh, okay, in terms of their political slant. So rather than just, "We're fair and balanced."

0:30:01 JY: Right, while obviously having a point of view.

0:30:04 SC: Yeah.

0:30:05 JY: Be a little more clear. And facts aren't negotiable, whatever your point of view. I think it's effective to say, "Here are the facts of the shut down." If you're a Democrat, you'll make the case that the shut down is at stalemate for this reason. If you're a Republican, you'll make the case that it's at stalemate for this reason. So you're showing the difference but the facts of the shut down remain the same.

0:30:29 SC: But the number of facts that one could in principle talk about is infinitely large.

0:30:33 JY: That's true.

0:30:33 SC: I mean, a big part of the filter, of the bias, if you wanna call it that, whether it's a... Not necessarily pejorative term, but we choose what to talk about and that's one thing that networks can control a little.

0:30:46 JY: Absolutely, and I also think there's nothing wrong with that. You become a journalist because we're saying you're the one we trust to help decide what we're talking about. And what bothers me is when journalists say, "Well, we have to cover this, we don't have a choice," or, "You gotta give both sides. We don't have a choice of pro-climate change and anti with equal weight," right? And, no, you're there because we asked you to do the research and tell us what you think is true.

0:31:11 SC: Yeah, there was this video, not video, but there was this little picture going around the Internet recently CNN had a segment... I don't know the details, whether it was a news segment or an opinion segment, but they were saying, "Stop giving a voice to climate change deniers" and they had a picture of various people denying climate change. But two out the four pictures were from CNN, like they've done that. What is... It is definitely mixed messages there.

0:31:36 JY: Well, there's also this false balance. We have this point of view, so we have to have that point of view.

0:31:41 SC: Right.

0:31:42 JY: And that sometimes is what makes me nuts. Like on climate change, you can have climate change is happening. This is the aggressive version of addressing it. Here's a conservative version of addressing it. You can have a conversation within the space of fact.

0:31:57 SC: Right.

0:31:58 JY: And at some point, yes, Fox is going to marshal different facts on a topic than MSNBC. It's also the job of the consumer to be a little news savvy.

0:32:10 SC: Well, that's a very interesting point. I'm a big believer, again, also with science, that you have to ask something of the audience, like they have to be a little bit aware of what's going on. It has to be a give and take, right?

0:32:22 JY: Absolutely, it's just a critical thinking skill. And it's our job to help train people, maybe, "Here's some media literacy." Now I'm getting... Now I'm on Instagram, and so I get a lot of feedback from the audience, and I do a lot of that where they don't know who to believe. "Can I believe this? It's in the New York Times. They hate Trump." You're like, "Okay, yes, the New York Times has a frame right now, yes, they're very... You could tell a little shrill, but when you have a reported story with an investigative reporter, I know this guy. Yeah, that's... Go with it."

0:33:00 SC: You can believe it. But do you foresee in the future as there are more and more ways for people to get their news and more of them are just getting it from Facebook and Twitter, that even that goes away? There's no such thing as reported news, there's just what your friends shared with you on Facebook?

0:33:14 JY: I believe that the future is credible... I think news organizations are like the old studio system where you had actors married for life to a studio and they had to do their movie with that studio but if a movie happened somewhere else, they can't be in it. That's how it is now. You've got to pitch your story to your network. If they don't want it, you're done. I think the future is all of that is gonna be... People will leave and you'll be seeing individual reporters on Facebook and Instagram and all these spaces and whatever emerges in new media platforms and people will start to follow the individuals they trust.

0:33:49 SC: Interesting.

0:33:50 JY: And I think it is a mistake to assume that because you're getting your news on social people don't want credible journalism. So I think there's a place for credible journalists reporting their well-sourced, well-researched information on social media in new channels outside the network system.

0:34:06 SC: In my more pessimistic moments, I see people on either political side, clearly believing something just 'cause they wanna believe it, regardless of the credibility of the source.

0:34:16 JY: Well, isn't there neuro science on this?

0:34:17 SC: Oh, yes.

0:34:18 JY: And why we... Right? You could probably tell me.

0:34:20 SC: It's a tough one. Yeah, people have all sorts of cognitive biases, but one of the things that is for better or for worse about the proliferation of places to get your news is you can sort of give in to your worst impulses there, you can just hear from sources that are gonna tell you what you wanna believe.

0:34:38 JY: Yeah. We're sorting into our like-minded communities.

0:34:40 SC: Yeah.

0:34:41 JY: And I don't know the way out necessarily. I think one way out is to have trusted voices that you get a large following behind. It's like the Walter Cronkite effect. He'll never exist again with that size of a following, but you'll have individuals who are trusted voices in different spaces.

0:35:01 SC: But one of the things we see on Fox News, for example, as well as on the other cable networks, is this back and forth on the channel between straight news and opinion or commentary. And my feeling is that on Fox a vast majority of the audience comes from the opinion commentary shows. So that just gives them more and more incentive to be more and more extreme in some sense.

