At 26, I was single, living in Manhattan, and working as a journalist at ‘Vanity Fair.’ I was Carrie Bradshaw… in sensible shoes.
I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later, I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat… colourful. That’s when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up.
And I came away from that experience, and it was a very difficult experience – I came to understand that you have to practice at being a good father and practice at being a good husband, just as you have to practice at being a good journalist.
George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.
I’m just a philosophical journalist, trying to describe what’s going on. I want to stimulate conversations, and hope out of them will come truths.
I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.
The job of a journalist is to find out stuff. The job of the government – sometimes – is to keep stuff secret. There’s a natural tension there.
My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.
Whatever you do, whether you’re a journalist or a player, you want to see what you can do – that’s why you’re doing it.
I wanted to be a lawyer. Then a journalist. Actually, I graduated from university as a journalist.
I’m not an investigative journalist; I don’t track crime or police blotters.
I took great offence at a journalist who called me blokeish. I have always seen myself as metrosexual and in touch with my feminine side.
I think every journalist understands when they are the beneficiary of hot information that, yes, they have a scoop, but they’re also being used. Part of your responsibility as a journalist is to tell the story of why that information is coming to you, consistent with the ground rules of your sourcing.
The homosexual community wants me to be gay. The heterosexual community wants me to be straight. Every writer thinks, I’m the journalist who’s going to make him talk. I pray for them. I pray that they get a life and stop living mine!
I think it’s foolish to interview someone who’s just promoting a movie that they’re in and ask if they consider themselves a feminist. That’s not about feminism; that’s about the journalist wanting to gauge how much this person is aware of the world or is aware of the feminist movement.
If I had not become an actress, I would be a journalist or a psychologist: I like to analyze the mind and be involved in political moments that change history.
As a guerrilla journalist, I participate in the news by holding individuals who are in the news accountable through personal interactions. That involves confronting people in ambush interviews, secretly recording them, or engaging in a conversation with them when they are caught off guard.
Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes.
What I notice now is that a lot of the things that are said to us on camera, on air, are not particularly believed and quite often not true. It is an extraordinary position to be in. It is a really weird position to be in as a journalist.
I had been laughed at my whole life through school, and I never really thought of it as a vocation. I mean, I started off as a soldier, and then I went into the university thinking I was going to be a journalist, but comedy kind of fell on my head and demanded I pursue it.
When I was in college, I wanted to be editor of ‘Reason’ when I grew up. It was an impractical ambition, especially since the magazine was located in Santa Barbara, way off any journalist’s normal career path.
I’ve been a software engineer, a novelist, a journalist, and a manager – and managing developers is easily the trickiest thing I’ve ever done.
My father was a journalist.
A journalist gathers information for a media outlet that disseminates the information through a broadly defined ‘medium’ – including newspaper, nonfiction book, wire service, magazine, news Web site, television, radio or motion picture – for public use. This broad definition covers every form of legitimate journalism.
I was a bad journalist.
But, I swear, they’re turning Donna into Annie Hall this season. More ties. More suits. But they’re also keeping her really motivated, ya know? Like, wanting to be a rock journalist. Wanting to be the first woman president.
I feel like, in some ways, I’m just a journalist.
I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at ‘The Saturday Review’ and ‘Horizon.’
Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you’re a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.
Best I can do for them is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments. That’s just my basic view of my function as a journalist.
Before MS moved in on me, I’d worked for seven years as a city lawyer, as the editor of a literary magazine, and before the age of 20, I’d also worked as a cadet journalist and as an assistant director in both film and TV. And then, after the lesions of MS, both on my spine and in my brain, I was the opposite of bionic.
Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that’s ingrained.
My wife – an ex journalist and current TV producer – has a rule that she taught me at the start of B3ta. Does the item make you laugh, or does it make you go, ‘Oh my God?’ If you score on either count, then you have something that is worth sharing.
Colleagues will malign you if you’re a moderately successful journalist.
And I’m hoping that fair-minded people will stand up and say that what’s been done to me is wrong, and that-that people’s personal lives have no impact on their ability to be a journalist, you know. Why should my past prevent me from having a future?
I got asked by a freelance journalist to jump in front of Princess Diana’s funeral. How pathetic is that? That would have been the stupidest thing on the planet.
While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.
I was a painter, then a novelist, then a journalist, then a screenwriter, and now I’m a director, and it feels all part of the same continuum. One led to the other, and it just feels like the natural confluence of all the ways of storytelling that I’ve been doing for almost 30 years.
I cut my teeth as a journalist writing about societies that didn’t have democracy.
I wanted to be a journalist so the character of a TV news person in ‘Run Baby Run’ was really interesting.
‘All the President’s Men’ is a movie that has a very personal place for me because it made me want to be a journalist, and then it made me want to be a filmmaker.
That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous – I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist – for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.
As a journalist, I think it’s OK to feel – I think there’s space for it. It’s how you react to those feelings that’s important.
Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you’ve got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you’re doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It’s very important never, ever, to feel above that.
When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst.
As a footballer, it can be enjoyable to do a proper interview where you trust the journalist to reproduce your thoughts.
When a critic or journalist writes, ‘It’s too complex,’ or, ‘It’s full of plot holes,’ they very rarely take the step of identifying what they mean. The reason they do that is to protect themselves, because they don’t want to reveal that they may have misunderstood or missed something.
I grew up listening in awe to stories of their wartime adventures. My granny, Joan, was a journalist and wrote amazing letters to my grandpa when he was a prisoner of war, while my nana, Mary, was a Land Girl, then a Wren. They were so independent, resilient and glamorous.
I had more sexist encounters as a lawyer than I had as a journalist.
Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch’s career as a journalist, so we’ve kind of kept in touch over the years.
I see myself as a recovering journalist.
After starting as a journalist for newspapers and magazines, I began to write books and had success with a novel and four nonfiction books for young adults.
