Merchants of Truth 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

“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

“Just as there is no pure objectivity in journalism, a profession filled with human frailties,”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“the internet, with so much free content, had become a news sewer. Certain discerning customers were now willing to pay for news of immense quality from a trusted source.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“journalists were shielded from reality like spoiled children.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“In a sale-leaseback deal finalized just before the Atlantic article was published, he brought in $225 million in emergency cash by selling the 20 floors of the building that the company used and owned. The Times became a renter in its own building. Sulzberger was aware that Times reporters leaked as much as some of their sources did, and suspected the damaging stories published about him in Vanity Fair and New York magazine came with help from the newsroom.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“In a sale-leaseback deal finalized just before the Atlantic article was published, he brought in $225 million in emergency cash by selling the 20 floors of the building that the company used and owned. The Times became a renter in its own building.”
― 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

“A third source of worry came from the Times’s longtime rival, the Wall Street Journal. After his acquisition of the Journal in 2007, Rupert Murdoch had transformed the newspaper, pushing it in a general-interest direction with more national and international news that was not strictly about business. He was determined to knock the Times off its throne as America’s most influential and widely read daily newspaper and hated the Times’s facile liberalism.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“The paper was engaged in a daily fight for survival that distracted its leaders from making necessary innovations. People were reading news on their smartphones, but the Times did not yet have an app for the iPhone. Its storehouse of wonderful recipes could not be monetized because they weren’t digitized. There were 50 projects stacked up undone on the business side’s list of top priorities. Creative thinking about how to fix the broken business model came to a halt.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“The Pew Foundation, which published an influential annual assessment on the state of journalism, introduced its report this way: “The newspaper industry exited a harrowing 2008 and entered 2009 in something perilously close to free fall.” Business Insider, a new digital start-up, proclaimed, perhaps with a note of glee, that 2009 was “the year newspapers died.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Jason Leopold, known for using the Freedom of Information Act to break open scandals. It was Leopold’s FOIA request that led to the scandal over Hillary Clinton’s private email server.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Starved for revenue, older magazines like the Atlantic and Forbes were quick to take note of Smith’s “solution” to the industry’s business problem and scrambled to establish agencies of their own within their walls. In just a few years’ time, the Times and the Post also had in-house agencies to produce native ads. The Times stole Forbes’s chief revenue officer and ad director, one of the most aggressive users of native advertising, to launch theirs.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Over the previous 25 years, the overall audience for network news had been cut in half. The concerns of those who remained were reflected in the ads for dentures, adult diapers, and pharmaceuticals to treat erectile dysfunction. Cable news, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC weren’t attracting many young viewers either. The median age of the Fox audience was nearly 70.”
― 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

“BuzzFeed now seemed less like “a lab that created content as R&D” and more like a breakthrough that might alter the course of history by preserving an informed public. “BuzzFeed has a major role to play in the coming years, to fill the hole left by the ongoing decline of print newspapers and magazines,” he wrote to his staff in the early fall of 2013. “The world needs sustainable, profitable, vibrant content companies staffed by dedicated professionals; especially content for people that grew up on the web, whose entertainment and news interests are largely neglected by television and newspapers.”
― 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

“Peretti told Nieman Lab, “I think the future is going to be about combining informational content with social and emotional content,”
― 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

“What mattered wasn’t whether BuzzFeed’s lists were high-minded but that they were irresistible. They proved so effective that soon even the most esteemed publishers were mimicking the form. The New York Times hopped on the trend,”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“When Peretti got flak for relying so heavily on this dumbed-down form of publishing, he zealously defended the practice. “Lists are an amazing way to consume media,” he wrote in a public memo. “They work for content as varied as the 10 Commandments [and] the Bill of Rights.” Another BuzzFeed editor claimed that lists worked for Homer. “You could call that [book, The Odyssey,] 24 Chapters about Odysseus. That’s, like, a really great list. Really top notch. Really, really viral. Super viral.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“a famous quote by the novelist Umberto Eco: “To make infinity comprehensible . . . [and] create order.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“If Peretti could capture the loyalty of the web’s everyday fanatics, he could deputize them for the purpose of further disseminating BuzzFeed’s content.”
― 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

“No Haters” was a breakthrough for the BuzzFeed brand, but it was no nobler a posture than McDonald’s marketers naming the Happy Meal.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“The emerging mania to get a Like on Facebook, of course, was antithetical to news.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“Facebook was the arbiter of importance and was unabashedly social. Its prescriptions were based on the preference for personally relevant material over material with global relevance.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

“The search engine platform had trafficked in information. The social network, by contrast, was a marketplace for emotional experiences.”
― 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.”
― Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts