Inside the Battle To Preserve Human Craft in an Automated World

Fabio Barratoni: No one's going to buy a subscription for AI written articles. So it comes on both sides. And dealing with that challenge and figuring out what the future is has been really difficult.

Narrator: Welcome to Modern Business Operations, where we talk with leaders about how OPS is adapting to our modern world.

Sagi: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Modern Business Operations. My name is Sagi. I'm the CEO and founder of Tonkin. And today I have the pleasure of hosting Fabio Barratoni. Hey, man. Good to have you.

Fabio Barratoni: Thanks.

Sagi: Well, Fabio is the general counsel of the New Yorker. Um, and you're also, uh, a junk professor at law at Fordham Law School and instructor in nyu. So I think there's a lot we can go from here, but maybe we start with a little bit about your background, your career, how you kind of got to this. I know you had an additional career before law, so maybe we can learn about this a bit.

Fabio Barratoni: So, um, I am from New York City. I grew up here, never really left, apart from short periods. And I started my career, I was an English major in college. And I started my career, I was very interested in journalism. And I started my career as a freelance journalist here in the city. Worked for couple of weekly, uh, newspapers on a freelance basis and then got a job at WNYC radio and did some, um, reporting for them and then was assistant producer for one of the talk shows there at WNYC for your viewers who don't know, is the National Public Radio affiliate here in New York, the largest NPR affiliate in the country. And I started up, was one of the people who started up a talk show there. It was great. And then I decided to go to Columbia, uh, journalism school for graduate school, or I decided to apply. I noticed while I was applying that they had a dual degree with the law school. And so I thought that would be interesting. One of the things that I was sometimes vexed by in journalism, and we're talking, you know, the early 90s, was both Sider journalism, which, which is, you know, you report on one side, you report on the other, and then you sort of leave it for the reader to sort of puzzle over. And it struck me when I was doing some stories that there was a right answer, it wasn't just both sides, and that I actually wasn't serving readers or viewers well by just presenting both sides of a contentious issue when it was distinctly possible that one side had more evidence or was a better argument. And I thought, naively, I thought that law school would help me determine that. So I wasn't going to law school to do Legal reporting. That wasn't what I was interested in and I didn't intend to be a lawyer. I just thought it would be good background knowledge. To my shock and surprise, I got into both the journalism school and the law school. And so I did. I, uh, did the full program, which was a full. You do the first year of law school, which is the really tough year, and then took a leave of absence from law school. You do the journalism program, which is one year. I don't know if the program is still the same format, but back then a full year at the journalism school and then you go back to the law school and finish your second and third years. And so I did that. And I really liked law school. It was weird. Don't like it. Maybe it was because I was there almost as a ethnographer. Right. I wasn't really thinking that I was going to do this. I was more, you know, studying the curious behaviors and habits of these strange people. And, and so it was just interesting and, and it was really fascinating. So that's how I, I came to the law. And towards the end of my law school career, I did a couple of clinics which are programs where law students, even though they're not admitted lawyers yet, are allowed to provide legal services for some issue or group of potential clients under the supervision of a lawyer. And I did a housing court clinic in a SSI benefit clinic and went and appeared in court for folks. And one. And that was like, you know, drugs straight in my veins. That was, you know, was just astonishing that I could walk in and, and make a presentation and have an immediate effect on someone's life. I stopped someone from being evicted. I got someone their benefits that they were being denied. And that was just a really incredible thing. So after that I went to, uh, a law firm and, and learned how to practice law for real and fast

Sagi: forward, you found a place to do both?

Fabio Barratoni: Yeah, I was at a couple of different law firms. I knew I wanted to do media law. I knew that that was, you know, where my heart was. And so I worked at a couple of law firms which was, you know, incredibly valuable training and how to practice and be an actual lawyer. And then after about seven years, I got a job in house at a company called alm, which is American Lawyer Media. They publish American Lawyer magazine and about 30 other magazines and newspapers around the country. There's one in San Francisco called the Recorder that they publish. And I was deputy, uh, general counsel there for six and a half years and then went to Harper Collins Publishers, book publishers and was there assistant, um, general counsel for a couple of years and really would have been very happy to stay there for the rest of my career reading books. I mean I love to read and I was uh, vetting non fiction books and just reading whatever came down the pike that we were about to publish. And then I did uh, legal affairs for the children's division as well. So a lot of copyright issues, trademark issues, and it was great. You know, I had a, worked with a great group of people and got to read books all day for, for work. But then this job at the New Yorker opened up and that was about 11 years ago and my wife convinced me that I really needed to apply for it. I thought it was an impossibility, but I did and, and again, to my shock and surprise, I got the job and I've been here for the past 11 years as General counsel.

