This is my first time in Berlin. It's very exciting. I'm thrilled to be here I just asked our gracious host are Germans really on time for everything and he said yes because I'm from the Middle East where we're not So I actually find a fascinating phenomenon. I came out to Berlin to share

the work that has been my labor of love and It's something my team created as a way to sort of rethink and redesign Something that we think we know very well Which is the news the way we tell stories the way we share information the way we consider media as a whole what are we optimizing for as

Journalists if you ask me we're optimizing for knowledge transfer media is adult education So that plus everything we had learned in the digital domain plus everything we've experienced As field reporters led us to build Syria deeply now, I'm going to share our story

I don't usually use myself as data But in this particular case we are an important case study because on one hand I think what we've done is special and it's clearly comes from a fusion of heart and mind But even though it's special it's not particularly unique

We're part of a growing phenomenon a trend in digital publishing Toward what we're caught coining as the hyper topical news revolution We saw hyper local news and now we're seeing a wave of hyper topical news And as we venture down this creative experience of a startup that became news deeply

It was really a passion project that became a social enterprise that became a startup called news deeply We found ourselves in the middle of a bigger broader trend that says something very potent and very Sort of high potential for the future of news. So with that I'll tell you my story. I

Started out as you heard as a television reporter for ABC News and Bloomberg I was based in Dubai covering the Middle East when I was 25 years old. I was with ABC News in New York They sent me out with a camera and a backpack to cover the Islamic Republic of Iran and later more broadly the Arab world

so here was ABC News really trying to expand its reach into the International reporting domain by giving a 20-something all of the tools of technology and seeing what would come of it It was amazing. It was an incredible experience

dream job Absolutely wonderful and I found myself as certainly, you know heading over there I'm now 32 in 2007 as a 25 year old in the midst of Generational change we talked about Millennials. I'm right on the cusp by the definition of the Pew Center's sort of

Demarcation of a millennial. I'm right on the line. So I was growing up in my career alongside the rise of the Arab Millennials that were leading this wave ultimately of regional change But also my career rose with the rise of Twitter So when it came time for the Arab Spring, we really watched it unfold

Hashtag by hashtag. This is a hashtag timeline of how the Arab awakening happened in terms of what you were seeing It started in Tunisia with the CD Boaz II to uprising essentially a young man setting himself on fire and CD Boaz II that becoming Tunisia's revolution and becoming known as the

Hashtag CD Boaz II that next came the Egyptian protests on January 25th What came to be known as the Tahrir revolution? February 14th in Bahrain Which became the Lulu Square uprising February 17 in Libya? February 20th in Yemen and finally in Syria and what I noticed as a

Journalist was that because Syria came last in the order of revolutions It got the least attention We were all fixated on the fight to oust Muammar Gaddafi and by the time that Conflict or that storyline had sort of tapered in the international press. We had story fatigue

We were kind of done with the Arab Spring story So when it came to Syria, I would often say we had an f-11 problem when there was a story on Syria It was often on page f-11 and if it was ever in the headlines

What happened in between the times it was turned up on the front page was completely incomprehensible. I Was not a serious specialist I'm still not a serious specialist But I knew a lot of serious specialists and more importantly I knew a lot of Syrians I had some personal family ties relatives from Syria

But more importantly I'd gotten to know the country and I really cared about what was going on there And I noticed that there was practically no space to cover it in any of the mainstream press It's a complicated story by the time we checked in this was already six eight months into the protests I could tell that it was a highly Consequential story with very low levels of comprehension

So here was come as a consequence and here was comprehension and I've never seen such a vast gap I also have this feeling that as a global press pool We had failed coverage of the Iraq War and not just at the beginning

But toward the end when we were still there and we had stopped paying attention So I figured if we stopped paying attention to Iraq as an American press pool Generally speaking there was a drop-off in coverage if we weren't paying attention when we were there we were Practically lost when it came to Syria, which was already a very complicated story

So I took a pause from television Actually it all started when I I did sort of product development without realizing it I drew in my Personal notebook, you know, what would be the ultimate story page for Syria if you tried to put a roof over a story What would it look like and that was because I had read Jane McGonigal's book reality is broken

They left a huge impact on me and she talked about user experience in such a novel way It's such an accessible way that it got me thinking about the user experience of everything What was the user experience of the party? I just went to what was the user experience of my ride on the subway?

