Quotes About Reporting

The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.

I can't go into a mob scene and sense the mood and the attitude of the crowd. I can't conduct man-on-the-street interviews or even get reactions that I can be sure are honest, because they know who I am.

Journalists know other journalists - that's the only reason my engagement made it into the papers. I don't think real people are interested - just the media, just Twitter!

I do feel like the media is one of the biggest problems. If you look at all these rolling news channels, they sensationalize the story, they focus on gossip, and they don't actually tell the full story.

Most of the stories I have covered in 45 years have been gray stories.

The earliest people to report porn-related problems in online forums were typically computer programmers and information-technology specialists. They had acquired high-speed internet porn ahead of the pack

Unlike so many "reporters" today, they knew the difference between objective reporting of news and hyping things up to entertain the audience—and bump up their ratings.)

As striking as the existence of a male beauty contest is the humorous, tongue-in-cheek tone with which Variety reported it. It gently ridicules the contestants, but it ridicules even more the Coney Island dowagers serving on the jury who hadn't a clue about what the sophisticated reporter saw transpiring, and seems to take glee in the exasperation of the chief judge, who did know what was going on.

Morally based framing is everybody's job. Especially reporters'.

Responsible journalists need to discuss systemic causation.

The implication that women are poised to make unfounded accusations in droves is even more alarming when every piece of data on false reporting contradicts that false notion. We need to believe women and believe in women.

And on election night I'd go down to city hall in El Paso, Texas and cover the election. In those days, of course, we didn't have exit polls. You didn't know who had won the election until they actually counted the votes. I thought that was exciting too.

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 was spending a lot of time in Mumbai after I met my husband, who is Indian, and while parts of the city were prospering like crazy, I couldn't quite make out how the new wealth had changed the prospects of the majority of city residents who lived in slums. So after a few years I stopped wondering and started reporting.

I wrote my first real murder story as a journalist for the Daytona Beach News Journal in 1980. It was about a body found in the woods. Later, the murder was linked to a serial killer who was later caught and executed for his crimes.

I'd get into a room and disappear into the woodwork. Now the rooms are so crowded with reporters getting behind-the-scenes stories that nobody can get behind-the-scenes stories.

That word 'funny' always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill Wegman - he really tries to be funny. I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter, and I'm sort of reporting.

My experience as a newspaper reporter was invaluable in terms of getting me to the kind of writing I do now. It gave me a work ethic of writing every day and pushing through difficult creative times. I mean, there's no writer's block allowed in a newsroom.

I know that I work hard for the things that I do, and I really go to the places that I report on.

People often talk about parachute journalism, but one of the skills that you get when you are a correspondent is the ability to look at facts fast and work out what the story is.

I've written thousands of stories, started hundreds of news cycles.

As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.

Historically, war journalists have embedded themselves with one side, which means the greatest threat comes from the clearly delineated enemy of that side.

For newspapers to continue to play an important role in civic engagement, they need more access to capital. Their decline has created a real threat to independent reporting at the state and local level.