In this episode, co-hosts Micki Maynard and Mark Remillard spend some time talking with long-time technology journalist and journalism professor, Dan Gillmor. They discuss the complexities of covering technology as a business journalist and explore the implications of technology in daily life, including the control of data, the impact of net neutrality, and the rise of centralized tech giants like Amazon and Taco Bell. The conversation touches on the potential future implications of automation and artificial intelligence on employment and society.
Transcript
[Intro Music]
Micki Maynard: How to Cover Money: Tips from Top Journalists.
Mark Remillard: Today on How to Cover Money: The big picture of covering technology.
Dan Gillmor: There are some trends in technology itself that absolutely demand more and more nuanced and more thorough examinations.
Maynard: Hello and welcome to the Reynolds Center podcast. We’re coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. We’re based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Micki Maynard, Director of the Reynolds Center, and with me is our co-host, Mark Remillard. He’s a Cronkite alum and a reporter and anchor at KTAR News. Hello Mark!
Remillard: Hi Micki. Today we bring you Series 2, Episode 4 of How to Cover Money and we’re doing something a little bit different this time. We’re gonna spend the next two episodes talking to one of the country’s best known technology journalists.
Maynard: Mark and I had a great conversation at the Reynolds Center with Dan Gillmor. He’s been a newspaper journalist, a blogger, an author. Dan is someone who thinks deeply about everything that’s going on in the tech world and the way that it’s being covered by journalists. So in this episode, we’re going to look at the big picture of where tech is today, and then next time, Dan will offer some specific tips for anyone who’s writing or broadcasting about tech.
Remillard: Yeah, technology is certainly exciting, but it can be also daunting to watch. Things are changing literally every single second. We asked Dan about what technology is doing to our daily lives.
Gillmor: There are pretty dramatic implications for a world that is hyper connected in that way, where the control of the data being generated from that is not in the hands of the people who are using these various everything’s. So that’s something that journalism starting to pick up on. Needs to wake up in a more general sense, because it’s coming faster than people understand.
Remillard: So this is like the big fuss with the terms and agreements that you see like nobody ever reads these things. You go on a social network, you sign up for any new piece of technology, basically any program, and you get these terms of agreements, and very few people ever read them. And then we get what happened a few years ago with Instagram and Facebook, where Instagram changed their terms of agreement, basically saying any “Anything you post on our social network, we have the right to use it any way we want.”
Maynard: Right. There was a big fuss over that. And I actually, I’ve been one of the early users of Instagram, and I’d built up quite a following. And when that happened, I actually closed down my Instagram account. And obviously a lot of people fussed too and so I think they backed off of the idea of “We own your photos and can do anything that we want with them.” And so recently, I returned to Instagram for a couple of reasons. First of all, I’m really interested in visual media, and I love seeing people’s pictures. Second, Instagram is now being used by public figures to communicate. It’s being used by baseball teams. It’s a place to go for legitimate sources of information, and so if anybody wants to follow me on Instagram, I’m MichelineMaynard, and what are you?
Remillard: I’m just Mar Remillard.
Maynard: Okay, so we’re both on Instagram. But I think the bigger point here is that tech is covered in a couple different ways, and one of them is by getting little bits of information. So somebody puts up an Instagram photo, the tech people all go and cover that, and one of the things that Dan told us was that it’s really important for people who cover tech to step back from that constant feed of little bits of info and try to look at the bigger picture.
Gillmor: People in technology, journalists must be asking about this concentration of power that’s going on, a recentralization and control of what was supposed to be a massively distributed, decentralized Nirvana that was conceived in the personal computer revolution and started to bear fruit in the early days of internet and is now in some real jeopardy. That goes to whether innovation and freedom of expression are widely distributed or decided by a few centralized powers. That’s a tech story.
Remillard: That’s a huge tech story right now going on. And net neutrality, I think, is kind of what he’s getting at there, is this idea of centralized places that everybody goes to on the web. I mean, nearly everybody, when they log on the web, goes to Google. A lot of people buy their retail things from Amazon and these big companies and and they have become such a go to that there’s a big concern that these are becoming just these massive, he said, centralized powers that are, how do you dismantle that? If they become invasive, or things like that that I think he’s talking about, or controlling, and have these fast lanes?
