Jeffrey Zeldman Quotes

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

The newspaper is dying. I'm not sure there will be newspapers and its one business I'd never be in.

American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long, a whole generation gave up on them.

The thinner a newspaper or magazine is - due to reduced revenue from advertising dollars - the less editorial content because of the standard ad-to-editorial ratio, and the less money there is to support investigative journalism.

The dilemma for early 21st century journalism is this: Who will pay for the news?

I think newspapers will survive in some form or another.

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.

Veteran print editors and reporters at places like the 'Times' and 'The New Yorker' manage to feed and clothe their families without costing their companies a million bucks a month, and they produce a great deal more valuable reporting and analysis than the network news stars do.

Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust - it has a business model that either works or it doesn't.

I have never lived through any time in my career when there haven't been grave challenges facing newspapers.

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.

Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin's 'Courant', it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America's last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive.

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

To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad.

I've thought for years that newspapers should all be owned by nonprofits.

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 basic problem is with the business model of journalism. That business model is premised on the idea that talk is cheap and reporting is expensive.

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.

I'm a failed newspaper man myself.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

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.

I've traveled around the country and I read local newspapers and all of that, and it's a sad, sad thing to go from city to city and see the small newspapers and they're tiny. They're tiny not only in size but also in scope.

Just as infinite access to free music ultimately leads to no one making a living at music anymore, free journalism just doesn't pay for itself - particularly not when a search engine is serving all the ads.

I'm definitely scared about newspapers. The problem is nobody wants to catch a falling knife, and nobody knows where things will stabilise. The value of newspapers has dropped significantly. I think we still have more pain to be felt.

I don't even read the papers. I read 'USA Today' because it has color photos.