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.

This is a very proud moment for journalism. I think The New York Times and The Washington Post are genuine champions in this moment. The role that they are playing in democracy is the role that you hear about journalism playing in civics classes. Other people are doing great work, but the Times and the Post have really been leaders. The public is watching, and they are hungry. They know something is wrong, there's a lot of anxiety out there. There's a real sense that the mission of journalism is very clear.

A big part of my book deals with the caliber of journalism. Our journalism in general is deplorable, and on elections in particular it's very ineffectual. There are a lot of problems, a lot of them having to do with to problems within the professional code of journalism, which defines its role as the regurgitation of what people in power say. Another big problem is that we allow people with money to basically buy what's talked about in campaigns through running TV ads.

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.

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.

Ultimately journalism has changed... partisanship is very much a part of journalism now.

I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.

Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody.

Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them.

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

And I really believe good journalism is good business.

It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

I hear, more than ever, people actively searching for women to direct, actively wanting to finance women's films, which is not to say it is easy, but I think it's been a great instance of how journalism has put pressure on business to be more fair between genders.

We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we'll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we'll not save democracy from its own inertia.

In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The technology has outpaced our comprehension of its implications.

I want to institutionalise and automate chequebook journalism.

I think people should be consumers of journalism.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

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

Journalism is about covering important stories-with a pillow, until they stop moving.

As electronic journalism came to be evaluated for its cost effectiveness, the network world began breaking up.

The Defense Department's plan to ban newspaper reporters from pool coverage of military operations is incredible. It reveals the administration to be out of touch with journalism, reality and the First Amendment.

And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.

In journalism, there are only two stories - "Oh, the wonder of it," and "Oh, the shame of it."

I was a newspaper editor in high school, and I truly thought of journalism as a career. I loved it.

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.

I believe that 'advocacy journalism' is not an oxymoron. If that means that I'm going to disrupt the cable, partisan fracas of obsession over what this means from left and right, then so be it. I will be disruptive of it.

I don't think crowdfunding is a good idea for journalism in general. Good work should be supported by news organizations, and publishers should pony up money to support investigative reporting. But we're in hard times, so there are upsides and downsides to it.

Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.

Pulitzer's Gold is a goldmine of inspiration for both journalists and non-journalists. Those in the newspaper business, who now find themselves obsessing about staff cutbacks and circulation declines, should embrace this book as a reminder of the highest ideals, and the absolute thrills, to be found in their profession. As for regular readers, Pulitzer's Gold offers marvelous storytelling, real-life adventures, and absolute proof that journalism can change our world for the better.

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.

Camera-Phones are at the root of the Citizen-Journalism revolution.

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

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.

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.

David [Halberstam] kept on doing what he did because he loved it. One of the obituaries I read quoted him as saying that he did journalism for the same reason the great Julius Irving did basketball: He loved doing it even when he was having a bad day.

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

If you've done a bit of journalism, everyone assumes you must be moving into PR. We're absolutely not becoming a PR agency and we're not turning into Brunswick. We will remain SRU, but we will be owned by the Brunswick Group. It's quite different.

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

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

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.

Journalism should be truthful and entertaining. You know, with news and important facts you can entertain people too. Have a little humor. Life isn't all that deadly all the time, but while you're having fun, tell the truth. If every word of a column is deadly serious, I can't read it. It makes me throw up.

Sports has become such a big business that the line between journalism and being a broadcast partner for all intents and purposes has been obliterated.

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

Online journalism has rendered us all news wire hacks - get it posted fast, forget about context or nuance or interpretation, and errors will be fixed on the fly.

I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.