It’s an extremely challenging time for the journalism industry. Between 2008 and 2020, employment in American newsrooms dropped by 26 percent—a loss of about 30,000 jobs. While the profession is still shrinking, many reporters found new opportunities at digital outlets, independent newsletters, and innovative community organizations. In many ways, the press is rapidly changing, and learning how to better serve readers.
Julia Ioffe spent years working for outlets like GQ and the Atlantic before recently becoming a founding partner of the media startup Puck News. “I just felt like a lot of the big legacy places didn’t stand up to the challenge that Donald Trump threw in our faces,” Ioffe said during a conversation at Unfinished Live. They were “really slow to adjust and to recognize the new reality that we were in, to recognize it for what it was, and to be honest about where we were with our readers.”
It’s not easy to leave a national publication and start something new, said Casey Newton, who left the tech website the Verge to launch Platformer, a Substack newsletter about the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy. But it’s also gratifying to establish a direct relationship with your audience. “Journalism has value and people are willing to pay for it,” Newton said. “And I can’t think of a more heartening lesson to take into whatever comes next.”
Watch the full conversation below, and scroll for a written transcript. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Statements by these speakers have not been fact-checked by Unfinished and represent their individual opinions.
Kevin Delaney
I’m Kevin Delaney. I’m the CEO and the editor in chief of Charter. We’re at charterworks.com and we’re a new media and services company focused on transforming every workplace. So it’s about resetting organizational practices and your own practices to being in coherence with climate change, with diversity inclusion, with the future of work, reinventing capitalism, a lot of the themes that I think people are talking about here today. We’re going to shift a little bit, and you guys are so far away from me, this is definitely Covid safe here. We’re going to shift to rebooting journalism for the post-truth world. And we have a group of people here, including Ron Nixon from the Associated Press who is wired in from his bookshelf there.
And we’re going to take the next 30 minutes or so, and talk about how the work that we all do as journalists has changed over recent years, just take stock of what the hell just happened and what is going on now. And then talk a little bit about where things need to head. Pretty much everyone here, including myself, a year ago I was an editor at the New York Times, pretty much everyone here has changed jobs in the last year or so. And so I’m going to start by actually just going through. I’m going to start maybe with Mitra and then we’ll go to Ron and then come back in the room. Just ask you what transition have you made in journalism? What are you doing now? And why are you doing it?
S. Mitra Kalita
You can Google the CNN leaving part. I was in CNN for five years, and I launched Epicenter NYC, which is a community newsletter born out of the pandemic in Queens. Actually launched it truly as a community initiative, I launched it when I was still at CNN and decided to go all in on community journalism. We’ve evolved from a newsletter into a twice weekly newsletter, a website, live streams, podcast, and really, really importantly, tons and tons of in real life interaction with our community. That actually is probably what defines us most. Because it is so hard to be a tiny entity in local journalism, I also launched a company called URL Media in January, and we are a network of black and brown community media outlets around the country with this belief that we don’t need to sacrifice relevance and service to our communities in order to be successful digitally and commercially. So I’ll leave it there. And certainly I’m thrilled to be here and reunited with some folks on the panel who I’ve known for quite some time. So thank you, Julia, you want to test your mind? Oh, sorry, Kevin, go.
Kevin Delaney
Why don’t we go to Ron now, and we’ll come back to this question of the positioning of your journalism in the community, particularly during Covid I think is really important to get to. Ron, can you walk us through your job shift of the last 12 months or so?
Ron Nixon
I came to the Associated Press from the New York Times in 2019. So I’ve been here for a bit. I did transition into the top investigative general at the AP within that timeframe though. So it’s been a challenge of course, being remote and also just living through the pandemic with people all over the world, but it’s also been interesting… I also will say that I am one of the co-founders of the Ida B Wells Society, whose mission is to diversify and routine the number of black and brown people in the field of investigative reporting that is truly lacking. And it’s something that we’re trying to work with media organizations like the Miami Herald, AP, The New York Times, ProPublica, and others to really try and get more people to come into this space.
Kevin Delaney
Great. And I think we want to come back to a few of those things, including you were involved in some of the investigative reporting on the border, the refugee detentions, the Trump administration shenanigans in Ukraine. And so I think we’ll come back to you on where investigative reporting emerges from this. And also if we’re talking about rebooting journalism, the path to inclusivity there. Okay. Julia Ioffe.
