Media Funding Quotes

The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage. It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don't have access to politicians, who don't have easy access to official documents, who aren't able to buttonhole people in power.

As it is, Al Jazeera is mostly funded by grants from the emir of Qatar-Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, whose family has ruled the country since the mid-1800s.

We've lost that very simple transaction that's so pure, where a reader can say, "I support what you're doing, here's my dollar. I know that you guys are gonna be watchdogs or keep the government accountable, so here's my 50-cent contribution each day." It's just so tidy, and I think so inspiring.

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.

Less money for public media means less access to the arts.

I want the BBC to be a mass market public service broadcaster still funded by the licence fee... and the licence fee is more durable than many people in the commercial sector believe.

We need to support the media by subscribing to newspapers and magazines and supporting their advertisers to stay in business. And we need to be less greedy and allow journalists to take the time to pull the story together.

The more channels putting money into quality programming the better.

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.

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

Advertising revenue available for all programmers, all broadcasters is not enough to create quality programming, and subscription revenues are very, very minimal which come to all programmers.

It is a tragedy when you pay to make a public broadcaster survive.

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.

There's more money on the left in media than there is on the right.

No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

As our leaders in Washington confront tough decisions about our budget priorities, I urge them to continue federal funding for public broadcasting.

For newspapers to continue to play an important role in civic engagement, they need more access to capital. Their decline has created a real threat to independent reporting at the state and local level.

The amount of money that's being put into long-form investigative journalism has become less and less.

We're all concerned about sports rights being so expensive. Obviously, we are funded by the licence fee payers, so it's not always easy to compete with those who can get greater revenue.

The most important thing the giant philanthropies could do - Gates, Rockefeller, Ford, Open Society Institute, and new ones emerging - would be to create a $2-to-$3 billion Trust for Independent Journalism. They wouldn't miss the money, and democracy would still have a fighting chance because of their investment.

Well, the fact that the news industry doesn't have enough money to only send salaried staff to war zones means there is an enormous, wide-open opportunity for young people who want to be on staff and don't know how to get there.

Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.

Newspapers are not free and they never have been. They can appear to be so, but someone, somewhere is covering the costs whether that is through advertising, a patron's largesse or a license fee. Advertising is no longer subsidising the industry and so the cost must fall somewhere - why not on the people who use it?

I have newspapers coming to me and saying, 'Can we get in on the TARP?'.

The relationship between the media owner, their relationship isn't strictly with people and audiences. It's also with advertisers, and that's the most relationship in radio; in fact it pays the bills.