Sagi: Wow. Uh, well, first of all, congrats on everything. This, you know, very impressive, uh, path, if you will, and finding that the way to kind of weave together the two things that you like. I think it's always inspiring. Maybe, you know, as you think about the last 11 years, very, I think charged times in media. I think also, you know, from our point of view, from the sort of the podcast topic and how you operate business and function and you've been 11 years as. I don't know how common this is, but you know, it's a decade long plus obviously it's also interesting to me from both. So just like general speaking, you know, media and kind of like the last decade. But also, how do you feel things are the same? Um, drastically different. And then we can maybe talk about future looking to.

Fabio Barratoni: Yeah, my joke about the New Yorker is that it's the best job I've ever had and it's the most stressful job I've ever had. And that's for a couple of reasons. One is, you know, it's obviously a very public magazine. That's the point of it. And so our choices, both legal and reputational, are very public. And so it feels very high stakes. If we get something wrong, if we make a mistake, you know, it's very, it's all out there for everybody to see and so the consequences feel really high. And they're also, you know, we take it seriously. They're people's. We write about serious topics and, and serious issues. And so they're important things at stake for the people we write about as well. So, you know, we take it really seriously. And I care a lot about it. Right. I Care about this institution. I grew up in a home that read the New Yorker and you uh, know, I've. It feels very personal as well. So it's always been, you know, pressure, but in a good way because I care and because I care about the people I work with and that. But you know, interestingly the pressure sort of increased over time in a uh, in a sense that there are a lot more threats in the last few years than they were previously and they come from different directions. Obviously social media wasn't as strong as it is now. When I started we were sort of dipping our toes into social media. There was a point where social media really drove the conversation politically for a lot of things that we cover and the time to react to things shortened. So the pressures have certainly evolved and gotten uh, more serious. And then this administration and anybody who knows New Yorker knows what are view is this administration has, you know, made public its disdain for what it calls mainstream media, legacy media, and issued a lot of threats and, and made life difficult for a lot of folks in my position at other media companies.

Sagi: What do you think? The um. Because I think politics aside, you know, it started with talking about the social media and I think everything since then, it's a little bit of that transition of uh, the role of different medias, again labeling them aside. It's, you know, the roles definitely I feel are changing. Right. And so the roles of certain outlet magazines versus you know, Word. What do you get from M tv? What do you get from like broadcast? What do you get from radio even? What do you get from podcasts? What do you get from. From social media, from blogs? I, I'm curious your thought of where this is heading. But again I uh, I do want to come back to how does that impact your guys, how you run things.

Fabio Barratoni: Yeah.

Sagi: As a response. Right. Maybe to refine the question. Markets change a lot. Right. So like media kind of like maybe before the last 20 years were sort of like pretty stable in the sense of like you know, there was a big TV that came in the, somewhere in the middle of last century. But previously, you know, there's print and it was all big stuff that takes uh, that held for a long time versus in the last 20 years. It feels like every five years. Right. There's a big swings. Other markets fill, fill it too. Right. And business models might change. But to your point, media is sort of like touching a lot, a lot of people in comparison to some other industries. And so it's a lot more public. I'm kind of wondering how that Also impact your way. You guys operating internally?