Julia Ioffe
Hi. I, in June joined Puck News, we just launched this month. It is a publication that focuses on the centers of American power. So we have someone writing about Silicon Valley and the gazillionaires that live there and the impact they have on our political life as donors. We have people in Hollywood. Me in Washington, and the wonderful Tina Nguyen in Washington writing, she writes more about the right wing, I write more about this town as it’s known and its weird habits and rituals. We have Bill Cohan writing about Wall Street, he comes from there and has written a number of books about it. I decided to join it, I had been at a lot of legacy publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New Republic, and I just felt like a lot of the big legacy places didn’t stand up to the challenge that Donald Trump threw in our faces. I think they were really slow off the mark and really slow to adjust and to recognize the new reality that we were in, to recognize it for what it was, and to be honest about where we were with our readers.
I also just like being at a place that is small and flat and inclusive in the sense of it’s not a bureaucracy that you have to manipulate to get a story told or to get an assignment, that you can just have a direct impact on what the publication looks like and what it writes about, because the people in the newsroom are included in the decision-making process, and that is something I really like. It’s also small and dynamic and nimble and honest about where we are. And it’s also just so exciting to build something brand new from the ground up. So you should all go to puck.news and subscribe.
Kevin Delaney
You’ve caught startup fever, it sounds like. I want to come back to this, how the media didn’t adjust to Trump, and the takeaway, what should we have learned from that? Casey, everybody knows you, but maybe you could talk about your professional shift. You just actually wrote, I recommend people, you just wrote A Year On Substack And The Lessons That You Took Away. So I recommend everyone read that post, which is kind of long and—
Casey Newton
Wow, harsh.
Kevin Delaney
No, it was good. It was long and good, so everyone should spend time with it. But I guess we don’t have quite enough time for you to read it off right now, just made my point. So, maybe talk about your transition, what you have learned over the last year, going from a bigger news organization to being your own show, basically.
Casey Newton
Sure. So I used to work at The Verge, I was a Silicon Valley editor, I was there for seven and a half years. And about four years ago, I started writing a daily newsletter about tech and democracy and the way that those two things had started to collide in the run-up to and then after the election of Trump. And last year, it was the middle of the pandemic, and it just felt like this would be actually the best time to start a company, offices aren’t real anymore, coworkers aren’t real anymore, my entire media company just feels like an abstraction to me at this point. Let’s see if we can actually make this, like the rest of my career in journalism, is just doing journalism directly for readers, allowing them to support my work directly. And so it’s now been a year, yesterday was the first birthday of my newsletter, which is called Platformer.
S. Mitra Kalita
Mazel tov.
Casey Newton
Thank you so much. And it’s been, honestly, mostly pretty great. I like to say that starting a newsletter is like doing business on easy mode, you’re just typing into a box, there’s not a lot of overhead, you’re just selling emails. But that said, it’s also been challenging in ways that I didn’t anticipate. I had a pretty big mailing list that I brought with me, which was a big advantage. I thought that I was going to convert at least 10% of those people to my paying subscribers because they’d been reading me every day for three years in some cases, and in reality it was closer to 5%. I was able to get that number up over time, but that was a challenge. As anybody who works in a subscription business knows, I have to deal with churns, so every month I lose about three or 4% of my paying customers. So in order to grow, I have to go and find more than 4% of my business.
So those are just a couple of the things that I’ve learned, but on the whole it’s been an awesome experience. It’s put me in a better position than I was before. And I now own an asset that can grow in value over time. And I think I would just conclude by saying journalism has value and people are willing to pay for it. And I can’t think of a more heartening lesson to take into whatever comes next.
Kevin Delaney
One of the takeaways from your posts that I would point out was the importance of Twitter, which I think you just talked about… a little bit, to actually driving the business. And one thing that we can come back to is the extent to which the journalism that you do is inflected by running your own business, as opposed to cruising along as a journalist within a bigger news organization where you don’t have to think about subscriptions or advertising. And I think there are probably a lot of ways in which it’s really good, but it may flavor what we’re doing. So there’s a bunch of stuff we want to come back to. I feel like we should just start by the big issue and just get it out of the way, if possible, is we just had a really strange last few years in terms of journalism and it forced newsrooms to confront a lot of stuff about themselves, as Julie hinted, about their own position versus government, truth, identity, almost so many things that we took for granted I think for years, probably not entirely in a good way, were really pressure tested.
