Jill Abramson > Quotes

“The loss of credibility coincided with Americans’ growing lack of confidence in all of their institutions, according to polls that showed approval for almost everything, especially Congress, falling.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Item No. 1 was frank and made clear he was no revanchist: “The Grahams never asked enough of people. Ask for more.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Unlike other newsrooms, which typically held staff accountable to a set of internal rules, BuzzFeed wouldn’t have an agreed-upon set of standards and ethics until January 2015.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“The amount of digital data produced worldwide in 2006 alone was three million times the material of all the books ever written.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Quality news involves original reporting, digging to find the real story behind the story.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“He blamed Arianna Huffington, “the queen of aggregation,” for what he diagnosed as “the ‘American Idol’-ization of news,” and lamented the kleptocratic regime she threatened to impose once she vanquished the industry’s incumbents. “In Somalia this would be called piracy,” Keller wrote. “In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Each journalist cost nearly half a million dollars when you added in healthcare costs and other coverage fees. The old-timers cost even more. Thinning the herd was the only way to achieve significant savings.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“He would explain this watershed moment as a pivot from the “Google World View” (“Connect people with the information they need”) to the “Facebook World View” (“Connect people with their friends, and give them the means to communicate and express themselves”). BuzzFeed would rely on Facebook and other social networks over Google and other search engines.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Keller clamped down on reporters’ uses of anonymous sources, especially national security officials who sold “scoops” but wouldn’t attach their names to the information they peddled. He was deeply skeptical about anonymous sources in Washington, D.C., where he had briefly worked at the beginning of his career.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“In the end, the only real product the Times had to sell was the quality of its journalism. Its highly educated and affluent readership had an extremely personal relationship with the paper, trusting it to guide its decisions on everything from whom to vote for to what movie to see.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“The Times had been setting the news agenda for so long that its primacy was taken for granted, especially by its journalists,”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“The last thing the Times needed, I believed, was to have its best journalists distracted from their work by endless meetings with product managers who reported to Thompson. That had become the essence of my job, and I knew my having to spend time in unproductive meetings on tasks I mostly hated left”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“The Washington Post had been hit far worse. Its advertising base in D.C. had been decimated, as was the case with many local newspapers,”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“I enjoy working in morally ambiguous spaces,” Peretti said in 2013, “I find that is where the most interesting stuff happens.” Distinctions between news, opinion, entertainment, and native ads continued to blur.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Each individual article now lived on its own web page, where it had a unique URL and could be shared, and spread virally. This put stories, rather than papers, in competition with one another.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Most important, its editors set the agenda of what news was important, although this was being challenged by online competition and a changing world. Some no longer trusted “the mainstream media” or the hierarchy of news selected by an unknown editor. The Times was mainly the voice of the coastal elites and reflected their interests and values. The liberal opinion pages offended some”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“In 2007 I was hit by a delivery truck while crossing the street in Times Square. I was hospitalized for weeks, with dangerous internal bleeding and many broken bones. I was out of work for nearly two months and had to learn to walk all over again.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Every so often one group or another would feel their wrists vibrate and in unison they would lift their arms and inspect the latest update from their company-issued Apple Watches.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“the Facebook Election that Smith had so eagerly predicted was turning out not to be the Facebook election he had optimistically envisioned.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Clinton’s Wall Street speeches, anodyne and unnewsworthy except that she gave them for big fees and insisted on keeping them secret,”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“To Snow Fall” became the new terminology for digital stories with lots of bells and whistles, but few of the imitators on other sites were as good.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“At the time the paper launched, he and his partners hated anything that smacked of political correctness, especially feminism.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“There are not that many places left that do quality news well or even aim to do it at all.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“He relished the ambiguity, knowing as he did that open-endedness meant versatility, and versatility was crucial to success in a changing landscape.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“BuzzFeed ingratiated itself with the younger generations. Smith said in an official announcement that BuzzFeed’s coverage would ditch the outmoded pretensions of equivalency and objectivity. This was house policy, he announced. “There are not two sides.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“The newspaper culture at the Post was even more inbred and suffocating than at the Times. For nearly 50 years there were only two editors: the dashing Ben Bradlee, followed by the stolid Len Downie. (During the same period the Times had five different executive editors.) Downie, who had already been executive editor for 17 years when Weymouth came on board and was not digitally conversant, said that he expected to remain several years more, until he hit 70, as Bradlee had.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“scale. This was a welcome departure from what Zuckerberg maligned as the “top-down way” that Google organized the internet, which made the user feel like a casual reader alone in the Library of Congress. Facebook, by contrast, felt like a Friday night house party. The top-down way was also how editors molded news at the New York Times and the Washington Post.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Publishing serious news ran completely counter to BuzzFeed’s founding model.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“He did not see a digital future and often cited a grim statistic: a daily print subscriber represented $500 in revenue, while a website reader fetched only $6.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“The web is ruled by maniacs,” he told an audience in 2010. “Content is more viral if it helps people fully express their personality disorders.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts