Quotes About Journalism

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.

As any editor will tell you, startling newsroom revelations are generally met with queries about where the information came from and how the reporter got it. Seriously startling revelations are followed by the vetting of libel lawyers.

You know it's always amazed me - I think the most startling thing that's happened in the last couple of decades is that there is no sort of objective reporting anymore.

Never look for the story in the 'lede.' Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.

I think it's important for the public to know, great reporting starts with a publisher who has guts and an editor who has guts.

Newspapers are so boring. How can you read a newspaper that starts with a 51-word lead sentence?

I was a journalist, but I was starving. And I've written fiction, but I couldn't get a publisher. So, I was basically a very frustrated creative person working in advertising, and even there, I have a great idea that client won't buy it.

Freedom of the press is not questioned when investigative journalism unearths scandals, But that does not mean that every classified state document should be made available to journalists.

I think that the press has a duty and an obligation to report on local government, state government, federal government - to be aggressive, to do its job. And its job is to report on whatever it's covering.

Running a magazine is a journalistic assignment, and part of the fun of being a journalist is that you get to change jobs every so often. Though there's no stated term limit, four or five years should be plenty of time to put your stamp on a publication.

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

When there are falsehoods and ludicrous statements made at briefings, we've got to call that out.

I was working at the 'Evening Standard' when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the 'New Statesman.' I remember thinking, 'That's perfect.' It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work - so I applied for it and got it.

I think 2001 was the year Al Jazeera started to play an international role, in a way. Because in 2001, we were the only TV station located inside Kabul, and every image out of the war in Afghanistan, the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, came through Al Jazeera screen.

Chicago, with its big newspapers and major broadcasting stations, couldn't have been a better city to start a journalism career.

I wrote for my university newspaper and went on to freelance for a Los Angeles publication in my first months after graduating from UC Santa Barbara. I also interned at a couple of TV stations in the L.A. area.

I've been a reporter for 20 years, and I don't ever get things wrong. That's important in terms of my professional status.

Edward Snowden copied and leaked information from inside the world's most protected spy agency, and then fled to Russia, but yet, because a small part of the data he expropriated was provided to a news organisation, journalism conventions readily accord him lone whistleblower status.

I never got away from the war. Not because I was obsessed with it in those years, but because it was the event of my generation and I started out covering it so I stayed with it.

People can say: Okay, it's not the old-fashioned traditional journalism that took place in the 'Houston Chronicle' in 1975 - it's different. But that's also why newspapers are having a hard time staying relevant, you know?

I'm a unicorn in the world of journalism; I've stayed in the same mid-sized city, and that staying has allowed me to write two deeply-reported books.

The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.

The idea of 24-hour news, if you really step back, is pretty insane. Just even saying '24-hour news' almost has satire laced in it.

Journalism constructs momentarily arrested equilibriums and gives disorder an implied order. That is already two steps from reality.