And she had this concept of and I don't know if it's hers or if she was just citing it the concept of pause X POS X the positive experience of something so I started thinking of how do I enhance? The user experience of the Syria story in a way that Enhances pause X makes it more accessible makes it more of a learning journey

So I drew in my notebook what I thought would be the ideal story page for Syria I started showing it to everyone I knew and there was a lot of interest but my industry couldn't really see it So, you know, it's a great idea, but we can't really see it

Okay, and and it's really hard in a way sometimes to innovate within an industry especially when it comes to new products and formats So and a lot of the foundations we spoke to early on told us we're not doing Syria So, okay, so the industry is not going to do it and so far the foundations aren't going to do it So we're gonna have to do it. So this is what we did

We found that because of this market failure in foreign news essentially We started to you know chart what was going on and document why we thought a page like this was necessary In the US at least it was a very simple equation oops For cost cutting and all sorts of commercial reasons

You're very familiar with foreign news bureaus had largely been shuttered 20 newspapers and news organizations had cut foreign bureaus Entirely now this doesn't really happen in Germany or it in Europe at large I think you just sometimes being in Europe you feel like you're closer to the world But being in the US can be quite isolating if you're following US News and US News is cutting all of its foreign bureaus

So they're starting to disappear for similar reasons full-time reporters reporting on the outside world were cut dramatically from 307 full-time correspondence to 234 by 2011 and that was still you know, there was still some Iraq war coverage then so that accounts for some of it

And as a result if you did a content analysis of what was out there in the foreign press For the United States the volume of reporting on what's happening in the world So the raw data is just not there So we charted that we made the case that essentially the result of that is mass confusion and uninformed

Societies and that as a result you found that in critical moments and we saw this last year in Critical moments like the US debate over whether to strike Syria last year you had 45 percent of Americans saying that they didn't even know enough about Syria

To have an opinion on whether to intervene the US is a country that has a very low bar for having an opinion and still its effect and still 45% of Americans couldn't formulate an opinion based on what they knew of the world

So this is what we did and this was you know about 18 months ago. We launched Syria deeply We thought we should go one story with one landing page with the best possible user experience of information It was basically a content architecture

exercise we took every type of information we thought was useful about this story and Designed it got a got a great UX guy to take literally rip that page out of my notebook and create What was this was the beta version? We've got we just want relaunched you can see it at Syria deeply org and the idea here was to be completely ego-free

There is no anchor person of Syria deeply We if there's something good out there that is on someone else's website Will we link to it if there's great reporting from Syrians who would normally be considered fixers or helpers We let them write in Arabic and then we translate and publish, you know

We do everything to produce high fidelity information on what's happening in the conflict at least whatever we can grasp Because there are crazy cool things you can do with this information The least we can do is start by putting it all on in one place So that was the first thing let's put a roof over this and let's optimize for the user experience of the aha moment

To the greatest extent possible and let's be ego-free and collaborate with other news organizations So we had all sorts of cool stuff background sections We thought you know since news is adult education. We should help people understand the basics

So we had who's who the timeline of events understanding the key dynamics international Participation in this conflict. So if you're coming to the page for the first time you can digest all that stuff We had data maps of casualty counts and refugee flows to other countries we did Google Hangouts because I believe that I as a reporter who have the privilege of calling up pretty much anyone and asking for 30 minutes of their time and then putting this much of

It in a news report I would rather unlock that and have the whole conversation as a Google Hangout and let anyone who's wonky enough like I am To be interested watch all 30 minutes of that interview and then select from it as needed for the other pieces of content

It was we had a fantastic time with that and a really great user response we had Google news boxes and Twitter feeds of hand-picked folks that we thought would be useful to watch because as long as I Find you know, as long as you sequester different types of information people will understand that it's distinct You know, our original reporting is not the same fidelity as any one tweet

But collectively watching those tweets has a very high value It has a predictive effect and it's more comprehensive than any one news outlet You know that already, but I thought it was useful to put it on the page So the impact was that we functionally hacked the news cycle. And what do I mean by that?

