David Gelernter Quotes

Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column.

The quality of news coverage has diminished, because giants of the print media are no longer being nurtured properly.

If I were to leave Congress and want to start Farenthold TV, it would be very difficult. The fewer players there are, the fewer the opportunities to build a big enough audience to get on.

What we did with 'AllThingsD', though, was very different. We weren't taking a newspaper and putting it on the web; we were creating a digital native product, and we did it inside of a very old, stuffy newspaper company at the time.

I hardly ever watch the news... I love reading newspapers, but I know they're dying out.

Hollywood is just a bunch of middlemen, people trying to facilitate content transfer between creators and viewers.

Television is obviously changing; the way we consume media is changing, so I think it's natural that we are going to try different styles.

The Indian television industry has catapulted into a huge business. Films, however, have not lost one shred of charisma or commercial lucrativity.

We all know that there are different scripted programs out there, and we're all facing the same challenges in terms of ratings and everything else, but I think that there is a lot of opportunity to be had as well, and what I'm excited to do is to get to explore that.

'Nothing But the Truth' is a journalistic thriller that is set during the end of days for print media.

We were an entertainment brand, and if we were going to compete in an era of incredible growth in the cable industry, I felt we actually needed to be entertaining.

I want to get in on how the media business is changing, how people are telling stories in new ways.

In Vice, I saw all of it in one. I saw a studio. I saw a content creator. I saw an agency. I saw a distributor. We want to learn from them. They're talking to a generation we're struggling to connect to as an industry.

I want to find the intersection between digital media and traditional media and be pioneering the endeavor to merge the two worlds.

There are several key pieces to keeping audiences engaged, and the evolution of that. One of them is a content ecosystem, which is leveraging and utilizing as many different platforms as you possibly can to continue to drive the conversation so people have the opportunity to enter your brand from different ways.

What concerns me is that the Independent is going, and there are job cuts at the Guardian, but the wretched Daily Mail is still rampant, making lots of money by millions of people clicking on pictures of cellulited women. I think that's sad.

I certainly felt the desire to reach as many people as I could; I wanted to make the most of this opportunity, sure. But I wouldn't call it pressure the way we're thinking of it now.

The digital revolution is almost as disruptive to the traditional media business as electricity was to the candle business.

In the eight years I worked at newspapers, even during a little stretch when I was a film critic, I was never, ever doing exclusively criticism. In the daily newspaper world, much more value is placed on reporting than on thinking abstractly about art. The eight years I was in newspapers, I was mainly a journalist in the conventional sense, and just doing criticism when there were opportunities.

I mean, Robert Pattinson. No, I’m kidding, I shouldn’t say that. He’s actually really nice. My neighbour works with him and said he was a great guy. I don’t know to be honest, I don’t really model myself after anybody. You’re always just trying to create opportunities and be ready when those opportunities present themselves. I can’t look at anybody and think ‘I want to be Damian Lewis’ – I’d be setting myself up for failure.

Magazines in the traditional sense were aggregators of novelty. A good magazine was a lot of novelty, stuff you've never heard of before, clearly aggregated by people who have been able to travel further and dig deeper than you have been able to do. And that used to be really an important source of stuff for me. And now it is less important because the Internet has eaten it all up. But my Twitter feed as an aggregator of novelty is like... I don't know what I would do if it became any more powerful, I would have to start reining it in somehow.

I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying - it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.

Doing this web show - people underestimate what it takes to do a web show successfully. They underestimate the amount of work that you have to do to get it to your audience after it's made. I think you have to work so much harder, especially if you don't have a huge budget. You have to know how to get your audience engaged, because the Internet is so distracting, and there are so many choices. People, even if they love your show, will forget to go back for episode four, because you know, people are busy.

I still read newspaper comics, but without much hope for their future.

Social media, especially Twitter, has completely changed the fashion and media industries - we now can go direct to consumers in a nanosecond - amazing way of distributing content - right to the point.