Quotes About Journalism

embaucador italiano Tommaso Debenedetti, que durante años estuvo publicando en diarios de su país «entrevistas» con escritores, políticos, religiosos (incluido el Papa), que

You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up.

There was an unspoken understanding that when a reporter chased a story, hunches and theories became airborne and other reporters could catch them like a cold.

Journalists make lousy politicians because they think they always need to tell the truth. —STEPHEN HARPER

When the New York Times confirmed the truth about Hue on its front page, word was definitely out: trapped marines . . . smoking city . . . five battalions of enemy troops. A huge fight was shaping up inside the old fortress. Suddenly nearly every reporter in the country was trying to get to Hue.

60 Minutes, the most watched and most respected news program on the tube.

Since the publisher paid the salary; since rewrite men, like television writers, maintained their own feeling of superiority to the mass by writing down to the level of a not very bright twelve-year-old; since the facts had to be trimmed and altered to fit the open space or time slot; even these reporters had a difficult time of maintaining the usual odds—that there is only a twenty-to-one chance that anything said in the newspapers or on the air may be accurate.

In such a dry spell, when advertisers were beginning to question circulation figures, and editors were racking their brains for a strong hate symbol to create interest, the delayed report from Eden came as a summer shower, that might be magnified into a flood. EDEN SILENT quickly became COLONY FEARED LOST and progressed normally to COLONY WIPED OUT. That there was no proof of loss or destruction bothered no one in journalism.

No one thought it curious they weren't trying to get the information from source for everyone in journalism understands the importance lies in what the competition is going to say, not in what happened.

Mark Halperin

Taking an idea, a central point, and pursuing it, turning it into a story that tells something about the way we live today, is the essence of narrative journalism.

Flugschriften, or "quick writing.

Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is invaluable. As is Nicolas Freleng's The Kitchen, David Blum's Flash in the Pan, the Batterberrys' fine account of American restaurant history, On the Town in New York, and Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel.

Whenever the circulation of such a paper begins to slacken, the proprietors should, as a matter of course, admonish their Alf to add a little power to the crushing department.

I don't believe the 'Evening Pulpit' can prove it, — and I'm sure that they can't attempt to prove it without an expense of three or four thousand pounds. That's a game in which nobody wins but the lawyers. I wonder

Mr Alf never made enemies, for he praised no one, and, as far as the expression of his newspaper went, was satisfied with nothing.

BUT SOMEHOW, IF YOU want to badly enough, you can always report a story. It feels like magic but it works like carpentry. You build a frame, and then you build on that, and pretty soon you have something to stand on so you can hammer away at a height that was initially out of reach.

He grinned and knee-patted and back-slapped; and few of his visitors, once they had talked with him, failed to look upon him as their Little Father and to support him forever. . .. The few who did fail, most of them newspapermen, disliked the smell of him more than before they had met him. . .. Even they, by the unusual spiritedness and color of their attacks upon him, kept his name alive in every column. . ..

Ellen Whoozis, the cocktail-party queen, who writes the Necking Notes, is going to marry the religious editor!

A good reporter remains a skeptic all his life.

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

Suspense in news is torture.

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.

This kind of thing is happening here in Al-Ahram all the time. It's very difficult to keep your hands clean. There are journalists in this building who have done just that. I know it for a fact. They get apartments. Not exactly as gifts, of course. But take that apartment for half a million: The journalist will 'buy' it for one hundred thousand, then sell it for the market price and make a huge profit.