0:35:23 JY: Yeah, well, my perception was always... 'Cause a lot of the Fox reporters... We all worked together at the White House, they were my friends, they were my colleagues, the reporters were always kick-ass.

0:35:30 SC: Yeah.

0:35:31 JY: The bias comes in the night time... It was especially the prime time shows, but as you get later in the afternoon. And it's hard as a viewer to make that distinction, and you were very smart to make it, but it's... The reporters are reporting information, sourced, researched information. They sometimes have to report into anchors who are untethered from those things. [chuckle]

0:35:53 SC: And is there room for something, maybe CNN, to have a balance of that news plus opinion, but keep the opinion balanced, just not try to be the mouthpiece of one side or the other, like the New York Times tries to do with its op-ed pages, although of course there's still a slant there.

0:36:14 JY: I don't know, the problem is on CNN, for example, in the effort to be balanced, they often book Trump supporters who had no experience in politics before this moment and say things that just aren't productive. It's not part of the conversation, right? So how do you get around that, how do you do that in an intelligent way where you have a balance that doesn't necessarily reflect the politics of the administration?

0:36:42 SC: Right. But we can imagine we're in the happiest timeline, we're in our ideal-o-vision here, so some day we won't have Trump anymore, maybe we'll have just very respectable legitimate parties on both sides. My question is, will it be such a splintering that every outlet picks a side, or do you think that you can still see outlets trying to stay above that political drive?

0:37:05 JY: Oh, I think you'll have outlets that are trying to... I call it reporting straight news and not... Yes, I think you'll absolutely have that. And I think you know after this moment where everybody's hysterical the corrective will be... People will be very sober, very substantive, possibly wouldn't, who knows, right? But we do... It's a pendulum.

0:37:27 SC: Yeah.

0:37:27 JY: And so, yes, I can imagine that we'll go to a place where neutral reporting will be what's valued.

0:37:35 SC: But there will always be this interest in having opinionated voices. My question is, do opinionated voices stick together or can we imagine that... I remember in the early days of Fox News Hannity was on with Alan Colmes, right, they at least gave some nod to, "Oh, yes, we'll have one person from each side." That didn't work.

0:37:57 JY: I just think what's happened now is that the opinionated voices have become so extreme, there's no conversation anymore, it's just talking points being flung back and forth, and that's why you never get learning. So my ideal is... Somebody told me that in the Netherlands, when you testify before in court, when two experts come, they do something called the "hot tub." Maybe one of your listeners knows about this.

0:38:19 SC: I don't know this one, yeah.

0:38:20 JY: Can teach us a little more, I'm sure I'm gonna mingle it. But that the experts who are on the opposing sides begin by submitting a document that shows their area of consensus. This is where we overlap, these are the topics on which we agree.

0:38:32 SC: Well, that's nice.

0:38:33 JY: How we see similarly.

0:38:34 SC: Yeah.

0:38:34 JY: And then you testify to the differences. And I love that idea, so that at some point you establish common ground and then you discuss around that. I think that would be a fascinating way to do these conversations. Another option, I like how they do it in Britain where you don't have two talking heads yelling at each other, you bring one person on and go very deep with them and then you can go on the other side very deep, but you actually then get to, as you're saying, the theory of the thing.

0:39:02 SC: Right.

0:39:02 JY: And what's happening now is you're just... It's like shout-o-vision.

0:39:06 SC: Well, and also they intentionally... There are people who are the ones who appear on TV who are just very... Obviously, their job is to present the advocacy case for one side or the other and their belief in sticking to the truth might come or go, but rather than having an expert who might have an opinion one side or the other, but nevertheless wants to get it right, they're just fighting for their team.

0:39:29 JY: Oh, well, but that's by design. So when I was on the inside, I'd find this expert, I'd see a TED talk or whatever, and say "This person's so smart, they know their stuff, and they speak clearly, let's get them on." And the response would be, "Will they bring the heat?"

0:39:46 SC: Yeah.

0:39:46 JY: And so we literally cast for people who will yell at each other, hold their ground. It's about that, that's not incidental, that's what the show is.

0:39:58 SC: So this needs to change, you're gonna change it, right?

0:40:01 JY: That's my goal.

0:40:03 SC: So you left your job, I guess, as Chief White House correspondent intentionally. And so you're trying to launch a new project to bring people news in a different way. Tell us about that.

0:40:12 JY: The project is called... I called it #newsnotnoise. We wanna bring you news and tell you what's the noise. And it's on Instagram. So first of all, you can find it on Instagram under my name, which is Jessica Yellin, and I am reporting the news there. And what happened... And it sort of started to take off, which is exciting.

0:40:30 SC: Yeah.

