Jeff Zucker Quotes

One-newspaper towns are not good because all the surviving newspaper does is print money. They make 25 percent on their money every year, and if they go down to 22 percent, they start laying people off.

Radio has always been a niche business. Cable television has always been a niche business. Magazines have always been a niche business.

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.

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.

The market for local advertising is in the billions.

We have more and more one-newspaper towns, and that troubles me.

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.

A good column is one that sells paper. It doesn't matter how beautifully it is written and how much you admire the author... if it doesn't sell any papers, it's not a good column. It's a terrible yardstick to use, but in the newspaper business, that's the whole thing.

The future of the television industry is changing at an unstoppable rate, and it is exciting to share my experience and thoughts on how this will change the value of content in the digital space.

When I joined Granada - which, you don't want to start crying about these things, but Granada was a very, very hot place to be, it was my good fortune to be there at that time - the BBC was firmly asleep.

I don't want to kill ads. I think advertising is great, and I'm very aware that there's multiple revenue streams in television, subscription and advertising. But I also don't want to put my head in the sand, and I think the world is changing.

I think TV is the only place left where you can have a midsize something.

The last bastion of competitiveness is local advertising sales. There's little being spent by local advertisers on the Internet. That's where local media have leverage.

I think there's always satisfaction that comes from digging in and telling a story and being on the front line and writing about it. I think there's a venue available if you look. Even print journalism is in good shape in areas.

I actually think there's a potential, a crazy potential, that network TV could become something valuable and worthwhile, just because of fear on the part of the networks.

Unlike productions in the other arts, all television shows are born to destroy two other shows.

There used to be three networks, and now there are 40 million networks. There's a lot more competition out there, too. We would bring in 27 million people. Now, they're lucky if they have 17. I looked at the ratings, for the first time in 25 years, just to see, and there were 130 shows on. There used to be maybe 30.

There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there's just millions of voices and people want to be heard.

The television business is actually going through a tremendous transition, but I think at the end of the day, television is still paramount.

io9 was the last standalone site that Gawker Media ever launched. It was born at a time when many of the company's other famous sites, from Consumerist and Wonkette to Fleshbot and Idolator, were being sold off or shuttered.

The relationship between the media owner, their relationship isn't strictly with people and audiences. It's also with advertisers, and that's the most relationship in radio; in fact it pays the bills.

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

Back in East Texas, all three networks have stations in my hometown of Tyler, and for a town that small, 85,000, to have all three networks, they all have their own news programs, six and 10, and they're always looking for news. Back when I was a judge, they were constantly coming to the courthouse and asking for comments.

If you take the more general role of going to local stations around the country in Montana or South Carolina or wherever, and start in the local news, it's a lot more difficult to get to the stories that you want to really cover.

The thing that interests me least about the radio business is the radio business. But I've had to learn a little bit about it. It's not rocket science: You get ratings, that's good.