Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

In order to have quality journalism you need to have a good income stream, and no Internet model has produced a way of generating income that would pay for good-quality investigative journalism.

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.

The quality of our journalism will make or break our industry, not the recession.

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.

Big media companies have lots of money and content, but they have no way to tap into a good base of users.

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'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to make money from the system.

We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.

If you don't think there is any value in the work I, or any other serious journalists do, then don't spend your money on it. At least you have the choice.

It's a good time to be in the content business though, the branded content business.

I'm very committed to and interested in CNN's journalism and our magazines and our movie studio, not just HBO, where I grew up. But I do have a fondness for subscription television.

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.

A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.

A lot of people take shots at news channels.

I'm focused on getting to a place where we can prove that journalism can make good money on the web.

One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters.

I'm 68 and a half years old; I grew up with newspapers; I love newspapers; I love the news business. I started CNN; I'm a journalist and proud of it.

I know that doesn't sound very radical and webby of me to say that but I think the New York Times is important. I also think there's an occasional piece that will pop out.

People sort of take it for granted, but the more you see of the media world the more you appreciate a paper like the Times where its family continues to invest in editorial quality and I think it's the truly is the best paper in the world.

Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

The competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can't do better, so be it.

Journalism is straying into entertainment. The lines between serious news segments, news entertainment, and news comedy are blurring.

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.

I don't think Hollywood will be the place that innovates great technology, but if people underestimate how they monetize content, they're sorely mistaken.

If I do commentary, write articles, or am an expert on a news channel, I can still earn money.