We were able to become an engine for covering this story and then we found lots of news organizations Eager and willing to use our reporting to either go out and duplicate it or quote us or carry our pieces We're Creative Commons licensed So we were built for that but as a result to whatever extent we could and I'm not saying we change it overnight

We were able to have a discernible impact on how people see and engage and grasp and cover and publish Anything about this conflict that we thought was worth paying attention to Now this is the most uncomfortable part of my presentation because I have to like show you how people said nice things about us

And that makes me a little uncomfortable But I think it's important because we really thought we were going to labor in obscurity I was pretty sure I was and I was told I was basically taking on a career killer by putting aside a really Valuable job in television to build a website. I think that was my mother talking actually you left television to build a website

Yes, that is what I did So that's actually when we launched the thing that people picked up on most like what? And our industry again really didn't get it So the fact that then people came around and started saying really nice things on One hand really doesn't matter on the other hand was really instructive and I think just gave us a lot more courage to bet

On ourselves the next time around even if they don't say nice things at the end So nice things, thank you time nice things nice. Thanks fast company Nice things. Oh this matters because when it did come time for that national debate over whether to strike. It's really awkward picture

MSNBC and others put us out. There's only one I got there's only one they give you gave me so but it's an illustrative because When it came time to have that national debate we were able to serve as a resource. They were able to wheel us out Literally and Put us out there into the public domain to feed in whatever we had learned whatever data we had captured as a sort of

Institutional living memory of what had happened in this conflict that now suddenly we all have to care about for 10 days and Then essentially the notion that technology can yes Revolutionize the way we explain something the way we engage something the fact that there wasn't enough real estate on television or even on

Page and the newspapers except for f11 to talk about what's going on here. We have infinite real estate I don't need to press that point here, but I think it's really the driver of filling in the blanks so that became our calling card we cover what's missing we cover what matters and

We're not out to do this to change anything except accessibility of information So With that come on now all these nice things people said thank you Thank you

But the impressive thing was how many news outlets ended up picking up the coverage? Which speaks to the point of being able to hack how people engage this kind of information? And that was the greatest point of impact as far as we're concerned Secretary of State John Kerry did a Google Hangout hang out with us We roped in the New York Times and we basically had 38 minutes of conversation on YouTube

Before he went off to Geneva to negotiate the now Somewhat wayward nuclear chemical weapons disarmament deal with Russia It was a 38 minutes of State Department time and that was really valuable We again were able to crack open the eggshell of an interview that would have otherwise had this much less than 38 minutes on

even cable television So the way we see the world now is through the lens of complex issues because as soon as we launched Syria deeply literally that day People came to us asking. Can you do Congo deeply and Catalunya deeply and Nigeria deeply et cetera, et cetera. So we started grouping them up

I see them as species level issues What are the issues that affect us as a species that are frankly? Already difficult to capture in a single story in a single 800 word article But are even more difficult to cover when whole topics are dropping off the edge of the news desk

Because we don't have the money to cover them. So we group them into Geographics Congo deeply Myanmar deeply Pakistan deeply I personally feel that conflict zones and states in transition need extra attention They need consistent coverage. So a page is actually a good way to go

Strategic issues like poverty deeply nuclear disarmament deeply and Science technology and public health. I know that's a big bucket But we need a bucket to put these in people talk to us about everything from oceans deeply to Alzheimer's deeply and we've just announced That the next one we're doing and we are doing this slowly so that we get it right and we don't rush

