>>Evgeny Lebedev: We're meeting today in the middle of a revolution.
Now, I understand that after the 20th century a lot of you might be skeptical about Russians
announcing revolutions, but don't worry, I'm not here to take away your private property.
The revolution we're living through has two dimensions: a political revolution and a digital
revolution.
I think they are very closely interrelated.
And I would like today to discuss the relationship between the two.
But first I'd like to explain the experiences that I bring to the revolution.
I know that today, if you argue about freedom in Britain, it can sound banal or obvious.
Who would say that they're against freedom?
But I have only lived for 32 years, and I have seen what the opposite of freedom looks
like and how fragile it can be.
I grew up in a country, the Soviet Union, where if you try to describe the world around
you honestly you are placing yourself in terrible danger.
A wrong joke could lose you your job.
For my grandparents' generation, it could lose you your life.
I was 16 when the secret police first raided my house.
They rifled through every book and every piece of furniture in search of thought crimes to
convict my family of.
Why?
My father had tried to set up and run a business.
That was all.
In the wild west of Russia in the 1990s, business rivals have clearly bribed senior officials
and they came after him and shut him down.
It happened all the time.
It would be as if in Waitrose instead of competing better, they just had everybody in Sainsbury's
arrested or shot.
So the police arrived at our apartment and basically tore it apart.
They ripped all the thousands of books off the shelves and rifled through them.
My mother and I just stood there watching.
Then I soon learned, it was only the beginning.
Sometimes later behind my father's chair where he would sit we found a bullet in the wall.
They had fired from across the apartment -- the apartment across the way.
If he had been sitting there, he would have been dead.
Lots of people told him to leave but he refused.
He had seen free countries.
He refused to accept that he did not live in one.
He started using his money to fund the free press, especially Novaya Gazeta, the freest
and bravest newspaper in Russia where journalists are murdered with horrifying frequency simply
for telling the truth.
All this was at the time the police were harassing us and endlessly questioning our father.
All this happened because, I repeat, he was trying to run a bank and a newspaper.
So no, I do not think that freedom is an obvious or a banal idea.
But I learned then that there is nothing more important than standing up for the ability
to tell the truth against anyone and everyone whose trying to shut you up.
The digital revolution has made it possible for more people than ever before to tell their
truth their way than at any point in history.
As Thomas Friedman has pointed out, just five years ago Facebook didn't exist, Twitter was
a sound, the cloud was in the sky, G4 was a parking place, LinkedIn was a prison, applications
were what you sent to college, and Skype was simply a typo.
Not today, though.
A couple months ago I was in Tunisia where the people learned online through leaked documents
revealing how their dictator Ben Ali was in the pocket of the Americans and laughing at
them.
They organized their resistance online.
Their hunger for freedom was something I recognized and wished that my 16-year-old self was able
to tweet on Facebook from our apartment in Moscow.
Not long after that, I was in Somalia where they have no access to the Internet in most
parts of the country, and I can guarantee you it makes everyone drastically worse off.
Political revolutions happened much before digital revolutions, as we all know, but you
can see how essential the Internet has been in organizing that has changed the world in
2011 by looking at the shapes of these movements.
The old resistance movements of the 20th century were shaped like armies or states with organizing
committees and formal memberships.
The new resistance movements are leaderless and shapeless, and have open boundaries.
They're Facebook made flesh.
While the most inspiring institutions in the world today is a campaigning organization
called Avaaz, which is founded by my friend Jeremy Heimans.
While political parties whither as we have seen during the last elections during the
U.K. four weeks ago, Avaaz has managed to march millions and millions of people around
the world into political action to stop the introduction of capital punishment for homosexuality
in Uganda, and to get Barack Obama to cancel environmentally disastrous pipelines and many
more.
All this new activism means we in the news-gathering business face a dilemma.
More people are speaking than ever before.
We used to control this news gate's effect and opinion.
We used to be able to correct people's anger towards false hopes and distractions.
It is getting harder than ever.
Indeed, when we get it wrong, the anger does erupt upon us.
The new spaces for people to express their anger did not just bring Hosni Mubarak.
It brought down the world.
Now I can't claim to have the answers to the dilemmas of the new world, but I am determined
to launch experiment that help us find them.
I am deeply committed to the strengthening of some of the most precious places that we
can talk to each other, Novaya Gazeta, the Independent, The EYE, and the Evening Standard.
I'm very proud of what my team of journalists have been able to achieve in this regard.
In this business, we're being constantly confronted with the depressing moan that print media
is dead and all we can do is manage decline.
Yet in the past two years we have taken the Evening Standard off its sick bed and made
it into a profitable paper in the heart of London read by more than 1.6 million people
daily.
We have launched a new newspaper, The EYE, that already sells more than The Guardian.
I think what we're doing is we're showing what print is actually for, which is to sift
through important stories and separate them from the endless see of blather and to highlight
the slow news that is too often ignored in the permanent feed of Twitter and so on.
Look, for example, at the Evening Standard's dispossessed campaign that has put the poverty
in London at the heart of the political debate and has raised more than 10 million pounds
for those in need.
Now I want to find how we can infuse this Avaaz style energy that's coursing across
the world, this revolutionary, democratizing energy into those newspapers and the wider
media.
Soon we'll be launching a new Web site called Independent Voices that will try in exciting
and bold ways to provide spaces for citizens to campaign and change their world.
Its editor will be the former independent journalist Amil Rajin (phonetic) with whom
I worked closely over the past year and I will be its editor-in-chief.
It will be the most exciting place for political analysis and campaigning on the Web.
For my part I will personally be using it to tell stories of persecuted journalists
across the world, to find and meet them and give them the platform they need to resist
their oppressors.
Now God knows what challenges lay ahead, but when I look at all these changes around us
and all these revolutions, I feel optimistic.
As Tom Stoppard pointed out the most exciting time to be alive is when everything you thought
you knew turned out to be wrong.
Most of what we knew as an industry is turning out to be wrong about the way newspapers work
and the permanence of such powers as Mubarak and Murdoch.
But as the old models fall, extraordinary new realities are emerging.
It is getting harder than ever to deprive people of a voice as the secret police tried
to deprive me and my family of a voice.
One of the capitals of Twitter today is Tehran, and Moscow is not far behind.
There are voices erupting all around us.
Our challenge now is to make sure that the people don't launch the revolution only with
140 characters of a tweet but with all the richness and subtlety of our newspapers at
their best.
We are going to have to launch many experiments to make this happen.
Not all of them will succeed, but I do know one thing.
It is an amazing time to be alive and to be free.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]