Quotes About Journalism

Democracies succeed or fail based on their journalism. America is strong because its journalism is strong. That is how democracies work. They're only as good as the quality of the information that the public possesses and that is where we come in.

Citizen journalism is rapidly emerging as an invaluable part of delivering the news. With the expansion of the Web and the ever-decreasing size and cost of camera phones and video cameras, the ability to commit acts of journalism is spreading to everyone.

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.

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

Politicians tend to live "in character" and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.

I think that if there are problems in journalism they're created by journalists... the trivialisation of the news and the sort of snyed, cynical allowance of untruth to be in a newspaper because it might be titillating.

If journalism is the first draft of history, then digital literacy is the first blush of the first page of history.

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

Without a serious study of journalism, there can be no understanding of citizenship, democracy, or community.

I want to institutionalise and automate chequebook journalism.

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.

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.

There is no democracy without journalism.

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.

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.

I would love to be associated with some sports organization. I was a journalism major. That's kind of intriguing, to do something in the political-commentary arena.

My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.

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.

Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.

Journalism should be more like science. As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers.

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

I suggest that what we want to do is not to leave to posterity a great institution, but to leave behind a great tradition of journalism ably practiced in our time.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

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.

Generally I try to read anything but indie rock journalism or anything about music at all, especially in the summer.

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.

If journalism were a religious order, George Orwell would be its patron saint.

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.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time.

Journalism is straying into entertainment.

At the core of investigative journalism is exactly the same thing that drives a page-turning thriller: telling a great story.

Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

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.

The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.

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.

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.

Successful publication is all about the mix. What Buzzfeed discovered was that people like cat pictures. We can pretend to be embarrassed about that as a species, but it is actually a truth. So Buzzfeed publishes a lot of cat pictures. But they use the money from cat pictures to build an exceptional newsroom that publishes stories that far fewer people want to read, but it is very important journalism.

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.

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

And I believe that good journalism, good television, can make our world a better place.

When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that's what I was doing, but it wasn't.

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.

I like keeping my work so open that it can be interpreted on different levels. Art can't be compared with journalism; it can't discuss concrete issues.