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.

One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little. The world now is almost inured to the power of journalism. The best journalism would manage to outrage people. And people are less and less inclined to outrage.

I find it interesting, the different rules that apply to journalism and drama, even though journalism has become more and more about entertainment, and entertainment has become more and more about journalism.

I got in journalism for any number of reasons, not least because it's so much fun. Journalism should be in the business of putting pressure on power, finding out the truth, of shining a light on injustice, of, when appropriate, being amusing and entertaining - it's a complicated and varied beast, journalism.

I feel like 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.

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.

I consider what I do on Deadspin to be based in the foundations of journalism, yes, based on the foundations of journalism that I have been trained and that I certainly use when I write for GQ and The New York Times and so on. Certainly, I think the language can be a little looser on the web, but I am held to the same standards and accuracy everyone else is.

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.

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.

Matt Drudge's role in the Monica Lewinski scandal] strikes me as a new and graphic power of the Internet to influence mainstream journalism. And I suspect that over the next couple of years that impact will grow to the point where it will damage journalism's ability to do its job professionally, to check out information before publication, to be mindful of the necessity to publish and broadcast reliable, substantiated information.

These pop songs almost feel like tabloid journalism, in a way. It's c**p that people seem to like. And I don't know if it has meaning. I don't know if one of the pop songs of the summer has any fibre in it. People are consuming it, and is it healthy?... Maybe there's some healthy property or some restorative property that I'm not receiving. It seems like it has a really high fructose content.

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.

Everything has added up to a load that I'm getting tired of carrying. It's gotten so complicated. It's the three failed marriages, and having kids that grew up without me, and it's the personal criticism, of being Mr. Nice Guy, or of divorcing my wife by fax, all that stuff, the journalism, some of which I find insulting.

Maybe it is because of Facebook or something else, but I have been interested in journalism for a long time.

The fun thing about journalism is if you go do a story about something, you can now ask three intelligent questions about it. Or say three intelligent things. And that gets people talking.

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.

Confrontation is not a dirty word. Sometimes it's the best kind of journalism as long you don't confront people just for the sake of a confrontation.

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.

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

Journalism is caring where the fire-engines are going.

Let me say this: I only expect the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism and when you do that, you have to go in with a neutral mind.

If I do, I say so. That's the only way out of that. If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words "I don't know." I mean, there are certain basic principles, like the dignity of the individual and the individual's responsibility, and certain basic economic principles, like how when something costs less, more of it will be consumed... There are certain things that I feel pretty confident about.

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.

And journalism itself has changed. News organizations and some journalists have transformed from their traditional role as watchdogs of power into institutions of power themselves with an ability, indeed, a susceptibility, to abuse that power.

I said in 2008 the media is dead in America. Journalism's dead.

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.

I think that more diversity is a good thing, and fresh points of view articulated by people who are committed to excellence in journalism is a beneficial change in the American media landscape.

My father was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. My grandfather had been in politics, too; however, my own inclination was for a job other than politics. I wanted to be a diplomat, perhaps do some journalism - certainly not politics.

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.

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.

Journalism has a distinct place in familiarizing and expressing public opinion.

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

Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.

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 abject hatred of actors and the acting world. I went to college as an actor, and halfway through, I switched to playwriting and directing. Then I spent a couple years working in publishing, doing some freelance journalism for The Village Voice and Musician magazine. I thought my life was going to be as a writer, but then I realized I missed performing, so I got into comedy. It was a nice combination of things I was sort of good at. I was a pretty good writer and a decent actor, but I didn't really like acting, and I didn't have the discipline to be a writer.

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.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

In journalism, especially, we tend to deal with large, complex systems by finding especially interesting people and story lines to focus on.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

I think what is happening is that Houthis and the Iranians have common interests, but there's very little good journalism that's been done to uncover the true extent of that relationship between the Houthis and Iran. But, obviously, I do think that they - they benefit from the rhetoric of the Houthis on the ground. But, also, they do have a connection, but not to the extent that is being covered in the media at the moment by describing them as a Shia militia backed by Iran. I think that's an overstatement.

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

The secret of successful journalism is to make your readers so angry they will write half your paper for you.

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.

Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.

It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.

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

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.