Fabio Barratoni: Yeah. So, I mean, you know, obviously the business has changed a lot. Even in the last 10 years that I've been here, there's been a big shift towards digital. The New Yorker already had a website when I got here. Obviously, you know, it was 2014. It's not the stone age. But we publish, we now publish a lot more on the website and the speed is much quicker. Before I was here, really, it was just the print magazine which comes out once a week. You know, there was a digital version of it and maybe a couple of other pieces, but not much. But now really the website is its own thing. It's really. There's a lot of breaking news, there's a lot of commentary that went on that. At the same time, we do documentaries. We actually won an Oscar last year for a short narrative film that we acquired. And so we show films and videos. We have podcast series, we have a couple of political podcasts, we have a critics podcasts that are very popular. We have a nationally syndicated radio show that's also distributed as a podcast called the New Yorker Radio Hour. That is our editor, David Remnick, interviewing various people. And that's on some hundred National Public Radio stations around the country. So there's a lot more stuff that we produce. And all of those are designed to sort of meet the audience where they are. And you know, the challenge with that is maintaining quality, right? Because as you said, there have been a lot of business, uh, challenges in the media environment, in journalism. People are getting their news through Twitter and through TikTok these days, and we obviously use those channels as well. But our core value proposition to the reader is spend, spend serious time with us, spend a lot of time with us, and we'll give you a view into a world that you might not have thought a lot about or know about. And we do that with really rigorous reporting and rigorous fact checking, uh, of that reporting and really careful writing, you know, beautiful writing. We take the writing really seriously and we care, uh, that it is beautiful. We have a viewpoint, as I, uh, alluded to earlier, but we value accuracy above all. So you can be, you can have a viewpoint and be accurate. We rigorously fact check pieces and you know, that all is expensive and uh, requires a lot of work and it's not for everybody. We are never going to be, you know, viral on TikTok. One of our 10,000 word pieces is never going to go viral on TikTok. That's not, that's not what we do. But we are profitable because our readers value us and there are enough of them that really care about what we do. And so as long as we keep our quality high, I think we have a long and bright future. But it is difficult, right? I mean, there are a lot of challenges and the speed of change, as you said, keeps spinning faster and we have to be smart about not trying to be everything to everybody, but really maintain quality.

Sagi: This episode is brought to you by Tonkin. Tonkin is the operating system for business operations, providing businesses with the building blocks to orchestrate any process with no code or change management required. Contact us@tonkin.com to learn how you can build complex processes fast. I definitely agree with that. I think there's also the aspect of when the bar goes down, the entry level, the entry bar goes down, then it's always a flux again, it doesn't matter in which industry, it always happens. And there's a flux that in the long run is usually positive because it allows the market to kind of readjust into what is now the most useful thing. But it doesn't mean that everything that comes out would be useful. Right. So there's like a cycle that goes through. So kudos to you guys for, for adjusting while keeping focus on what you guys are core mission is curious, you know, in your department, specifically in your role, uh, you mentioned that is the most stressful job, right? Obviously very public. There's, there's aspects of it that are just part of the, of that market. How much of the change around you guys, again, with all the different new channels and avenues, how does that affect the way you manage your own organization? When you think about, you know, strategy for your team and how to structure different things, is that an impact or is essentially just sort of like more complex and harder, but essentially the same flow?

Fabio Barratoni: I think it's probably the latter, to be honest. I mean, I know that this is not, you know, smart management, but I rely a lot on sort of brute force lawyering in the sense that, you know, we have to be really thorough. We can't. There's, there's, there are no, there are not a lot of shortcuts. And that one of the challenges recently has been there used to be a lot of things that I didn't have to worry about that I now have to worry about, and I do have to worry about them. There are, you know, legal threats and challenges that really require thought and answers. And it's. The only way to do that is through, is through really working on them and thinking about them. So that Just means that, uh, this is what I spend all my. All my time doing. And, uh, you know, I just end up working a lot, and so does my team. But that's. That's really the way to get. Get the job done. I mean, obviously there. There are technological advances, as you mentioned, you know, working from home during COVID we can do this work from home, we can do zooms. We don't have to all meet in a room. But a lot of times I like to be in the room with people, especially on really critical things and listening. You know, the further I get along in my career, the more important soft skills such as listening and building consensus are really important. And I find that's easier to do in person than over zoom. But that all takes time. And so as the issues get more complex and new risks arise, it feels like there's. There's just more to do. But again, that. That sounds terrible, but it's. It's not when you have a client. And, um, I'm speaking as a lawyer, a client that you really respect. So, you know, one of the great things about working at the New Yorker is that not only do they want to do the right thing, they want to, you know, produce really good quality journalism, but they want to do it the right way. And that is both internal and external. So, you know, we want to treat sources well, we want to be open and honest with our readers. But internally, too, it's just a really decent place. And I really, you know, the people who work here are really decent and thoughtful people. And that makes my job a lot easier because I'm not dealing with a ton of internal politics or strange dynamics or difficult personalities. It's really, you know, the work comes first here. And. And that makes my job, um, much, much easier.