Maynard: We had a story recently on businessjournalism.org, our website, about Taco Bell and how Taco Bell is about to get into delivering food. They don’t just want to make tacos anymore. They want to be everywhere that their customers are. So they want to bring Taco Bell to your house. They want to bring Taco Bell to your street corner. They are literally about 6100 outlets now. They’re going to add 2000 in the United States. They’re developing Taco Bell outlets that are in shipping containers. So if they want to do a Taco Bell pop-up, they can come to your to your street corner, literally, or your fair or whatever you want. And so Taco Bell is kind of modeling itself after Amazon, which was supposed to be a bookseller, and now it sells and delivers anything you can imagine, including groceries. So here we have a fast food chain, a bookstore chain, we have a search engine, we have these things that were created to do something else, and are now the law of unintended consequences, becoming these powerhouses in our lives. And I think one of the ones that we would all agree about is Apple.
Remillard: And speaking of Apple, I mean, we’ve heard so much news about them recently, specifically about the Apple Watch, which is now on sale. And really, anything that Apple does gets covered extensively. You hear about it before it happens. People live blog and tweet about it at the press conferences, and they do tons of reports about it after the fact and analyzing it and what it’s going to do, all their features. Dan had a few things to say about this kind of beast that everyone’s feeding constantly.
Gillmor: Product launches are like press conferences in Washington. They’re ways to fill space. And for the people who want to be quoted, they’re a tool to sell products, people, ideas, whatever. But they’re journalism that’s not very far removed from public relations or stenography, and I’m not a big fan of stenography as journalism. In many cases, going deeper means to listen and ask questions oneself about, “Well, what’s in it for me?” As as I’m the reader of what you’re talking about, what’s in it for me, why do I care? I think that’s a really great question that journalists ought to be constantly answering.
Maynard: As we’ve talked about on the podcast. You know, if you are covering this regularly, you are up to speed, up to the minute, literally when you walk into that press conference on what’s been said. So what you should be doing is listening for exactly what Dan said, listening for what I call the “light bulb moments.” So you’ve it’s like being a political reporter and hearing the stump speech over and over and over again, and suddenly the candidate diverts from the stump speech. If you’re not listening, it’ll go by. If you are listening, that’ll jump out at you. Because what we’re seeing with these tech companies is that they aren’t just introducing new products. They are trying to get deeper into your daily life. This isn’t just Apple hoping you’ll buy a watch. This is Apple hoping that it is so indispensable to you that it’s everywhere, from your desktop to the seat back pocket when you fly, to your watch, to what’s on your wrist.
Gillmor: Things like surveillance, which is at the heart not just a political story, but a technology story. They include a related thing that’s related in part, which is what people are calling the “Internet of Things,” which is the concept that and the reality that pretty much everything we touch in the physical world is going to be embedded with intelligence via micro-processors memory, and we’ll all be connected to other networks at high speeds and the data being created from all that will be available to lots of people.
Remillard: And I think that when you realize that we have this wearable technology now. We have things that are on us all the time, that are constantly refreshing and searching for data and creating things all the time. There’s a big concern about those things. From your Apple Watch to your phone, your tablet, from another topic that Dan mentioned to us about surveillance, privacy, these are things. These are big concerns with these products. And kind of goes back to also not reading the terms of agreement, and even seeing what you know, what kind of information you’re sharing every second of every single day, even while you sleep and your phone is on next to you on the charger. These are things that are really big concerns for this industry, that people that need to be covered that. And I think this is a large part of what he was getting at.
