Quotes About Journalism

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.

Art is art, and journalism is journalism.

I'm even stunned at some of the majors you can get in college these days. Like you can major in the mating habits of the Australian rabbit bat, major in leisure studies... Okay, get a journalism major. Okay, education major, journalism major. Right. Philosophy major, right. Archeology major. I don't know, whatever it is. Major in ballroom dance, of course. It doesn't replace work. How about a major in film studies? How about a major in black studies? How about a major in women studies? How about a major in home ec? Oops, sorry! No such thing.

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

I got a journalism degree. I started doing journalism - I interned at 'Cosmopolitan' magazine in the 1970s, which probably wasn't the best place for me, and I spent six or nine months freelancing. Anyway, I wasn't that good at it.

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.

I hated the culture [working in the bank], I hated the work. I very quickly realized that this wasn't what I wanted to do. So, after two years, I took some writing courses - I always loved to write - and I figured the only way I was going to get paid to write was in journalism.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

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.

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.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It's, on its best day, is a crude art. We make mistakes; I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist, I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories, make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

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.

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.

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 obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

I think I'm careful. My goal is to try to stay away as much from opinion journalism as possible.

It's funny but when young people say to me "what can I study to be a force for change, should I study law or biology or business?" My answer is music, drama, journalism, communications.

Internet journalism is not a world we know very well at all. It's conducted more on the screen and less in bars, which makes it rather less useful for getting stories about people throwing up over one another, which is what one's after.

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

When you look at the whole explosion of the Internet, the decline of print journalism, there are all of these plus-or-minus ramifications, and you have to work it out. The great thing about books is that you have a tactile thing that's there. You can download this or download that, but how long do you want to be staring at a screen for the rest of your life? You've got to have some kind of proper interface for people that's not about the screen.

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.

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

I'm a girl from South Carolina. I was raised in a middle class family and decided to major in broadcast journalism and now I'm at the national level and that doesn't happen to most people and I realize that. I know that I'm very fortunate but this great country allowed that to work in my favor.

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.

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.

Journalism has become a sort of competitive screeching: what is trivial but noisy and immediate takes precedence over important matters that develop over time.

American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor.

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

I personally feel that there's a lot of music journalism that is dominated by genre, because you need a language in which to write, but actually the things that strike people about music, are very hard to write about, and its sonic connections, it's a sense of harmony that I think we all have even if we don't know how to express it - it's something musical, it's synapse connections in our brain.

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

Journalism classes teach us that one must extract oneself from the story in order to report without bias, but often we need to be in the story in order to understand, to connect, to help the audience identify or else it has no heart; it could be a robot telling the story, for all anyone cares.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

There was a lot of tabloid journalism about my supposed sex addiction. Bullshit. It's all bullshit. I mean, come on, I never pretended to be a saint. But give me a break.

As someone who has spent a lot of her career as an investigative reporter, I'll confess that a frustration of mine has always been that so much investigative journalism involves a dissection of events in the past.

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.

Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.

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

WikiLeaks combines several of my prior interests in technology, policy questions, and journalism.

It is one of the paradoxes of journalism: The more servile a reporter is toward his sources, the more authoritative he can appear in print.

Al Gore has found a new job. He is going to teach journalism at Columbia University, which is ironic isn't it? The guy who did all the coke winds up going to the White House, the guy who didn't do coke goes to Columbia.

It's not the day in which I grew up, long time ago, where we had three news networks. No cable, no social media, no internet. Where what you see is what you got. We had basically straight journalism. We don't have that anymore.

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.

Poetry allows me to write about what I don't know, whereas journalism demands a higher level of certainty to be worthy of being written.

Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening.

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