Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Harold Evans and Jason Epstein on Publishing and Memoirs

And now I'm delighted to welcome our two speakers for the evening. Harold Evans is an acclaimed editor and publisher working his way up from reporter to editor of The Sunday Times of London and eventually editor of The Times of London. He settled in America in the 1980s. On this side of the pond he was founding editor of condé Nast Traveler president and publisher at Random House and editorial director and vice chairman of U.S. News and World Report the Atlantic. Fast Company and The New York Daily News in 2000 two journalists in Britain voted him the greatest all time British newspaper editor. And in 2004 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. His new memoir My Paper Chase True Stories of vanished times chronicles his own life in the newspaper business as well as the many changes both good and bad that have transformed the industry. And by way of transition and by way of introducing Jason Epstein I'm going to read a passage from Harold Evans book My Paper Chase in which he describes Mr. Epstein. At 22

fresh from Columbia he did invent of the groundbreaking trade paperback as a format for quality books distinct from the pocket sized soft cover mass market books. A profitable format that everyone imitated. He'd been co-founder of The New York Review of Books and a participate participant in the founding of 1979 of the Library of America series of classics seeded by state dollars. He had an omnivorous appetite intellectually and in the kitchen. You never knew whether his next disquisition would be on the virtues of Saint Thomas Aquinas or a properly prepared artichoke. He was also it has to be said Captain of the Praetorian guard of pessimists. So I discounted his warning when I called him when I called him that the job of publisher had become impossible. Now please join me in welcoming Jason Epstein and Harold Evans conversation between Jason. I met when I knew him before I became president random house of his. He's written a book.

Call 18 which has an egg on the front. It's a beautiful jacket but it doesn't. I feel like eating it. Why. Because the book is as sensuous as my secret life by Walter. If you don't know that sex manual you've never lived a says Jayce is sensuous as that and as eloquent as any April loss of. In fact it's quite it's a quite brilliant book. However Jason is a normal person despite the fact he's written this fantastically sensuous and sinew was a book I want to just describe his encounter with a lobster. OK because the book is a combination of recipes as I said it my own thing writing about him in my book My Paper Chase you never knew when he was going to be St. Thomas Aquinas or an asparagus that was the subject of the disquisition.

I think I was ready for both by the time I had been there a few years. Here's what he says. A few years ago I described my surprise when I was preparing to grill a dozen or so lobsters. Those companions of my childhood in my second Harper kitchen. This meant killing them first by plunging a stiff boning knife into the shell just behind the eyes drawing the knife forward to the head and reversing the blade by stick the entire creature from head to tail. I'm already feeling quite delightedly from head to tail. I piled lobster on the counter next to the sink and with no more consideration for their feelings than if I were opening an oyster opening a potato reach for the first victim and split it into. To my surprise the other lobsters raised their claws in horror. What I had done and scuttled on my ass backward. Some fell to the floor others into the

sink. I was faced with a dire limit. For it was plain that lobsters were not at all on feeling like the potato kindred souls who dreaded violent death as much as you or I do. Oh and that's typical that he goes on of course really what you really should do with a lobster. If you want to cook it properly in fact the book opens with a fantastic. If I make a confession he knows I know absolutely zero about cooking I run to sardines on toast OK. He runs to almost anything and he opens this book with to me the most evocative passages I have ever read about food and I've probably read almost all the literature on it rather than the cookbooks. And this is a about making a blackberry pie a blueberry BlackBerry blueberry blueberry Because it right. I can't even get it right about how you make the pastry where you get the. And so it's full of enormous pleasure and a slim

book and also fantastic tips and I think if I could guarantee my wife is out of the way and my kids are safely locked up I'll try one of these one day. Now Jason I talked about the violent death. You were there 9/11. You told me you lived downtown and did you look at the twin towers before they went down or what legal feeling was the strangest. It was the strangest morning it was that it was election day. And my wife had already gone downstairs to go to the polling place which is around the corner and called me from there and said there's a fire in the World Trade Center so I went out to a terrace from which I could see the towers that were there. They were the background of that terrace. They still glow at night like candles every beautiful at night rather ugly during the day. And I saw smoke coming out and I said to myself if somebody dropped a match in a wastebasket I couldn't believe that it was anything more than that. But then I saw it was something much

