During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.
In 1949 there was a new thing called Television, to which my agency and advisers opposed as a performance medium.
Cinema is dead, long live cinema.
The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
Nobody will have control of the media in the future, because user-generated content is going to become the major content.
At News Corporation, we have a history of challenging media orthodoxies.
It's the digital era. What makes it exciting is that it's both the Golden Age of television and the Wild West of television. Something is happening now that's unprecedented, and we know that we're a part of it. What could be more exciting or better than that? You can't lose because you're on the pony and you're staking the claim.
We had seen the way the print industry had been disrupted; we'd seen how the audio industry got disrupted, so it just seemed like a natural progression that video was next. We thought we were late to the game in 2003.
Even to current-events junkies, the notion of a 24-hour news channel sounded like a gimmick when the Cable News Network launched more than 30 years ago.
I want to shake things up like 'Bloom County' did.
The diversity revolution [in the news media] was supposed to increase readership and enhance credibility. Just the opposite has resulted. How long will it take the business to figure this out?
We're about to see an acceleration in technological platforms that, for marketers, will be on a scale rivalled only by the arrival of color TV.
But having said that, there's also a sea change in attitude towards media.
The press has met their Waterloo, and it's Obama.
When Limbaugh entered the world of talk radio, the AM dial was essentially moribund. He turned it into a weapon for conservatism, and in the process, led the revolution that has ended in the disintegration of the old media monopoly.
'The Tube' was the first time the plebs had gone on the television. The lunatics taking over the asylum.
Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.
The coming of the motion picture was as important as that of the printing press.
I've got a lot of shows under my belt that are ancient history solely because they were on the air before this video revolution came along and ensured that canceled shows could continue to have a bit of a presence.
Most filmmakers looked at it as a medium to palm off sub-standard stuff. I don't look at it like that. Your TV screen, mobile screen is as relevant as a cinema hall.
Advertising has always been the 'head boy' of the communications industry, but not anymore. Now the rest - creative, digital, and media - is just as important.
I've been fortunate to have had the opportunity to be at the forefront of the digital media revolution.
In the first years after the systemic transition, our screens showed American entertainment that had not been available before, or had been available only sporadically.
When I talk about taking bold actions in the world, few things are bolder than creating the 'Huffington Post' from scratch and reinventing the newspaper business.