Slow startup is what we're doing Is gonna be Arctic deeply Because the Arctic is an issue that friends of ours who are expert in the issue came to us and said It has all the same problems as Syria. It's not getting coverage. It's extremely consequential and no one really comprehends what's going on

So the idea for us we built a two by two matrix Of course and on one axis was the need for information and on the other axis was the opportunity for impact I didn't put it in the presentation. I will next year. I promise so we looked at issues and we charted out issues

And we got even more granular on what those two things mean But we looked for issues that have a high need for information and a high Opportunity for impact and I felt that Arctic was one of them and it's a really critical time It's a bellwether for global warming and we thought that it would be a good one to take on. Oh Thank you

So the goal here I feel like I missed something 10, okay So for every deeply we are building a teach deeply So we had a lot of social studies teachers in America tell us that they're using Syria deeply in the classroom to teach their students

At grade 7 8 9 10 11 12 What's going on in the world what's going on with Syria and when we presented to the National Association of Social Studies teachers They said can you please do teach Afghanistan next because we have a lot of students whose parents are deployed in Afghanistan, and we can't explain why

Because when the news fills the public the teachers can't teach the students So we actually had to step in and try to hack that as well. It's very easy. It's an easy hack because Right now every teacher that in the u.s. Who wants to teach their students. What's up? Literally Constructed on their own and there are a lot of services and there there's accessibility

but money Ends up being the barrier because there are two types of schools schools with money and schools without money and the schools with money have access To the world and the schools without money don't so if you you know A lot of services are producing this kind of stuff But charging teachers $200 per lesson plan around such and such topic and that's fine if you're building a business model

But it's not fine if you're optimizing for the number of teachers who put this in front of the number of students So I think for frankly media in a way has an optimization problem content maybe has an optimization problem and that's when you have to pause and ask yourself why you're doing what you're doing and

If standing in front of a TV camera is achieving that or if building something new is a better way forward So that is how we're keeping our commitment to the story. We've spent 18 months as a startup not scaling Because I care about Syria we kept so much pressure so early to oh my gosh You could blank blank blank with this you could grow this way with that. You could revolutionize this with that

I don't care I Care about getting it right on Syria and I know that when we get it right on Syria We will be able to scale it much more sustainably to everything else grow fast seems to be this weird startup like Default

But it wouldn't work for us So I really had to slow down the train and that like I stopped drinking coffee actually that helped But like you had to do everything possible to stay true to what you were building in the first place So that's our story, but it's not ours alone We were approached by Columbia University to study this phenomenon that we became part of

So at the Tao Center for digital journalism, we've been fellows Studying in specific the single subject news model and it again It's not just us you have incredible people who came before us everyone from Politico clearly grew up to be very big to Tehran Bureau to

Arconect to crime watch homicide watch they do all of the crime tracking in the city of Washington, DC So what we found is that we are part of this broader trend toward hyper topical publishing Vertical news as a whole and especially salient. We're part of this phenomenon of

journalists becoming entrepreneurs Maybe because the media industry isn't doing R&D or product development the way other industries are doing but it's become a fascinating Space for that reason alone. You see a lot of incumbents Learning from the startups that are publishing vertically

So yes politico but now other news outlets really taking a second look at how they publish verticals and how they do or don't invest in the Story page and that's part of the impact here, but it's also Led people like me to speak in front of people like you because as journalists become entrepreneurs

They face a very daunting challenge of fusing newsroom skills with startup skills Maintaining everything we need to maintain for editorial credibility and Quality of content with lean startup methodology the capacity to manage the capacity to project manage the capacity to self

Manage these things are not inherent to being a journalist. We're actually kind of a basket case culture I think it's been a really good discipline to put those two together But there are a lot of us and like the teachers were all kind of laboring alone So the Columbia study was a lot about learning the best practices of what journalists are doing in this space

