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Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.
Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.
I now wear a Jawbone. This is a bracelet that keeps track of how I sleep, move and eat - transmitting that information to the cloud. It allows me to track and maintain my health much better.
Imagine if we succeed in inspiring our audiences to reduce their own impacts on climate change by just 1 percent. That would be like turning the state of California off for almost two months.
I've always been more interested in the content of our newspapers, political positions day to day, the thrill of communicating with people through words that I am in the pure business aspects.
In motivating people, you've got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example - and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.
While we reduce our own carbon footprint we will encourage the companies who truck our DVDs and newspapers, sell us paper, and provide an enormous range of products and services to all contribute.
We've got to get rid of the fear of failure in this country. In America, people start things, fail and shake themselves down and start things again. The animal spirit of capitalism is stronger there.
Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.
I was brought up in a publishing home, a newspaper man's home, and was excited by that, I suppose. I saw that life at close range and, after the age of ten or twelve, never really considered any other.
I'm not ashamed of any of my papers at all and I'm rather sick of snobs that tell us that they're bad papers, snobs who only read papers that no one else wants. I doubt if they read many papers at all.
If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.
We're not a manufacturer, or an airline, but we do use energy. Printing and publishing newspapers, producing films and television programs, operating 24-hour newsrooms. It all adds carbon to the atmosphere.
No one's going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.
If you're in the media, particularly newspapers, you are in the thick of all the interesting things that are going on in a community, and I can't imagine any other life that one would want to dedicate oneself to.
I try to keep in touch with the details... I also look at the product daily. That doesn't mean you interfere, but it's important occasionally to show the ability to be involved. It shows you understand what's happening.
I feel that people I trusted - I don't know who, on what level - have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it's for them to pay. And I think, frankly, that I'm the best person to see it through.
Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall. That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as to every other business on the planet.
I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother's father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.
I think the important thing is that there be plenty of newspapers, with plenty of different people controlling them, so that there are a variety of viewpoints, so there is a choice for the public. This is the freedom of the press that is needed.
My worry about the New York Times is that it's got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we'd love to challenge it.
The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing."
We're not spending enough money, but probably we let the teachers unions set curriculas which don't teach them the right things. There's not emphasis on the ...the basic learning that you need if you're going to go on in a college and into post-graduate work.
We could make a difference just by holding our emissions steady as our businesses continue to grow. But that doesn't seem to be enough: we want to go all the way to zero... Today, I am announcing our intention to be carbon neutral, across all our businesses, by 2010.
Size and synergies between the different segments of the company matter. As far as we are concerned, the Internet is broadening our opportunity, as well as for other big media companies with huge resources in sports, entertainment and news. There's just more opportunity.
Now if you look at the London 'Times,' you'll find that with quite a number of the photographs, you touch them, and they turn into videos. I think newspapers come alive that way. We talk about 'papers.' We should cut out the word 'paper,' you know? It's 'news organizations.'
So long as I can stay mentally alert - inquiring, curious - I want to keep going. I love my wife and my children, but I don't want to sit around at home with them. We go on safaris and things like that. I can do that for a couple of weeks a year. I'm just not ready to stop, to die.
In my life, I have learned that most people want the same thing. They are not driven by class resentment. What they want most is to make a better life for themselves and their families - and to know that the opportunities for their children will be better than they were for themselves.
Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O'Reilly. He's done certain things to Bill O'Reilly that I believe were way over the line. I think that's bad behavior. But it's okay for him to criticize Bill. And Bill shouldn't be so sensitive. He should ignore that.
I wasn't weaned on the web nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives.
Some of our businesses use more energy than others, but our strategy everywhere is the same... first, reduce our use of energy as much as possible. Then, switch to renewable sources of power where it makes economic sense... And, over time, as a last resort, offset the emissions we can't avoid.
The CNN international is a different service - it is even more leftist and anti-American than CNN is. That's their business, that's fine, but it can't be getting any revenue. There is no cable network that I know of anywhere in the world other than in America that pays them for their products.
News Corporation, today, reaches people at home and at work... when they're thinking... when they're laughing... and when they are making choices that have enormous impact. The unique potential - and duty - of a media company are to help its audiences connect to the issues that define our time.
As an immigrant, I chose to live in America because it is one of the freest and most vibrant nations in the world. And as an immigrant, I feel an obligation to speak up for immigration policies that will keep America the most economically robust, creative and freedom-loving nation in the world.
Becoming carbon neutral is only the beginning. The climate problem will not be solved by one company reducing its emissions to zero, and it won't be solved by one government acting alone. The climate problem will not be solved without mass participation by the general public in countries around the globe.
I think we've been an agent for change, everywhere, and I think change frightens people. They're going nicely in what seems like a settled industry, and someone comes in and says "I can do this better. It doesn't matter how nice that other one is." That's one of the distinguishing points of our acquisitions.
In a world as competitive as ours, the child who does not get a decent education is condemned to the fringes of society. I think all Australians agree that this is intolerable. So we must demand as much of our schools as we do of our sports teams - and ensure that they keep the Australian dream alive for every child.
Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I'd try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, 'This is the end.' I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.
People who watch 'Fox News,' you may say, and this is anecdotal, but they are passionate about it. In the most unlikely places, like down in Soho where I used to live, people would come up to me and thank me for it. People I didn't know from a bar of soap. People appreciate that at least they're being heard. It is much more watchable.
To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.
We're starting with our own carbon footprint. Not nothing. But much of what we're doing is already, or soon will be, little more than the standard way of doing business. We can do something that's unique, different from just any other company. We can set an example, and we can reach our audiences. Our audience's carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours... That's the carbon footprint we want to conquer.
Advances in the technology of communications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes: Fax machines enable dissidents to bypass state-controlled print media; direct-dial telephone makes it difficult for a state to control interpersonal voice communication; and satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels.
John Marks Templeton has achieved exemplary success in both business and philanthropy. For Looking Forward he has assembled a diverse and remarkable group of experts in their fields-including the environment, medicine, the physical sciences, religion, the family, and international relations-and contributed two stellar pieces as well. Together these essays dispel fashionable pessimism and show how the world can progress-and is progressing-toward a better future.