622 Quotes About Journalism

It pains me that I will never be able to do it again, return to that same place, that same time, in that same state of mind, eager and uninformed, and, best, unformed.

It was electric. It was journalism. And it was spectacular. We were all in.

...if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

The moral division of labor between newspapers, then, may parallel the moral division of the human faculties between the more respectable faculties of abstraction and the less respectable feelings. People control themselves to read of politics in fine print; they let themselves go to read of murders or to look at drawings of celebrities. Information is a genre of self-denial, the story one of self-indulgence.

This business of giving people what they want is a dope pusher's argument. News is something people don't know they're interested in until they hear about it. The job of a journalist is to take what's important and make it interesting.

We think people want SERIOUS, and they do, but they only want about 3 inches of serious on most things. USA Today got it wrong ... they didn't go far enough. I'm getting more and more convinced people want a smattering of everything but just a smattering, and you'd better tell them the nut graf quick. I call it "drive-though journalism": filling and fast. And don't forget to give them a side of fries or an apple pie along with it.

The power of television has nothing to do with its quality.

The rules were clear then. If you once crossed the line from journalism into partisan politics, you could not return. They were them and we were us.

Відповідальна журналістика - це наріжний камінь сводоби й демократії.