Rupert Murdoch quotes: the media mogul’s most helpful tips.
“Successful workers will be those who embrace a lifetime of learning. Those who don’t will be left behind.”
“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.”
“You can’t build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.”
“The buck stops with the guy who signs the checks.”
“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.”
“I’m a catalyst for change. You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.”
“When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.”
“The internet is the fastest-growing advertising market.”
“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.'”
“There is so much media now with the internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices and people want to be heard.”
“You’ve got to look for a gap, where competitors in a market have grown lazy and lost contact with the readers or the viewers.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic.”
“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.”
“I think a newspaper should be provocative, stir ’em up, but you can’t do that on television. It’s just not on.”
“We started Fox when everyone said it couldn’t be done.”
“We have no intention of failing. The only question is how great a success we’ll have.”
“Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?”
“I’ve operated and launched newspapers all over the world.”
“Monopoly is a terrible thing, till you have it.”
“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.”
“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. They’ll never know a world without ubiquitous broadband internet access.”
“We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.”
“The future course of news is being altered by technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways.”
“The data may show that young people aren’t reading newspapers as much as their predecessors, but it doesn’t show they don’t want news. In fact, they want a lot of news, just faster news of a different kind and delivered in a different way.”
“Success in the online world will beget greater success in the printed medium. By streamlining our operations and becoming more nimble. By changing the way we write and edit stories. By listening more intently to our readers.”
“News – communicating news and ideas, I guess – is my passion.”
“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, than I am in the pure business aspects.”
“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.”
“It’s been a long career, and I’ve made some mistakes along the way.”
“My mother just died at 103, so that’s a start. You should live 20 years longer than your parents.”
“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.”
“I’m a curious person who’s interested in the great issues of the day, and I’m not good at holding my tongue.”
“When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right.”
“I did not come all this way not to interfere.”
“I don’t mind what people say about me. I’ve never read a book about myself.”
“I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years.”
“I’m a permanently curious person. I probably waste my time being curious about things that have got nothing to do with the business sometimes. What keeps me alive, certainly, is curiosity.”
“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.”
“I would like to be remembered, if I am remembered at all, as being a catalyst for change in the world, change for good.”
“Money is not the motivating force. It’s nice to have money, but I don’t live high. What I enjoy is running the business.”
“Someone whom I respect a great deal, Bill Gates, said recently that the internet would attract $30 billion in advertising revenue annually within the next five years.”
