Elon Musk funds Trump — and owns Twitter. What does that mean?
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And what is actually going on with these acquisitions this year, especially in the AI space? Why are so many big players in tech deciding not to acquire and instead license tech and hire away co-founders? The answer, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than it seems. You'll hear all that and more this month on Decoder with Nilay Patel, presented by Stripe. You can listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That's me. I'm the chief correspondent at Business Insider. And we need to do a tiny bit of preamble today because I'm recording this late in the day on Tuesday, November 5th. The earliest you're going to hear this will be the morning of Wednesday, November 6th. So I am not going to have timely election content for you on this episode. If you want that, check back next week, I hope.

But I do want to give you some thoughts about politics and media and tech. So I chatted with Charlie Worzel, the awesome Atlantic writer. He's been guiding us through a lot of this stuff for years. We love him. And for this episode, I specifically wanted to talk about Elon Musk and Twitter and what it means for Donald Trump's most prominent backer to also own a big social media platform. So we have that discussion. You will like it.

On the other hand, maybe today is not the day you want to hear politics in your podcast. So I get it. Some days I don't want that either. We got you here as well. The second half of this podcast is about what we used to call newspapers. One newspaper in particular, that's the San Francisco Standard, a three-year-old publication, online only, no actual paper involved. It is owned by billionaire Mike Moritz. And every time I go out to the Bay Area, the people I talk to are reading it.

I wanted to know more about it, so I talked with Griffin Gaffney. He is the CEO publisher of The Standard, and he has been in media for three years. You see the connection there. We talk about what he's learning on the job running a paper slash online publication. We talk about how The Standard might make a profit one day because it's not.

And we talk about what it's like to have a billionaire owner funding those losses. That could be a fraught discussion. If you've been following what the likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Benioff have been up to recently. In any case, I think it's pretty interesting. I think you're going to like it. We've got two conversations in one podcast. You can listen to them in whatever order you want. I do not judge. I don't judge about that. Here's me and Charlie Worzel. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe.

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Yes, the thing you're listening to right now. Well, it's increasingly being produced directly by companies like venture capital firms, investment funds, and a new crop of creators who one day want to be investors themselves.

And what is actually going on with these acquisitions this year, especially in the AI space? Why are so many big players in tech deciding not to acquire and instead license tech and hire away co-founders? The answer, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than it seems. You'll hear all that and more this month on Decoder with Nilay Patel, presented by Stripe. You can listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home.

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I'm delighted to be rejoined by Charlie Warzel, who has been on this show many times before. Now he's at The Atlantic, writes really smart stuff all the time. You should go subscribe to The Atlantic just so you can read Charlie alone. Welcome, Charlie. Thank you.

Just for the record, we're recording this around four o'clock Eastern time, Tuesday afternoon. So who knows what has happened between now and when you listen to this podcast. But I did want to spin forward and try to imagine what the world looks like November, December, January of next year about the stuff that you write about all the time, sort of tech and politics, how they intersect.

And there's one super obvious thing that I think none of us, very few of us have spent enough time on. You wrote about recently. It's this just basic idea that Elon Musk, world's richest man, owns the thing that used to be called Twitter.

And he is also, I think, the biggest backer for Donald Trump, certainly maybe the most prominent backer for Donald Trump. How should we think about the world's richest man owning a platform and also campaigning for Donald Trump at the same time? Oh, man. So I think it's... I think we've talked about it, like, you know, the media has talked about it a fair bit, but I still don't think enough has been made about the fact that there were, like, years of...

tech executives in front of Congress and just, you know, this big sort of, you know, conservative Jim Jordan-led ethics or, you know, whatever investigation against the big tech companies for perceived biases and, like, slights, right? Like, some of these things were like, hey, you know, we think...

We can tell that the culture there is, you know, is going to censor conservative thought and just true, true outrage about the perceived bias. It was an article of faith that big tech was biased against conservatives. And that also, obviously, that this was a bad thing, because even if these things weren't

weren't part of the government, they still should sort of have non-bias. Even though these are privately owned platforms, they should still be available to political thought across the spectrum. This was an important idea. Yeah. I mean, like truly five, six, seven, eight years of this as, and something that to be also very fair is,

Democrats took seriously, like the ref working worked in a sense, right? And tech companies took this very seriously. And then you have Elon Musk sort of barging into the fray. And there's no perceived sense of bias, as you've just laid out. He is...

You know, the number one funder, he's going to, you know, we're recording this on Tuesday afternoon. He's going to spend election night tonight, reportedly, with Donald Trump. There is, you know, like a true...

Advocacy. He's running the get out the vote campaign. Right. Yes, he's paying. He's not even just throwing money at it. He's actually organizing the Trump election. Cutting like, you know, million dollar golf checks to swing state voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan and etc. So I just think that needs to be said that the silence on behalf of people like

Jim Jordan or the Judiciary Committee, whatever, in the House. I just think it's worth pointing out that if you were even remotely concerned about bias in a nonpartisan way, that might be at least of interest to you. So hypocrisy noted, and we'll underline it a couple of times, but beyond hypocrisy,

Does it matter? Why does it matter if Elon Musk Trump fan is also Elon Musk Twitter owner? What does it mean?

How does it affect what Twitter does and doesn't mean today? From what you can prove, right? There's a lot that you can't prove and there's a lot of innuendo you can, you know, insinuation that you can do to say the algorithms have changed to favor conservative content. There's been like the Washington Post did a look into this, just how Republican and Democratic lawmakers are.

How much they're tweeting, how visible their tweets are, how many followers they're gaining. There seems to be an imbalance there in terms of favoring Republican lawmakers. People like myself have done an experiment with a Twitter onboarding system just to try to see if you were coming to the platform and knew what Twitter would be showing you. And it was honestly crazy.

Pretty, pretty stark. When you're a new user and you show up on Twitter, what do you get? I created an account and said that I was only interested in gaming and technology and sports. And it asked me to follow this whole battery of accounts, many of them, you know, Elon Musk and the Charlie Kirks of the world, whatever.

And all I followed was ESPN's main account. Just all I want is sports scores. They said, here's some politics. He said, no, thank you. Just sports for me. Don't show me politics. Just this is what I want. And because I'd only followed one account, it populated me right into the For You feed on my new Twitter account. And Elon Musk was the first thing that I saw. Some battleground state political tweet followed by...

