When I started at the Globe 40 years ago, there were seven newspapers in Boston and now there are only two. There were only three or four television stations in Boston and now there are a dozen.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There is a long history of newspapers being doomed. They were doomed by radio. They were doomed by television. They were probably doomed by the telegraph way back when.
I did TV for a bit, and somewhere along the line, I started writing a column for 'The Independent' newspaper in England, and now I write features for 'British Vogue.'
There were eleven publishers in New York City, and when it was all over, I think it went down to four or five, and then finally just the three of them, the Big Three.
The reason we have not gone to newspapers is because its a slow growth industry and I think they are dying. I'm not sure there will be newspapers in 10 years. I read newspapers every day. I even read Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.
We have more and more one-newspaper towns, and that troubles me.
American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long, a whole generation gave up on them.
There were always plenty of newspapers in the house. 'The Times', 'Guardian', 'Daily Telegraph' and 'Daily Mail' were all regular fixtures on the coffee table. I used to enjoy reading 'The Times' editorial pages and the 'Daily Mail' sports pages.
While I was doing 'The Newsroom,' I always had the news on on different networks on different TVs around my house and around my office.
One of the problems with any kind of talking about the media landscape is that we've just been through an unusually stable period in which, for fifty years, English language media was centered in three cities - London, New York, and Los Angeles - around a very stable group of people working in a relatively stable set of media.
Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.