worse. And when the second plane hit I could actually feel that building I lived about a mile little less than a mile north of that. It was just an amazing sight. And I stood there long enough to watch them collapse. And something you won't soon forget. And thereafter for a week 10 days two weeks the smell of death was everywhere in the neighborhood. We had a way the facemask police had cordoned it off. You couldn't go in or out of the neighborhood unless you will have actually lived there. It was it was an eerie eerie moment. And. Shattering you know you'll never never get over it. You're right here. Firehouse on Lafayette Street was banked with flowers and photographs of the men who died who might recognize and whose job would be in to save our lives I assume the bin Laden and his gang would be quickly captured. You never entered my mind that a year later he would still be at

large with the United States would be a war with Iraq which had nothing to do with the attack. And you found you didn't find solace. But when you went to Sag Harbor next you did trying to take some comfort by cooking. What did you cook. Can you remember if you don't I'll tell you. And I do remember when I quote the article that Kerry is this is the chapter that Harry is reading. Resulted from a request by some and by one of the editors of The New York Times Magazine and if I could I write a recipe column appropriate to the first anniversary of 9/11. And I thought and thought and thought and finally the courage to me that MF K. Fisher the great food writer who died about 10 years ago and a great love and a great lover had written beautifully about her own situation in the 1930s in Europe when everything was going to pieces and there was the what was it. Everybody knew it was going to be a terrible war didn't know what could

be done about it and and what sustained it was that she had fallen in love with a man who not her has been she left her husband and she said rather than become a faculty waif eating my smell of salads at Smith College and when I but this other fellow when they build up that they did a house since in Switzerland and. And they. And is. As time went on there. The war became more and more imminent and and he himself had been gassed in the first world war and by the time we get into the chapter that you'd written you see that he's lost when I visit legs and it's a very very touching moment when they come back that they've got it and it stays then they went back to clear up their house because the war was going to happen any minute. And I

took a train from vais where they lived in Switzerland to M.A. and they found themselves in a compartment with a lot of German health joy is that plump people in later and squeezing them out and they were rescued from that by their by the two waiters in the dining and the restaurant car who had known them from before and who were shocked to see the condition that her level was in but took them into the restaurant tried to keep him away from that mass. And and. The waiters were arranging things for lunch. They were taking the tops off of radishes and doing that sort of thing and they found themselves seated in the dining and the restaurant car and the train had stopped for an unusually long time at the Italian border. And as they were having their lunch they noticed that the two fascist

secret agents who were dragging a prisoner through the car and in chains they were taking him back to Italy where his brother killed him there and the train waited and waited and waited and the waiters were doing everything they could to keep Fisher and her friend from going back into their seats and when they finally they did go back they noticed there was some dampness on the floor in the vestibule and the glass partition the window had been slashed and they said what happened and it got his throat going back in. But all this is surrounded by. This all happens in a restaurant car and so you hear hearing that and you're knowing how she cares about those rattus as a thickening. And. And let me stop you there and tell you the recipe it would seem merged in these rather sad thoughts. 911 I'll give you

just it just gives you a taste not of the actual food itself which Jason will call for any of you turn up at his house. I'm sure warm bus salad. I'll read just a fragment of this. I made a warm salad. I discarded the skin from a pound and a half of wild not farmed striped bass fill it cut the fish into warnings ques removing the small bones that remain and drop the Q brass into a fork or port of gently borning salted water to which I had added a cup of white wine and half a lemon. I pushed the fish just long enough so I could break the cubes apart with the force of the consistency of lump crabmeat timing here is crucial. Brass dries out quickly and poaching liquid on the other hand bass has to be cooked through. You see why I never gave it but ever tried cooking on the one hand you are going to get dried on the other hand it's going to be you know I don't have the patience. How do you I mean

