Thank you, Liz. I’m going to slide this over here. I love the orange stand. So, I’m going to go ahead and do this. I’m going to go ahead and do this. I’m going to slide this over here. I love the orange stand. So, following Joel’s talk, obviously, what he was talking about, very, very heavy stuff, I’m going to touch on journalism as well. And I want to start with some irony. I’m going to stand here today and discuss the general demise and confusion of one of our nation’s important institutions. And then, after tracing the downfall, I’m going to tell you that we should follow their lead. Come on, it’ll be fine. So, let’s play word association. When I say journalism, what jumps to mind? Maybe it’s back in the day, black and white, Edward R. Murrow with smarts and swagger, and ill-advised cigarette dangling from his lips. Or, perhaps, it’s Walter Cronkite fighting back tears and telling us from Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time. Maybe you don’t think radio or TV. Maybe the word journalism conjures accountability, investigations, Woodward, Bernstein, and I’m not a crook. Or maybe it’s a romantic notion. A Sunday morning, a hot cup of coffee, an all-American breakfast in the big, fat New York Times. Perhaps you think of today’s morass, great journalists still plying their trade, but surrounded by the polar opposite truthiness of Bill O’Reilly and Rachel Maddow. Maybe when I say journalism, you think of two comedians, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who have recently hung up their fake fedoras and ditched their non-existent press passes. Here’s the thing, and Joel’s talk really reinforced this. No matter what images you land on, this truth is undeniable. Journalism is still important. It still matters. It still digs beneath the surface and forces answers, even when the truth is stubbornly hidden in plain view. In spite of all that, though, journalism is mired in a great financial fire, a technological convulsion, a furious downsizing that has created gaps in coverage and thrown valuable civic attention up for grabs. So what does journalism have to do with public interest communications? For many, many years, decades in fact, professional communicators relied heavily on their ability to reach and convince particular reporters at particular news outlets. Their outreach strategies centered on the chase for someone else’s perfect story. Even when they found the person and grabbed their attention, they had to sit back and hope, please, please, do not screw this up, that that one journalist would capture the right perspective on the right issue and use the right words. A project’s glory or demise would frequently rest in the hands of the all-powerful journalist. Now, while I am dabbling in irony today, I’m not some knee-jerk social media as everything, Acolyte, who’s going to tell you that traditional media outreach tactics are dead. They’re not, but they have receded from their central importance. They are meaningful. They are components of our strategies, but they are not the be-all end-all. A two-line mention of your project in the New York Times may cheer some, but it is perishable. It is not sustainable, and it must be paired with other tactics that tell stories and attract attention. This gathering of public interest communicators, it’s truly, truly unique. We fill gaps in the public’s knowledge base. We educate and spur movement. We take complicated issues and find a way to bust through the clutter. So people notice, listen, and act. But our work is increasingly about identifying and building those other tactics that can fill the breach as journalism’s singular influenced wanes. So I’m not laying a wreath at journalism’s tombstone. And if I worried some of you by apparently tearing down the very fabric of an open and independent press, well, don’t fret. In fact, let me swing the pendulum the other way. I am a former journalist. I don’t say this like a recovering addict. Or even as a lament for some bygone days. I say it because it is part of the bedrock of the way that I look at and think about public interest communications. When I worked in newsrooms, my peers had varied interests. But the extremely important church state separation between editorial on one side and business on the other meant that many journalists didn’t look to other industries for clues about how they could innovate. It would have been sacrilege. And I did it anyway. But to tell your colleagues that Coca-Cola’s or GE’s approach to storytelling could heck it should force journalists to think differently about audience and content. So now as a content oriented communicator, one of my key points is this. Newsrooms know the process to tell stories, to tease out nuanced information, to make sense of and translate complicated data sets, to form connections that help crystallize a muddled world, to chart a plain language path beset by wonks and subject matter experts. All of those skills, if we can harness them, are exactly the things that we need in our work. That newsroom process, that logic can transform the way we approach this communication work. So we need to read, research, report, question, listen, verify, test, refine, understand an issue down to its bones and then craft creative solutions. It’s not sufficient for us to say that we are storytellers and then deliver press releases. It’s not adequate to slap a news link on a website and then populate it only when we have a program launch or an annual conference. We can and should apply the best principles of journalism to our communications work. This is about artfully telling stories with clarity and depth, not bludgeoning our readers with convoluted program titles or acronyms, acronyms, acronyms. We have to meet our audiences where they are, speak to them in their own language and if we’re successful, propel them to the change that we envision. We know that people are spending more time than ever consuming information online in apps and through mobile devices. In many cases, news organization websites are not their primary destination for knowledge. Journalists would be heartbroken to hear that. Instead, they use a complex mix of search, social media, niche sites, news aggregators and e-mail to find their information. If we hope to have impact, we must develop strategies that capture a prominent place in that stream. Decision makers, whether they are legislators torn between two policy approaches or parents grappling with their children’s poor health, place a high value on thorough, detailed, reasoned content that deepens understanding and leads to smarter decisions. Those decision makers, legislative, parental, everything in between, used to look primarily to the news media to make sense of the world around them. Now, many of us wake to a smartphone alarm and squinting at the glare and the darkness. We review push notifications, text, e-mail and social. Many of us, and think about this, we now consume more content and we formulate more conclusions before we get out of bed. Then we might have a generation ago by reading an entire newspaper or watching the nightly news. We fill downtime by checking if anything new has popped in. We pool to refresh. We follow links wherever they lead. Our David Brinkley’s, Christiane Amanpour’s and Gwen Eiffel’s may actually be Emily from high school or Jamal from your first job, or your Uncle Richie who somehow found you and friended you on Facebook. When Uncle Richie is pushing links at you and you know that you click on his links and spy to yourself, then there is certainly space for individual non-media organizations like us, like the people you represent, to craft unique content that serves the public interest. If we can educate, or surprise, or enrage, or delight with stories that are rooted in facts and precision, then we can all play a part in embracing journalism’s public service mission. And perhaps we, as public interest communicators, can help to improve the human condition in the process. Thank you. Thank you.