0:40:31 JY: But what happened is... So I left, I wrote a novel about my... Like, what's it like to be a woman in the news business, that's the critique. And then I did research into what we're talking about, how is the news impacting viewers? And I looked at something specifically called "news avoidance." People who want information seek it out and then turn it off or want information and don't seek it out. They're avoiding the news for a reason, even though they want it, and what I found is that it is triggering so much anxiety in a part of the population. They just can't engage. It's heavily female but not exclusively, and it's not that they don't care about the news, and it's not that bad news is scary and they must avoid it, it's the tone and the negativity and that yelling.

0:41:18 SC: The shouting, yeah.

0:41:19 JY: It's the shouting makes them, "I have enough going on, I've kids and a boss, and my car's broken. Stop."

0:41:25 SC: Yeah.

0:41:25 JY: So how do you reach that audience? And I was told forever... And so I did the research, and in fact, yeah, there's this audience and they want the news told differently, but all the conventional wisdom is, "No one's gonna watch that."

0:41:35 SC: "No shouting, why would I watch that?"

0:41:36 JY: This is precisely why they do the shouting, to get ratings. So I went on Instagram because I figured this is a place I can test out another way.

0:41:46 SC: It's an interesting choice, I'm a little bit on Instagram, but I think of it as a place to share pictures of my food.

0:41:52 JY: I did it a couple of reasons there, one, it doesn't have that same patina of, like, "Is there a fake news here? Right?" It's unsullied. Two, it's very female. And I knew that this... Like, the first target for this thing is female. And it's a nice place. People aren't nasty to each other on Instagram as much as they are on the other platforms. And I just thought, "At least they won't be mean to me." [laughter]

0:42:18 SC: Or maybe to each other, or maybe they're not seeking meanness, yeah.

0:42:20 JY: Exactly.

0:42:21 SC: Yeah.

0:42:22 JY: And nobody was really doing the news there. I mean, you just don't have that.

0:42:25 SC: Yeah.

0:42:27 JY: So I started off and I do a post that's like an explainer where I break down a topic in the news, basically what is a tariff, or people are comparing. Michael Cohen's testimony to John Dean. Who's John Dean, what did he do? Many people don't know, or even every person in the Russia investigation, what are they... What's their piece of this? And then there's a section that's video, and I do a video newscast in there. And what... And I started it because I wanted to see, "Will people pay attention if the news isn't hysterical, panicky, screamy," and then, I just wanted to see what the reaction was. Anyway, I started doing it...

0:43:09 SC: When you say "you," you mean "you" personally, it's just you, right?

0:43:12 JY: Yeah, I mean, it is... It was so hard at the beginning, 'cause I was the Chief White House Correspondent, I had a cameraman, I had like... And then there I am sitting in my living room with my iPhone, alone, thinking, "Am I really gonna do this?"

0:43:27 SC: Yeah.

0:43:28 JY: What if people laugh, what if nobody cares, what if I'm awful? What if a million things. So that was really hard.

0:43:37 SC: Are your video segments short, long?

0:43:39 JY: Okay, so this is the thing about Instagram. Every video has to be 15 seconds. So what I do is I break a newscast down. I say every piece of it in 15 seconds. So, "Today, there is big news in the Russia investigation, it's a bombshell New York Times report you're not gonna believe." Next 15 seconds is...

[overlapping conversation]

0:44:00 JY: Yes. And so, people advance through those 15 second things.

0:44:03 SC: And that's in... Instagram lets you have multiple things on one post. So that's all in one post.

0:44:08 JY: Yeah, so there's this thing called stories on one part of it.

0:44:11 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:44:11 JY: Up on top and you can watch video and usually that's used for...

0:44:16 SC: I went to Hawaii.

0:44:17 JY: I went to Hawaii, look at my new bathing suit, my dog, it's usually shallow, fluffy stuff. But this is me talking to camera, or I'll post an article that I think is important, and I'll summarize it, and give you a link so you can swipe up and read it. And then sometimes I do interviews about a topic that's in the news, and people come up and we do the two-way.

0:44:41 SC: So what is the archiving like? Is it easy to find old things that you've done? 'Cause you're explaining all these wonderful things, maybe I'll still wanna know what a tariff is next year.

0:44:49 JY: So yeah, so the part that's... Like those explainers I was saying, they stay forever, and they're... I don't even know what you call... They're in the thing in the Instagram called the gallery or the feed.

0:44:58 SC: Okay.

0:44:58 JY: So if you go to my page, you'll see all these pictures and if you tap, look at each of those pictures, there's a caption with them that explains the story. So they stay forever. Then there's the video piece and those last 24 hours.

0:45:12 SC: Okay, so they're like the Buddhist ideal, they're gone to the wind 24 hours later.

0:45:18 JY: I try to remember to save them to this one highlight section, so people can go back and watch, but I don't always remember.

0:45:24 SC: It's kind of charming, though. It's the news, it's current right then and...

0:45:29 JY: And then is gone.

