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.

Journalism today is obviously in a major transition. Going to journalism school, learning how to write, working your way up in a little paper in Decatur, Georgia and then moving to Atlanta and then maybe to New York: it's just over. You have to have a whole other set of skills now. You have to be a videographer, you have to do social media. You can't do a long, thoughtful, insightful piece if you don't have the time to do reporting, particularly reporting around somebody who doesn't want to be known or an issue that doesn't want to reveal itself.

A lot of people involved with celebrity journalism have interesting ideas about the people they want to write about going into the interview. Then as soon as they actually sit down with that person, they basically ask the questions they think journalists are supposed to ask, and they start viewing themselves almost as a peer of the subject. Like they're going to become friends. That's why most celebrity journalism is so terrible.

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.

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

... Don [Hewitt, 60 Minutes exec producer] told me, "You have set broadcast journalism back 20 years." Naturally, I was both proud and elated although too modest to say so, but broadcast journalism recovered with alacrity, my contract wasn't renewed, and the incident was forgotten.

The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers.

News at Work is a vivid, inside look at the collision of print journalism and electronic media. Based on close access to the leading news organizations in Buenos Aires, Boczkowski documents how contemporary journalism is caught in the grip of emulation; this spiral of imitation exacerbated further by global news media and their intensifying homogenization. The portrait of this transformation of the news is both fascinating and deeply worrying, and is guaranteed to provoke debate.

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.

I think we need to reckon in a very serious way with the emotional content of news and the way that people perceive facts and their perception of their situation and to me I think the tabloid is like fundamentally an emotional form of journalism and that kind of emotional valence is what distinguishes it from the broad sheet.

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 best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

For me, the best journalism is usually the best storytelling, and the best stories are those of real people. Sometimes those real people are people in positions of great prominence or power or adverse situations, and sometimes it's just normal folks who help illuminate a situation, a place, a culture. And for me, that's always been the best way of telling a story.

Given the multiple crises we are living through, investigative journalism is all the more important.

The truth is, "What is a journalist?" is one of those questions for which there is no proper answer. The prehistory of modern journalism shows it has been a ragged and confusing trade all the way through.

The first victim in journalism today is proximity. I know I've used that word a lot. Because of foreign budgets, newspapers have consolidated, and journalists now cover dozens of countries at a time. It is physically not possible for one person to understand and live the unique sets of experiences in all these places in honest and meaningful ways. Outlets used to send journalists to places like Congo for months at a time, and they were stationed there for months or years. There was a sense of immersive reporting, and that has been a casualty of the shift in news over the past years.

Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.

There is a shortage of clerks. Everyone is going into journalism.

The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.

Journalism is nine-tenths being in the right places at the right time.

Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art.

As for documentary, it was a natural progression from my earlier career in journalism. The two media are connected, but of course making films is much more complicated, because you have image, sound and music to work with, not simply words.

The thinner a newspaper or magazine is - due to reduced revenue from advertising dollars - the less editorial content because of the standard ad-to-editorial ratio, and the less money there is to support investigative journalism.

Most magazines have become wallpaper, they're all the same, all the same celebrities. It's really an abysmal time in American journalism right now. But occasionally one story or two will pop out.

A news sense is really a sense of what is important, what is vital, what has color and life - what people are interested in. That's journalism.

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.

In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation.

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.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

Every profession has changed. Journalism has changed. Medicine has changed. Technology has changed and it evolves. The same is true of football. Free agency has now allowed teams to be a dynasty as they have been before. It is not a great thing for the fans, but it is a good thing for the players.

If we're going to live as we are in a world of supply and demand, then journalists had better find a way to create a demand for good journalism.

Journalism is a Darwinian process.

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.

At the core of investigative journalism is exactly the same thing that drives a page-turning thriller: telling a great story.

An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.

The media does not do news. The media is the Democrat Party hacks assigned to journalism positions. Some hacks are consultants. Some are candidates. Some serve in elective office. Some are professors. Some are teaching assistants. Some run think tanks. Others are in the media.

I love craftsmanship of any kind, a job well done either by my chiropractor or carpenter, and I am addicted to print, the type, the ink. But my basic passion is journalism and I can't live without being online.

I didn't know growing up what I wanted to do. I finally settled on broadcast journalism as a way to satisfy the urge to perform and also do something important, which is to give people in a democracy information to make good decisions.

In a time of transition for journalism all around the world, it's reassuring to know that some of the old ways endure.

Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening.

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information which is how I got a good job in journalism.

Journalism has been very important for me - for a long time I made my living as a journalist, and it also serves as a source of ideas. Many of the things I have written I would not have written without the experience of being a journalist.

In the United Kingdom at various stages, journalism has been the profession of gentlemen amateurs. And some of them even pride themselves on being amateurs. Their quality is not comparable with the quality of intelligence services even if most of them harbor a remarkable degree of corruption and incompetence.

Journalism is not easy. It's the first rough draft. I don't think you need to wait around until you have the definitive thing. You record what's there; don't delude yourself that this is the ultimate historical view.

I can tell you many reasons why environmental stories don't get adequate attention in conventional media. Basically, environmental risks don't fit the norms of journalism. They're incremental. We hate incremental.

Needless, heedless, wanton and deliberate injury of the sort inflicted by Life's picture story is not an essential instrument of responsible journalism.

In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching.