Quotes About Journalism

Being able to create your own work, being able to indulge your own fantasies is so much better than journalism, so much more fulfilling than journalism, to me, that as long as I can continue to write fiction, I shall.

The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.

The New York Times I think really is the gold standard of a certain type of journalism and in some ways it's the most important type of journalism, this chronicle of the biggest and most important stories of our time covered with a level of rigor and seriousness that is really unparalleled.

The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1.322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26.911 words. The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Comedians, such as yourself, Jon Stewart and others, are a valuable supplement, and here's why: Good journalism at its best frequently speaks truth to power. What's happened with journalists - again, I don't except myself from this criticism - in some ways we've lost our guts. We need a spine transplant. What's happened is comedians, in their own way, speak truth to power and fill that vacuum that we in journalism have too often left, particularly post 9/11.

I always thought that I could write a novel. In my case, it was misguided. I do believe that the best nonfiction is not "literary journalism," a misleading term, but rather journalism that asks the questions that serious literature asks. It's storytelling that happens to be true. So I don't think it was a missed opportunity. After awhile you learn what you're really good at. Life is short, so spend time doing that.

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.

A reckoning is coming on the state of the internet journalism, because right now, the way it's set up, there is so much room for libel to squeak through that you're going to see...they're going to rewrite the rule book on journalism very soon. They have to, because the bloggers are getting away with so much rumor-mongering about public officials and even private figures because they don't have editors and they don't have fact checkers and they don't have lawyers. There is going to be a price to pay somewhere down the line.

Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution.

I think people should be consumers of journalism.

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.

In the '50s and '60s, journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for - it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job.

We have lost the good old British spirit. Instead we have American journalism and black-shirted buffoons making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers.

When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all: I’m trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.

Donald Trump creates word salads. And that is awful to language, because we try to parse out what he's saying and try to find meaning in it. Journalists don't have a choice about reporting what the president says. I find the idea - "Let's not write about his tweets" - to be absolutely ridiculous. I mean, he's the president! Of course, we have to write about his tweets and look at what they mean. The problem is, they're hollow. But we don't have the option of ignoring what he's saying because he's president. That's damaging to language, and to journalism.

No one is safe from Mattera’s hard-hitting, meticulously reported, and genuinely funny investigative journalism. CRAPITALISM blows the lid off crony capitalism.

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.

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

Media has changed dramatically, as you and I know. We're in a world now where you're rewarded for being outrageous. Punditry has replaced reporting as the gold standard of journalism.

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.

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

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.

There have been so many individuals who have really put a lot on the line. That they've sacrificed so much to try to protect the principle of source protection in the journalism world. And I think Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks, and Sarah Harrison have really been extraordinary in standing up for that.

At CNN, our view is that good journalism equals good business.

Language, journalism, food, sex. All is politics. Even innocent love stories are politics. ... There is no such thing as neutrality.

Let's be clear on one thing, the corporate media in America is no longer involved in journalism. They're a political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda, and the agenda is not for you, it's for themselves.

The junk food of political journalism...all reshuffle stories are crap.

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.

Journalism is a great profession. It's complicated now. People talk about the demise of investigative reporting. I was a judge in some award contest recently, and the stuff that is being done by major newspapers, and local, regional papers around the country, is great. Newspapers play an amazing role in our society, and I still think they are important. I'm sorry newspaper circulation is down. Ultimately, the importance of newspapers can't be replaced.

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

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.

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.

Contradictory to my religion, I think, is journalism.

A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.

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.

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

Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.

When I finished grad school, I sort of fell into journalism. Someone mentioned that there was an entry level job at the Reuters News Agency. I applied, and, to my amazement, I got the job.

I want to go to college to study journalism. I want to speak French fluently, to travel. My mom was a journalist and it's in my blood.

I think because I came into journalism by way of the Black Panther Party - and not J-school or a corporate bourgeois institution - I tried to do news, writing and reporting that had social, political and racial content and context.

I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people

In journalism, when we want to get a story over the jumps, we refer to it as a universal experience, but it almost never is. There is one universal experience, that's death. That is something we are all going to experience at some distance in the lives of loved ones, strangers and friends, people around us and certainly our own.

Don't count out other amazing programming like Frontline. You will still find more hours of in-depth news programming, investigative journalism and analysis on PBS than on any other outlet.

I've already become a mastodon in print - I don't see a consciousness for my kind of journalism.

The quality of our journalism will make or break our industry, not the recession.

I didn't like the competitiveness of big-time journalism.

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.