Hobart and William Smith Colleges

commencement 2025

Nancy Gibbs, Former Editor in Chief of TIME Magazine 
Commencement Address
May 18, 2025

First congratulations to you all and thank you so much, Mark. 

I’m honored to receive this award, from your president who I so respect and admire, in front of an exemplary group of graduates, your friends and families, this faculty and community.  

Elizabeth Blackwell was what was demurely described in her day as a “badass,” as was her sister Emily, also a doctor, and sister-in-law Antoinette, the first woman ordained as a minister in the U.S., and her niece Alice, a leading suffragist.

Your time here has equipped you to also be trailblazers, adventurers, to take the lessons from this campus, from your service in this community, your travels abroad, and create a future that will serve those who follow your footsteps.

I have just one important question for you this morning. May I have your attention?

That’s actually the question.

Such a simple formal request and yet so profoundly powerful, that I am asking you for the most precious thing you have–the resource that defines the most intimate immediate reality of who you are, how you live, what you believe, and what is possible. Your attention.

So that’s what I want to talk about for a few minutes before you are released into the great swooping waves of love and pride and farewells and new beginnings that this day holds. 

In the decade since the term the Attention Economy was coined, but especially in the years since we were captured by the attention vampire that is our phone, we’ve come to a different understanding about what attention means and the competition for it.

The cliché used to be that time is money. But I think what that is really getting at is how you choose to spend your time and more specifically what you choose to pay attention to is increasingly the source of value and power in ways that we have not even begun to fathom. 

Let me put a challenge to your parents. If you rescued a child from a burning building and called your son or daughter to let them know that you were going to be featured on the evening news that night, how hard a time do you think they would have knowing how to watch it? The research shows that local television news is the most trusted sources, and yet that mainly tells us that television remains the overwhelming information source for people over 50 while it barely registers for people under 30. We are experiencing a massive generational disruption in where we get information and what we pay attention to.

I am largely agnostic about where you get your information; But it is immensely consequential at this moment that the information be worth your attention, worthy of your trust, safe to consume and not poison in your bloodstream and that of the larger body politic.

Why am I using this precious, festive occasion to talk this gravely about what you pay attention to? Because you are a wartime generation.

My parents' generation, the so-called Greatest Generation, was a wartime generation, fights for freedom fought on battlefields in Europe and Asia that changed everything about the world we live in. 

They were born alongside invention of the radio, came of age with the movies, came to power with the atom and the television, and lived to see the arrival of the Information Age, your age. 

Because you too are a wartime generation, as Information becomes the battle surface of the 21st century. And in a very lucky twist of fate, on which a great deal depends. You are the cohort uniquely equipped for this challenge. You are the first generation to grow up entirely in the post-traditional media age, fluent in multiple languages of audio and emojis, video, vibes and memes. We, and by that I mean my generation and most of us in positions of power and authority in this 21st century, failed to foresee and then address the threats that would come from linking every single person to every other person, providing the tools for instant and infinite information creation with no premium or protocol for whether that information was true and could be trusted. 

I am no post-modernist; I think it is possible to seek truth, recognize truth, hold fast to the truth until new evidence comes along that requires reassessment. I believe this so strongly maybe in part because my first real job in journalism was as a fact checker, where if I failed to ensure that what TIME printed was true, I was out of a job. I got to work in and ultimately lead a global newsroom during the last glory days of what was often called “paradise publishing.” Mind you, I missed the full feast, when on closing nights at TIME Magazine waiters would come down the halls with a food cart–offering steak dinners complete with linens and cutlery as writers pounded their stories out on their typewriters and then gathered round the open bar in the editors' offices while the fact checkers and copy editors did their thing.

But I was still immensely lucky: over time I got to meet seven presidents, multiple prime ministers and the late Pope Francis–twice–and had as my main assignment to be curious about everything and everyone. 

The core function of journalists, as we sat around conference rooms and coffee shops and on campaign buses was just one goal: Find the stories that are important and then find a way to make them interesting. That was it.

The alchemy of a great newsroom was to seek out the secrets, the stories, the guesses and gambles, that shape people's lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness. In a democracy we voluntarily turn over power to people we trust to represent our interest; the press is tasked with making sure they do it. That’s one reason the founders chose to protect just one single industry in the Constitution, even though the 18th century press was wildly reckless and partisan and unreliable.

So how is that working out for us now? Traditional newsrooms are increasingly on life support, battered by legal, financial and political challenges that have flattened them. We are losing newspapers at the rate of two a week; Conspiracy theories flourish as a substitute for the hard work of actual knowledge. Our attention spans shrivel. Cynicism grows. And we detach from the people and places that shape what it means to be human.

There were a lot of problems with the journalistic world I grew up in; Biases that were flagrant, stories that went untold and voices unheard. But something has been lost when we turn our attention away from a process that still required a good faith effort at truth-telling and ransomed ourselves to algorithms that are exceptionally engineered to capture and hold our attention, largely by delivering content that will make us mad or scared, inflamed at our enemies, fierce in defense of our tribe. Here fact-checking makes no difference; tribes trump truth.  

No wonder record numbers of people now say they don’t know who to trust and actively avoid the news because of how it makes them feel.

You’ve heard the righteous defense of empiricism that facts don’t care about your feelings. But the dirty little secret, which is not little and less and less secret, is that the business model of the world’s most powerful tech companies, which is to say, the Attention Merchants, care enormously about your feelings. Their very currency is your feelings. Because feelings grab and hold our attention. 

To say the obvious, We need to care about facts too. 

We need to think about access to reliable information as a human right, the way you think of freedom or food or fair treatment under the law. This is not a call to bring back the noisy, smoky, newsrooms of the 20th century or tell you to get off your phones or delete TikTok or try to turn back time.

But it is a call to bring to bear the critical skills you have learned here, whatever your major, whatever your passions. Skills of inquiry and skepticism, a willingness to hear out those who disagree with you. 

If as the saying goes, the opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference, then the antidote is engagement. Please don’t disengage. Don’t walk away from the fight.

Find the voices wherever they are-the anchors and analysts, creators and influencers, the YouTubers and TikTokers-who will widen your world rather than narrow it, who are the spiritual and intellectual heirs of the giants of the past, of Ida Tarbell and Edward R. Murrow.

Be deliberate about what you consume and what you share, what you pay precious attention to, and who you trust, because that is the whole battle.

In the end, trust is a choice, a private calculation of risk and reward. 

Unless you believe that the country is a more fair and strong and welcoming country as trust has declined, then we all have a stake in rebuilding some measure of faith in each other and our core institutions. Our success, our growth, our health and happiness depend on it and depends on you, in whom I have enormous faith.

One day in 1906 Elizabeth Blackwell’s niece Alice wrote to her expressing gratitude for the example she set. “I shall often remember,” Alice wrote, “ how one day when I said I must fly, you answered, "Success to your wings!"

So I give her the last word and say to you, "Success to your wings!"

Thank you very much.