Rob Sheffield Quotes

When I first broke through, there was only NBC, CBS and ABC, and they had news in the morning and in the evening - there wasn't no 24-hour news.

I think a lot of people in television news look at the cable networks with great envy.

The focus of entertainment is taking away from what the public needs as news. I think investigative journalism will always be important and always find its way, be it on the Internet or wherever.

The evening news is a concept whose time has come and gone.

I think that what people want from cable news channels is the sense that if there's hard news, it's going to come up immediately.

News in printed form is in secular decline. However, news delivered the way consumers want it is growing and thriving.

I never quite understand why we watch the news. There doesn't really seem much point watching somebody tell you what the news is when you could quite easily listen to it on the radio.

In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.

ABC wouldn't be a player in the news major leagues until the 1970s, when Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and programming approach he had applied to ABC Sports.

The Fox News cable channel is doing very well because there is a market for what Fox News has to offer.

It is well documented that Fox News has the audience demographics that other networks thirst for.

I'm pretty sure the last time any anchor could honestly ignore ratings was well before I was born.

The old attitude toward newspapers was that they were completely disposable - today's newspaper is tomorrow's fish wrap.

The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news... and it's not entirely the media's fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news.

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.

The perception is that more important people watch news in the evenings than in the mornings.

Traditional broadcast media seems old-fashioned and vague to me. When I watch television news, I'm aware of what skilled journalists they are, but I find it hard because of the corny way they present it.

Newspapers are the engines that drive the Web.

Television news was expanding to an hour, and producers did not know how to fill the space and time.

Television has certain imperatives that CNN had the luxury of ignoring for a long period of time. CNN could take the position that the news would be the star, because in most of the programming day, they were the only all-news operation on the air.

The current wisdom now is that if the three networks are covering the news the same way the difference is the anchor people. I think that won't be true in the future.

The whole idea of television news or any kind of news is to inform people about things they need to know about.

We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They've heard it on the radio. They've seen it on the Internet. They've seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different.

Even to current-events junkies, the notion of a 24-hour news channel sounded like a gimmick when the Cable News Network launched more than 30 years ago.

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