Jason Calacanis Quotes

As I discovered in my media manipulations, the information that finds us online - what spreads - is the worst kind. It raised itself above the din not through its value, importance, or accuracy but through the opposite: through slickness, titillation, and polarity.

People write negatives things, cause they feel that's what sells. Good news to them, doesn't sell.

I did buy 'The Sun' a few times, but I just don't read the tabloids. Sometimes they can have genius witty headlines, but that's all. There's nothing to read.

I think people are sort of waking up to it now, how probably the biggest change in Internet media isn't the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability. Which is actually terrifying if you're a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like.

The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.

For blogs today, it's really about content creation and partnering with a brand. You can get the news in so many forms and so many places. A tweet now is enough to tell you about a story. People don't have to click to go to your site.

Negativity gets attention and gets clicks.

Don't talk to me about appealing to the public. I am done with the public, for the present anyway. The public reads the headlines and that is all. The story itself is fair and shows the facts. That would be all right if the public read the facts. But it does not. It reads the headlines and listens to the demagogues and that's the stuff public opinion is made of.

I am an unrepentant tweetaholic. I use the communications service all day long to discover news, interesting tidbits and, of course, to flack the work of our tech and media news site, Re/code.

I think that Twitter and YT and blogs are keeping media more honest. Everyone can be a journalist now. Everyone is a fact checker.

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.

There is no doubt that the way journalism worked when I was growing up and getting started has changed forever.

What they will do is, you know the tabloids. They'll take one element of a story that may be true and they'll build everything around it. Take a picture and invent a story around it.

My kids wouldn't dream of buying a newspaper - and we are a newspaper household.

Since news breaks on digg very quickly, we face the same issues as newspapers which print a retraction for a story that was misreported. The difference with digg is that equal play can be given to both sides of a story, whereas with a newspaper, a retraction or correction is usually buried.

If you talk to most people under 30, they don't read a newspaper.

One of the things that is counterintuitive about BuzzFeed is that there's not a natural corollary to what we're doing because it isn't possible to distribute content through word-of-mouth in print.

We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.

When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story.

After I do my first writing of the day, I will generally look at Twitter and Google News - and that's my big media secret. I look at Twitter and I look at Google because they pull all the headlines from other websites.

Political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting. If enough of them are tickled then, bingo, you're news.

Unfortunately because of the variety of outlets for people to speak their minds on the Internet and that kind of thing, it's made the media in general more opinionated and there's more of a 'gotcha mentality' than real reporting.

These days, it takes only seconds - seconds - for a picture, a photo, to suddenly become an international headline.

The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

On the Internet, news is consumed a la carte. If someone shows up on the main page of a website and doesn't see anything of interest, they leave. This negatively impacts ad revenues. The solution on the Internet is to pack news websites full of things that will draw people in, regardless of whether they are news or not.