Donald Trump, libs of TikTok, Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, the far-right influencer, just down the line. And some of the stuff was truly a little out there. I wasn't well-versed enough in the internet far-right lore to understand what I was seeing. But this just goes to say, it's definitely... There are parts of Twitter, whether it's intentional or not, that are...

really pushing a specific type of follower and just generally the issue of politics, right? Let's just even step back and just say it's really asking you to engage with politics. Right. And the Wall Street Journal, I should say, did the same experiment you talked about. They did it with more controls and across multiple states. And, you know, it wasn't just a casual thing, but basically replicated what you found, which is you show up, you say, I'm not explicitly not interested in politics. What do you got for me, Twitter? And they give you

politics broadly and really right-wing politics, starting with Elon Musk. And so this is all kind of a long-winded way to say that I think why we ought to care about this, why people ought to care about this, is because it's a communications platform, that it's not open source in terms of its algorithms. You can't audit their algorithms. But also Twitter has been for a very long time, ever since the straight-line

reverse chronological feed got replaced by an algorithmic feed, it is one that, like many other platforms, is making decisions on what you can see.

So the ownership of that, the value of that, the political interference or not, is always noteworthy. And I don't think that from the social media era, we've certainly seen a Silicon Valley preference in, let's say, the mid-2010s for the traditional Democratic Party or something like that. But we've never seen...

That is always been Twitter's thing. It's always been Twitter's thing.

very good at that. That's where the lawmakers come to, you know, make their pronouncements. It's where celebrities go. It's where a lot of journalists still are. And, you know, there is a fair amount of influence. Like when you look at what $44 billion bought Elon Musk, it bought him a ton of influence. I mean, you could argue he is important right now in a way that he couldn't have been

two and a half years ago, just simply because he is the owner. I mean, we've gone back and forth over the years, sort of overstating Twitter's influence and arguing that it should win the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing democracy to the Middle East and then saying, actually, it's a hell site. Actually, it's a hell site, but Elon Musk shouldn't own it because he's going to wreck it. Actually, he's wrecked it. No, actually, all the journalists are still there. We go back and forth.

So we can just say at least it exists. People still use it. I still use it grudgingly because there's people that are there that I want to reach. But does it matter if it's owned by...

someone whose politics I don't like. Again, I can still use it to communicate with people I care about. My curated feed seems to be undamaged by whatever Elon is doing in the For You feed. Can those two things exist at the same time? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's hard always to talk about this because it's very easy to be framed or be perceived as being, you know,

against the idea of free speech, right? Or saying like, you know, we need to shut this down because it doesn't... We certainly aren't arguing that someone's politics should preclude them from owning a printing press or a media outlet or even a platform. Right. And I think if you look at the way that people owned media platforms before, I think there were a lot of people who in the, you know,

lead up to 2016. And after said, Fox News is a dangerous platform, or Fox News has an outsized influence in, you know, creating a MAGA narrative and helping bring Donald Trump to power or helping to program his administration, whatever it is, right? I think Elon Musk is running X in a way that is kind of akin to, you know, the way that a Roger Ailes or Rupert Murdoch, you know,

had influence over those things. It's not ever to say that, you know, we're going to pull the license for Fox News. It's that it's being run in a very political way. And one example of this, I think, that brings it away from this idea of like, oh, are his politics bad or not my politics and just kind of brings it down to the actual impact is this election integrity community that Elon Musk is

his super PAC America is pro Trump super PAC created this community and basically said, this is going to be the home on X for people to subscribe to it and then drop in any examples you see of voter fraud in the lead up to the election or on election day. And very quickly, tens of thousands of people joined and it became this repository for people

any unverifiable rumor. And, you know, some of these start out and they're like kind of harmless. They're like, hey, you know, I saw there's, you know, there's a line here and there's some people who look like they're trying to intimidate us. Okay, that's always happened, right? It very quickly became this rumor

incitement weapon, right? People sending photos of, have you seen this man? You know, we believe that he just stole ballots, et cetera. And then someone saying, okay, it's so-and-so they live here. Right. And it becomes a direct harassment target, but, but also even more broadly, uh,

It creates this sense, this unverified, rumor-filled sense that something is happening, right? It is laying the ground for an election denial situation, and it's sort of doing so at scale and in this way that Musk, who set it up, seems very happy to perpetuate. And that, I think, is...

So it's different, right? It's qualitatively different than if Twitter X on its own was just filled with this stuff and people were doing it on their own, or even if they were organized in some way to have the owner saying, spew your unverified rumors here about something that I'm politically interested in. That's meaningful. I think so. I think if Elon Musk had said, hey, guys, almost in the way that Joe Rogan just did recently and said, I endorse...

Donald Trump, right? If Elon Musk had said, yeah, that's who I am. That's who I'm supporting. X is a free speech platform. And there was like a lot of stuff that was rampant. And he was like, yeah, people could very easily and would make the case that Twitter was biased in this way. But the way that Elon Musk is running this platform at the moment, the things that he is setting up,

like this election integrity community, the things that he is sharing, the posts that he is amplifying by either commenting on them or retweeting or whatever, they have a desired intent, and that is to create this kind of confusion and set the stage for this idea that should this not go their way tonight,

something nefarious has happened. And I think that that's dangerous. I want to ask you to make a prediction that is totally irresponsible for you to ask you to make anyway, but I'm going to do it. What do you think will be more important for this election? The fact that Elon Musk, Trump supporter, owns Twitter, may or may not be changing the site to achieve his political ends, or that he's donated $160 million to the Trump campaign. What do you think matters more in the end?

Well, I don't know because the get out the vote stuff has been that some of that money has gone towards, some of that PAC money has been full of, it seems to be pretty disorganized. Seems like these little bunch of dollars on flame. Yeah, maybe not the best use of the money. I'm not sure. And I want to be clear that all of this stuff that's happening is,

on X, I don't see it in the sense of brainwashing people and all of a sudden making them randomly vote Trump. What I see is it's a poisoning of sorts of an information environment, right? It is making it more and more difficult to sort what is happening on the ground, right? By kind of creating these rumor mills and incentivizing this and not doing anything whatsoever to try to, and I'm not even talking about, you know,

censoring the post or anything, but just making sure that it's not like a prominent feature of your website. So I don't see it as him having some like influence on the outcome of the election. I see it as having an influence on the way that people are getting their information and sort of the way that it will be interpreted.

whatever happens. I think that that's the really important thing. And to be clear, regardless of how the election turns out, Elon Musk will continue to own Twitter.

Maybe he'll find himself sort of discouraged by politics and bored by it and he moves on to something else. It seems to me that now that he's got a taste for it, he's not going to give that up and that Twitter will become more and more and explicitly Elon's political views platform, which seems to be a double-edged sword if you own a platform like that. It seems that the Charlie Worzels and Peter Kafka's are less likely to hang out there in the future. And he probably knows that. Doesn't care is my guess.

Yeah, I mean, I think, too, there's this real question of if Harris wins. And I think that Twitter is actually like a great political proposition for him, right? I think it's kind of, you know, becomes this almost like resistance platform thing for him. It's a great way for him to kind of run the playbook that he's been running for the past two years. In the same way that if you put up the Murdoch's to a lie detector test, right?

Fox News is more valuable in a Harris administration than in a Trump 2.0 administration. Right. And I think that there's an element, too, of, you know, Musk could end up being the guy that the dog that caught the car. Right. And if Trump is to win, because I think if Trump becomes president again, you will inevitably have a situation or potentially, I should say, potentially have this situation where

you know, Elon Musk ends up with, you know, some unofficial or maybe quasi-official government role or something, right? Plus he's the owner of this communications platform. It's very easy to see his ego budding into Donald Trump's ego, right? In terms of, I think there's a number of people who have said, oh, you know, he's going to be the, he could be the shadow president of a Trump administration. And I think that that's,

Probably incorrect because we don't know too many things about Donald Trump for sure, other than he does not like when other people talk.

start to quote unquote manage him or feel like they are managing him. Yes. And his allies tend to have sort of a difficult time being his allies. Before I let you go, Stu, in election results, I did want to ask you about an article you wrote about a month ago, great headline called, I'm running out of ways to explain how bad this is. I want you to first of all, give me a very brief synopsis of what the piece was and then tell us what happened after you published it.

The piece was essentially a way for me to talk about what I had been seeing online over the past couple months, but really in the aftermath of the two hurricanes, the one that devastated Asheville and other areas in North Carolina and the South, and I think Milton, the one that hit in Florida, and the misinformation around them, right? These ideas that the storms were

engineered by the government to make them worse. And it was all a plan of the Biden administration to hurt- FEMA is going to take your house. Right. All the anti-FEMA stuff, which resulted in a lot of harassment of aid officials and people in the real world. I wanted to also speak to this idea of the limits of our understandings of misinformation or misinformation as a word, right? And there's this idea I think a lot of people

when they hear or say misinformation, they mean it in terms of persuasion, right? This idea that like, you're just a person going about your, you know, your day or your understanding of the world. And you see a couple of tweets and you ultimately abandon your worldview and go down the rabbit hole, right? And I think that that,

that idea of dupes, of people being dupes, it's a little infantilizing to a lot of people. And I think I wanted to communicate this idea from this scholar, Michael Caulfield, at the University of Washington, who said that misinformation isn't about persuasion necessarily. It's about keeping people in their worldview. It's like an inoculation from outside information that's

you know, that's troubling, that's dangerous, that feels like it could change your worldview. And I think that is just a really important thing to think about. And the reason why I felt like I could make that connection during this time period is because in the aftermath of Helene and in Nashville, lawmakers and just regular folks were sharing AI-generated images of people

the destruction of the city and, you know, FEMA aid failing and et cetera, and saying that they were real. And when they would get called out for not being real for sharing, you know, AI generated stuff, they would say, well, it feels real. It represents something that is real. Therefore, I'm not going to delete it. And it's truer than true. And I think that that is a bit of a departure, right? It is a sort of an order of magnitude, uh,

different than the idea of sharing some fake stuff and then getting your account deleted or whatever, or disappearing or denying or whatever. It's this idea of, it's really the Stephen Colbert truthiness idea, right? I just saw one of those today on November 5th. Someone's circulating a picture of Jamie Raskin, the Democratic lawmaker, and it says something effective like, well, even if he wins, we're never going to seat these people and we'll stop it no matter what.

And of course, it's a totally fabricated quote. And someone, Twitter has eventually pointed out that this is a made up quote. And one of the people retweeting it said, well, it's the idea. He has said it in so many words, which is wild. I think that's a real departure, right? When people are no longer saying, oh, that's not true. Oh, geez. Or, you know, it's that I don't care. And in fact, the reality that you...

to be living in is one I don't really want to live in, right? That's sort of what the admission is there. And I think that that's incredibly meaningful and concerning and not from like a pearl clutching perspective. Like this is just very real. This is just people who don't care anymore. And I think that's wild. It's a great piece. You should all go read it. You publish it. And then what happens? I think you can guess, but just even though I could guess, it's still amazing. You tell us what happened. So I was rewatching

ready for a lot of people as they tend to do to get mad about it right the content of the piece and and screenshot it and you know maybe screenshot it out of context but you know have have stuff that was gonna rightfully criticize me in whatever ways they wanted to you were gonna get dunked on you're ready for the dunking ready for the dunking as always and uh and i started instead to see

A bunch of people. Well, first there was like a screenshot. Some, a commenter, a YouTuber had screenshotted my piece and said, you know, I think, you know, this is why free speech was a mistake or something to that effect. Right. Which is not the argument of my piece at all. Nothing I can do about that. But Elon Musk and Mark Andreessen,

you know, screenshotted that or quote tweeted that and basically, you know, use that comment to criticize my article, which, you know, never makes a mention of free speech being a mistake or censoring anyone.

Do you think they knew that they were retweeting a thing that was falsely describing what your piece was about and what you were saying? I'm not really sure. And I don't mean to say this in the sense that I'm like not interested in the truth there, but I just don't think it matters. Like I think for them it was a

They basically said, oh, this is the game. The mask is off. This is what they really want. This is some fancy pants from the Atlantic who says that we Americans and people of the world can't be trusted to learn on our own. And instead, they, the ivory tower East Coast elite, are going to come down and fix it. Yes. And then shortly after that, I thought that, okay, that will be the thing that I have to deal with, right? A misinterpretation, which is also somewhat normal, right?

even though Elon Musk getting involved always makes it not normal. But then some people on, I don't know what, some message board, 4chan, somewhere, wherever, some back channel thing, created a fake screenshot of a fake headline that had the subhead of my story, but a different headline. And it was, excuse the language, but it was basically, anyone who says the words gay and retard should be put into camp by Charlie Warzel.

And then with like the very, you know, Atlantic-y like subhead that I actually wrote, which is just like misinformation is blah, blah, blah, right? Obviously not what I wrote, even remotely, like completely not. And my inbox was flooded with over a thousand at the end of the day, you know, at the end of the time period, emails from people who were absolutely furious, like tens of thousands of tweets, tweets.

People using this, you know, I did like a search for it, like reverse image search the thing to just try to see if I could figure out where it came from and just saw it all over all kinds of different message boards. Some percentage of those people probably thought it was a funny joke. Some, some, but I got this one email from- In the same way that, by the way, that like lots of people understood that J.D. Vance was not having sex with a couch. Right. Yeah. No, no. And that totally makes sense.

I did, though, get this email that kind of stopped me in my tracks and made me kind of question, like, I basically think I don't know what people know, right? Or like how I don't understand what the level of literacy is with stuff like this. And the thing that the email that kind of gave me pause was,

was this guy who said, one of my really good friends works in an intelligence agency and he's kind of gone down the far right rabbit hole. And he sent me this text and it was a text with that and said, can you believe The Atlantic published that? And he was like, oh, buddy, like, no, here's the headline. Like, can't you see it's pixelated and it's the wrong font and all this stuff? And he goes, oh, well, I don't know. Fuck The Atlantic.

And he said, this person works in a government intelligence agency was all they told me. And I was just like, whoa, that's pretty wild that like either they don't care, which makes more sense to me than they can't understand what it is. But it was another example of getting called out for something that was just like false and saying that they didn't they didn't mind. And I guess my my last thought on all of that is.

It's just I think it's really indicative of this whole, you know, of what the point of the article was, which was rather than engage with the piece, which I think was very dunkable. Like you could have called me a snowflake, you know, to the ends of the earth and I would have, you know, just had to sort of nod my head or whatever. Right. But instead they were like, no, let's just make up some crazy argument so that, you know, it's easier to dunk on him.

So there's a part two of this conversation where we'd say, okay, given this, given that there's a market failure here, the platforms are not going to self-correct for this sort of stuff. And we know that government isn't capable of really policing this stuff unless you're doing an authoritarian sort of state way. And it's certainly not on the table politically here. There is the what is there to be done about the state of this?

Luckily and unluckily, we don't have time for that conversation. We're going to come back to it. I don't know when, but we'll figure out a time to do it in the nearish, not so near, in the future, some point. Who knows what tomorrow is going to look like? Who knows what today or tomorrow looks like? Charlie Worzel, thank you for helping me get through part of Tuesday, and I will come back to you in the future. All right. Stay sane out there.

Thanks again to Charlie Wurzel. In a minute, we'll hear from Griffin Gaffney from the San Francisco Standard. But first, a word from a sponsor. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe. Payment management software isn't something your customers think about that often. They see your product, they want to buy it, and then they buy it. That's about as complex as it gets. But under the hood of that process, there are a lot of really complicated things happening that have to go right in order for that sale to go through.

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I'm here with Griffin Gaffney. He is the CEO of the San Francisco Standard. It is the thing that everyone I talk to in the Bay Area reads, which I think is a good thing. I think it's a great thing. Welcome, Griffin. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Let's explain what the Standard is to a big slice of the listenership that does not hang out in the Bay Area. We are now one of the largest local media companies in San Francisco.

You call yourself a local media company. I would say local newspaper, but you don't print a newspaper. There's a lot of baggage with those terms, like newspaper. What even is that anymore? I think news is not very comprehensive and exciting, and it doesn't really embrace all the...

fun parts of being in local media. Okay, but you cover local news. Of course. I'm going to call you a local newspaper until you force me to do otherwise. Yeah. One reason I wanted to talk to you is because whenever I go to the Bay Area, everyone says, this is really cool, I really like it. And the other is I'm always really interested in local news.

writing and ignoring it for a decade plus because everyone tries to figure out a business model for local news. No one can or the models they come up with involve anything but hiring people to cover the local area they're in. What's your approach? I think the approach is embracing that San Francisco is a global city with huge impact politically, socially, economically, and

And telling those stories to the world. And frankly, I think a lot of East Coast publishers do a better job of that. And though we started with a very, very narrow focus on local politics at a time when San Francisco was seen as...

maybe a little off the rails and providing that service to our core readership in San Francisco. And we'll continue to do that. I think there's a massive opportunity for us to be the ones that tell the story of San Francisco to the people who live there and also to the world. So that's a mission statement. Yes. And in terms of actually how you do it, I was trying to lead you to, you actually employ people to go out and report news about what's happening in the neighborhood. We do. Yeah, absolutely. How big is this F? Almost 50 people. And?

And how many of those are in editorial versus business? It's a vast majority editorial, about 35 people in the editorial staff, reporters, and editors. So you've got 35 people working to put out a publication plus 15 other people on the business side. Mm-hmm.

How's that working economically? Is that working economically? Yeah. Well, we're currently financed by my business partner, Michael Moritz. We can talk about the whole story of how I met. I don't have a news background. We're learning this all as we fly. But we'll actually be launching a metered paywall in December and a subscription product that has some other stuff in it, which you'll learn about in December, that we think will be pretty popular with our readers. We also make modest revenue now from advertising in our newsletters, on the site, and

Social partnerships. So there's a lot in there. Let's back up. Michael Moritz, billionaire? Highly so, yes. Highly so. He's funding it, so he's losing money right now. How long has the standard been up and running? We've been up for about three years. Three years funding it, losing money. How much money are you losing right now? We don't talk about that. I heard $5 million. Is that in the ballpark a year? Don't need to talk about it.

At least I asked. But you're losing money, but the plan is not to lose money forever. No. He and I share a principle that, which I've learned in my little crash course the past few years in the news industry, feels wildly optimistic that this can be a business. And the thing about Michael is not just...

what he's achieved in his venture capital career. It's that he started his career as a journalist. He understands that this takes time and that it's hard. And then you do have to be patient and you do have to understand how the news industry works. We're going to go to your history in a bit, but just to get to the news, I guess will be news. This is free now as we're speaking, but there is going to be some sort of paywall on the front of the site. Yeah. We've been pretty clear from the outset that

Michael and me and with the team and with the world that we would spend time building trust with our audience and then figure out ways to monetize the product. But one of the key assets that we have is him and the ability to experiment for a bit of time before we understand that.

So step one to building a successful local newspaper is have a billionaire fund you. It certainly helps. It helps. But again, I wouldn't just call him that. I would say he's – I, in conversation, call him one of one. I'm not aware of anyone else who has what he has, which is the experience in journalism and the commitment to doing it right mixed with the incredible –

on-the-ground experience he's had with all these massive tech companies. So maybe not replicable around the country, around the world. You need a lot of different billionaires to each fund their local newspaper. I think what we are learning can be replicated. I think that we have very special circumstances, and it's not just...

him and me and the team, the incredible team that we've assembled at the Standard. It's also the time that we got started and the place that we got started. There's a lot of things I think that are working in our favor. I want to come back to the Mike Moritz of it all, but let's just talk about the Standard and sort of what it is. Again, I asked you and you said, well, it's sort of a news brand. Yeah. It's a newspaper. You guys cover local news. Without the paper. There's crime news. Yeah. Who is the audience for the Standard?

Our core reader is about 30 to 50 years old. They live in the Bay Area. Obviously, when we have a story about San Francisco, as I said earlier, San Francisco is of interest across the globe. We get readers from all over the planet. But our core reader is in the Bay Area. They're younger. They're slightly higher income than the area average. And demographically, race, they sort of fall in the same buckets that you would see in the Bay Area. I'm picturing an upper middle class readership. Again, that's a little bit based on who I talk to when I'm out there.

there, which is a little telling on my show. That certainly is true. Yeah, that's certainly, maybe we're over-indexed on that, but we have readers across all income levels and it really depends on, and this is where you pushing me earlier on the actual local news coverage of it all, like

Certain stories are very popular with certain communities that we are serving in San Francisco. So it flexes with what we're reporting on. I kind of think of it as a newspaper for readership that lives in the Bay Area and thinks property crime is bad.

As opposed to some apologists who you'll see when there's a crime story. Well, that's just property crime. It doesn't really matter. And you guys cover property crime. You cover weird shit that happens in San Francisco that would freak people out if they didn't live in San Francisco. Like the raccoon on the bus? The dead raccoon. Top four story this week. Man tries to ride Muni with dead raccoon.

Which you can frame that a bunch of different ways. It's a crazy story. It's a look what's happening in San Francisco story. It's what's happened to this man's mental health that he thinks swinging a dead or not alive. Yeah. I don't think it was alive, no. But you click on it. Yes.

What do you think sort of – is that the sort of stuff that performs best for you, the holy shit, look what's happening to our city kind of story? Not always, no. The way I think about what we do in answering this question of the readership is to just listen to them. And by that, I don't mean we, like many publishers, have all of this audience data. We live broadcast it in the office. Reporters and editors have access to it on their computers. I do not mean look at the thing that got the most pages. And do more of that. Do more of that, yeah. And –

Which, by the way, is a pretty tried and true way to run a lot of businesses. Yeah. Do the thing that was successful again. But what I think you lose sight of in that

pursuit or that strategy is looking at your audience a little bit more holistically and asking the question like, well, what is the bigger product that we can provide to them that is actually worth paying for and is valuable? And sometimes the dead raccoon story or a viral crime story is part of what people are thinking about as they're navigating the Bay Area and they're reading the standard. And other times it's like a 2000 word essay about the mayor.

Both of those things are valuable to our audience, and I think there is no one type of content or reporting that we can do that is the thing. And again, how big is that audience? It's a few million readers a month now. A few million readers a month. Yeah.

I saw a number for Truth Social yesterday that pegged it at 4 million. So you're doing half the audience that Donald Trump is getting, which is good. Generally, though, modern web publishing, you would say that is not a sustainable business. It's small. It's not sustainable, I think, if you're looking at it as...

business model that needs to be supported by programmatic ads. I think our audience absolutely can be bigger. But in our current iteration, we don't have ambitions to have 50 million readers a month, because that would suggest that we're pushing really hard to reach a bunch of readers outside of the Bay Area. And I don't think that we have a product that serves those people today. So why would we do that?

Makes sense. And then you mentioned there's going to be a paywall. So how is that going to work? More details to come. We're not going to get into it yet. Some sort of free premium. As a classic startup, we're mere weeks away from the launch and still working on a lot of the details. Still figuring it out. You'll get some stuff for free. You're going to come to your core reader and go, we know you like this. It's time to pay up. Also, you can probably afford it.

That is not wrong. It will be priced in a way that I think for most people in the Bay Area, in our readership, is a no-brainer. But I think what's important about it too is not just having or not just asking our readers to pay for access to the site. There'll be a lot of other stuff that goes into it. Events,

promotions and partnerships with local businesses that are actually valuable and interesting to the readership that we have. And we've been experimenting with that over the last year. And the example I always bring up is we did a private chocolate and whiskey tasting at Dandelion Chocolate Factory in the Mission in San Francisco. We put it up on the website. It was a paid event. It sold out in an hour.

I think one of our biggest assets is that we are geographically near the people who are reading us, which is why I'm not obsessed over having the highest reader count possible. There's so much other stuff that we can do for this group of people that's exciting. It's fun. It's entertaining. It's giving you a thing to do on a Friday night that it's not just the news content.

Let's go over the origin story. How old is the paper? It's about three years. Three years. And you already stepped on this. I was going to sort of lead you into your previous journalism and publishing experience, but it's zero. Yeah, it's nothing. Okay, so Mike Moritz, billionaire, has you, who has zero experience in media, running a local newspaper. How'd that come about? I...

Moved to San Francisco sight unseen pretty close to after I graduated college, not because I had any aspirations to work in tech, but because I needed a job and I needed to pay the bills. And I was at LinkedIn for a little while shortly thereafter I moved to Stripe. And I loved working at the company. I did not love living in San Francisco, frankly, in part because I just didn't know anything about it. And I always wanted to live in a mega city, which San Francisco is not. Uh-huh.

And as I lived there, I felt sort of icky about all the things that San Francisco is known for negatively in the press, the visible dysfunctions. I ended up leaving San Francisco with Stripe to London. I came back. And when I came back, and this gets to how I met Mike and how The Standard came to be, I made a pact with myself that if I was going to live in San Francisco again, I had to do something about it.

all the ickiness that I felt. And so I threw myself into volunteering with organizations addressing homelessness, met people who were homeless, discovered, and it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that many of the people in the population I was volunteering with had more career experience than I did as some random mid-20s kid at Stripe. So I started getting them jobs at tech companies because I knew people. You're talking about the homeless people you were working with. Yeah.

Specifically at the time, I mean, it's very different now in the not 0% interest rate world. But in the mid-2010s, I mean, anyone with a pulse could get some sort of job at a tech company. And I knew that. And I knew how to work the system. And I got these people jobs and sort of discovered that I was a half-decent social worker. And I decided I was going to quit my job and do that. And I had an idea to incubate a nonprofit to help people who were experiencing homelessness get better-paying jobs in the city. And I was fundraising for that.

As I have built the entire company, just sent hundreds of cold emails out to anyone that I thought would be able to fund that idea. And Mike was not one of them. I met someone who introduced me to someone else who at the end of that meeting said, if you really care about San Francisco, you should meet my friend Mike. And I knew who that was. And I was scared shitless to meet him because he is a legend.

And I went to his office and I still have the notebook where I had my pitch for the nonprofit idea. And like a true journalist, he cut me off two words in and grilled me on my life for an hour. And at the end, he said, look, I think you should think about something much bigger and tell me what it would be. And I went away for a month and I wrote him a long list of things I would try out. And one of them was a news company. And here we are.

I know it's a compressed story, but that's a pretty wild story, right? Yeah. You go from like sort of line worker in tech to crusader for homelessness. And then somehow Mike Moritz says, I'm going to give you a ton of money to run a newspaper, which was not your plan. No, it wasn't. And even in the proposal that I wrote him originally, which did, as I said, have other things like helping homeless people.

My initial pitch was just sort of broadly fixed news and not even for some of the stuff that I've now learned and I'm really obsessed with the standard doing around making it more fun and a better digital product. It was...

Really started from as I got more involved with the city, I felt like many of my questions were not answered by the press. That the depth of the reporting I got access to was not commensurate to the depth of the issues that I saw. And I felt like someone should be doing this. San Francisco does have local news. There's the Chronicle. Absolutely. That's a longstanding newspaper. They do.

People have been experimenting with sort of micro-local news, things like Hoodline. You felt all that was not adequate. No, not necessarily. What I would say is as a casual observer of the city, which I think many news organizations, many local and regional news organizations fall flat on thinking that

And they themselves, reporters and editors in their teams, are representative of the city population as a whole. And I think one of my strengths in leading this company is that I always remember what it was like to be the person who didn't know that we had as many publishers as we do locally.

And I think a lot of local publishers would blame me, the reader or the customer. And in my role, I think- It's your fault you're not subscribing to us or reading us. Yeah, I think that the company needs to do the work of bringing you in and writing for an audience that doesn't know who the mayor is, that doesn't know what the board of supervisors is, because that's where I started my journey. And anyway, bringing it back to this plan and-

or whatever, I said, look, I don't have any news experience. And you're like one of one amazing business person who started their career in news and has this deep commitment to the Bay Area. So maybe you should find someone else who does have the news experience. I'm just telling you that it's a problem I observed. And in true Mike fashion, he said, I don't really care. I'm going to push you off a cliff and I think you can do it. And

And that's what happened. Okay. So Mike Warren says, the good news is I'm a billionaire who's going to fund your local news operation. The bad news is you have no idea what you're doing. Yes. How long before that to you launching the site? It took maybe eight or nine months. And the hardest part was finding people to join the team. Because my pitch at the outset was, hi, I'm Griffin, a person with no experience. Also, there's a billionaire. Can you move to San Francisco? Also, it's a pandemic. Yeah. Also, it's a pandemic. It was

peak pandemic and one of the first people I messaged hundreds of people on LinkedIn. In fact, if you're listening to this, you should check your LinkedIn emails because I might be in there from 2020 or 21.

You're also hiring an editor-in-chief. We are, yes. As a plug, if you are our next editor-in-chief, it's griffin at sfstandard.com. Yeah, and one of the first people to get back to me was a woman I went to college with who was here in New York, a reporter at CNBC.

And she responded, and I remember the feeling I had that anyone responded to me, and I'd said, please, can you get on the phone? And she did, and I somehow convinced her to uproot her life and move to San Francisco. And that was really the beginning of us

having a team assembled. Then we brought in some other people from San Francisco and elsewhere, but we launched with a scrappy team of a handful of people and a site that absolutely could not compete even with the small publishers in San Francisco. We were tiny. We didn't publish very much, but we had this belief that if we

did things a little bit differently in the ways that we could, we would probably make progress. And that's exactly what's happened. So there's a lot of downside to you not knowing anything about the media business when you start. But there's some upside, right? You have fresh eyes. What did you think from the get-go? Oh, I'm going to do a local newspaper, news product that's entirely different than people have seen before. Or I'm going to do one that reminds me of the paper. Where'd you grow up? Oregon. That reminds me of whatever the Oregon paper is. I don't know. The Oregonian. Thank you. Yes.

And we're going to do a version of that. What were you thinking initially? I think what's been really interesting about my journey, my very short journey in the news industry is I, prior to starting the publication and hiring people who have a lot of media or news experience, media, whatever you want to call it.

I had a lot of conviction that everything could be done differently. And not because differently is maybe not even the right word because I didn't know what to compare it against. I just said, I'm going to do this the way that I would probably run a tech company. And that comes to life in a lot of different ways.

But as it pertains to the product, I had some ideas. I didn't think we're going to blow up a newspaper other than not having paper. But really the only idea that we had at the outset that was truly different, I think, for a local publisher was to be really good at video and social video, which at that time during the pandemic and the now this era, et cetera, was not new information to anyone. People had already pivoted to video.

But local publishers have not. Because it's expensive. Yes. It's difficult. In theory, there's money there, but that requires enormous scale usually. Yeah. But we had some cash in the bank. We had room to experiment. And Sophie, who was that first employee, was a video producer at CNBC.

in New York. And we launched with a handful of stories and one of them was sort of a first person walk through the Tenderloin with someone who had been on the streets in the Tenderloin. And it was a

I mean, if you look at the video on YouTube today, I'm sure it's not that many. It's not hundreds of thousands of people who viewed it. But I think it was a clear line in the sand that we are going to try and do things differently. And that's the type of storytelling that you had not seen from other publishers in San Francisco before. They have the inertia of the way they've done things in the past. I have not seen a San Francisco Standard video to date, but that's just maybe poor.

research on my part is that still an important component of the paper we've pulled back on that type of like full scale and i think we're not unique and you've already brought up some of the issues with full scale video production like we did in the early days and frankly we were able to do that because we had so much lead time because we knew we were launching and we could pick the launch date we still do a lot more social video and that is not out and i think the the

Audiences are not as excited with full-scale video productions going out on social anyway. And so all of our reporters, like our food reporting team,

reporters take their phones out and do the video themselves. Here's the croissant. Exactly. And that's what the audience wants. And so we've moved with the audience and also with the evolution of the business. I'm assuming through trial and error, you have learned a lot about the business. Yeah. And that some ideas you thought were good ideas turn out to not be good ideas. Someone could have told you that early on. And some of them probably actually are good ideas.

One of the things that comes, I mean, there's a lot, good and bad. And I'm pretty honest with the mistakes that I've made, and I'm happy to talk all about those. But one of the things that I find myself coming back to a lot is that the product should speak for itself. And something I've heard on our team, but from other news companies as well, frequently, is if a story doesn't perform, it's because we, but they're usually looking at me and saying, I, Griffin, didn't market it.

