Cortico, Part Two.
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Joe Klein has decamped to London, but ‘Night Owls’ carries on. Below is the link to Part Two of our three-part podcast on Cortico.
For those of you who did not listen to the first episode, here’s how the company describes its mission:
Bringing under-heard voices to the center of stronger civic spaces.
We do this by building tools and methods that enable deep conversations and make it possible to understand and learn from these voices and experiences.
Today’s challenges demand more than just talk. There is no shortage of ways to speak up, but it’s hard to know how to be heard.
Town halls and pulse surveys can be helpful, but they rarely capture the breadth of people’s lived experiences, and leave voices on the sidelines.
These times demand better listening channels, stronger civic spaces where input shared by neighbors, peers, and colleagues sparks more informed decisions and deeper understanding within and across communities.
Joining me on the podcast were Deb Roy, Cortico’s co-founder and chairman, and Alex Kelly Berman, Cortico’s vice president of programs and partnerships.
It was (and is) amazing to me how much time some very smart people at MIT have devoted to better understanding conversations; how they might be structured, what makes them work, what they tell us and how they might (or can) be included in policy-making, decision-making, story-telling, etc.
Cortico has been working on “understanding” conversations for eight years. Deb and his team have built a platform that enables “deeper” conversations, while tamping down the loudest (and/or most strident) voices “in the room”.
The result, in most cases, is a shared “sense of things.” Or as one Cortico conversation participant put it: “You can be in a room full of people and still feel alone.” Within a Cortico group conversation, she said, “you don’t feel that way.”
Where the Cortico platform might lead is an open question. Like countless start-ups before it, it could fail. Ninety percent (90%) of start-ups do fail. But it seems more likely that Cortico won’t fail; that it will succeed in ways that it intended to and in ways that it did not.
It’s fairly easy to see how it can be used to better inform “town hall” meetings, or better understand different points of view within institutions, and/or see what shared values emerge in conversations about contentious “issues.” Governments, NGOs, corporations, civic groups, religious organizations and others need these types of insights. Those are “markets” that Cortico can successfully address and serve.
What’s intriguing (to me at least) is how Cortico might be of use in a post-legacy-news-media….news ecosystem.
A few legacy news organizations will survive the great digital “shake out”. Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Nikkei (owner of Nikkei Asia and the Financial Times) are four that immediately come to mind.
News organizations and “outlets” that serve very specific audience segments will also survive. Some will thrive. A newsletter that covers birding better than most will succeed because birders love birds and they want to know more about them, all the time. That’s an “addressable market”, willing to pay and happily so.
But what’s missing in both cases is the audience. What is the audience (or what are the audiences) thinking about this headline news story or that specific report about climate change and bird migration patterns.
In the case of the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, there were two major news stories. Story one was the police story and, following the arrest, the suspect’s back story. Story two was the public’s view of what happened and what it meant. A surprisingly large number of people used social media to express support for the shooter.
As everyone knows and understands, social media exaggerates the loudest and/or most strident voices, which in turn are exaggerated by algorithms designed to keep users “engaged.”
Cortico’s platform produces a much richer medley of views and identifies and promotes “under-heard” voices or themes. In the world of new news media, the Cortico platform’s ability to enrich “second” stories (stories about the reaction, not the action) seems like a natural (and relatively inexpensive) fit. The reaction, after all, is often more important than the action.
Anyway, click on the arrow below for Episode Two. It’s a bit repetitive (because not everyone will have listened to Episode One). But something is happening at Cortico that may be something else.
You can listen to ‘Night Owls’ podcasts on all the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon, and Spotify.