Quotes About Journalism

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.

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.

Almost everything I've learned about journalism has been from other friends who are journalists, taking advantage of the money I hope they don't think they threw away at j-school. I studied comparative literature, but the professional vagaries of journalism I've learned through other people's trial and error, and my own.

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

Looking back on the event, I find myself thinking there are three approaches to journalism represented here. One is the "cool" approach of traditional journalism, including network broadcasting in which NPR is no exception. One is the "hot" approach of talk radio, which has since expanded to TV sports networks and now Fox TV. The third is the engaged approach of weblogging.

I think everybody's talking about like facts and truth and you know like that 'We're here to fact check' and all of that, that's the base material of journalism. You cannot have journalism without facts and truth. But if facts and truth were what actually you know sort of moved people's lives and moved their decision-making like the election would have had a different outcome.

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

Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

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

And I really believe good journalism is good business.

I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper.

You're required to be outspoken in journalism, and in television you're exposed anyway, because everyone watches it.

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

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

Anonymous sources are to journalism what silicon enhancements are to the feminine figure; they look impressive to the gullible, but something doesn't feel right.

Rachel Maddow is a national treasure. I think that we need honest voices like that and we need journalism like that.

I think people should be consumers of journalism.

Among the reasons that you go into journalism, I suppose, are some rather idealistic, even foolish reasons. In my case one of the reasons was I wanted to explain how things really work, how political power really works.

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.

Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.

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

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

They call me the father of illustrated journalism. What folly! I never thought any such thing. I had a small newspaper, which had been dead for years, and I was trying in every way to build up its circulation. What could I use for bait? A picture, of course.

Journalism is an immense power, that threatens soon to supersede sermons, lectures, and books.

As the newspaper industry continues to contract, one of the most commonly voiced fears is that serious investigative journalism will be among the victims of the scaleback. And, indeed, many newspapers are drastically reducing their investigative teams.

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.

Journalism's been a continuing course in adult education for me.

The truth is not that the problem is the newsroom does not understand capitalism. The problem is that the front office does not understand journalism. The problem is not that the average reporter does not understand what it is that's necessary to make the payroll, to make the good edifice, to make the thing that he wants. It is that in fact those who control too many of the edifices have actually come to believe that Wall Street has wisdom, and that that wisdom should instruct our business.

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.

Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.

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.

I love great journalism. I appreciate it. I love good news stories. I love great books. I love great articles. I appreciate them so much, and they've been part of my education as a woman.

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.

What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise.

The basic problem is with the business model of journalism. That business model is premised on the idea that talk is cheap and reporting is expensive.

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

In journalism, if there's a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you've got a 4 p.m. deadline. It's a neat skill to have but it's deadly for literature. In literature, you need to stare at that hole, not ignore it. You need to figure it out.

In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.

The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know, the second, is to find out who will tell you.

When Trump says fake news, he means journalism that makes points with which he disagrees, usually about him.

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 like being involved in the lighter side of journalism because it serves a purpose, and it's fun. And I can keep my opinions off camera if I want.

I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.

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.