Maynard: This is something that I want journalists to do. I want journalists to tell our audience, or inform our audience, about what’s going on. For example, all the time when you download a new app, it says, “blah, blah, would like to know your location.” It doesn’t need to know your location, not for your safety or anything like that. No, GPS is one thing. Yes, it needs to know your location. I just downloaded a new app that allows me to do radio broadcasts. They don’t need to know my location. They want to know my location, but essentially, I’ve just turned that off. And I think as journalists, we need to be telling our public you know, you’re giving away this information. I just saw something on jalopnik.com about car dealers that are now requiring people to do credit checks before they can do a test drive. Well, when a car dealer does a credit check of you, they generally need your social security number. When they have your social security number, they can find out all kinds of stuff about you. And so this, and that’s low tech. Now, what Dan has been talking about is high tech or really sophisticated technologies. And one of the things that he was telling us is that there’s some enormous implications of all this coming up.
Remillard: Yeah, it’s kind of like covering like the defense industry or something like that. It’s such a big, global, important story, it’s hard to not get lost in all the tiny parts of it. And this is not a story that’s just about technology. This is not, this is involving finance, politics, everything, all these things are wrapped up in this that affects everyone and these have some real, fundamental, real world effects.
Gillmor: Robotics and artificial intelligence, may well, I’m not a Luddite, and I’m not, I think it’s important to recognize that we’ve had revolutions of technology in the past, but where people worried that it would destroy employment, that no one would, there would be all these jobs lost and nothing to replace, and that hadn’t happened yet. This may be in the time it does. I think the jury’s out on this. But are we even remotely prepared for the possibility that there will be no real need for employment from the point of view of the capitalists, the people who own everything? That could go one of several ways. One is that we have a world where people are living and doing things that they love to do, as opposed to have to do where everyone is provided for. You know, kind of an idyllic notion. More likely is a world where we return to the pre-industrial age notion of serfs who live at the pleasure of the owners of the proper of the land.
Maynard: I think about this a lot because I’ve seen what automation has done to the auto industry. And when you go in the most modern assembly plants, you have rows and rows and rows of machinery, and they’re staffed by maybe one person for every 30 machines. Back in the old days, an assembly plant traditionally had like about 5000, 6000 workers, and now some of these plants are doing the same work with 800 people. And, you know, you cross off those people on a chart, but there are still people out there that need to be employed and they need to have work.
Remillard: Yeah. I mean, this is a bleak picture that he paints a little bit there. I mean, he says, well, it could go one of two ways. It could be idyllic, and, you know, and we have this great technology, like, how much we love when a new product makes our life easier, but at the same time, is it also replacing the job of someone else? And that, that’s a very real possibility, this kind of, I don’t know, 1984-ish, like Terminator future kind of thing, where you have these, just this, this machines has basically replaced everything, and that’s a really concerning thing. And Dan wouldn’t really make predictions about which one he really sees the future going to but he definitely says that as these things are coming into place and future, and the time is rolling on, and technology is becoming more and more a part of our lives. This is really leaving the door wide-open for journalists and the need for this coverage.
Gillmor: I’m reluctant to predict things, because I don’t feel smart enough. There are some trends in technology itself that absolutely demand more and more nuanced and more thorough examinations and the kind of coverage that is and that holds to account people working in these fields, and holds to account people who are learning through the journalism. Because a lot of the decisions we’re going to make in the next 10 to 20 years and have been making in the last 10 to 20 years are going to set a path for humanity that will be very, very hard to dislodge once it’s firmly in place.
Remillard: That’s about as far as we could get them to predict. But you know, once these things get in it’s really hard to change. And so those are some big thoughts to leave us on, and so next time, we’ll have Dan come back to give us some tips on getting started in covering tech and how journalists can get involved in this and get a part of this coverage and a lot of the ethical dangers that they’ll face as well.
Maynard: I hope we’re not scaring people, but I think it’s important to look at this in more of the context of what it means for society and less of the context of what it means for what’s on your wrist.
Support for How to Cover Money comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Visit our website, businessjournalism.org. You can sign up for our daily newsletter, Must Read Money stories which will give you story ideas that you can cover wherever you are. You can also see a calendar of all of our workshops and find information on how to enter the Barlett and Steele Awards for investigative business journalism. For Mark Remillard, I’m Micki Maynard. Now, start thinking like a business reporter.
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