And we don't pay. We've never paid for promotion of any kind. We don't do brand marketing. We don't boost our posts. None of it because I hold very dearly a principle that the product should speak for itself. I don't know where that came from because I don't have the experience in the publishing industry, but there's literal arbitrage of trying to get your posts to go up so you can sell more ads against them. And

We are lucky that we don't have those pressures. Maybe if we did, we would make different business decisions. But I think one of the most compelling things about the way the standard has grown is that we've not done that. And we've been able to figure out the things that our audience actually really likes. How do you get a story to your audience in 2024 in a world where, you know, if this was

late teens, people say, oh, well, obviously through social and we're going to work with Facebook. And of course there's Twitter and pretty much all of those tried and true distribution methods no longer work for publishers or they're much, much harder to work. Google is still enormously important. Is that, is that important for you guys? The majority of our traffic comes direct to the site, literally directly to the site or from one of our newsletters. And I think that's the way it should be. And it wasn't always that way in 2023, 2020,

As the publication grew, we started to get a ton of referral traffic from search, Google search. And anyone at the company can tell you I sat down in January and had an all-hands meeting and said, we've got to stop. This isn't going to work. We

We need to focus on loyalty. Let's stop optimizing for Google. Well, not stop entirely, but we cannot get high on that supply. We have to ask ourselves, what is the stuff that people are going to come directly to us for? And that is not always the same story. Sometimes it's the dead raccoon story. But I think especially a regional publisher, you can – and we did this in 2023. We published half as many stories on a monthly basis this year as we did in 2023. Yeah.

And that's because I sat down and said, focus on loyalty. The question is how many people who are here today were here yesterday? It's funny because this is now sort of a standard thing you hear from publishers. It's the homepage is newly re-important again. I don't think it's the homepage. But all versions of we have to own our own distribution. We can't rely on social. Google is going to go away even though we're still optimizing for Google. But a couple of years ago, that would have not been what you would have heard.

Yeah. Your argument is a pretty simple one, which is we'll make something, people will like it, and basically they'll tell their friends they like it? Essentially. And that is what's happened to us. I mean, our audience growth is organic. And how much do you want your newsroom employees or journalists thinking about the business overall, metrics for their stories? Are they supposed to be out there promoting stories? Are they supposed to be knocking on doors, handing printouts? Not literally. Although I've been –

Truly excited to see the degree to which the team has really gotten fully behind this subscription product. And people asking like, well, how do I go out and sell it? I'm like, well, you don't need, I mean, you can if you want, but you don't need to be doing that. I think it's everybody's job to run the business. And I say this to the team frequently. There's no, I do the news and you do the business or I do the business and you do the news. It's everyone at the company has equity in the business. We are all the business, right?

And the firewall absolutely needs to exist ethically, but not because it's philosophically important. It needs to exist because it's the right thing to do for the reader, which is the right thing to do for the business. Do you find that newsroom employees on the edit side

are comfortable with that or they're like, no, no business either. I shouldn't be involved in business stuff because that's not ethical. I shouldn't be touching that or it's icky and gross and I don't want to hear about it. I want to write stories. It depends on the person and you know, any team, some people like stuff more than others and that's okay too, but we need to operate from a place of shared understanding that we are all in this to build a business and

And if you don't want to talk about it and you're a reporter, like that's okay. But we need to have the shared language, which is very different from when I started the company and started hiring people with tons of editorial experience, which is the right thing to do to build a trusted news company.

And, I mean, going back to the very early days, when Sophie was working on one of her stories, it was in a Google Doc, and I jumped in and started editing it. The CEO publisher was editing it. It was like a three-person team, okay? So give me some grace. Also, no experience, as I said. I've been in a three-person operation where the CEO and publisher is editing a story, so I get it. Yeah. Yeah.

And she said to me, I don't have a problem with this, but just so you know, there's this thing called the firewall. And I said, huh? Like Norton antivirus, which I guess is dating me, but it reminds me of my desktop computer in our house as a kid. And she said, well, you know, you should really look into this. And I mean, I remember that moment and feeling like the life drained out of my body. Like, oh, there's this huge thing.

That I'm supposed to know that I didn't know. And – The basic idea of there should be a divide between editorial and business in a newspaper used to be really a religion in older news products. Yeah. Less so now. You'd never heard of it. I mean – Did that make you feel like I'm really stupid? I don't know what I'm doing? Or that's a bad idea? It made me feel like I'm an idiot. Yeah.

And sometimes I still feel like that when I meet people in the news industry. I mean, this week in New York, I've been meeting tons of editors, reporters, and they'll say names of people. Oh, do you know? And this other person, I'm like, I have never heard of them. That's a tiny little insular club. I'm aware. But this is a whole. And I love all of them. Yeah. Thank you for listening. They're amazing people.

And in those moments, I don't think you're the problem. I think I'm the problem. And I think that's a really healthy impulse to have to go inward and ask, what is it that I don't know? What can I get better at it? What can I learn? And do that. And then come back to the problem and say, here are the parts of it that I want to keep and here's the parts that I want to change. And that's what happened with regard to

to this whole my relationship with the history of news and where the firewall comes from. I don't think there's anything more important than not. There's nothing more important than making sure that your reporting is high integrity. And it doesn't cross that line. But what I won't accept is that we're going to be on different floors and we're going to be on different sides of the office and we're never going to talk, which I think is sort of that concept taken to an extreme.

And then it leads to teams that don't understand what business they're in. And more importantly, what product they can create to be valuable for the business that they're in. And that's very different from those early days when I heard about the firewall, pulled way back and thought I had everything wrong. And now I have a much stronger understanding of

the way that I want that to look at the company that I run. Are you touching copy now? Are you writing headlines? Are you suggesting stories? I'll certainly suggest a story idea as a resident of San Francisco who runs a publication and sees a dead raccoon on the bus. That wasn't actually my story. But if I see that, I'm absolutely going to bring it to the team. We all should. It doesn't matter if it's me or the person who comes in to help clean the office. We're all on the same team, and great stories can come from anywhere.

But as it regards to the reporting process, absolutely not. If it's a tip that I have with some, I'll send it to a reporter and editor and say, you do your thing. So bringing back to Mike Moritz, there's a couple, there's multiple different ways to, multiple theories about how you make a publication work in 2024. One is be owned by a billionaire. Obvious upside. And there's some obvious downside. And this is, we're talking a week after the Jeff Bezos non-endorsement campaign.

And so there's a new round of this is why billionaires shouldn't run papers. This is why billionaires aren't the answer to running a paper. So let me start here. What's your understanding with Mike Moritz about what input he has over day-to-day operations of the paper? I just keep calling it a paper because I'm old. Or general direction. Is he just writing you a check and walking away or is he hands-on?

