New Media

For too long, minority groups have been overlooked in art and media. They have been underrepresented and misrepresented, resulting in negative biases and stereotypes. The tide is starting to shift, and yet, as many aspects of inclusion and representation push forward, attention to religious diversity lags behind. Accurately portraying the full spectrum of American religiou...

In America today, your understanding of the truth rests upon who you are, where you live, and who gets your vote. It’s no surprise then that trust in the media, once a given, is equally fractured — presenting a danger not only to democracy but to the fabric of society itself. Through a perilous maze of political identities, how can the news deliver the facts and reunite us...

News organizations find themselves in an unenviable position today: charged with delivering the facts in a post-truth world, all while staying financially viable and navigating a rapidly shifting technological landscape. In this conversation, Noah Oppenheim and Jeffrey Goldberg discuss the long game for media through the critical lenses of editorial, business, and tech. Wh...

What’s the future of streaming, disinformation, and building greater trust among audiences? A conversation with César Conde, the leader of NBCU News Group, the largest news organization in the United States, reaching more than eight in ten Americans each month.

Much of the way we experience the Web today was fueled by venture capital. This Silicon Valley model helped drive an explosion of innovation — but innovation that favored huge wins and outsize returns. Entrepreneurs discovered they could achieve both by using our own data to get us hooked. Now our digital interaction is largely brokered by private companies, and their succ...

This session considers the importance of trust, and a healthy distrust, in the well-being of a democracy and the role of the press in this equation drawing on the report of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy released Feb. 5, 2019 titled, “Crisis in Democracy: Renewing Trust in America.” What measures should local journalism, social media, and the public ta...

How do family secrets shape and distort us? Will exposing them liberate us? Dani Shapiro dared to tell a newly discovered family secret in her best-selling memoir, "Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love" and then created the wildly popular podcast “Family Secrets,” to provide others a forum to tell their life-altering experiences. Shapiro reflects on her...

No single technology on the horizon offers the promise — or the peril — of quantum computing. This long-imagined leap in computer power could radically transform everything from weather forecasting to cryptography, and, with its arrival, make every existing encryption tool instantly breakable. What’s the reality of this new idea, and just how close are we to achieving it?

As humans, we have an inherent and intense desire for connection. Social media and our always-on devices have simultaneously fulfilled and thwarted this desire, so what comes next as artificially intelligent companions become even more integrated into our lives? In this interactive conversation, two tech journalists will explore and demonstrate the technology that wants to...

Why do some leap ahead while others fall behind in today’s chaotic, connected world? Two visionary thinkers take you on a whirlwind tour of the 21st century, revealing how "new power" — open, participatory, and peer-driven — is reshaping politics, business, and society. New power works like a current, not a currency — and it is most forceful when it surges — and understand...

Facebook is at the center of some of the most important questions in American life: How can we distinguish truth from fiction online? How can society develop fairly in an era of artificial intelligence? Can technology bring us together, or will it drive us apart? Chris Cox, chief product officer at Facebook, will discuss all these questions and more with Nicholas Thompson,...

After The Atlantic ran a cover story with the headline “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation of Kids?” a spate of stories and opinion pieces followed. The media was flooded with rants in comments sections, a former Facebook exec warned that social media is ripping apart our society, and Apple investors formally asked the company to take measures that would prevent iPhon...

Big Tech firms bristle at the mention of regulation, and unlike major industries including finance, energy, and pharmaceuticals, tech has so far managed to avoid the strong arm of governmental control. But companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon wield an out-sized amount of influence over how we shop, communicate, and get the news. Just in case these companies don’t ha...

As consumers increasingly get their news online, and many news outlets shift from advertising-based business models to digital subscription-based business models, what role should tech platforms like Facebook play in supporting quality journalism? How do publishers tackle the challenges of breaking through various online channels to establish trust and relationships with r...

Every major social platform has to wrestle with its influence on society and how its leaders’ decisions affect people. But one site that hasn’t made many headlines is Reddit, a network of hundreds of thousands of communities for people to connect across shared interests, in politics, jokes, hobbies, life struggles, and countless other topics. From new content policies to p...

As technology drives economic change, the discussion of the future of work seems to be binary: either dystopian or rose colored. The public policy debate has congealed around a set of silver bullet solutions — from universal basic income to coding for all — that reflect Silicon Valley’s strategy for addressing economic inequality. But what if the best strategy isn’t a sing...

For our annual signature event in the Benedict Music Tent, the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival hosts former secretary of state John Kerry in a candid conversation about geopolitics with Andrea Mitchell. Immediately afterward, in collaboration with Theatre Aspen, Ideas Festival presents a live performance by Broadway actors followed by panel discussions examining the historical a...

Marty Baron has a larger-than-life reputation among journalists, who revere him one of the best editors in a generation. Multiple Pulitzer Prizes — and Oscar-winning narratives — only punctuate his passion for excellence in reporting. Since joining The Washington Post as executive editor in 2013, Baron has pursued the kind of investigative journalism for which the paper is...

An opportunity to hear Axios Founder and Executive Editor Mike Allen discuss journalism and politics of the day with documentary filmmaker and journalist Perri Peltz.