Quotes About Journalism

Anyone who does investigative journalism is not in it for the money. Investigative journalism by nature is the most work intensive kind of journalism you can take on. That's why you see less and less investigative journalism at newspapers and magazines. No matter what you're paid for it, you put in so many man-hours it's one of the least lucrative aspects of journalism you can take on.

Journalism continues to go south, thanks to big media and its strangulation of news, and there's not much left in the way of community or local media. Add to that an internet that has not even started thinking seriously about how it supports journalism. You have these big companies like Google and Facebook who run the news and sell all the ads next to it, but what do they put back into journalism? It isn't much.

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.

I'm always very careful to make the distinction between music criticism and music journalism. A lot of people don't. But criticism doesn't require reporting. You can write criticism at home in your underwear. On the other hand, journalism takes legwork - you have to get out there and see things and talk to people.

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 personally think honestly disclosing rather than hiding ones subjective values makes for more honest and trustworthy journalism. But no journalism - from the most stylistically objective to the most brazenly opinionated - has any real value unless it is grounded in facts, evidence, and verifiable data.

The best I can hope for is that I might provoke a water cooler argument between you and somebody else. But it is not journalism. It doesn't have the rigor of journalism. It doesn't have the proof positive that facts provide. So it can be readily dismissed as mere propaganda. But I can certainly reach more people.

Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, that’s not journalism. That's gossip. Journalism was invented as an antidote to gossip.

Journalism schools are good to get a job, but I don't know what else they are good for. I don't like the word "journalism" to begin with. It's news reporting, and that consists of using your two feet. The only lesson, then, that you could give people is how to climb stairs, because there are no stories on the first floor.

I've always been a writer. I started getting paid for writing in college. Where it transitioned from commentary to journalism was in that shift - not wanting to write personal stories because people are hungry in not necessarily great ways for the sexy, sexy, sex work story. I was trying to shift the focus, and journalism was the tool I needed to write about people outside my own life and range of experience.

Everything has added up to a load that I'm getting tired of carrying. It's gotten so complicated. It's the three failed marriages, and having kids that grew up without me, and it's the personal criticism, of being Mr. Nice Guy, or of divorcing my wife by fax, all that stuff, the journalism, some of which I find insulting.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

Confrontation is not a dirty word. Sometimes it's the best kind of journalism as long you don't confront people just for the sake of a confrontation.

[A 2005 response to doping allegations] Unfortunately, the witch hunt continues and tomorrow's article is nothing short of tabloid journalism. The paper even admits in its own article that the science in question here is faulty and that I have no way to defend myself. They state: 'There will therefore be no counter-exam nor regulatory prosecutions, in a strict sense, since defendant's rights cannot be respected.' I will simply restate what I have said many times: I have never taken performance enhancing drugs.

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

It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view." There is never a third view.

There is a very big difference between American and British travel journalism, and that's this whole business of the assisted or freebie trip. In Britain we are unashamed about any travel company paying for you to go and then writing about it. That's the only way we can do it. But I have tried the same in the States, and I can't write for any sizeable American newspaper because they tell you to do it on this basis.

There's a certain elitism that has crept into the attitudes of some in journalism, and it played out perfectly over the issue of these little [American flag] lapel pins.

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

Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.

I was raised by a formidable woman. She always pushed me to be competitive in a man's world. That's maybe one of the attractions to journalism in the beginning. It was a male profession, and I was comfortable in that.

Journalism is the entertainment business.

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

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

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.

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'm an avid reader, and though it doesn't always work out in terms of relaxation, I've got to keep myself up to date with current affairs. I was a journalism student in college, and I don't feel like I can relax unless I feel informed. When people say they can't watch the news because it's too stressful, I just think, ignorance isn't bliss. It's just another way to procrastinate.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism.

Never miss it - that's the second biggest compliment I'd give to RealClearPolitics.com. The first is that it has become indispensable to anyone, in or outside of journalism, who's interested in politics, policy, or world affairs.

The media has changed. We now give broadcast licenses to philosophies instead of people. People get confused and think there is no difference between news and entertainment. People who project themselves as journalists on television don't know the first thing about journalism. They are just there stirring up a hockey game.

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.

Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.

The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.

The photographer must bear the responsibility for his work and its effect …[for] photographic journalism, because of its tremendous audience reached by publications using it, has more influence on public thinking than any other branch of photography.

I've been able to write at least one book a year for 20 years, and I don't think I would've had that kind of drive if I hadn't come out of the journalism business.

Journalism, like democracy, is not something that is achieved. It is a work in progress, and not every day is as good as the last.

It amazes me to witness the masochism with which some journalists characterize their industry as a dying species. The future belongs to citizen journalism and blogs.

Journalism was looked upon as a more noble thing than it is now. I don't know if it carries the same cachet that it did then.

I've written one book-length piece of journalism. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? That book had an impact. Eight years after it was published it's still having an impact in Guatemala. I remember when I wrote it, a surprising number of people said things to me like, "That is such an amazing story; why didn't you turn it into a novel?"

Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.

I think the style Plimpton popularized - the dive-in, try-it-yourself journalism - is appealing and useful for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the value of an outsider's view into a little-known or misunderstood subculture. I tried to do the same thing with my book - tap into a pocket of American life that few people have any idea about, and tell the real, unvarnished truth about it in a way that was open-minded and authentic.

There is no doubt that the way journalism worked when I was growing up and getting started has changed forever.

It was while making newspaper deliveries, trying to miss the bushes and hit the porch, that I first learned the importance of accuracy in journalism.

As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.

I still love following and thinking about politics. I enjoy recommending important journalism I read or see from other sources.