Quotes About Journalism

Forty years ago, we were on the tail of the Front Page era. There was a different point of view. Reporters and editors were more forgiving of public people. They didn't think they had to stick someone in jail to make a career.

To presume that my greatest achievement is that I dated someone famous twenty years ago is completely sexist and anti-woman. It's lazy, nasty journalism that makes me sad about our world.

I started off in journalism 16 years ago in Stockholm, and I wrote for a few different publications for many years. I've also worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director, but I changed it for architecture at 25 years old.

So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.

Up until about 12 years ago we never, ever, wore flak jacket or helmets but now the nastiness has got worse.

America's great newspapers have staffs that range from 50 percent to 70 percent of what they were just a few years ago.

A lot of reporters don't have conversations - they just fire off questions. I'm going to listen to what you're saying. If you start giving me a pat answer, I'm going to challenge you. That's where my sports background helps, because athletes do it all the time. So you have to stop them... and sometimes they're going to yell back at you. So what?

I will not subject my wife, family or friends to the sadistic vitriol of yellow journalism. I will not dignify such journalism with a reply or an answer. I never will.

We all know that yellow journalism didn't just happen a week ago or a month ago, that yellow journalism has probably been with us as long as journalism has been with us.

I think yellow journalism is something that appears everywhere, in the underdeveloped and developed worlds alike.

When an international news organization covers a story in Somalia, Yemen, Sudan or wherever, they will fly a crew to go there, spend a few days, interact with some officials and analysts, most of the time English-speaking elite, and file the story and go home.

I look for strong people. I don't like people who'll say yes to everything I might bring up. I want people who can argue and disagree and have a point of view that's reflected in the magazine. My dad believed in the cult of personality. He brought great writers and columnists to 'The Standard.'

Yes, you are running businesses, and yes, we understand and accept that, but surely there must be a level beyond which profit from news is simply indecent.

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose... the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom - it's gone.

Anyone with a smart phone is a potential eyewitness cameraman capturing and transmitting stories at speeds that turn Reuter photos and traditional reporting into, well... yesterday's news.

Traditionally, what we in the news business do is cover what happened yesterday.

When I started in the press there were really ink-stained wretches. Not everybody went to college. Now, everybody at the New York Times and the Washington Post and Salon and Slate, most of them have Ivy League educations.

The 'Fake News Alert' Chrome extension, created by 'New York Magazine' journalist Brian Feldman, identifies hoax news articles. However, cutting out fake news source entirely from operating is easier said than done, since anyone with internet access can create fake news.

My own career started in New York at the 'Associated Press', a fast-paced news agency where we rarely had time for deep reporting.

The great 'New York Times' columnist Dave Anderson famously slept one year in a child's race-car bed. There he was, Pulitzer Prize and all, snoring as his feet dangled over the rear tires of Lightning McQueen.

I know that doesn't sound very radical and webby of me to say that but I think the New York Times is important. I also think there's an occasional piece that will pop out.

You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the 'New York Times' on foreign coverage.

I get 'USA Today,' the 'New York Times,' 'Wall Street Journal' and the 'Star-Telegram' at my doorstep. I can't do without them.