And so I think I’d like to start by just saying the Trump administration or at least the first Trump administration is over, and what are the lessons, I’m not making any predictions there haven’t been any indictments or anything yet so it’s a possibility, so what are the lessons going forward from that time and how has journalism been affected by that? And maybe, Julia, we start with you, because you talked about that. And Ron, I want to pull you in from the investigative perspective especially.
Julia Ioffe
I think that the lesson we learned is that you have to be transparent and honest with your readers or your viewers or your listeners. I think also we learned about the limits of the word and the concept of objectivity. And this is, I think, a conversation that was started by journalists of color especially, and forced us to talk about and reckon with what we mean by objectivity. And I think it really came to a head last summer, but it is something that’s obviously existed forever, and was, I think, really building during the Trump years.
And for me as a former foreign correspondent, I ran into this with Trump because I had covered Putin for a long time, and nobody thought it was unobjective to say, Putin, the authoritarian leader of Russia, right? That was objectively true. It was objectively true that he was corrupt. It was objectively really true that he lied. And because he is a foreign leader and because you always get points for sticking it to Vladimir Putin, there was no issue with editors sitting in New York and DC, when I was writing from Moscow.
Then when we were confronted with Trump, we were suddenly dealing with, instead of calling things by their name, we were dealing with this wishful thinking of he’ll grow into the presidency, and today is the day that Donald Trump became president, and that he might change. I was reminded of this moment in 2017 when I was at the Aspen Ideas Festival and was on a panel with the General David Petraeus, and this was, I think, June of 2017, and he was feeding into this, frankly, bullshit of he has good people around him, there are adults in the room, they have their hand on the wheel, and he’ll grow into the presidency.
And, as I said, I was like, “Shit, I’m going to get fired for this,” because I was like, “Why are we lying to ourselves? This is like the Stockholm syndrome that an abused partner deals with, well, he apologized or you brought me flowers, and like he said, he’d never do it again.” And I think, during the campaign and during the first couple of years of the Trump administration, this is what I certainly dealt with in the newsrooms that I worked for. And as my scalp was fed to the Trump administration in hopes of like appeasing this tempestuous god.
Kevin Delaney
I want to pull in Ron soon.
Julia Ioffe
Yeah. And I feel like finally by the end of the Trump administration and with the Covid pandemic, we learned our lesson there, but I think it came too late. And I think there’s a reason that readers don’t trust the news media as much anymore. Yeah.
Kevin Delaney
Ron, maybe you can react to that last statement in this question of trust, but also the bigger question of how newsrooms and investigative journalism has changed over the last few years. You’re very much up against some of the hot button issues.
Ron Nixon
So let me ask the latter part of their question first. And I think that one of the things that’s come out of this is news organizations were more willing to call things for what they are and being specific about it. I think, previously we were using terms like racially tensed or some other euphemisms rather than just calling something racist. And I think that that’s going forward. I think that’s a positive thing. The same thing with lie, we would say someone misspoke or we would use all the euphemisms that we could to get around saying that the person lied. And, I think that that’s what happened with the Trump administration, that we were just willing to call a lie a lie. And if the reporting supports it, then you say it.
And I do think that there is this sense that objectivity means that you have to put both sides of everything, and that’s not what objectivity should be. It should be about being transparent with your reporting methods… When you report, you say what you know, and what you don’t know you don’t put it out there… And I think this is transferred over into larger society too, led by people like Wesley Lowery at 60 Minutes. With like the police, there was a time we would just quote the police, whatever statement that they would put out, something happened, the police would say such and such happened. And that’s no longer the case now, I think just like any other party to an event that you quote them… not as this is the definitive statement about what actually happened.
And to the question of trust, we’ve been talking to a number of people about this for a while. And the idea of us getting back to a point where people trust the news media, is not entirely true. I think some people did, but for communities of color in particular that has never been the case. And the media…has been part of the problem. You see organizations like the Kansas City Star and LA Times address their role in reinforcing some of those societal ills against communities of color. So I don’t think it’s a thing of trying to get back to any point in time where we were trusted. It’s more of getting to a point where we build trust with all communities so that they believe what we say, or at least that they feel like what we presented to them is something that they can trust, or they can see how we do what we do. And treating all of those communities equally. That’s the point that I think we need to get back to.
Kevin Delaney
Casey, one of the complicating vectors in all of this was Facebook, which you’re one of the world’s experts on, and again from where we sit today, what is Facebook’s position in determining our news? A recent poll showed that the percentage of Americans who actually get their news from Facebook is still enormous, but it’s actually going down, partly because of Facebook having been singed by various aspects of this. What does Facebook have looking ahead?
Casey Newton
I think it’s definitely a major vector in the way that news travels. I think something like half of Americans say they get their news from Facebook. Interestingly, only half of Twitter users say they get news from it, which is like, “You can avoid news on Twitter, who are these people?” Teach me your ways. But this is a subject that’s probably too big for this panel. But I just think that we have to pay close attention to the way that Facebook ranks news, we need better access to data about, which are the best read stories on the platform? Which stories are traveling the furthest? Which stories are being discussed in public groups? What can we learn about what’s being discussed in private groups? We know, for example, that the anti-vax movement grew hugely on Facebook, mostly in private groups that does seem to have been a major vector for misinformation.
There are other ways though, where it seems like Fox News has a greater effect on actually shifting people’s mindsets on politics, maybe than Facebook does. So I pay a lot of attention to Facebook, but I also try to place it in the context of our entire broken news ecosystem that we live in.
Kevin Delaney
And it’s worth saying that Facebook has systematically reduced our ability to answer the question that you just raised, to assess how news has traveled? And misinformation has traveled on the platform? By systematically cutting off researchers, cutting off data sources, like CrowdTangle, frustrating any ability to hold them accountable. And I think, I don’t know, everyone’s nodding, so there’s in our community, in our newsroom community, there’s a fair amount of, I think, indignation and outrage about what this means for our civil society. Is that a fair—
Casey Newton
Yeah. I mean, completely, it’s insane that you can’t just know what are the thousand most popular links on Facebook. That would not be a violation of anyone’s privacy to just know what people were reading. And in fact, it’s really the only media organization that doesn’t have a page or some sort of little module that tells you what is the most popular thing on the platform. So I didn’t see this coming, but I actually think research has been the big Facebook story of the year, the way that they have been systematically denying access to it, reducing access to it. And of course there’s a flip side to that, which is that great journalists, like the ones with The Wall Street Journal, and brave whistleblowers inside the company, are coming forward and sharing some of that research, so we at least have some idea of what’s going on. But we need to break that dynamic.
The last thing I’ll say is that in the European Union, they’re actually moving legislation through that would require platforms like Facebook to grant access to qualified researchers. So it will no longer be in the platforms’ hands what sorts of data are shared. And I just think that’d be a huge step forward if that happens.
Kevin Delaney
Mitra, I wanted to ask you two questions. So you were at CNN through this sort of crazy election cycle, and so I’d be interested in your views on this last question, how newsrooms emerge from this craziness? And then, also I think a lot of journalism traditionally has been from a distance. So the journalist is someone who sees tragedy happen or sees injustice happen, and from a distance says, “They’re poor people or they’re someone who’s been wronged,” and that’s a really important role. But I think the work that you’re doing is rethinking that distance, and it’s played out in really interesting ways during the pandemic. So maybe-
S. Mitra Kalita
Sure, can you all hear me? I was waiting for the right time to make a joke about the people of color on the panel having technical difficulties. You can hear me, correct? Ron, I’ve got you baby, I’ve got you. Ron I’ve known since I was like 19 years old, so we go way back. I think this first question of what Trump did in some ways to the media you’re seeing before you, all of us have changed course, and I’m no different. And before the mic was working, I said, “My last day at CNN was the week after Joe Biden was declared our 46th president.” And I said, “You’re welcome.” But I really decided to leave before we knew who would be president. And I think that’s important, because especially for a lot of people of color in the country, who’s president of course matters, I don’t want to say that it doesn’t matter, but I think there was a commitment to, no matter what happens, we can not continue as we’ve been.
So even with the Joe Biden presidency this week. So one of the partners of URL Media is the Haitian Times, and I’ve been so proud to have a partner like the Haitian Times as they’re chronicling Haitian families in Texas who are helping people get out of this mess. And this bridges your questions I think Kevin, takes us from the noise around stories and this pride that newsrooms have of like, “Oh, we called it racist. We called something a lie,” and it took us nine hours to get there, or discussions among like 16 SVPs and four managing editors, and that’s sort of how it goes down in the newsroom, but to get to this place where you’re literally in service to the community that you are serving.
We talk about our audiences, we talk about our readers, but I think in some ways the language we’ve used with the digital boom has also kept us at a distance. We know what they’re reading, and so “This story is performing at The Atlantic so let’s do the same story,” became our digital strategy. And so now for an outlet like me, and the Facebook algorithm matters immensely, and I was nodding furiously when you said that Kevin, because if you’re an outlet like mine, and you’re trying to bridge this gap and you are trusted in your community, and you’re trying to get information about Covid out there, and every time you post a link, and guess what, you’re a community organization, and Facebook has said, we would like to be a community platform, and you get a pop-up saying you’re not going to be fit, this is about Covid, are you sure you want to proceed? Or the algorithm doesn’t favor you because it’s information about Covid IN Queens, that doesn’t feel like it’s setting us up for success.
So I do think that there’s a bridge. And Kevin on the second part of your question, the distance, there’s been so much attempt to define journalism, and it just felt like once I left CNN, I really was ready to commit journalism that mattered. And in the early days of epicenter, and Kevin knows this because I would text him euphorically, like, “Oh my gosh, we put a link to a food bank and they got six donations of diaper boxes!” It was little things like that that allowed us to build impact, but also for a community to learn to trust us. And to really feel like we were centering their needs, but also listening to their needs, because so much of what we do is like, “We should do a story about this,” as opposed to finding out what’s actually needed.
And I’ll just wrap up that thought by saying over the last few months, we’ve been focused on vaccine efforts, and we’ve helped more than 5,000 New Yorkers and many of their cousins in Kansas, and god knows where all over the country get vaccinated, Pennsylvania too, and all over. And it was in that process of learning what some of the obstacles were to be immersed in this, and I was dealing with vaccinations as recently as yesterday, but to watch national media where it’s such a polarized debate, and it’s very politicized, as opposed to listening to someone about what their concerns are, a woman who’s saying, “I really need to get pregnant in the next year, I can’t do this,” and to meet her where she is, has made me rethink journalism and our delivery entirely.
Kevin Delaney
Just a quick follow-up, I want to get to a few other things, but people say like, “Oh yeah, you’re a community, you’re focused on Queens,” you can observe that people are having trouble being vaccinated, but also line up volunteers to get them vaccinated. Do you think that that practice, that engagement is possible and desirable on a national news organization level?
S. Mitra Kalita
I do, as long as it centers the ground up. So the example I would use with vaccines for example, is that the national news story would be, “The government says your immigration status doesn’t matter, please just go get vaccinated.” And the national media repeats that line. If you’re in Queens, and you’re an outlet like mine, you’re hearing daily via text message or WhatsApp or email from people saying, “They’re asking me for my ID.” And so that distance is actually one that we really need to solve for. Now, it’s incumbent upon national media not to suddenly insert themselves into the equation, I think it’s incumbent upon national media to either partner or listen to organizations like mine and reflect that story, as opposed to six weeks later saying, “This has been a problem.” Well, the people who were at the center of that problem already knew that, and the policy makers have moved on to their next crisis. So we’re really not solving for much.
Kevin Delaney
Brian, I want to come back, we’ve just got a few minutes, and I want to hit maybe two topics quickly. But Ron, this question of rebooting journalism, rebooting newsrooms, and this question of inclusivity, having more diverse newsrooms, what do you see as the key levers for that? And are you hopeful for that being part of what’s ahead of us?
Ron Nixon
A lot of news organizations will have diversity committees and things like that, and those things are fine, but the question is why create another step to the hiring of people when you can just hire them? Because you don’t need to create diversity committees and other forms and things to hire other people. So why is that necessary? And it seems like you’re adding more work than you need to, when you can go to organizations, like NABJ… so on and so forth. And not just show up at a conference or to show up when you need, but establish an ongoing relationship with those groups so that people know you, and some trainings. And I always joke about how when you’re a reporter, you don’t treat your sources like your cousin Ray Ray,who shows up every time he or she needs money, right? You have a constant relationship with that source, and it’s ongoing, and that’s … maintenance. Well, the same thing should happen here, if you’re hiring people, you should have an ongoing relationship with these organizations that are made up of journalists of color.