0:45:29 SC: Which it's different than an explainer which should hopefully be good for a long time.

0:45:32 JY: Exactly, and the most satisfying thing is when you do an explainer that you can keep reusing. "We're back to this story. Remember, if you missed it here it is." Like, what is a national emergency? As everyone's talking about the wall, right?

0:45:44 SC: Right, yeah, no, I think that the whole idea of explaining things is way undervalued in our news media ecosystem entirely, so more of that would be great.

0:45:54 JY: People wanna know.

0:45:55 SC: Yeah, yeah, and it's working, Instagram?

0:45:58 JY: So yeah, the fun thing's been... So I don't know how celebrity-savvy everybody, but Amy Schumer the comedian became an early follower.

0:46:09 SC: Okay.

0:46:09 JY: And she decided to announce her pregnancy on my Instagram feed.

0:46:14 SC: Alright.

0:46:15 JY: She announced to... She did this political thing around the election and said, "PS, I'm pregnant." Okay, so when she did that, all of a sudden, the world exploded. Because you know what, a celebrity announces their pregnancy, it's like the biggest news in the world and it... I'm not saying it, that's how it should be.

0:46:29 SC: I get it, we get it.

0:46:31 JY: Anyway, so then all of a sudden everybody noticed I was doing this, and it's really become... There's a following for it and the most interesting and satisfying part to me is that the audience is really engaged. So I have people who ask questions and then other people in the community answer them, and you can see this dialogue going on. And then I also have a different kind of connection to the audience, so I'll do a story and people will instantly message me saying, "I don't know what that meant." So then I know I have to break that down.

0:47:00 SC: That goes back to my idea of how scientists can be better communicators, just asking people what it is they don't understand.

0:47:04 JY: Exactly.

0:47:05 SC: Very important.

0:47:05 JY: And you don't have that feedback when you're on television, so that's really gratifying.

0:47:10 SC: And so this race is a question of, there's a very wise person once said, "Don't read the comments." To anything about anything. And largely, it's kind of a shame, because sometimes comments on the internet are wonderful, and I've learned a lot from people, but many of them are pointless or toxic or whatever. So is it because of Instagram or because of your feed, or how engaged are you in those comments sections?

0:47:34 JY: I'm pretty engaged. Sometimes it's too much and I can't, I'm busy, but I do my best. So far, knock on wood, people have been very nice. Yes, you get the occasional screed but I'm surprised how completely open and they're sort of like news-sponges, like... So one of the things... So I say it's news, not noise and the way I cover things is I say, "This is news." And then I'll say, "Here's another story that got a ton of attention today in the news business. But it's noise."

0:48:05 SC: Okay.

0:48:06 JY: "I'm gonna tell you what happened, but you don't have to pay attention to it. If it interests you, follow it just like you'd follow Us magazine, People, but it doesn't matter," so that's noise. So people are constantly messaging back and forth like, "I found noise, I found news. Is this noise or news?" That's cool and that's the kind of stuff you get in comments, not the mean stuff you get on Twitter, it's a much nicer experience.

0:48:29 SC: It seems, maybe this is a disadvantage, so tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems that it's so different from the other stuff on Instagram that if I have an Instagram feed, yours will stand out for better or for worse than everything else.

0:48:41 JY: I do, I think that's part of it. Nobody's really tried it this way before. And so, it's distinctive for now, I'm sure that'll change, because everything changes.

0:48:49 SC: Then your plan is to grow this and...

0:48:51 JY: So my goal is to... Now that I've seen that people really want it is find a way to do more, 'cause it's very hard to do a full news cast and really answer people's questions on Instagram as it is right now. I also wanna bring other reporters in. And so the question is, how do you that? How do you grow it? What's the next step?

0:49:15 SC: But the goal is to be a substitute for your biggest news source, whatever that is. The New York Times, or CNN or whatever, fill that niche.

0:49:27 JY: Some day, that's where I'd like to go.

0:49:27 SC: Yeah.

0:49:28 JY: I think of it as, at least at this stage, like look in four years, could there be a day when we're doing investigative reporting and breaking the stories ourselves, or sooner? Yes, that'd be amazing. For right now what I'm trying to do is, let's say you're a super busy person and you do not have time to follow every twist and turn of what's going on all day long and those notifications on your phone are making you crazy. We gotcha. So come to us at the end of the day, we're gonna distill it all in a way that doesn't make you feel stupid, but really explains it, tells you what happened, what mattered, what you can ignore and a reason to still feel good about the world.

0:50:04 SC: And is there still a race to be really quick when something breaks?

0:50:07 JY: So no, and that's so hard for me. That's such a smart question, Sean. Oh, my God, you so get it. So one of the things are... The ethos is, is it's more important to process and distill a thing and then make it as succinct as possible for the viewer. And that means letting the story unfold, letting it breathe, let it happen in the world a little bit before you do it, but my muscle memory is, "Run to the camera, get it on now, I got it, go." So I have to... Everyone around me is like, "No, Jessica you don't report, don't, stop, put your phone down."

