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.
Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.
Amateurism has its place in government, in journalism and also on the tennis court, but lack of expertise means politicians routinely promise far more than they achieve.
The media has not done a great job in fulfilling their role – journalism’s role in a democracy is to provide information on profoundly important subjects so we’re an informed citizenry.
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
My wife herself had an upbringing where she wasn’t allowed to pursue what she wanted to do because of her parents. She wanted to go into photography and journalism, but because classes ran so late, she had to be home at a certain time. We don’t want that for our daughter.
Certainly in my own body of reporting, I was very acutely aware of the risk of any mischaracterized journalism and the need for anything I put out to be absolutely bulletproof.
I had discovered journalism to be my life’s ambition.
I started, actually, in journalism when I was – well. I started at the ‘New York Times’ when I was 18 years old, actually, but really got into journalism when I was 15 years old and had started a sports magazine which was trying to become a national sports magazine.
God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.
My own personal conviction is that if I were writing without thinking about how images or how journalism is creating a world for us, I would not be happy about it.
I’ve always been kind of a mutt creatively. I started off in journalism, and I’ve actually done more police and procedural shows than I’ve ever done science fiction shows. I was on ‘Murder She Wrote,’ I was on ‘Walker, Texas Ranger,’ I was on ‘Jake and the Fat Man.’
Journalism is what we need to make democracy work.
Journalism took me around the world. I worked in London for ten years and reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the first Gulf War.
The danger of the blogosphere is reading only those you agree with. While there are right-wing blogs that are entertaining freak shows, it’s hard to find substantial journalism there.
We never see any journalism or documentaries on the oceans and what we’re doing on this Earth and how it affects the oceans and how important they are. I’m intrigued by it. It’s almost an untold story.
In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation.
I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism.
My life can’t be reduced to click-bait journalism.
I didn’t like the competitiveness of big-time journalism.
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.
I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising.
I kind of knew inside that I wanted to try comedy, but it was a mystery. How do you start? So when I hit 30 and I had done everything I wanted to do in journalism, so I went to a comedy class. I figured I’d learn how to do five minutes and see how it feels.
When journalism is treated as just another widget in a commercial enterprise, the focus isn’t on truth, verification or public good, but productivity and output.
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Seymour Hersh is one of the giants of investigative journalism.
Online journalism has always had a sourcing problem. From using unverified ‘anonymous tips’ to repeating whatever rumor or speculation people are chattering about, the general ethic is, ‘We’ll publish just about anything.’
The passion and knowledge of journalism as storytelling is incredibly infectious.
As editor-in-chief of the ‘Guardian’ and the ‘Observer’, my job is to ensure that our independent journalism continues to be enjoyed by as many readers as possible and that our print newspapers make a positive financial contribution to securing a sustainable future.
The alternative to the corporate media is a renaissance of citizen journalism emerging around world – exploring the different avenues that do exist, like podcasts, to tell whatever story you want to tell.
Democracies succeed or fail based on their journalism.
Journalism constructs momentarily arrested equilibriums and gives disorder an implied order. That is already two steps from reality.
One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism – accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet – with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.
Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off.
I was a newspaper editor in high school, and I truly thought of journalism as a career. I loved it.
Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody.
History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.
I think everyone has their own style in journalism. Look, I’m a girl from the South! Sometimes I laugh. Someone can pejoratively call it giggling. But if you look at the body of my work, I ask lots of hard questions and break a lot of hard news.
The level of journalism in this country is just so pathetically poor, and I’ve, in a sense, gone over the top of them, which they don’t like.
A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
At CNN, our view is that good journalism equals good business.
Journalism classes would have been interesting to me.
In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals – Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine – which set the agenda.
The kind of in-depth investigative journalism we practice at ‘Frontline’ is thoughtful, rigorous, and time-intensive. It requires us to constantly seek untold stories and to give our producers and reporters the time and resources to dig into them deeply.
At Grozny TV, the line between journalism and government propaganda is traversed as often as a Manhattan crosswalk.
In this day and age, much of journalism is about right or left, conservative or liberal, and ‘The Observer’ is just that: an observer. It is about truth.
Journalism is always the art of the incomplete. You get bits and pieces.
It’s all storytelling, you know. That’s what journalism is all about.
One of the biggest complaints readers have about my work is that I don’t tell them often enough what they can do. I do think this is an area where journalism sometimes falls short. We describe a really grim situation but don’t really explain to people what they can do about it.
I don’t actually see that much difference between telling stories in journalism and telling them on film. The tools are very different, but the basic idea is the same.
In journalism, I have done many a bad report. Some have been exceptionally terrible.
Tests conducted before I graduated predicted a future for me in journalism, forestry, or the teaching of music; persons who know me well could recognize some truth in those seemingly errant prognoses.
What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.
Fake news is a big thing in the field of Social Media Journalism. Fake news can be as simple has spreading misinformation.or as dangerous as smearing hateful propaganda.
As much as the Pulitzer is the hallmark of journalism, I think what I love the most is when somebody says they took my column and it’s in their wallet. I have had people open their wallet and show me a corner of a column.
I wasn’t the kind of kid like Spielberg or Lucas who knew to go to film school. I didn’t know at 12 what I was going to do; it took me until I was about 23. I studied journalism in college, but after school, I got a job in public television and I never worked as a journalist for one moment.