Sagi: I was debating myself in the last few seconds. Should I let this be the first episode for a long time that we didn't mention the word AI, or

Fabio Barratoni: should

Sagi: we touch on it? Because the pro agreement is you are in an interesting section of the market, both the law aspect of it and the media aspect of it, which even just the concept of generative AI around what AI can do with content is sort of like highly exposed, if you will, but also highly leveraged from the other hand. So I'm kind of curious from that media side of things in general. But then specifically, you know, from your experience on law, how do you think about. Are, uh, you. Are you a net positive, a net negative, neutral, skeptic, optimistic?

Fabio Barratoni: So I have to confess, I'm a little bit of a skeptic and neutral to negative in the sense that, you know, AI has imposed. And this is not just to the New Yorker but to uh, a lot of media businesses. A lot of pressure on companies because of the decline in search. So uh, most media companies, print magazine like the New Yorker, most people come to us through search or historically have come to us through search. Very few people who are younger than me go to the homepage of any publication. Right? Nobody, nobody types in new yorker.com anymore, except if you're ancient like me and looks at what's on the homepage and then decides what to read. They all either Google something or something shows up in their social media feed and they click on it. And AI has been really taking a chunk of that. So when people do a, uh, Google search or other search these days, instead of getting the top ranked list, they get an answer from Google. And then sometimes, you know, there are links there that they can click, but virtually no one clicks on those links. So our traffic from search has gone way down and that affects our advertising revenue. And advertising historically for media publications has been, you know, down. That's been a steady trend over the past 20 years. When I look at old copies of the New Yorker, you know, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, I'm astonished at the quantity of advertising. There's just a ton of liquor ads and car ads and all kinds of, you know, ads that we, for whatever reason, uh, advertisers just don't feel the need to do that now and, and won't pay the same prices. And so advertising has been declining for the past 30 years. And then, you know, that, that the decline in search really even hurts advertising even more because fewer people are coming to our site in that way. You know, again for us, we've been able to make up the business through our subscription revenue. And again that's uh, a, that's because we present a really good value proposition for our readers. You spend, you know, $9 on an issue and you get a, uh, few hours of really compelling critical cultural commentary and, and journalism and art and even funny cartoons. So you know, we've been able, we've been for a long time. We've had a bigger chunk of our revenues come from subscribers rather than advertisers, which is not the case for a lot of other media companies that have, that have really faced this difficulty with, and had a lot more problems with it. But it's still not great. And uh, a lot of that decline is thanks to AI on the other side. There's more what we call AI slop out there for journalists. Just stories that are generated by AI and we are committed to not doing that and not, not just producing AI generated content. But there's more content out in the world for people to consume and see. So potentially breaking through is harder. But you know, again that would be a downward spiral if we were to start publishing AI written articles. No one's going to buy a subscription for AI written articles. So it, so it comes on both sides. And dealing with that challenge and figuring out what the future is has been really difficult I think.

Sagi: What. So the search is a whole different obviously rabbit hole.

Fabio Barratoni: Yeah.