0:50:42 SC: I kind of know exactly what you mean because for a long time, my biggest... For a little while, anyway, my biggest social media presence was on Twitter, but now I have a podcast and on Twitter, you say something, and most of the responses are within half an hour, right? People are responding to you right away.

0:50:58 JY: Really, yeah, that's true, right away.

0:51:00 SC: Now I have a podcast. It takes an hour and a half just to listen to it. I'm very disappointed when half an hour after posting it I haven't had any responses yet.

0:51:06 JY: Right? We're so quickly trained for that instant feedback.

0:51:09 SC: It's this part of our brain. I don't know what it is, but yeah, instant, right away.

0:51:14 JY: Well, there is this thing evolving, they're calling it the "slow news movement," which is both what we're talking about not reacting too rapidly and also reporting stories over a longer time. So they're more in-depth.

0:51:27 SC: And it's good because it's a difference... I never really liked the phrase, long reads. I don't know if you know this word, because it gives the idea that, "Okay, we should read things that are more than 500 words and really go into them and get it right," but that's great, but we can also be correct in short amounts of words, it's a whole different angle, a different axis that we're trying to focus on.

0:51:49 JY: And that's what I'm trying to do. And PS, it's very hard to fully understand a complex situation, and then break it down in a very short way that is accurate and clear, is a challenge.

0:52:00 SC: I did this very explicitly with my last book, The Big Picture. So a big, sprawling book where I covered all sorts of things. And some of the topics were pretty heavy, so every chapter was like three or four pages long, right? And there were 50 chapters, so you could just focus on getting that one little bit, process it and then move on.

0:52:17 JY: It's hard.

0:52:18 SC: It is very hard.

0:52:19 JY: It's a discipline.

0:52:19 SC: Yeah, I'm not doing it in my current book. [chuckle]

0:52:22 JY: How long is your current book?

0:52:23 SC: It's a much a shorter book, but it's only 10 chapters, rather than 50 chapters. 'Cause it's like... It's a different... All the different modes are okay. The new book, the mode is, "I'm gonna dive in here, I'm gonna wallow in the details, I'm gonna accumulate this knowledge and hopefully it will help me come out the other end with something really deep", rather than, "Here is a survey of many, many things."

0:52:45 JY: What's the new book about?

0:52:46 SC: The new book is about quantum mechanics, especially the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics. And you just have to sort of steel yourself and try to get into the weeds a little bit. Whereas The Big Picture, there's a lot of deep stuff in there, but it was a lot more sign-posting, a lot more, "Trust me, there's more here, but this is a glimpse."

0:53:07 JY: So when you're you and you're the expert in the field, is it still hard to write a book? 'Cause when I wrote my first book, I was like, halfway through I'm like, "I'm out in the middle of ocean, I don't know what I'm gonna do."

0:53:16 SC: I think that's a great question. It's different for different people. I know plenty of professional journalists who hate writing books. They love writing a few thousand word article or whatever, but with a book, they just get lost. I love it.

0:53:30 JY: You do.

0:53:30 SC: I'm never happier than when I have 100,000 words in front of me. Like, "Get to do things my way, I get to explain things." And the current book's supposed to be like 80,000 or 90,000 words and I feel very constrained.

0:53:42 JY: Wow. I admire that.

0:53:44 SC: But so and it's... So it's going well so far?

0:53:47 JY: Yeah.

0:53:48 SC: Is there going to be at some point like a separate web page where people can find it?

0:53:52 JY: Yes. What we're thinking about now is how do you turn this into something that's more of a news brand and what does that look like, where does it live, how does that work? And so I'm having those conversations and it's... That's a whole new world and learning curve for me.

0:54:07 SC: And I have to ask, how do you make money? [chuckle] How do you keep the wheels?

0:54:09 JY: This is the question...

0:54:10 SC: How do you keep the lights on, right?

0:54:12 JY: Because there's no... You really can't on Instagram.

0:54:14 SC: There's no ads or anything.

0:54:15 JY: Not really, I guess you can get sponsorships, but I feel that's... I don't know.

0:54:19 SC: Do you have a Patreon or something like that or people on...

[overlapping conversation]

0:54:23 JY: Yeah, I haven't done that. Maybe that's the direction. I'm looking at these options, is it Patreon, is it finding a backer who will back something so you really stretch your wings and try, but again, the goal is to do this in a way that has integrity and is about the things we've talked about, focusing on understanding the audience and so you just don't wanna get in the situation where you're again just like servicing how many eyeballs can you get?

0:54:47 SC: Right. You're beholden to... Yeah.

0:54:48 JY: That same machine.

