Tom Shales Quotes

Printing made us all readers. Xeroxing made us all publishers. Television made us all viewers. Digitization makes us all broadcasters.

On telly, there's been a move towards entertainment - with some very high-powered, fast-moving dramas. Then we have the Internet, where we get our information but it's all in bite-size pieces. I think the documentary, as a form, actually speaks to what's missing.

I don't think there are too many traditional media guys who really understood what the new digital media is about.

People say: 'Oh, but would you be happy for your show to go on BBC3 if it was just online?' If I was sat here telling you I had just signed a huge deal with Netflix you'd be going: 'Wow, that's amazing.' You can't see it as 'Oh, it's no longer a channel because it's not on TV.'

The future is electronic. It's radio, television and the Internet; it's not really newspapers anymore.

We're in this transition period of figuring out how to deal with all the new technology that is out there, but television still proves to be the granddaddy of them all.

I think the media world is adjusting to the digital age.

Going from three TV channels to broadcast TV to cable to talk radio; obviously the online explosion has changed things.

Television, cable, the Internet, that's knocked the boundaries down.

Copyright law is a dinosaur, ill-suited for the landscape of today's media.

But I never, never thought of the ministry nor did - of course, television when I was growing up, there was no television. So I didn't know anything about it.

The stories about broadcast dying or it being overtaken by cable have stopped. Same goes for the stories about the Internet hurting our business.

If you look at the Internet, it's been hard for a lot of the traditional media companies to launch viable brands.

Cable would not translate into the public radio universe.

Kids today aren't listening to music audio-only. They're picking up a CD and looking at the lyric sheet and wondering why the pictures aren't moving around. Who wants to do that? It's like Bam Bam Flintstone hanging with the dinosaurs vs. Elroy Jetson who's flying around space. If I'm a kid, I wanna be kicking it with Elroy.

With the profusion of images and the Internet, you can get any truth you want.

As incredible as television has become, it often feels like a sideshow in what has become a daily three-ring media circus.

The world has changed - we can all get news 24/7 from any device, any outlet... but we want to tell different stories in different ways, and add to the news.

It used to be CNN and other television outlets were founded on this idea of a news wheel. You give us 22 minutes, and we'll give you the world. But that's not the way people consume news and information any more.

This media era is amazing. Twitter, Facebook, ESPN, news outlets everywhere.

A guy playing pool in a pub once said to me that they should put me on the telly. It went in one ear and out the other. But then I started thinking about it. I wondered how it all worked, did you have to be best mates with someone at the BBC who you went to uni with in Oxford?

The evening news is evolving rapidly, and I think we have to be extraordinarily nimble.

We would like to be the third-most-watched news channel in the U.K.

When you think of Yahoo, they had a shot to be what Vox is doing, in terms of taking content and distribution, and really focusing on news, sports, finance - the things that uniquely Yahoo was really terrific at - and really build that whole flywheel.

Television takes you to an altogether different audience and directly to people's living room. On television, I'm being myself, and that's why people relate to me more.