Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The weakness of cable news is that it chases its audience around. Your audience wants fast-paced, popular news. It needs real news. Cable news changes its stripes based on audience reaction. Viewers are reacting well to breaking news? You probably do more breaking news than you need to. The struggle is building something so that people will come to you, as opposed to constantly changing what you are because you're unsure of where the audience is.
What drives me nuts is that we have these serial sexual predators, who hired back women whose careers were ruined by men who harassed or assaulted them and they're high profile people, and the next day the media is talking about who's going to rehire them. I'm like, Who cares? Why would they be hirable again? I mean, I'm all for comebacks, but what about the women? Shouldn't we be going back to them first? They had the American dream taken away from them.
Most kids come home from school. They don't go to their TVs first. They go to the Internet. They check their emails, or some blogs, or some sites. Then they go watch TV. Other people are at work all day 9-5 in front of a computer. They see certain clips. We're not going to hide the fact that people use the Internet. We're going to try to be as interactive as possible with our fans. I'm currently on Twitter and Facebook and Flicker and Dig. I'm on all that stuff.
I do a lot of work with the Red Cross, too. As a reporter, before I went to entertainment news, I tended to follow natural disasters. I went to Charleston, South Carolina, after Hurricane Hugo. I went to Miami the year after they were recovering from Hurricane Andrew. I came to California when they were recovering from a big earthquake. I've seen the Red Cross and how they stay there years after a natural disaster. They're not just there when a disaster is happening.
Over the years, Americans in particular have been all too willing to squander their hard-earned independence and freedom for the illusion of feeling safe under someone else's authority. The concept of self-sufficiency has been undermined in value over a scant few generations. The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society.
The more you lecture those running the companies on how they need to give more breaks to women or other minority groups and be more open-minded to their work products and perhaps question themselves on a double standard, the more some of those people shut down to your messaging. I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying you can very easily get labeled as someone who sees everything through a prism of race or gender or what have you. So we have to walk a fine line. It's sad but it's the truth.
I had an opportunity to move to L.A. back in 1999 and start up a horse racing network of all things. At the time, I was younger and married but didn't have kids; so we thought, Let's just go to L.A. for a while and have fun, and we can always come home. One thing led to another; and once I was out there, I had my eyes opened to this other world and quickly got a home and gardens show and did a game show and then The Bachelor ended up falling into my lap in 2001. And 'the rest is history' as they say.
In the very early stages of working in sports, I was sick of being referred to as "the Barbie doll" because I had long, blond, fake hair. So I went and bought a boxed hair color, dyed my hair black, and put on glasses. And I looked ridiculous. I looked like a completely different person. I was trying to get away from the stereotype but what I realized in doing that is that what I say and how I conduct myself in what I do will speak for itself, and I don't need to apologize for being a woman in that space.
My scrapbook albums are about capturing and saving the everyday joys of my whole family. In fact, in lots of ways, it's every bit as important to get the pets we love into an album or something that's going to keep them with us forever. There's not a pet owner out there who hasn't felt the loss of a treasured friend. An album lets us hold onto the good times. I've seen some incredible, touching, adorable books put together for pets - because clearly they deserve it. These are unconditional, lifelong friends.
Here's the story: 25 years ago, I had my lips injected with silicone. Stupid thing to do at 24. I saw 'Beaches.' Remember that movie 'Beaches'? I did it with my best girlfriend, so she and I go and we get our lips done. Fine. I have it like that for my whole career, right? So then cut to a couple of years ago, I have a doctor remove as much as they possibly can because it got to the point where they were yucky. You know, they get hard. It's gross. They are now whatever that was after they took out as much of the silicone as they could.
At one time, I hated the iPhone - but that was only before I used one for the first time. Now, it would be difficult for me to make the switch to any other platform. I've spent a fair amount of money on apps that continue to ride with me as I upgrade my iS devices. The iPhone certainly has its share of flaws and shortcomings, but having spent a great deal of time with other devices that claim to be "killer" continue to fall short. The industry needs competition, but I just need my mobile communications computer to work with a healthy array of software.