0:54:49 SC: Yeah, I made that decision so far, for the podcast where I don't have ads, I could make more money if I had ads, but it's a little bit less fun to have the ads. There's some good things out there, but I don't care what mattress you sleep on, honestly. I don't know why the mattress companies love advertising on podcasts. So I'm asking people to support through Patreon or through PayPal or whatever, so it's great.

0:55:13 JY: And they do? They show up and they do it.

0:55:16 SC: They do, yeah. I'm mostly grateful, like people are willing. If someone gives me a dollar per episode, I think that they... If it's an hour and a half of talking, they're getting a dollar's worth out of it.

0:55:28 JY: Sure. You can get it.

0:55:29 SC: But I still feel extraordinarily grateful when they do. Yeah, it's great.

0:55:32 JY: That's nice, yeah.

0:55:32 SC: But you're doing something a little bit different. I talked on one podcast episode with Neha Narula, who's an expert in crypto currency, Blockchain and things like that. And I said, "What we really need is just a non-optional, you can listen to this but you pay a nickel."

0:55:48 JY: Right.

0:55:49 SC: Right? And most people would do that.

0:55:51 JY: I so agree.

0:55:52 SC: But the technology isn't quite there yet.

0:55:55 JY: Really?

0:55:55 SC: Not yet. I mean...

0:55:56 JY: How long?

0:55:57 SC: It could be very soon, but the whole crypto-currency thing is just in so much turmoil, right?

0:56:01 JY: Yeah.

0:56:02 SC: I think, actually, that technologically it could happen, but the buy-in is not quite there yet.

0:56:06 JY: Well, you know, the numbers show people are more and more willing to pay for their content. And subscriptions are way up.

0:56:11 SC: That's right.

0:56:11 JY: And so I think there's an increasing consciousness that you gotta support these sources.

0:56:17 SC: Yeah.

0:56:18 JY: Or they'll go away. Or you end up with your uncle Fred giving you the news on Facebook.

0:56:22 SC: Well, I'm one of those people who subscribes to a couple of real newspapers and magazines, just 'cause I wanna support journalism.

0:56:28 JY: Would they show up as paper forms in your house?

0:56:30 SC: No, I don't get paper forms.

0:56:31 JY: Okay. [chuckle]

0:56:32 SC: In fact, I get nothing.

0:56:33 JY: I got it.

0:56:33 SC: It's things I could get on the internet for free...

0:56:35 JY: But you pay.

0:56:35 SC: The New York Times or whatever. But I'm willing to pay the 20 bucks or whatever.

0:56:38 JY: Good for you. Yeah, I'm with you.

0:56:40 SC: 'Cause it does matter. And the world is getting more complicated, it's not gonna get any simpler. And getting reliable news matters... Reporting matters, right?

0:56:49 JY: Yes.

0:56:50 SC: Yeah. But that's not all you're doing. Not only are you reporting the news and trying to start a whole new... Not only a new particular news operation, but a new way of doing the news.

0:57:00 JY: Yes.

0:57:00 SC: But you have a novel coming out, right?

0:57:01 JY: Yes. Oh my gosh.

0:57:02 SC: What made you decide to do that? Too much free time? You just needed to...

0:57:05 JY: How did you know?

0:57:06 SC: Fill the hours somehow?

0:57:07 JY: I wanted to do something that would make me feel like I was very bad at my task.

[chuckle]

0:57:12 JY: So, I'd always wanted to write a novel. I loved trashy novels when I was a kid, and I wanted to write them when I grew up. And then I ended up being a journalist instead. And so I thought... When I was leaving, it was really important for me. So I left before Trump, but I saw what was happening in the industry. And I thought, "I really want people to understand what goes into the making of the news, and what it's like every day." And there's two ways to do that: To write a tell-all where you rip people and hurt people, and I just didn't wanna be part of that.

0:57:46 SC: Yeah.

0:57:46 JY: But I still wanted the story to be told, so I wrote it as a novel. And it's called Savage News, and it's about a young female reporter named Natalie Savage. And she basically has always wanted to be White House correspondent, and gets to a cable news channel, and they put her at the White House just as the First Lady disappears. And she has to chase the scandal of the missing first lady, but she realizes along the way something else much more serious is happening. And her network won't let her report the more serious story, 'cause it won't rate. And there are all these other components. She's competing with a man, and they're in a contest to get the White House job.

0:58:21 SC: Yeah, okay, good.

0:58:22 JY: So there's lots of drama.

0:58:24 SC: Was it fun? Did you have fun writing the book?

0:58:26 JY: In the end I had such a blast. And it's funny. So that was a fun part. And being able to tell the stories was so fun. But it turns out there's like a whole craft to writing a novel. You can't just write your story.

[laughter]

0:58:37 SC: I don't think that's true at all. I think you can just think it and it appears.

0:58:41 JY: Right?

0:58:41 SC: Well, no, that's what I was gonna ask. Characterization, how much you describe and things like that. Was there a lot of give and take with editors and readers and so forth?