Sagi: On um, the what people would pay for. I think there's going to be very few people that would disagree that at the end of the day, you know, what is your product. Right. And if people buy from the get go like you mentioned, you know, throughout here, they are the buying the product of the magazine. Right. Of what it is that you're putting together. Outsourcing that to a different person or to a machine is equally gonna reduce the value of the product itself. Right. It's like buying uh, a scarf from a factory or from someone knitting it. So I think that makes sense. On the other side of it, you know spoke to a lot of folks that were able to find. It's almost like uh, I feel where people lean more into because of that last point, less of what they produce outside but more how they produce it internally. And in your guys case obviously because you are you know the writers on your staff that writes stuff. So for them of course probably makes less sense because like I said it's kind of hurting integrity. But there's other areas that there's a lot of leverage and I kind of wonder if it is a little bit of like a black and white for you guys because there's negative aspects to it to essentially say we don't want to touch this or there's areas where you know, I'll give you an example like in the marketing processes obviously there's marketing aspects to what you guys do. Would your marketing department use AI to do a better, you know, analysis of results, you know, those type of things.

Fabio Barratoni: Yeah, that, so that. So our ah, restriction on AI is really editorial use as opposed to business use. If there are smarter, better ways to run the business that use AI even you know, non external facing editorial uses. So like transcription software. So we may use you know, AI services that transcribe an audio interview like we're having right now and make it much easier for the reporter to then find the relevant bit that they need for their piece and use that. And that's not particularly revolutionary. I mean, some of those have been around. But yeah, there are certainly things like that that are useful. We also have a limited use of AI to produce audio versions of some of our pieces. So we used to, you know, people like to listen to our pieces and click on the audio version we used to have. We still do have those read by voiceover people, but there's a limited set of things of, you know, pieces that we can have that done with and AI's potential to expand the number of pieces that we can produce an audio version of. And that feels like that's, that's just a net positive. Right? That's just more of our stuff out in the world for people to consume. That even that is not, is not perfect though. You know, sometimes the, the AI mispronounces things or mispronounces names and that is distracting. But sure, yeah, of course there, there, there are AI tools, business tools that make running the business better or smarter. You know, we, we would use those without hesitation if we can figure out a better way to get our magazine into the hands of people who want to read it.

Sagi: Makes sense. Awesome. Well, you know, through this, different revolutions, uh, some will call m Massive earthquake changes. Some other will call. I always like to go back to. Is there something that kind of you carried with you went through one industry to another come back some advice that, uh, that you feel is worth paying forward?

Fabio Barratoni: Yeah, I think a lot about a joke that a law professor of mine made when I was in law school, which is, it was a criminal law class. And he said, uh, if somebody has to go to jail, make sure it's not you. Which is great advice for lawyers generally. Right. But the further I've gotten along in my career and, uh, it doesn't, it's not that it's come up a lot in my career, but it's just the idea that your ethical obligations and your ethical responsibilities really rest on you and to not compromise what you feel is the right thing to do. And it's not just a matter of going to jail, but on a whole host of things. You know, you are the custodian of your ethics and your responsibility and you should see that as something that is really critical. Nobody else is going to just like, you know, career advice. Nobody's going to look out for your career. You have to manage your own career. Nobody's going to look out for your ethics. You are really responsible for your own ethics. And you have to make sure that what you're doing at each stage of your career is something that you believe in and that matters, and that, uh, you know, makes it. Makes the world a better place. And so that, I think, sort of guided my career. I had a chance when I was graduating law school to go work for a firm that did a lot of tobacco litigation on behalf of tobacco companies. And it's not that that's unethical or. Or immoral, but it just wasn't for me, and I wasn't, you know, that's not how I want to spend. We work incredibly hard. That's not how I want to spend my time. And so finding something that I care about and I feel deeply about makes all the hard work that I was describing earlier really meaningful. And so you know, that that little joke sort of has resonated with me for. For many years.

Sagi: I love it. Thank you so much, Fabio. That was great. If anyone wants to chat with you, learn more how they can get involved or just. Just to nerd out on some of those things, where. Where can they find you?

Fabio Barratoni: I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Bluesky. Uh, but I virtually never post, but LinkedIn is probably the best, best place to reach me.

Sagi: Sounds good. Awesome. Thank you so much again.

Fabio Barratoni: Okay, thank you.

Narrator: I hope you enjoyed this episode of Modern Business Operations. You can see the show notes and all of the resources mentioned on, um, today's episode at tonkin. Com mbopod. Thank you for listening and be sure to subscribe for updates on future episodes. And if you're interested in staying up to date on the latest in business operations technology, head over to Tonkin.