Quotes About Journalism

One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little. The world now is almost inured to the power of journalism. The best journalism would manage to outrage people. And people are less and less inclined to outrage.

I loved journalism until the day my journalism teacher, a man I revered, came by my desk and said, 'Are you planning on going into journalism?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'I wouldn't.' I said, 'Well, why not?' He said, 'You can't make a living.'

I have so much more compassion for journalists and the work that they have to do, in order to do the jobs that they have to do. I am much more in awe of and am celebratory of great journalism when I see it, and I'm much more critical of bad journalism, or crap masquerading as journalism.

The quality of life in America is dependent on the quality of the journalism. Most people don't realize that, but if you think about it, journalism is one of the pillars on which our society is perched.

Democracies succeed or fail based on their journalism. America is strong because its journalism is strong. That is how democracies work. They're only as good as the quality of the information that the public possesses and that is where we come in.

The more readings a novel has, even contradictory, the better. In journalism, you talk about what you know; you have provided yourself with records, you have gathered information, you have performed interviews. In a novel, you talk about what you don't know, because the novel comes from the unconscious. They are very different relationships with words and with the world. In journalism, you talk about trees; in the novel, you try to talk about the forest.

I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism, and I have a communications degree. I studied journalism -- who, what, where, when, and why -- of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy, that expectation that the public has for truth to be reported. And then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us.

I'm saying that the WMD reporting was not consciously evil. It was bad journalism, even very bad journalism.

Our mission is to help people discover and support great journalism. But something like Blendle, asking micropayments for journalism, hasn't been done before on this scale and with our broad support from media companies. So we want to do it well and listen very carefully to the feedback of our users first. That feedback from the early community is very important to us.

We do live in a time where there are fake web sites peddling mistruths out or sites that use hyperbole and don't put things in context. There's a range of ways that real journalism has been mashed up with things that aren't journalism... like opinion or that's sensationalistic in some ways. It is really noisy out there. You have to think of ways to cut though the noise.

Very rarely are you going to see the large shareholder or CEO of a corporation march into a newsroom and say, "Cover this story, don't cover that." It's a much more subtle process. The professional code adapts, but what we try to see, is how commercial and corporate pressure shape both the professional code and the sorts of things that are considered legitimate journalism and illegitimate journalism.

And I really believe good journalism is good business.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

I have a passion for words. I love words. And I'm just learning and developing my skills for words. I do books and I do journalism and plays. I have a broad palette. I don't have a great eye for direction. I love working with actors and I work very well with them because I appreciate what they bring to the table. I'd never say never, of course, but I look at it and don't really fancy it. I want to try and master the word side of it first.

The fun thing about journalism is if you go do a story about something, you can now ask three intelligent questions about it. Or say three intelligent things. And that gets people talking.

At Gallaudet, deafness isn't an issue. You don't even think about it. Students can pay attention to accounting or psychology or journalism. But when a deaf person goes to another college, no matter how supportive it is, that person doesn't get the same access.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

Nothing will replace good journalism.

As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey.

I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I'm not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

I think the Internet is to MSM what TV was to yellow journalism.

This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It's, on its best day, is a crude art. We make mistakes; I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist, I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories, make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television.

Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world.

The story of journalism, on a day-to-day basis, is the story of the interaction of reporters and officials

I can only speak as an American, but most journalism here isn't doing its job any more. It's about selling stuff.

To change the media, you're gonna have to totally throw out every journalism school and get rid of everybody in every newsroom, and then you're gonna have to change the grade school and middle school and high school curriculum.

We didn't see what happen when Marines fired M-16s... We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?

It's funny but when young people say to me "what can I study to be a force for change, should I study law or biology or business?" My answer is music, drama, journalism, communications.

The country is only as strong as its journalism - that's the way democracies work. The higher the quality of the information, the better informed the electorate is and the better the government runs.

Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.

A rat called Possible New Strain was sitting under a spaghetti strainer held down with a pile of journalism textbooks, saying rude things in rat-speak.

We are moving rapidly from an era of an oligopoly of content providers to an oligopoly of content controllers: new choke points. This is not media consolidation in the traditional sense, where a few huge conglomerates used economies of scale to dominate journalism by dominating the local and national agendas. This consolidation, to a very few companies plus increasing government intervention, is even more dangerous - and information providers of all kinds are finally starting to grasp what’s happening.

As for journalism education, there are some terrifically exciting things going on in some schools. Others are struggling to adapt. Curriculum changes can be slow, by design. Yet there are arguably more dynamic minds, old and young, gravitating to teaching than ever before, both on the research and scholarly side and on the side of what is called "professional practice," a term that usually refers to experienced journalists without Ph.D's moving to the academy.

I realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition.

The junk food of political journalism...all reshuffle stories are crap.

I started as a journalist actually. I graduated from Northwestern Medill School of Journalism and with my degree discovered, once out in the real world, I wasn't very good at it.

Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

Simplification seems to be the removal of objects for the goal of making a graphic as clean and uncluttered as possible. Whereas, with optimization, it feels like there's more intelligence in that. It maintains the usability, but tries to distill something down to its essence. But with some data-sets you have to be careful because, as with linear, print journalism, it's easy to shave off facts that don't quite fit the flow.

WikiLeaks combines several of my prior interests in technology, policy questions, and journalism.

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.

There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!

In 2014, impunity in journalism murder cases reached a staggering 96 percent and the remaining 4 percent obtained only partial justice, we have become targets. Insurgent groups no longer use reporters to transmit news, but instead kidnap them to make news. They treat us as enemy combatants and spies. This is our everyday reality.

I keep telling myself to calm down, to take less of an interest in things and not to get so excited, but I still care a lot about liberty, freedom of speech and expression, and fairness in journalism.

Where would we in Washington and we in America be without the Center? We would know much less about the workings of our Congress, and our tax dollars. We would know much less about the powers of the Executive, and its ability to hide wrong doing behind secrecy and classification. The Center takes the notion of integrity very seriously, and its investigations are a model for today's good journalism and, we all hope, an inspiration for the mainstream press to do more.

It is one of the paradoxes of journalism: The more servile a reporter is toward his sources, the more authoritative he can appear in print.

Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off.

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.