Journalism

“AI can write better than a lot of reporters. AI can synthesize information better than a lot of reporters. So if you're not bringing real genuine expertise or original information to the ecosystem, to the conversation, what are you contributing?”

“AI can't walk into the locker room and start to interview the athlete or figure out what the coach did two days earlier and try to get somebody to tell them something off the record or behind the scenes. And that'll become a sort of higher order value proposit…”

“Our view is that there is a need for philanthropy to fund some of this the same way that philanthropy funds the opera house and museums and parks that having a vibrant journalistic outlet to oversee a lot of these things Is that necessary for a vibrant communi…”

“We talked about this great, great tad friend profile in the New Yorker in 2015 that I referenced in the piece that, that I wrote on a 16 Z this past week saying that that kind of kicked off or was the last kind of point in an era where journalism cared about F…”

“I think that I still believe in, maybe this is a slightly old school of journalism, that your writing needs to be unpredictable.”

“So journalism, as the non-consensual invasion of privacy for profit, really captures what it is these critters do.”

“The journalism plays a fundamental role in checking power, something I personally wish it would remember.”

“In journalism, there's sort of, at one end is gathering facts that are not on the internet, and putting them on the internet, and then there's a lot of other things, writing and producing in the middle, and at the other end is connecting with, is a human being…”

“When a reporter writes up an article, that's, like, the last five percent of the work that they've been doing. Like, 95% of the work is, like, collecting new facts that don't exist on the internet. And don't exist anywhere. Because they talked to someone, they…”

“Over the long term, if you allow this appropriation, one worry is that there's not going to be an incentive to invest in the production of information, in the production of robust and vigorous journalism, and so that's why getting that piece right is going to …”

“Journalism is doing a disservice by covering one of the most consequential aspects of our reality today in that way.”

“Every journalist that wants to survive as a journalist has to go independent in the next 10 years.”

“I think about journalists as sort of writing about what is happening at best, uncovering facts. Analysis is explaining why it happened, and opinion is some aspect of saying what you think should happen.”

“It's irrelevant, and I'll tell you why. Because the facts are known instantaneously on Twitter and through the internet. We don't need people to relay facts. We need people to wrap facts in context and allow us to come to our own conclusions.”

“Journalism is a terrible business. There's no path to viral growth here. Every time you grow in order to grow their top line, they're going to have expense. So if you want to get more page views, you're going to have to hire more expensive entitled writers as …”

“The sort of similarity of what I saw in my colleagues and what I did is it's like trying to get at the forefront of cultural shifts, even if you don't know what they mean, just trying to see, okay, are these like these weird movements that are happening in soc…”

“The kind of biggest trend in media, and I can talk about another one of our investments, Substack, which I think has sort of benefited from this trend, is that people are now brands. They are identities. And the individual journalist is ultimately more powerfu…”

“The tools create the illusion that, that what we say matters or that because our text matters, Can look all like it's in a sub stack. That means it has equal value to everything else that's up there. And it just doesn't.”

“Inside, like, let me just give you the example of the New York times inside the New York times, the vast majority of people, especially let's say the older generation, 40 and up believed in the old school values of journalism, you know, striving for objectivit…”

“I'd say that the core superpower of a former journalist or the core superpower of many investors is to just listen to the And actually decide whether you believe the story to be true, and then be kind of a helpful, almost Socratic guide to the founder on their…”

“A lot of journalists are committed to the idea of spreading information and truths with the hope that the more people know those things and understand them, the better the national conversation will be, and the more engaged people will be, and the more ration…”

“Google and Facebook, right? They're siphoning up most of the advertising dollars that used to go to journalism, and yet Google and Facebook, it will deeply impair their business models if journalism ceases to function, right?”

“I don't think it's necessarily getting it right, because I think really provocative stories may prove to be wrong. I think it's transparency and intellectual honesty, so being clear about what the facts are and where things are coming from, so that people can …”

“Journalism is the subject of the future. It's the curriculum for the 21st century.”

“The thing that helps critical thinking development the best is doing it. And that's where the whole journalism thing comes in because you have to think critically every day when you are writing stories and analyzing data and figuring out who said what and does…”

“We're in the business of editorializing, and we've been in that business since basically Facebook and Google, you know, Kind of destroyed the ability for journalism as it stands to remain intact.”

“A lot of those newspaper stories you read every day are being done by AI, not by human beings.”

“I've heard from a number of people in journalism, the arts, and media, and tech. In those four industries, it seems as though the organizations are changing to accommodate the students.”

“That's the basic thing is sort of old school blogging is it's like someone who has an expertise in something other than journalism, like writing about the news of the day. So it's not like necessarily like reporting or research intensive, but it is applying kn…”

“Like, there's almost no news report you can't put into that framework, that you can't put into the fairy tale framework.”

“One of the problems we have at the moment, and one of the biggest problems journalism has, is that you have to assume that you're being watched, or that your emails are being read, your phone is potentially being, not necessarily tapped, but at least the infor…”

“And so as we build out our product, which is allowing people to annotate any website, Not just stuff on our site. We think this is going to be a key part of how people read and write journalism.”

“Well, I think the biggest challenge that journalism and the information businesses face, ah, over the coming decade is actually the same one that the information consuming public faces, which is how to sort out the wheat from the chaff, how to deliver high qua…”