0:58:50 JY: Well, the new way you do a novel is you hire an editor as you're doing it. You send the editor the pages to give you feedback. So you're in conversation with somebody who knows the space.

0:58:57 SC: Okay.

0:58:57 JY: And so I was constantly in conversation. And one of the challenges has always been to tell people. They're like, "Well, this seems larger than life." And you're like, "No, no. That literally happened every day."

[chuckle]

0:59:09 SC: Yeah.

0:59:09 JY: Like, I'd call my reporter friends and like, "You're not gonna believe this stuff. They think it's crazy." And they're like, "No, no. It happened to me a minute ago."

0:59:15 SC: Can you give us one little example?

0:59:16 JY: Yeah, I'll give you example. She is fighting, fighting, fighting to prove herself at the White House, and she finally nails this one scoop. And she runs and tells her boss the scoops that she can get on air. And they're like, "Run to the camera." And by the time she gets on the camera, she goes up live just as she watches her male competition report that scoop she got. And so the boss gave it to the guy. And my friends were like, "So people outside the news business think that would never happen."

0:59:41 SC: That's cartoonishly evil. Yeah.

0:59:43 JY: Right. Happens all day, every day.

0:59:45 SC: Yeah. Alright. So we're gonna learn a lot. We'll have some laughs, but we'll learn a lot. And what was the novel called again?

0:59:50 JY: Savage, S-A-V-A-G-E, News. Savage News.

0:59:53 SC: So something that's come out in all of these different aspects, the CNN, the Instagram, the novel, is that maybe it's worth talking to women as well as men. I mean, this is clearly something that we don't always do in our society. How important is that to you?

1:00:11 JY: That's a big part of this. Yeah, we haven't gotten to that. I mean, part of the book is about reporting while female. And I don't get gruesome, but there's sexual harassment in the book. There's MeToo. And in the process of writing the book, so many people told me to take that out. "Nobody wants to read about that." "That seems implausible."

1:00:29 SC: Men or women told you that?

1:00:30 JY: Both. And then the Harvey Weinstein thing happened, and everyone calls me up, and they're like, "Put it back in, put it back in!"

[laughter]

1:00:37 JY: So in a way, writing the novel was a parallel of the experience, which is you're not allowed to talk about this stuff. And one of my critiques is that we do need much more diversity. Not just women, but diversity in general, at the highest levels of these companies. Because who decides what counts as news is completely limited by your own experience. And so if you're a black woman who comes from Ohio, what you think counts as news is gonna be pretty different from somebody on the Upper West Side of New York. And we don't have enough of that. And so, yeah. I think it's really important that you have women in decision-making roles. And CBS just named their first female news president.

1:01:18 SC: Oh, I didn't know that. Who is it?

1:01:19 JY: Her name's Susan Zirinsky. Oh, and here's a little trivia factoid. She was the model for the Holly Hunter character on Broadcast News.

1:01:27 SC: Oh, okay. That's a good starting point right there.

1:01:29 JY: And she's legend in the news business, and she's a badass.

1:01:34 SC: I do think that there's this feeling in some quarters that, "Sure, it's good to be fair to men and women and white people and black people and whatever, but anyone can do it." And there's a countervailing opinion like, No. As well-intentioned as you are, there's something about living the experience that gives you a perspective that you don't have otherwise.

1:01:54 JY: Well, I'll just tell you this. The research shows that when you have a woman running a newsroom versus a man running a newsroom, the way the coverage is done is very different. The way the coverage is done when a woman's running it is much more about... You have many more humans in the story saying, "It impacted me this way." And there's a more... I mean, it's cliche to say it's more empathic, but there is more of an empathy in it. It's much more connected to the human level. And when the guys are doing it, it's much more theoretical, the game, the fight. And this is my thesis on why they say women like political and foreign coverage less, because we don't take the time to connect it to the you. And if you bring it back to the human level, the female audience will engage more.

1:02:39 SC: The technical term for this in philosophy would be standpoint epistemology. We're talking about this on another podcast. But, yeah. Epistemology is the way that we learn things, the way that we know things, the way that we justify what we know. And guess what? People coming from different perspectives of the world do that differently, even if it's the same truth. It's not a matter of being relativistic about what is right and what is wrong, but we pick out certain things as important, or roots to getting there, depending on where we come from.

1:03:05 JY: And gender would clearly be a factor in filtering that.

1:03:09 SC: Hugely important. Yeah. So you mentioned the fact that one of your draws toward Instagram was the fact that there's a lot of women on Instagram. And I'd never thought about it that way. I'm on Twitter more than anything else, a little bit of blogging, and the podcast and everything. And being a scientist coming from where I come from, a large majority of my audience is men, not women. I would love it if there were a larger fraction of women there.

1:03:31 JY: We'll get you women.

1:03:32 SC: Maybe I should be...

1:03:33 JY: We'll bring from 'em Instagram.

