Success Quote by Sumner Redstone

Redstone’s line lands like a boardroom shrug, but it’s really a eulogy delivered by someone holding the knife. “The newspaper is dying” isn’t just a prediction; it’s a power move from a media baron whose empire thrived on scale, speed, and entertainment-first margins. Newspapers, in his telling, aren’t noble civic institutions so much as a structurally broken product: expensive to print and distribute, slow to adapt, and fatally dependent on ad revenue that the internet was already siphoning away.

The second sentence does the sharper work. “I’m not sure there will be newspapers” performs uncertainty while signaling inevitability. It’s executive-speak pessimism: plausible deniability with a clear message to investors and rivals that capital should flee. Then comes the clincher: “it’s one business I’d never be in.” That’s not commentary; it’s brand positioning. Redstone is defining his own competence as the opposite of what newspapers require: patience, local infrastructure, a tolerance for low margins, and a commitment to public-service journalism that doesn’t always monetize cleanly.

Context matters. Coming from a mogul shaped by broadcast and film, this isn’t an outsider’s lament but an insider’s market logic. The subtext is Darwinian: if journalism can’t survive as a business, it doesn’t deserve to. In a few blunt clauses, Redstone captures the early-2000s shift from news as a civic habit to news as an attention economy casualty - and implicitly absolves the winners for walking away.