how do you. Have a patient what you supposed to be reading books. I was president of the company you were supposed to be reading my new scripts. The cooking is very much like like writing a story. You have an idea where you want to get and how you're going to get there and you think of the different pieces you're going to put together to get to it and you get it wrong the first couple of times in fact many times that recipe took a long time to figure out because I had something like that when send in person and Italy. And did you write when you had that lovely maid impose it on the stage in your mind or do you write it down no no no I was obsessed by it. I didn't have I didn't have to write it down it was in my head forever. But how do you know what they'd done where you didn't see them doing it. Well I didn't get it right the first time I did over cook it. Oh missed the mess that I made when putting the bass and large pieces and the poaching liquid which meant that the outside of it get poached on the inside of it stayed raw. So to prevent that I cut it up a little cubes and

then it really evenly. You have to be very quick about it you have about two or three minutes in the poaching liquid before you roll and you have to know and let me tell you my story about a vegetable because I mean I can't compete with Jason in the color and it's in fact. I left school at 15 and learned shorthand and typing. I grew up joined the war with my father driving mission trains through the dark and the shorthand and typing at the age of 15 with a bunch of giggling girls. Enabled me to apply for jobs on newspapers since all the grown men were away fighting the war. They gave this kid a chance but I was summoned to this newspaper in a cotton town. Just Said report him middle Hurst was used name and when I arrived climbed the stone stairs past the line of type machines all things which you vanished today.

Middle Hurst was he said. He thrusts it was having a row with the head printer and he thrust some sheets of paper into my hand and said as Spartacus and quick about it laddie. So I took the sheets of paper and went to the typewriter and the two of the men in the room were made it quite clear. You're on your own kid. We're not going to help you in any way whatsoever because this is supposed to be your trial day. So I typed as Spartacus was on top of the thing and I went through these bits of paper to give me what was a funeral. One was a wedding one was a whist drive. Another one which looked promising was reporting a clergyman had come back from thrilling adventures in China and when I turned over the pages he never mentioned what the thrilling adventures were. So I was kind of stuck and I was in despair this is my big chance to break into journalism. And while I was doing it man came up and I he rubbing his hands and he said you're a new trial I said.

Yes he said let me look. And he picked up the sheets of paper and he said well write them up as paragraphs. I said wait a minute. As paragraphs as I spent. So I wrote the last paragraph and it went into the newspaper and that was I started in journalism. So I can claim I can claim a kind of killing or a history to my own memoir A con complete I couldn't. I don't even know how to cook ass but I just know what you do just boil it. I don't know what you do with it. But I was I just opened the book by describing an epiphany when I was on the let me read that in reading OK. So I was on the beach it was really North Wales during the war. This is this is just after Denker which was presented as a heroic success for the British and I think that of course Harry was taken by a father to the beach to one of the beaches where

the soldiers had landed. It had been brought back a place called rial in Wales. The soldiers were so still clothing so torn their faces pale they looked as if they had died where they fell and yet they had escaped death like thousands of their comrades left on the battle grounds of northern France thousands more were on their way. Two years in German turned camps. The men I saw were the lucky ones. A few hundred out of the hundred ninety eight thousand two hundred twenty nine of the British Expeditionary Forces were just days before in May June 1940 and fought their way to Dunkirk 24 24 hours before we saw that they had been on that other beach being hammered from the airbase took a dive by me stranded by the machine guns Messerschmidt rescue ships ablaze

a ship shore and every hour the German Panzers closing the ring. They were a full on group and shaven some in remnants of uniforms some in makeshift outfits of pajamas and sweaters not a hat. Between them lying apart from the rows of deck chairs in the Punch and Judy show on the pier and the ice cream stands most of the men who were evacuated had been sent to bases and hospitals in the south of England. The several thousand had been put on trains. The seaside resorts in North Wales where there were army camps and spare beds in the boarding houses. The bulk of the men sprawled on the Ryle beach were members of the Royal Corps signals attacks to artillery regiments some 64 offices and twenty five hundred other ranks had been sent to the second signal training center at Preston. Preston I guess that's it. Preston which shared the miles of sand with the point

that Pippin is parrot as Harry calls it is that he discovered the distance between what really happened in that case and how it was presented as a great moral victory which is anything but. And of course the politicians couldn't possibly admit what had actually happened. And Harry saw it when he was a kid and I think he became a journalist at that moment. That's right. Well I should explain that I was very annoyed because my father. Could never stop talking to anybody he met. I was cut up in embarrassment because he would go up to somebody and say well how are you. And they might not answer he says well I'm Freddy Evans I drive. What do you do. And so on this particular day my dad who was then 39 sat on his haunches and off at these men a cigarette and then came back to the boarding house

as Jason said when the newspapers said Bloody marvelous victory and I my opinion it was I thought how could it be. The newspapers which I love get it so wrong and so began my paper chase in which I never encountered a lobster I had to kill. You know there's a there's a there's a townie version of the same thing that that just happened. This fellow this was who Lou Dobbs was and I didn't expect the United States just dumped him. Well let me tell you how the press handle Lou Dobbs is being fired as you know he was a nuisance and. On CNN that he didn't belong there and he was of those and they were they were losing customers right and left because of him. So they got rid of my Fathom and I paid him eight million dollars to go away they know they paid me a little contract. Wow that was that was the end of his contract. The press called that. That he quit he didn't quit. If you quit you don't get eight million dollar severance obviously.

And they would have been the same in the same sentence when he quit he was given a million dollars. You know that's not the way it goes. So that's a that's a tiny version of This Is It kind of misleading. No it's keeping truth in the news each day ha when I started coming in as a traveler as you well know. And if you read an article in the Chatham magazine you would want to know that it had been paid for by the hotel and it was a situation where every head waiter treated you like a joke and bowed and scraped. It was my experience and I got into truth in travel Jason because when I was on the Sunday Times one of my correspondents went on a cruise ship. Where unfortunately you were not presiding in the kitchens and everybody got dreadfully sick I think four hundred fifty people were taken to hospital and he came back this reporter looking very pale and he said Well of course I can't write about it.

I said what he said well I can't write about it because it was a free trip. I said Like hell you write about it. So we wrote about it and I made a resolution there after the Sunday Times to pay for his trip so when your friend signed you how student Jason was very well said I've gone crazy I want to start a travel magazine would you do it I said on one condition that we call it truth in travel. So I have been early by this book in fact I'm kind of dangerous to be around because I blurt things out I should keep to myself. But anyway coming back to. Characters that we know I want to just. Jason both you know as an editor of course he's edited all the illustrious people of Norman Mailer William Styron just you name it the greatest names in American literature have been gone through Jason's cheese cutter. I have to adopt a colorimeter for a game because he was quite formidable in fact my two American history is an American century. They Made America were edited by Jason I know what it's like to be

sliced diced and cooed and inserted in a vault pan of olive oil. It's quite an experience. So he's an exemplary and famous editor. But in that role he's literally meets many extraordinary people I want to just again go back to his writing which is so magical to me. How many people know you're all too young. This is the trouble with getting old. I mean Roy Cohn was Joe McCarthy's constantly area. And if you ever saw the McCarthy hearings there was his dark furtive guy even when quite young he was dark and furtive whispering in Joe McCarthy's ear during the most to call polling prosecutions and Jason knew Roy Cohn in a way few of us were given to know. And this is how it is crimes and. You meet him in a course where you get where you think he meets you meet him in a restaurant of course he said with Charlie of hors d'oeuvres souffles and its chocolate truffle to take as you

left so even here insert some delicious delights said you can spend $40 for dinner for two with a decent Clarett etc etc says Zoe meets Roy Cohn here. My and what does he say about how much fun this thing is you know. Roy I discovered I was born without a conscience. A Shakespearean birth defect that he shared with Edmund and Iago for HOAs frailty Estee Coleridge invented the exquisite motive list malignancy. Roy believed in nothing and had no concept of truth. His condition may explain but hardly excuses it shows his behavior already deems the harms he did to his countrymen and the countless people eager to assist the hurt of McCarthy's chief counsel. I was fascinated by him as the moral grotesque light fullness phlegm snopes the fictional twin of Col. Rove. I mean it's just

that of course. Now tell us tell us what Roy Cohn did to send Judyth to Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. I could go on about adventures with Roy Cohen when I have. I used to see him in New York at people's houses he was a fairly popular character. God knows why and he was her family I could hardly stand in the same room with them and then my friend Norman Mailer happened to be his next door neighbor and Provincetown that you know that hasn't happened to anyone and top of the other and that has tragically touched and said to me one day that Roy Norman came to know and Norman is fascinated by graphic tasks he writes about and he would be lost without them. Said that Roy is writing his memoirs and you should take a look at that and. I couldn't have said no it would have been wrong for a publisher not to pay attention to a thing like that because it meant that he might have had a lot to say as it was that the manuscript was in magic couldn't tell the truth

from non-truth that was a big pile of junk. But I did get to know him and though I didn't change my position and the moral issue it turned out he was right charming the way devil's going to be much more charming than angels. And I was fascinated by him and I saw quite a lot of him and get to the rose it looks. Good because this is a poll that when I read this story well I'll tell you how. Sure I see people in this room who must know the Rosenbergs. There's a good executive to spy for the state and they were at they were executed and their children Royal for I was a young was a very young graduate of Columbia Law School too young actually to join the bar but his father was an important judge in New York City political judge and get him a job at the U.S. attorney's office. And he found himself as chief of staff for the U.S.

attorney say Paul who was prosecuting the Rosenbergs. Roy was a by the way a lifetime Democrat and his father was of course a Democratic political judge and he had actually campaigned for Roosevelt in 1944 he had no idea what communism was at the height. But he met the young FBI agents who were working on the case and he said not to put too fine a point he fell in love with them that it turned out to be the kind of people it is. That he he would he would fancy all the rest of his life. And they convinced him that communism was something terrible and had to be dealt with. And they. And since he was incapable of thinking clearly of an issue like that in the conscience he managed the prosecution he was the one who arranged for Mrs. Rosenberg's

brother Greenglass to testify falsely against her. The deal was a green glass would not be executed but is and this is a sister his sister would be a terrible thing. And. Later Roy Roys really lived next door on crack Ave. to the judge Judge a cab with him and they would meet every evening after the trial ex-parte within a supposed to do a course and discuss the proceedings that day and how to handle it the next day. And when the verdict came down and the punishment had to be assigned. The judge said to Roy what do I do about about Mrs. Rosenberg. There's no question about him but what about her that is there was a lot of a lot of people claiming I said Howard and the pope and so on. I didn't think that she should be executed she was a woman after all. And in fact Roe knew perfectly well if she

hadn't she hadn't done anything that Greenglass did testify falsely that she had typed up her husband's notes which would have implicated her in the crime. And she wasn't guilty but in any case as he put it Judge Kaufman. Told me that he would said to the press that he was he was consulting as his guide every day to see what he should do about this terrible dilemma. And Roy said the closest he got to the Temple Emanuel the big Jewish form temple and the avenue was the telephone both that front where he would call me I was in Boca Raton and he would say I was going to play in the Times. So it's that kind of it's horrible that kind of thing. After I read that in the book I wanted to make a chick chick you file something because I felt I must have something nutritious and warm me good my own encounters with the Lord I describe in my paper chase because I had a nice but amazing.

If I say so amazing experiences trying to. The judges were not corrupt. Britain atoll. No you couldn't do that in England they would just. Still living in the 14th century that was the problem. So for instance when children were born without arms or legs by taking a drug thalidomide which also came to United States in limited numbers I was stopped from inquiring how it happened. I was stopped from campaigning for compensation for when I had to fight the case for five to seven years and in the course of that I reflect on the difference in American and British journalism. Jason of course is the founder of The New York Review of Books. And the difference is this that America is the most open society in the world. It's perfect but it's Press by comparison the British press is half free and yet it does require the American press if I might just say this to be more alert and active than it often is. For instance when the DC 10 then on a crash which

is the biggest crash through in 84 people no one might daunt Douglas body jet. It was the second time the cargo door fall off leading to an explosive decompression. And I happened to be lunching not on anything that would draw Jason's attention. A cheese sandwich with a pilot friend of mine and he said it's funny that's a second door for his plane. So when I got to the office I said let's look into it. Well could a long story short. Congress opened an inquiry and then forgot about it because of a lot of pressures from the aircraft industry to forget about it. The American press forgot about it too. And my my team of reporters I sent to here and I was called to testify. California courts found that we couldn't get into the

proceedings in court either when the proceeding was settled out of court so nobody knew. How come a plane is flying with a door which is going to come off. How come it's pretty important to know to make sure it doesn't happen again. And I had a young reporter called Elaine Porter Weiss to trace the whole story. Took a long time a lot of effort to find the man who'd signed that the door had been replaced and she the man called Evan's curious enough and she showed him his signature and he had to say don't ever recollection of sign each signature was forged. Pretty clearly. But the point of this is when I came to publish why the DC 10 Island crashed I got no warning from the American legal system or from the British legal system which regard this

foreign matter but in England if I tried to do that I would have got an order for prior restraint and stopped from publishing because the case was before the courts. Sub Judice he contempt. So we have to rejoice in the freedoms of American press Jason but we also have to ask them to do their job what do you think. It's a complicated situation because you had your hands tied over and over yes by that ruling we don't have the same. We can so you think the American. Let me ask you a question which is germane to my argument. Do you think I mean your wife did a very very good job in what all of the work she did. Judy Miller what do you think the. American pressure to be more alert to the financial meltdown which we're all enduring now using a good reporter would have spotted what was happening with bribes to Congress for housing with the rating agencies giving out triple-A

ratings for companies that didn't need it and getting paid for it with bankers only leverage a hundred to one. I mean I think every time I come in and drive past the business school here I think that that institution is sad. There are through the years that the subprime mortgage mess was brewing and apparently nobody noticed. And the same can be said for the for the for President Summers at the time he was not running that whole country's economy. There he is responsible element Lee for the Harvard endowment. And. I became aware that there was a mess because back in 2003 when and after a man of well known woman named Jane Jacobs and some of you may have heard that he did that great book about cities was Jason published The Death and Life of an American city she was reading a book of very depressed to the end of a life about the future of this country and wrote a book from that point of view

and happened to say that there's an absurd situation now going on in in the mortgage world she said in the book. This is bubble and she said I can quote her words when a when a bubble forms without any corresponding value created it blows up. She was afraid of the housing bubble that was in 2003. The editorials noticed it. So I became aware of it then and I certainly no economist and I think about those things except the way that ordinary people do and. I say this with immodestly I got out of the market in just a minute. Why don't you tell the rest of us just OK. You know reminds me of all my friends of the Christ said Oh of course to Harry I went into cash two years ago. Wait a minute. OK do you really get out. I did I did. My God.

I did about any questions in the audience about I made my point I was trying to make was that without newspaper reporting whether it's on the web My wife runs a website The Daily Beast which has a lot of original contributions without good websites or good newspapers you get an absence of reporting. And when you get an absence of reporting you get the misadventure in Iraq improperly examined. You get the financial meltdown. And you know the hell is around the corner forming right now with another property zero interest my goodness what a temptation to make more mistakes when money is free. And so you're a person as I said he was the Praetorian guard of pessimists but he's often right. Any question that's missing from you could be right nine times out of 10 if you're a pessimist. Any questions about anything you want to know how to. OK. Back to the back. So the question is about the fake objectivity of American news as opposed to European news and the fact that American news is very business driven business

driven. Well you can give examples of course when they've overridden business for instance. In the Watergate investigation for instance in the Pentagon Papers case various For instance I'll give you another one. When the New York Times expose the fact fact maybe it should maybe it shouldn't of phones being tap telephone conversations being listened to. So I dare I said to myself that my criticism presently is that the. Clowns have got hold of newspapers causing the thing that matters which is reporting now. If you can give as if if I were running a newspaper today you could give me evidence of improper business. I would seek to expose it in England that is true I think it is quite a lot of it has gone on for instance when the BBC was trying to oppose you commercial television the

commercial television people started running stories in newspapers about the terrible BBC. So I'm not totally and I don't particularly like a government owning a newspaper I like to think the press should be independent. What do you think of it do you agree with this criticism here. You know I think I think I think you have perhaps but I think that would be prime. Well you're suggesting it's more like he's talking about put different political parties being represented by and by and you know that's the kind of overt pressure and persuasion I don't like it frankly I mean my ideal and you can tell me I'm an idealist. My deal we did have the Sunday Times in London 15 years for instance I'll give you one example of what an independent paper can do when the North Sea oil licenses were given out for looking for oil and gas. The Thomson organization which owned my papers. It was one of the bidders for licenses and one of my staff who followed these things wrote

a stingy memorandum to me about how this was a grotesque giveaway of the national wealth to private organizations. So I said I'm going to write an editorial about that. So we wrote an editorial condemning it condemning the sale. I never heard a word. I never heard a word also when the Thompson organization had a team selling television to that terrible fellow cedi Jagan in British Guiana. And we ran a piece about the corruption in the government. The television team was put on the plane the next day and I never heard about it till five years later. So it is possible I would rather have the risk because of a business own paper provided you've got strong editors then having picking up a poppy propaganda sheet which is what you Jason calls it profitable it may not be as bad as that but the pretense of Octopussy is another interesting question. We need a long time to go into the question of objectivity and impartiality often or often

are mixed up in papers at the fact I represent political position the Murdoch papers for example are obviously of an extreme extreme right wing papers. But I think you can't. The idea is to get ideology as much out of. I was you can't get rid of it and try to be objective and if the parties run the papers that much that they will be obviously ideologically biased and you can't have that. That ruins everything. I agree. Interesting questions worth a further discussion. So the question is how do we get quality reporting back when so much of news is going online and the pricing structure is so different where you can get free content online. Well yeah but my my wife Daily Beast for instance pays for investigations and writings which is very unusual because most websites just pick up stuff for nothing. And the question is really relevant. I think there has to

be expended choose rightly say because a lot of stuff a lot of wonderful stuff on the web but there's also a lot of rubbish. And there's also a lot of things which is not even remotely true what I was doing my book on innovation I researched various things on the web and found I was wasting my time half the time because it was totally misleading. I mean the trouble with google is you put something in and you are sent on a wild goose chase. Some of the things we made show some things you don't so you're raising a very important point here several potential. Rescues one is now a number of foundations that are paying for good reporting. The patron of one in England which has just put five million pounds into investigative journalism and it has to find media outlets is another thing called Pro Publica here by started by Paul Steiger editor of The Wall Street Journal as the Center for Investigative Journalism and so on and so on and so on

so there are signs I almost hate to use the phrase green shoots coming up in the desert. The major problem of the moment as I say is that the worst thing a newspaper can do is cut reporting save money that way. And yet I mean I just go back a little when the owners the night Ritzer papers took over by a Philadelphia Inquirer Miami Herald the new owner came the new managing director came and said we got a great target for next year for everybody and they all sat back thinking was this going to be you know we're going to expose corruption in city hall or whatever it may be. He said our profit target is going to be 22 percent next year. It was already pie. Twenty two percent is a pretty good profit in American newspapers live along a lot of fat. I wrote a piece for a magazine called Strategy and Business and this is bound to fail. Well of course it did because when they went for profit

is the first target they started cutting the editorial and the man who introduced that thing had to sell out and then the first thing that the new owners did was to cut the editorial stillborn employ marketing people 70 markets. So very many issues here and I think that the I think the digitisation is going to it's going to knock everything into a cocked hat and we can't begin to predict what the eventual effect of digitisation is going to be but to replace physical inventory physical newspapers books with virtual content. It is a world changing event the way the Google Groups printing press was a world changing event five centuries ago. It's a world changing event orders of magnitude greater in fact because it's going to be world wide than Gutenberg's invention ways which is whose effect was limited to Western Europe and the new world.

I can't begin to guess what's going to happen next where the book business is going to go either way. Jason of course is the head of a chip of print on demand books which he didn't. And there's also innovations in print on demand newspaper you can get a machine now from here at the back of it will print a newspaper in your home and it isn't all that expensive. Well I think I can imagine a world without physical books that would be a world that would be a world and it would be chaos and I think as a whole books will survive. You don't have to imagine you only got to look at Afghanistan. Well speaking of Afghanistan when when Gutenberg invented his press in the 15th century Islam banned it. Call it satanic. Within 50 years of Gutenberg's invention there were more than 100 presses all over Europe at the.

But at the border of Islam none and you see the difference. I think that the Afghanistan assistance is a is a relic of that of that disastrous choice and the right exactly. China for example also banned it or rather didn't take advantage of a Korean alphabet phonetic alphabet which would have made it possible for them to use a movable type and so forth for five centuries China languished its K thing important point that that's really a good point without without without the press. It was it was it was by mere accident by the way that that that the church in Europe didn't ban the press the Catholic Church didn't Gutenberg was a an important Catholic layman. He made his living selling religious trinkets at fairs. But I just fair as and when he invented this machine he thought that he could use it to print uniform and expensive missile prayerbook up to that point prayer

books made by hand as you know and I'm minded to write and function very expensive and could not be widely distributed. The church was suffering from endless schisms in those days especially in the north where Gutenberg came from and he thought that he could bring the church together with his new inexpensive missile equipped exactly the opposite happened. That within within 50 years you have the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation and the disintegration of the church at least in northern New York. So when I said interesting because I think I generally agree with this Jason. You could roughly calibrate most advances in civilization within Vance's in the distribution of knowledge. For instance it was good to go to that you had done this I set my first newspaper by having single pieces of type and then a German call Merkins Allah invented the line of Time Machine which enable newspapers two

to flourish and that was a huge advance because as newspapers became cheaper and more widely disputed knowledge advanced whether objective or impartial whatever it did. And now we have digital. When I was at University of Chicago in 1956 a very strange eccentric man said to me in 20 years time a lot of photo typesetting. And he did the pretty well right actually. So the question is how benevolent in one's estimation is going to be digital typesetting and and distribution electronically. What it one thing it means this is a radical decentralization of the market for books because once when Safire wants a digital file exists it can be downloaded anywhere in the world. That means you have to have new copyright law you have to have new ways of protecting you. What do you think you would do what you think of Google taking books and putting digitizing them.

Well I wish somebody else had more sophisticated than Google had done that because they don't yet understand what where the bibliography has to do with and understand what meditator for books. So they made a kind of mess out of it but they'll correct that. Alas no and it's too bad that the Library of Congress didn't get there first and that is you can blame Google all you want but you can certainly blame a Library of Congress much more. Yeah but for their sin of omission they should have been there. But the head of the library has been against digitisation from the beginning and that's been true of a lot of major libraries and that's a very important point here is that so just to be such an interesting subject it Google Microsoft and Yahoo are in league the most laughingly called the Creative Coalition whose intent is to remove copyright entirely. Now if you remove copyright entirely from every word every work of art where you get away then I'll tell you for a fact. Yes if you are going to diminish the output because you know even

writers occasionally have to eat you know they can't eat like Jason does. But occasionally occasionally they have to get a cheese sandwich or whatever to keep writing or investigating. Once you know these creative thieves as I call them and you know it is called the Creative Coalition It's like those campaigns the exon rankle saving our natural resources i.e. anything to stop they would do anything to stop initiatives to end global warming so they cold buy these false names. Well Google has has recognized its error and and digitizing books that it had no right to digitize those books by the way are books that are out of print but still in copyright. And that's a good service and under the under our copyright law which is terrible. A copyright exists for 75 years after the author that this version of copyright law was in response to Disney to protect Mickey Mouse

literally. But it now means that books that perfectly were the books that should be in the public domain by now and those are the books that Google brutally. Detached without permission. The people who run Google are engineers they don't think about things like copyright they think about solving a problem building it dam or a bridge or something like that. And they don't. Larry Page who's one of the founders as I know and he came to see me about this five years ago and proposed this plan to digitize everything and I thought you better get lots of lawyers to get you're going to trip up a copyright and you ought to get bibliographies because you don't know when book from and then that they digitized Leaves of Grass and they categorized it under agriculture. Oh I love it.

And I didn't know that there was seven different versions of Dave's are grabbing a lot of them for the Roman Empire. Well I mean that they did a lot of silly things which they were aware of now but it's going to be hellish to fix them all and I think the Library of Congress owes the country an apology for allowing this to happen because page did go to the Library of Congress and said that he would like to do it with them and they turned him down which is pretty stupid. We are running a bit low on time so I think that's a pretty good place to stop. So I'd like to thank our speakers this evening.