So I’m hopeful that it can happen, but I’m also a little frustrated at times, because we put up these unnecessary barriers to hiring people that are just not helpful. And, just as a word to people, don’t use the term diversity hires, I’ve heard that term quite a bit and you’re hiring journalists. So let’s just focus on hiring journalists.
Kevin Delaney
Great, and Mitra I think one thing that you’ve recommended for managers in journalism, but in fields generally, is like, “Don’t have every interaction with journalists of color be transactional.” So it’s got to be ongoing. It’s got to be regular. It’s got to be, to Ron’s point, go beyond that specific hiring box you’re trying to check. I wanted one last question, we just have a few minutes, and maybe Casey and Julia you can take this, it’s a question that emerged earlier, which is you’re not, and Casey maybe we start with you, you’re not a journalist in a newsroom where there’s a business department selling ads and subscriptions, how is your journalism inflicted by the business model that you’re working under?
Casey Newton
Every journalist, I think, winds up being captured to some degree by their audience, and this stresses me out as somebody who runs what is essentially a trade publication, because you don’t want to be captured by the corporations when you started the publication to critique and analyze them in great depth. So the way I’ve tried to solve for that is to just expand my audience to include different kinds of groups, so academics, people who just want to be good citizens, people who worked for rival companies, and then just put myself in the uncomfortable center of all those things and let them pressure me into triangulating the truth there. But it is definitely a challenge.
Kevin Delaney
Yeah. Julia, the same question.
Julia Ioffe
I think one of the things that is similar at Substack, and Puck is doing this too, is making journalists part owners in this venture. And the explicit mandate is to think like a business person as well. I think it’s different in that it’s, again, it’s honest. It’s not like when I was at The Atlantic or at The New Yorker or The New Republic that journalists weren’t thinking about these things. You’re thinking about what stories do well, and how to get more eyeballs on them, and these metrics do influence your work anyway, but you’re not having a say about how these decisions are necessarily made, you’re also not benefiting from them if they do well, so again, I think it’s a more honest and transparent relationship with the fact that you were always involved in the business of it, but just didn’t really have any power to change it. So, yeah.
Kevin Delaney
Okay. I’m going to sneak in one last speed round question for each of you, what is the best thing that’s changed in journalism in the last 10 years, and what is the worst? And we actually just have a minute, so Casey, I’m going to start with you and then we’ll go to Ron.
Casey Newton
The best thing is that creators like me can now monetize an audience directly and lead a rich and full life without having to worry about the ad market. The worst thing is that Twitter has taught journalists that the only story that you can tell is a scandal. And so now we just live in a world where everything is a scandal, and I think it’s just dramatically warped our sense of what’s going on in the world.
Kevin Delaney
Julia.
Julia Ioffe
I think the worst has been the dying off of local media. And I think that that’s kind of how we miss Trump, is we didn’t have this feedback loop with the rest of the country. The best is, I think, the move toward inclusion of people of color, women, in newsrooms and not just hiring them for their token diversity, but also actually listening to the perspective that they actually bring to the table instead of just being like, “Oh, okay, you’re a Black journalist, but can you please think like a white journalist.”
S. Mitra Kalita
My best thing, and worst thing are the same, as they often are. Community, so I think that the absence of community got us into this mess. I think the best thing that we’re seeing is a recognition of community. You’re seeing community as a position in other companies, you’re seeing outlets like mine embrace the phrase community journalism as opposed to local journalism, which is more bordered and limiting. So I think I started out the decade as very pessimistic on community, and the tail end of your 10 years, Kevin, I think, are seeing a resurgence of it.
Kevin Delaney
Great. And I would say the best thing is that we can have conversations like this and actually engaging with all these issues. The worst thing, I think, is maybe that the pipeline for training young journalists and bringing them into the industry professionally has broken, it needs to be reshaped. And that there’s a risk that young people don’t get the exposure and the training to do the amazing investigative. Not being precious about what that is, but I think we’re in a moment where that needs to be reformed to build the amazing journalistic resources for the future. So thank you. Thank you, Ron, Casey, Julia, Mitra. And thank you all for sitting here for this discussion.