The startup newsroom is often hyper topical because a journalist will break away to start something in the domain They know best. That's why news deeply starts with Syria deeply, etc, etc I really encourage you to watch this to read up to

See if you have a passion point and if someone is publishing around your passion point because They'll probably be your new first place to go in the morning, but separately and independently You know, I hope I hope this is something that inspires in a way of rethink Around the user experience of what you think, you know

How can it change? How can it be better? What are you optimizing for and how do you design for what you're optimizing for even if your industry thinks you're nuts? Thank you

Thank you very much. I think we have one question We have a few minutes left so are there any questions your chance, okay, yeah Thank you, are you planning something like NSA deeply or privacy deeply we've thought about privacy deeply

It's again. It's not something I know It's not my thing So it usually happens and it should probably happen more systematically that people who know it best Don't have a platform in a lot of cases People who know something well and feel like it's missing from the news cycle. Just build it themselves in other cases

They come to us and say listen, I'm expert in X. Let's make it make this make platform happen apropos to our last speaker We were approached about robotics because robotics and AI are moving fast further faster than our

Conversation about them basically, so it's been on our mind, but it hasn't been our thing. So it hasn't been triggered just yet Okay So it seems like I'm having a micro. So I I think it's a great project It's really amazing what you've built up and I totally appreciate it. I think we need more people like you

It's it's really inspiring what you say Just from a business point of view I'm wondering how do you plan on financing this or are you already earning money with that? Because basically that's the problem that people are not willing to pay for that, right? So I was wondering about your ideas and that we are revenue positive. We were revenue positive in our first year

and we were revenue positive largely because people loved our design and then think tanks and institutions and Universities asked us to build things for them based on our design. So we are alternate revenue stream was around

Sort of tech and design driven consulting So we've built other people's systems for convening people around a single issue. So that's how we kept the lights on And that was our business model to begin with because it was only thing we could see initially Single subject models and this is part of our paper We've published the preliminary results if you search for the single subject news

Just search single subject news and Columbia our preliminary report will come up and then we're publishing a longer one later It's here. And what we found is that publishers who go deep on a single topic have more than a few revenue Revenue streams available to them and right now it's been done ad hoc

This is why we're publishing the report because every startup is you know And they range from one guy who's obsessed with something and doing it on the side of his day job To a team like ours where we have six people dedicated to maintaining this site Everyone is reaching for the revenue that is closest within reach for some people. It's live events for others. It's

Membership and member services. So how do you hear that $10 and it's often not subscription because for as a startup They don't want to block themselves off very few of them instituted paywalls over time But some did North Korea news did a few others, right, but there are a lot of options

So those are the kinds of things they're doing live events actually have the fullest But I'll tell you what they're not doing they're not doing traditional ad revenue because they have found it more Worthwhile to obviously not to monetize traffic but to monetize engagement so not to monetize content but to monetize community and

What you offer to that community and that's part of a bigger trend within the news world and that's Noticeable within the industry numbers that the Pew Center just published in their state of the media report state of the news report Would they call it alternative revenue or? Audience revenue as opposed to advertising revenue. So everything you can derive frankly from providing a service to the audience

Thank you. So whether that is a live event or a stream of Monthly conference calls that are interesting that people subscribe to and then can be part of whatever it gets very creative So everything from foundation grants not surprising live events crowdfunding

Merchandising North Korea news made a whole deck of cards around like Kim Jong-il or something, you know, but it worked Earned revenue so external projects like we're doing that's you Shahidi's model We borrowed their business model They were early partners where you have an external projects team and that funds the house projects that you incubate

Subscriptions and premium models and then markets and job boards There's an education news site called chalk beat in the United States that found that there's such a strong talent Demand for teachers that if they put a job board next to their education news site

They were able to make significant revenue from that. So it's really audience derived revenue It does require some R&D but there's more hope in that space and there's more Revenue for quality content than I think we've ever really realized Thank you very much Lara, thank you applause