1:03:34 SC: Yeah, maybe I should be on Instagram more. I use Instagram just for the silliest, most trivial reasons. Pictures of my cats and food and things like that.

[chuckle]

1:03:39 JY: You're allowed.

1:03:40 SC: And yeah, I'm allowed to. But maybe there's, in many, many ways, certainly in science, we could do a better job at reaching audiences that we don't. I was a science consultant on the original Four movie.

1:03:54 JY: Ooh.

1:03:54 SC: Not a lotta science in that movie, but a part of the motivation was that Natalie Portman played a role of physicist. And you almost didn't notice while watching the movie, but at least we had hopes that there's gonna be some young girl who would see that and sort of identify with that. And that movie will reach a lot more people than I ever will with all the books I ever do or all the podcasts I ever record.

1:04:13 JY: Well, representation makes a huge difference. Just having it in a different form matters.

1:04:18 SC: Yeah. Yeah.

1:04:20 JY: And I certainly think... One: I've been talking about this business I'm doing. And when I pitch it and say that the first audience is female, I get a lot of pushback from men who are like, "I hate the news too. Why aren't you trying to reach me?" I'm like, "No, no, no, I am. It's for you too." So...

1:04:36 SC: Do they realize the irony in that the last 500 years or whatever has been the other side and they weren't complaining?

[laughter]

1:04:42 JY: No, I try not...

1:04:45 SC: But the stories... Just because maybe people listening don't know. You would never know from seeing your Instagram feed that there was anything especially female about it. You're doing the same topics that everyone else covers.

1:04:57 JY: Right, and that is a challenge, is that people think, "Oh, you're doing girls news or women's news." No, no, no. I'm doing the news.

1:05:02 SC: There's baking tips. [chuckle]

1:05:03 JY: Right. Or style or fashion or home. No, no, no. Syria's there. What's the latest in Yemen. This is hard stuff. I'm just trying to... I guess the better way to say it is, I try to think of the stories, and bring feminine values into the way I make sense of it. I am so hardwired to be the other way. I know how to cover news as sports. I'm a color commentator, whatever you call the sport... So how do you bring another point of view into it? And so that's what I'm trying to do.

1:05:36 SC: But this gives you credibility, right? Only Nixon can go to China. You've done the work in playing that game that way, right?

1:05:43 JY: Yes.

1:05:44 SC: So let's, just to close up, what is... Tell the future a little bit. Are you more or less optimistic about the future of news and how we get it? People debate about the effects of the Internet and social media and fragmentation. There's clearly both good aspects and bad aspects. How should we bet?

1:06:01 JY: Well, I have to say, my experience has been so rewarding that I'm optimistic. Because I get so much feedback from the audience that says, "I stopped watching the news. Thank you for giving me news without a panic attack." Or, "You've taken the toxicity out of the news. I can watch you before bed and feel calm and I can sleep." And so it's instructive, not because they're giving me complements, but because they want the information. And one of the things I was constantly told is, "People, they're checked out, they don't care, they don't wanna know." And as long as you have an audience that wants to know, we will find ways to tell it. And it turns out that by telling it with integrity and discipline and empathy, you get an audience. So I think that in having success in this space, it will encourage other people to try this as well.

1:06:53 SC: Yeah, I think that... For one thing, that's a great accomplishment, because the stories you're bringing them are not intrinsically calming.

1:07:01 JY: No, that's true. And sometimes I feel bad, because I'm like, "Oh my God."

[laughter]

1:07:05 SC: Right. But what you're pointing out is that this traditional ESPN talking heads motif makes it even worse. It aggravates it and...

1:07:14 JY: Yes. And there is a piece of this that I'm still trying to crack, which is people want solutions. And it's not, "How are we gonna solve the government shutdown? But I'll tell you the story of the government shutdown, which doesn't have a resolution, but here's a story about a company that's rescuing garbage out of the ocean and they've had enormous success." As long as you're reminding people that over the course of history we've found ways to solve the hard problems, it gives them the optimism to feel this too can be solved.

1:07:41 SC: So I'm gonna come down on your side being a little optimistic here. 'Cause I know that whether it's doing this podcast or giving talks about science or being on TV talking about the multi-verse, I'm always positively encouraged when people stretch out to sort of learn these hard new things and respond to them. And I think that we condescend a little bit to our audiences, and when we refuse to do that we're rewarded.

1:08:05 JY: Absolutely. They just don't know. Explain the basics, and they're with you. And that's what's really exciting, is people respond to that. They're like sponges, they wanna know.

1:08:16 SC: Good. Well I hope we can push a couple more subscribers your way through this podcast.

1:08:18 JY: Yay, I love it.

1:08:20 SC: And you're helping making me a little bit more optimistic about the news.

1:08:23 JY: Sean, it's such an honor to be on with you, really. This is a pleasure. Thank you.

1:08:27 SC: Jessica, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

1:08:28 JY: Thank you.

[music]