Media Economics Quotes

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.

It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.

As electronic journalism came to be evaluated for its cost effectiveness, the network world began breaking up.

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.

If you had to pay separately for just PBS, probably, sadly, not a majority of Americans would do that. So there's many channels, whether it's Discovery Channel or C-SPAN or many, many others, that just aren't viable.

I worry about every newspaper. I worry about the financial undertaking, and I worry that somehow the loss of the sale of the paper version will affect their ability to have journalists and editors and producers. We really need those.

What the Web has never figured out is how to pay for reporting, which, with the collapse of print newspapers, is in desperately short supply, and without which even the most prolific commenters will someday run out of things to say.

I think the biggest issue for legacy media - both TV and film - is that it just costs too much money to develop a TV series or movie. And most of them don't work. Then the one that works has to pay for the rest.

It bothers me when people, say, you know, write for, you know, a web publication and get paid little or nothing or, you know, expecting to, like, read the best newspapers in the world and not pay a cent for it. Those newspapers need money in order to operate.

Journalism is being pushed into a space where I don't think it should ever go, where it's trying to support the monetization model of the Web by driving page views. So what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize.

One Ad is worth more to a paper than forty Editorials.

Veteran print editors and reporters at places like the 'Times' and 'The New Yorker' manage to feed and clothe their families without costing their companies a million bucks a month, and they produce a great deal more valuable reporting and analysis than the network news stars do.

It is the advertiser who provides the paper for the subscriber. It is not to be disputed, that the publisher of a newspaper in this country, without a very exhaustive advertising support, would receive less reward for his labor than the humblest mechanic.

As long as we're monetizing our content... we still win at the end.

There's much more money being brought into the advertising and communications business than in the music industry.

The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.

The free market allowed shock jocks to flourish, and millions of listeners apparently enjoyed the rant.

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

The basic problem is with the business model of journalism. That business model is premised on the idea that talk is cheap and reporting is expensive.

I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value.

If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.

The big difference in those days was that in England the Government subsidized TV, in America we work on TV so we can subsidize the Government.

News may not be very profitable anymore, but it sure is popular.

I would imagine that if you had a media brand that is solely focused on publishing 5,000-word stories with beautiful proprietary photographs and highly-produced videos, it would be a tough thing to make that economically sustainable.

Anyone who says network news cannot be profitable doesn't know what he is talking about. But anyone who says it must "always," make money is misguided and irresponsible.