Standing Up for the Newsroom

“Nobody values their work, because Google and Facebook take their work for free. The readers think they shouldn’t pay for it. So my next job is to say that their work is valuable. So the newsroom shouldn’t fight me on that — they should actually say, ‘This is fantastic. Somebody’s standing up for us.’” 

—Patrick Soon-Shiong, publisher, LATimes, in Ken Doctor, “Newsonomics: Patrick Soon-Shiong on the L.A. Times’ transmedia future, french-fry tweets, and modernizing the ‘newspaper’ business,” NeimanLab.org, March 28, 2019.

• Editorial Comment: What would Clark Kent do?

• Related: Only 14% of Americans have paid for local news in the past year.

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“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard