Okay, welcome back. Now I would to segway into our next session a panel discussion
on the topic of Citizens vs. professional journalism are we open to the implications. This session
was organized and is being led by Craig Forman who is a nominee for this year's 2005
media and journalism award. He's VP and general manager of Yahoo, producer of PBS series
Great Entrepeneurs and Great leader's, former V.P. CNN Financial News, former VP Worldwide
Development Timing New Media, former Tokyo Bureau Chief Wall Street Journal and just to
mention it again, a nominee for this year's World Technology award for media and journalism.
I could go on and on about Craig. The other panelists are equally accomplished as well and I will
now turn it over to Craig Forman. Thanks very much. Good morning, can you hear me on this mike, is that all right?
wave please in the back. I was here yesterday for some of the presentations
including Steve Juritson's terrific presentation of nanotechnology. I think this is going to be a very
different session from that one, but I think equally interesting and I want to thank Jim for giving us some
opportunity here to get into among the most interesting issues involving technology and public affairs
and the media with a very distinguished panel here which whom I would like to
introduce this morning. Let me start by from my left, introducing Maria Thomas, who's the vice president and
general manager at NPR online and Maria other things is leading what many of you may
know is NPR's new efforts to create lots of what different forms of new media and new
information journalism in the Online area including NPR's new efforts and pod
casting and other new media types. Before joining NPR, Maria's had a very interesting career.
She was an executive at Amazon.com, and prior to that spent time at the World Bank as an
investment banker, so has a terrific business and media expertise that she'll share with us
this morning. Next to Maria is Helen Whalen, who is the founder of success television which is one of
the leading video one demand of programming companies that exist today. Many of you are now
beginning to get video on demand through your of cable services and satellite services such as Comcast,
Cox and DirectTV. Success TV in a short amount of time has become the leading programmer of personal
growth material on air and on the Internet and earlier Helen was a broadcast journalist
and business executive. You may remember her as the Washington bureau chief of PBS's nightly
Business report and later as the VP of business development at CNN financial news. She
wrote the business plan and managed a team that launched CNNFN which was the first digital non linear
television network on air and online and finally just to the next of Helen is George
Anders who is a national correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. George is based out here in California, but his
work takes him all over the country and indeed all over the world. You may know George
not only from his byline in the Journal, but from his several books including books on
America's health-care system on the leveraged buyout industry and his recent book on the HP
and Compaq merger and on Carly Fiorina's tenure as the leader of Hewlett Packard. You might
also remember George earlier in his career as the writer of the Heard on the street column and he was I
can tell you from personal experience from my early career at the Wall Street Journal the fastest writer
of the World wide column front-page news Summary column, whose ever existed the paper. So among
others things George brings an distinguished background to this morning's panell. I'll just set it up by
talking about two major trends in technology. I know for this audience people are extremely familiar
with not only information conveyed via Internet protocol and when I see information conveyed by Internet
protocol and I'm simply any longer talking about our computer boxes connected via coaxial cable
or a cat five cable or even wirelessly to a router that us out to the internet, but I'm talking about
all devices now whether it's the moblie devices that many of us are carrying around. We're increasingly Internet
delivered over other platforms other screens including our televisions. Two main trends that
we have seen at Yahoo and I think all the panelists will share are very important trends in this
convergence has long been talked about, but now that we're starting see the trend for
consumers to take control of their media and their Internet experience into a world that
were calling at Yahoo, My Media, allowing users to get the information they want, where they
want it, on the device they want it, and increasingly customize that information to actually being a new product.
We've seen this in many different cases but just headlines from the last week, Time Warner announcing
IN2TV its new effort to bring old television series back to life by creating a channel that will be seen only
on the Internet us to see Welcome Back Kotter as many times and as frequently as we like to see
Welcome Back Kotter. We're seeing online time shifting. We're seeing with the popularity of PBRs
and TiVo the ability of users to really control their media gathering experience. And on the other hand,
we're seeing an explosion of user generated content through blogs, through RSS feeds that allow
people to create material and distribute it all over any IP connected device and into that that my
media world allowing new voices and direct access for people who never previously
could have reached that audience. So I'm going to kick off our discussion here this morning with a question for
Maria. Maria represents an organization which all us are familiar with National
Public Radio, but is taking National Public Radio in to some new directions including the pod casting
direction and well, it's an unfair question we could ask Maria is there ever going to be a time when National
Public Radio, Maria, may be delivering new products that in fact don't require radio at all to reach an
audience and I'd ask you to talk about generally the challenges that you see in an organization that
represents all of us where National Public Radio may not be the focus of all the products you
create. Thanks Craig. The answer to your question is yes and to a certain extent already being
done, but before I get into it I do want to ask, by show of hands, I've talked to a few of you
moments ago and I know this is an international audience so I actually don't assume that everyone in this audience knows what NPR is
May I ask by show of hands anyone who doesn't understand want NPR. Who does not understand , okay
great. We've got just one person. Briefly, I will explain for those of you who may not
be familiar. NPR does stand for National Public Radio. It is a radio network that is in the
business producing and distributing radio programming historically. It's network is about 35 years old. It has
its roots in educational programming. It is not owned by the United States
government. It's also not a radio station. So, those are 2 important points. The radio,
National Public Radio historically, as I mentioned, has been in the production and distribution of radio and
programming business. Our network, our radio network is comprised of about three hundred
stations across the United States. Those stations are independently owned and operated. We do
not own the stations. I'm emphasizing this because it will important as I begin to talk about the alternate forms of
distribution. The stations are independently owned and operated by a variety of kinds of licensees. Those
licensees tend to fall into a couple of big categories: community-based licensees and university based
licensees. So you quickly understand that this is a network that has its roots in education and actually
back in the day when it was established and had some frequencies reserved for it at the far end of
the radio dial. So some very