Quotes About Journalism

Journalists used to be obsessed with working at a New York magazine or newspaper or TV network. Now the entire industry is obsessed with going viral and how words will be received via social media.

A number of years ago, I found a book of photography by Weegee; he was a crime photographer in the 1930s in New York. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car and drive around.

What's 'straight news?' I guess a lot of people out there in the general public would probably say the New York Times and Reuters. I just disagree that is straight news.

I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night.

Probably the biggest influence on my career was the late John Hersey, who, while he was at 'The New Yorker,' wrote one of the masterpieces of narrative non-fiction, 'Hiroshima.' Hersey was a teacher of mine at Yale, and a friend. He got me to see the possibility of journalism not just as a business but as an art form.

Veteran print editors and reporters at places like the 'Times' and 'The New Yorker' manage to feed and clothe their families without costing their companies a million bucks a month, and they produce a great deal more valuable reporting and analysis than the network news stars do.

I'm not a reporter but the 'New Yorker' treats everyone like a reporter.

For news, I follow 'The New York Times,' 'The New Yorker,' and 'ProPublica.' For entertainment, I like The A.V. Club and The Onion.

My readers know my views on politics and politicians because I make no secret of them in my comments for 'The New Yorker' and elsewhere.

One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is they let you write stories that sometimes end up almost half a book.

In 2004, Lawrence Wright wrote in the 'New Yorker' about 'The Kingdom of Silence,' where a massive sewer project in Jeddah was really a series of manhole covers across the city with no actual pipes underneath. I, as the editor of a major paper at the time, can say that we all knew - and we never reported on it.

It took me a long time to be able to write for the 'New Yorker,' and for me, that has been the best job. I live a very conventional life, but reporting for the magazine has allowed me to do things I would never otherwise do, such as investigating a criminal conspiracy in Guatemala or trekking through the Amazon looking for a lost city.

If you're on a contract at 'The New Yorker,' the contract specifies the number of words you will publish in the magazine per year. I get paid by the word, like most writers. That's one reason why the Scientology article was 25,000 words long!

I don't know if I ever believed in the infallibility of a journalist's objectivity, but I definitely stopped flirting with the notion as a young adult.

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.

Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

My father was a newspaper editor, so I was surrounded by journalists my entire life. I think the fact that he was so well known may be why I chose to go into magazines and move to the States at a young age.

I graduated high school, and I always wanted to go to college, but I also really wanted to work at a young age. At 18, I was pitching talk show ideas to different networks. I was a journalist.

My parents were journalists and friends with writers, artists, and just a really interesting assortment of people, so I was exposed to all lifestyles from a young age.

I'm not someone who from a young age imagined myself being a writer or had dreams of being a novelist or anything like that, but I was always very driven by ideas and by values, and that is the reason I got into journalism.

I was drawn to journalism as a young guy because I felt like there was some purpose to it, not always but sometimes.

In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The technology has outpaced our comprehension of its implications.

I think a lot of times, especially for certain stories, photographers travel together for safety reasons, and they also invariably cross paths. But you could have 10 photographers shooting together in the same spot but capturing different images.

The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it.