Quotes About Journalism

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 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.

Journalism today is obviously in a major transition. Going to journalism school, learning how to write, working your way up in a little paper in Decatur, Georgia and then moving to Atlanta and then maybe to New York: it's just over. You have to have a whole other set of skills now. You have to be a videographer, you have to do social media. You can't do a long, thoughtful, insightful piece if you don't have the time to do reporting, particularly reporting around somebody who doesn't want to be known or an issue that doesn't want to reveal itself.

I'm always very careful to make the distinction between music criticism and music journalism. A lot of people don't. But criticism doesn't require reporting. You can write criticism at home in your underwear. On the other hand, journalism takes legwork - you have to get out there and see things and talk to people.

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.

I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.

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.

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

Eclectic is a word that appears almost as much as the word smarmy in rock journalism and I've come to the fact, just as a personal side, this reminds of Oscar Wilde's insight that criticism is the highest form of autobiography. I think that's exactly what rock journalism has attempted to do, to celebrate its autobiography at my expense.

Moving forward, investigative journalists need to train themselves to be media amphibians - just as comfortable with the classic verities of great journalism as they are with video, Twitter, Facebook, and, most importantly, citizen journalism.

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.

I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

Journalism is not a profession, but a mission.

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.

I think the Internet is to MSM what TV was to yellow journalism.

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

It's very difficult to measure the impact on policy of any investigative journalism. You hope it matters to let a little more truth loose in the world, but you can't always be sure it does. You do it because there's a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

I started as a print reporter. I’m a journalist and that’s what I do. My function is an anchorperson, but it’s in a journalism context, and gravitas and coats and ties and haircuts and all that sort of stuff, I’ll leave to others. My thing is just to do my job the best way I know how and as I say I’m very fortunate to be able to do it the way I want to do it.

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.

To change the media, you're gonna have to totally throw out every journalism school and get rid of everybody in every newsroom, and then you're gonna have to change the grade school and middle school and high school curriculum.

There's a certain elitism that has crept into the attitudes of some in journalism, and it played out perfectly over the issue of these little [American flag] lapel pins.

There is no democracy without journalism.

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.

Tailoring the facts to fit one's theory constitutes neither good science nor good journalism. Rather, it is intellectually dishonest and, when published for consumption by a mass audience, adds up to propaganda.

The country is only as strong as its journalism - that's the way democracies work. The higher the quality of the information, the better informed the electorate is and the better the government runs.

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

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

After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.

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.

One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.

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 think that we as a culture, not just in entertainment journalism, but in general the boundaries have become extreme. You know, all bets are off and it seems that there's not much that we consider off limits. I'm just glad that I was in it at the time when I was, which just seemed like - maybe everybody feels that way then they do a look back on their life and career. And I always think for me, my motto is 'ever forward' and I think that's the best way to live your life.

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.

I would just like to see hip-hop journalism in general take a step up and match the artistry. There have been great writers in music who are the caliber of artist as a writer as the people that they're covering.

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

If we're going to live as we are in a world of supply and demand, then journalists had better find a way to create a demand for good journalism.

And I've been incredibly lucky to have a long career in journalism that has given me a front-row seat to some of the most important moments in modern American political life.

It's difficult to overcome what you're getting beamed into your brain by the television every day. The worthlessness of journalism today is just making the country confused and bewildered and lost.

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.

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.

Simplification seems to be the removal of objects for the goal of making a graphic as clean and uncluttered as possible. Whereas, with optimization, it feels like there's more intelligence in that. It maintains the usability, but tries to distill something down to its essence. But with some data-sets you have to be careful because, as with linear, print journalism, it's easy to shave off facts that don't quite fit the flow.

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.

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.

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

Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.

I grew up a child of Watergate. It gave me a good dose of skepticism about authority. One of my favorite movies is 'All the President's Men.' Woodward and Bernstein, those guys were my heroes. I have a degree in journalism.