Katherine Boyle: evaluation

Transcript context

…Clearly, you still have such love and reverence for the world and for The Post. The world we're in today, especially with Andreessen Horowitz, it does feel like in some ways, they're on the other side and that there's like a battle going on now, specifically a battle between the old world media and technology. The world of media has completely changed since I was a journalist. There wasn't a sense that you were at war when I was a journalist. I think that, of course, changed with a number of things, like everything from Trump being elected to the types of people that are going into journalism, even the idea of what journalism means. A lot of the people that I worked with when I was a journalist had this very old school view. It's talked about a lot. It's the, are you reporting the facts or are you an activist? There are a lot of people who will point blank and say, now, they're going into journalists to change the culture, to change the world, they are activists. They will use that word. They will say, I am an activist. I was part of a generation of people who would have bristled at that. There were people when I was at The Washington Post that wouldn't vote in elections because they didn't believe that they should be voting in elections if they were covering certain stories. I had such admiration for that, that if you are going to be the person who is on the sidelines of the culture, reporting on the culture, that you should really do your best to take a neutral stand. I took a lot of pride in that as well, covering things that were uncomfortable for me. That was something that I actually revered about the old-style view of journalism that I think has completely transformed and changed in terms of the people who are now at the forefront. I think there are reasons for that. I think a lot of it is Twitter. I was pre-Twitter actually becoming what it is when I was at The Washington Post. There was still a view that social media should be second to our actual reporting. If you read the recent reports from the New York Times about how they're trying to kind of curtail their Twitter use, because they've realized that it's completely changed how they report, I think is the biggest trend in media. I can talk about another one of our investment, Substack, which I think has benefited from this trend. People are now brands. They are identities. The individual journalist is ultimately more powerful than the institution. I think that that's just one of many trends, where institutions are collapsing in individuals. You all know this. Look at what you've built. Individuals will capture an audience and be more important than an institution now. When I talk about being a former journalist, I'm really talking about the Stone Age. It was 10 years ago, but that type of journalism does not exist anymore. It's so funny. I feel the same way thinking back on my time at The Wall Street Journal, even though I was on the business side not writing. I know exactly what you're talking about with that style of journalists. The people who were the managing editors, the deputy managing editors, the section editors at the journal at the time, they were those people. Yes, it's so different than today.…

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