Quotes About Journalism

Investigative journalism has been relegated to a very, very tiny space in America. We don't really have much investigative journalism left. And the last refuge for it is documentary filmmaking.

The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.

It's important to remember that the future of quality journalism is not dependent on the future of newspapers. The discussion needs to move from "How do we save newspapers?" to "How do we save and strengthen journalism?" - however it is delivered.

The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1.322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26.911 words. The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

A reckoning is coming on the state of the internet journalism, because right now, the way it's set up, there is so much room for libel to squeak through that you're going to see...they're going to rewrite the rule book on journalism very soon. They have to, because the bloggers are getting away with so much rumor-mongering about public officials and even private figures because they don't have editors and they don't have fact checkers and they don't have lawyers. There is going to be a price to pay somewhere down the line.

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

Moving forward, investigative journalists need to train themselves to be media amphibians - just as comfortable with the classic verities of great journalism as they are with video, Twitter, Facebook, and, most importantly, citizen journalism.

The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.

If journalism is the first draft of history, then digital literacy is the first blush of the first page of history.

Maybe it is because of Facebook or something else, but I have been interested in journalism for a long time.

If you're in Journalism and you're looking for friends, you should get a dog.

Journalism is always the art of the incomplete. You get bits and pieces.

Let me say this: I only expect the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism and when you do that, you have to go in with a neutral mind.

Without a serious study of journalism, there can be no understanding of citizenship, democracy, or community.

It's very difficult to measure the impact on policy of any investigative journalism. You hope it matters to let a little more truth loose in the world, but you can't always be sure it does. You do it because there's a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

I'm an expert on the NewsHour and it isn't how I practice journalism. I am not involved in the story. I serve only as a reporter or someone asking questions. I am not the story.

I worked for a newspaper in Europe for, I lived in Europe for about seven years, so I worked in this sort of a yellow journalism kind of a thing, it was like a scandal sheet.

We define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.

Henry Blodget does occasionally have a new idea. If you're making a point about aggregation or the emptiness of modern journalism, he's far from the best target. Try Huffpo - or Gawker writers whose souls have been corroded by irony.

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?

Journalism has a distinct place in familiarizing and expressing public opinion.

My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.

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.

Paste Magazine really embodies all that's left of a true independent thought and expression in music journalism in the states right now. Please support the cause and lift them up to keep them moving forward.

I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism.

It's very hard to be a screenwriter. I remember getting a couple of awards. I got a PEN West award a million years ago when I did Running on Empty, and I sat in the room with all these writers. They wrote everything from novels to non-fiction to children's books to journalism - any kind of writing - and I realized that there was no one in the room who would ever read anything I'd written.

I've always liked elliptical writing, whether it's Kafka or Paula Fox, and I'm often bored by writers who explain too much. I think that becomes journalism. Mostly I don't try to explain to readers who somebody is - I just write about the somebody. I'm thinking through ideas. And I have the sense that, if you're reading this, you have some interest.

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.

Let's be clear on one thing, the corporate media in America is no longer involved in journalism. They're a political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda, and the agenda is not for you, it's for themselves.

Social media is the greatest boon to journalism since the printing press.

Master's degree in journalism served several purposes. It helped me to break down and understand scripts. And the discipline of getting my master's gave me a certain amount of confidence. I don't think college is the only path, but I enjoyed it and it worked out very well for me. I had some good friends with whom I could get a little crazy, but still be responsible. It was the perfect bridge from living at home to independence. I also love learning. I might have been a professional student and earned a couple of doctorates, if I didn't have to pay bills.

Journalism is a great profession. It's complicated now. People talk about the demise of investigative reporting. I was a judge in some award contest recently, and the stuff that is being done by major newspapers, and local, regional papers around the country, is great. Newspapers play an amazing role in our society, and I still think they are important. I'm sorry newspaper circulation is down. Ultimately, the importance of newspapers can't be replaced.

I'm happy to have interns at The Weekly Standard and happy to have readers of The Weekly Standard, but if you all tell me that you were busy reading Plato and [Lev] Tolstoy and playing violin in the orchestra, I'd say that was great. I wouldn't tell you to take time out from that to get involved in political journalism.

I expected to go into journalism or law.

I'm very committed to and interested in CNN's journalism and our magazines and our movie studio, not just HBO, where I grew up. But I do have a fondness for subscription television.

A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.

Journalism should never be prostituted for selfish ends or for the sake of merely earning a livelihood or, worse still, for amassing money.

Mexico just needs more journalists, and especially more good places to publish and exhibit. There are all kinds of censorship practiced in Mexico, not just violent repression. Perhaps the biggest threat to good journalism here is the massive power of the country's media monoliths - Televisa and TV Azteca - who have 80% of the market. They endlessly saturate the country with propaganda and inanity.

As I'm sure anyone who's born after the '70s' access point is - is '70s films and '70s culture and there is a kind of a paranoiac atmosphere in that time in America. Yes, it's the golden age of journalism, Watergate, and all the rest of these people making these great breakthroughs - but it's also the moment that "if it bleeds, it leads" becomes mainstream and sensationalizing the news becomes more and more the given. Checking how many numbers you're getting, whatever you can do to get more numbers.

Photojournalism is neither photography or journalism. It has its function but it's not where I see myself: the press is for me just a means for photographing, for material – not for telling the truth.

Many years ago I had two small children, and I wanted to be able to be home when they got home from school. And I didn't like the direction journalism was taking. I thought if I could write books, I could work at home and have the best of both worlds. I wrote my first mystery while still working full time, and it didn't sell, but the next one did sell, so I quit my job for the world of fiction. Scary, but I've never regretted it for a single day.

Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.

At what price do we get our news? The role of economics in defining the nature of contemporary journalism has never been better explained. A valuable, important book for those of us who watch, read, or listen to the news.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, if you start the clock, then 47 journalists, reporters, cameramen, photographers have been killed in Russia since the fall of communism. That makes it the third most deadly country on Earth to practice journalism. That's not a record to be proud of.

I dont personally feel that I have to save democracy and journalism.

No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape.

I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.