622 Quotes About Journalism

It’s the great flaw of journalism. The more something happens, the less newsworthy it is.

Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day where their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses — the days of interviews — are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.

Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.

In North Korea, journalism, the job of telling the stories power and money do not want told, of giving a voice to the voiceless, does not exist.

I was a journalist and I liked to watch. I was in awe.

Blogs are assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of the business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you're at The Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimportant stories.

Go and nose out the next piece of shit... as one said in the trade. If nothing else was available, you could run an article on the latest miracle diet. That always worked.

To figure out what was really happening behind the clichés, I'd learned, meant a practice of looking not at the center but at the edges of things—at the unlikeliest and weakest people, not the most apparently powerful. It meant asking lots of stupid questions, making room for inconvenient facts that didn't fit a schema, and trying to remain honest about what I didn't know.

Computer hackers are the true journalists in the 21st Century. The old journalism is worse than dead. It is unreliable to the point that it is nothing more than a nuisance, an obstacle in the pursuit of truth.