Quote

I've operated and launched newspapers all over the world.

A newspaper is a public trust, and we will suffer as a society without them. It is not the Internet that has killed them. It is their own greed, it is their own stupidity, and it is capitalism that has taken our daily newspapers from us.

The advent of the Internet exposed the fact that the old business model for newspapers was broken. The world wide web fundamentally changed the media eco-system, challenging established journalistic practice in what is known as the mainstream media: radio, television, newspapers and magazines.

From the beginning on, newspapers have prospered for one reason: giving readers the news that they want.

A newspaper is the center of a community, it's one of the tent poles of the community, and that's not going to be replaced by Web sites and blogs.

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.

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.

I haven't read a newspaper in 20 years. I don't look at the computer or anything. You have to have a filter on what you let in.

News, news, news - that is what we want. You cannot beat news in a newspaper.