First of all, we have lots of owners, including our employees. So I push against people sort of characterize Mike as the owner in the, you know. He's the owner. You guys are running it. He's the one funding the deficit. For sure. But just to be clear, we do have other owners and they are our employees. And what is actually more accurate to say is that he's the chairman of the company. And as the chairman of the company, like, yeah, he should be involved in making sure that we have an excellent product and that we're making the best decisions that we can.

And I have a very close relationship with him to that end. And can he send me a story tip that I then send to the team? Like, sure. Do they have to report on it? Absolutely not. And...

He, kind of on a yearly cadence, I'll do a Q&A with him in front of the whole staff. And he has said in front of the whole staff, anything you want to report on that I've done, my portfolio companies that I've invested in, nonprofits, politically. He was a VC at Sequoia for many, many years. So he's got a lot of relationships. A lot of companies. Fair game. He said that, not me. He said that to the whole team. Have you guys tested that thesis? We reported on the Solano County project in a way that

I may not have made him look good. Tell the audience what that project is. It's an effort in part of the East Bay of the Bay Area to build a new city, essentially. There's a couple of these, right? Yeah. There's another one. I'm forgetting the name, but yeah. There's one that Andreessen's involved in. Yeah. And this is the Moritz version of it. Well, it's not. We're going to create. It's not his. It's a handful of people. We're going to create our new version of a. We're going to create a city. Yes. You can do what you want to do. My job is to make this.

a product that our readers love, and he will hold me and the whole company to that standard at all times. And I often call him the chief typo officer. And I think this is, it's like a gift actually to have someone who is the chairman of the company who's that obsessed with the craft. He will find the typo and send it to me. Are there broad ideas and themes that he is interested in and you are reflecting those interests? I think the...

shared interest that he and I had and the staff from the very early days is political accountability reporting, which is very local. Like we, I think for a small new publication, have an outsized impact on the local political landscape because of that reporting that we've done. We all share that. Do we share like a particular view that one particular person is the problem? No. No.

But do we think that there are problems? Absolutely. And we're going to go attack those. So this flared up end of the summer in advance of you guys writing us – publishing a story about Brad Horowitz, Felicia Horowitz, his wife, becoming basically pro-Trump people after being –

Very liberal for a long time. And Marc Andreessen, his partner, and Horowitz both got on Twitter railing against you guys in general and then Moritz specifically. And it became sort of a battle of VC billionaires. Were you anticipating that you'd get to that point at some point that eventually Mike Moritz's name and I'm just going to call it ownership of the paper would become a flashpoint?

It already had in various ways that maybe, you know, you wouldn't be paying attention to on the other side of the country, which is not a dick. It's just the truth because we were doing local reporting. I mean, it happened from the day that we started. It happened. I mean, I'm getting angry phone calls, emails. What are you doing? Who is this? What's the involvement? And so it didn't shock me at all because people try to spin a narrative about why he's in it, how he's involved, what he's doing, etc.

They can think what they want to think. What I'm focused on is I know how this business operates and it's not an issue for me. It's not an issue for him. And I wouldn't even characterize it as that particular story as a fight because Mike didn't. He just moved on. He was not participating. And it's, you know, to be crass about it. Right. It's great marketing for you guys. Don't read this terrible story. The San Francisco Standard is about to publish this trash publication. Yeah. So it was a good story. Thank you. And.

Then, by the way, a couple of weeks later, the Horowitz's said, actually, we are going to endorse Kamala Harris. It's sort of underlined what a confusing turn that family has taken. I used to say before this job, I don't make the news, but I can't really say that anymore. And, you know, I as I said, like this type of spat or or people getting upset with us and then dragging Mike into it or me or whoever, you know,

When it first started happening, when we got going, and this is where I just like am so deeply inspired by journalists, I would get the angry phone call and accused of all of these things and similar to what I described as my emotional journey with the firewall, immediately think, wow, we got everything wrong because this person is so angry with me. I must have made a mistake.

And the first time it happened, a journalist on our team was like, yeah, it's happened. I was like, it was this, there was excitement and I was so confused. How could you be excited in this moment where we're being attacked? Like, it's really horrifying. And as time has gone on, I'd really adopt this stance, which is when something like that happens and it gets escalated to me, I say, okay.

Thank you, first of all, for reaching out. Number two is, is there a factual error? Because in that case, I'm going to stop everything and get this fixed with the team. I'll bring it to the team. They will respond. They'll figure it out. But other than that, these are all things you should consider before you do crazy things.

I want to help you recruit a new editor-in-chief. Yes. But I should say, you've been up and running for three years. This will be your third editor-in-chief. Yeah. What has gone on? And we don't need to get into details about the first two, but just how do you explain that you're on editor-in-chief three? I would say that we have, like any startup, changed a lot. And this is hard to...

For any startup, what you are today may be totally different tomorrow. We change with the customer base that we have, with the increased ambition that we have as a company, as we see that we can achieve more. And I'm looking for someone who isn't going to come and say, my aspiration is to build a slightly better version of an existing regional publisher. My aspiration is to have someone come in and say, we're going to own the story of this place.

We are going to be fun and exciting, and we're going to keep doing all the serious accountability reporting that we're known for, but really build something new and big and exciting. And that's not easy to find. So that's a huge goal. Yes. Do you have an even bigger goal that maybe you guys figure out how to make this work in the Bay Area, and then you can replicate it in Oregon and different parts of the country? I think I used to think about it that way, the expansion of the company, but

I use this term often on the team, newspaper thinking, as a pejorative. And I think thinking about how to expand our work city by city or state by state is newspaper thinking. That is very sort of old school. I think that there's a world, like, not to dig on the East Coast folks, but

You know, publications with New York in the name don't have any problem telling stories about California or San Francisco and keeping New York in the name. And I think San Francisco ought to feel the same because, frankly, we in California are hugely influential. I would say that many of the publishers on the West Coast are influential.

a little too thoughtful about that fact. And I would like us to have swagger because we are from San Francisco. You want to own the Bay Area news. Everyone in the Bay Area reads you. Everyone outside the Bay Area wants to understand it. Exactly. Big goal. It is a big goal. I think we can do it. Good luck, Griffin Gaffney. Thank you.

Thanks again to Griffin Gaffney. Thanks again to Charlie Worzel. Thanks to Jelani Carter, who produces and edits the show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring this show to you for zero dollars and zero cents. Thanks to you guys for listening. Good luck with the week. Good luck to us all. We'll see you soon. Support for the show comes from AT&T.

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