Alex Tabarrok Quotes

Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.

What if you could radically alter the way stories get told? What if the way people wanted to consume content actually changed what you could make?

I don't underestimate audiences' intelligence. Audiences are much brighter than media gives them credit for. When people went to a movie once a week in the 1930s and that was their only exposure to media, you were required to do a different grammar.

If you watch kids looking at something on television, even something that's produced for them and is supposed to be funny, what you'll notice is that they don't laugh.

If there was a blog with five listeners or viewers, I had to be on it. Now I have to be on fewer media, but more substantive media.

The dream factory of that time was much simpler. As media outlets grew, everything became so complicated.

Before that, they thought talking movies might eliminate radio as well. But radio just keeps getting stronger.

We all grew up, our grandmothers and mothers had about three channels to watch, so we watched those soaps and now, a generation has grown up with the Internet and computers and video games.

We are increasingly offered a diet in which sensation, not story, is king.

People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.

I think there was a sense that the impact was being lost because the audience was so familiar with the form. You combine that with people's attention spans, which are clearly conditioned to be shorter now, and there's a need to vary the paradigm.

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

Television and I grew up together.

In a television age, the record is lame; it never catches up.

Some millennials have completely stopped watching TV. So for them, we've created special digital content for handheld devices only. We've paid close attention to how to present online content effectively. We try to catch their attention within the first five seconds - otherwise, they click onto a different content.

The whole industry is changing because so many people watch things on DVR, and they watch things on other platforms, and I think everybody is kind of scratching their heads about how this is going to play out.

Facing fewer subscriptions, ratings drops, et al., media is catching on: people don't want endless editorializing. They want the facts, Jack. If you're going to be op/ed, at least be up front about it.

Television is on a small screen, inside someone's living room, so you have to grab their attention while they are having dinner or cooking or doing something else.

As more and more Americans spend their earliest hours scrolling through news alerts and weather forecasts on their smartphones and tablets, morning shows have to adapt, too. And their biggest competitive advantage may be that, unlike an iPhone, they offer some form of companionship.

I'm in the industry, and I'll fast-forward through the ads most of the time. But I'll stop for the good ones.

A modern audience is capable of processing just so much information because they're used to visual media that's on overload.

As long as you are a trusted source of news, the distribution channel doesn't matter as much. If we have to move to tablets or phones, that's fine.

I like giving the audience a lot of stuff to look at, and rewards for repeated viewings and paying attention.

As far as radio goes, it really isn't what listeners get; it's how they get it. Social media gives us new and fun ways to stay more directly connected to people who listen to us, and it also helps us make decisions faster.

It's imperative that I continue putting together the best shows and take it to the next level. I'm talking to people about holograms, and my dream is to do the hologram drum solo with dad next to me.