Media Finance Quotes

Bloomberg is an overpriced legacy software system that subsidizes a money-losing media company.

There is never enough money for TV.

We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

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.

Advertising's always been a considerable pressure on publishers.

I hear from broadcasters pretty often. Their ad revenue is down.

The cable model is just a better model. Dual revenue stream: advertising-supported and subscription-supported revenues.

In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.

The American advertiser has made the superior American magazine of today possible.

The CNN international is a different service - it is even more leftist and anti-American than CNN is. That's their business, that's fine, but it can't be getting any revenue. There is no cable network that I know of anywhere in the world other than in America that pays them for their products.

I told [a big investor in The New Yorker] - I was complaining the way writers complain.I said'[Bill Shawn] pays very well, but a lot of my pieces don't get in,' and that was true of most of the writers there.But he pays you for them, that was very nice of him. This guy didn't think it was very nice. He figured, 'Oh, my God, that's more of my investment gone,' and paying money to writers for not printing them. That became, apparently, one of his weapons against Shawn when he - in the corporate skirmishes that went on. It was a bad mistake on my part.

The major media companies are significantly reducing their financial commitment to the motion picture sector.

All media depend on advertisement to survive.