Mallory Ortberg Quotes

I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I've covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that's what this book started out to be.

I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting.

Most of the stories I have covered in 45 years have been gray stories.

I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I'm attuned to current events.

A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.

I've been getting pulled from newspapers for my entire career.

I'm a journalist; I love doing interviews, and I hope that will continue.

News is the backbone of our network; the main commodity and the main successes of Al Jazeera came out of our involvement in covering the news in the Middle East.

I can't think of any other job in journalism where the newsmakers come to you.

Journalism is in fact history on the run.

Traditionally, what we in the news business do is cover what happened yesterday.

It turned out I really didn't like journalism. I wanted to make up stories, not cover real events.

My journalist sensibilities have guided me toward the types of projects I've gone for, even though the projects have been fairly diverse. It always has to have that interesting to attract me, I think.

In my first year or so at the 'Post,' I began to write with some frequency on the least important issues - so-called light editorials. The titles themselves are revealing of just how light: 'On Being a Horse,' 'Brains and Beauty,' 'Mixed Drinks,' 'Lou Gehrig,' and 'Spotted Fever.'

Presidential coverage used to be a very serious endeavor.

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

I love covering stories that have huge historic impacts.

I developed my love for the news because of my love for international news.

And I've been incredibly lucky to have a long career in journalism that has given me a front-row seat to some of the most important moments in modern American political life.

[Journalists are] more attentive to the minute hand of history than to the hour hand.

I'm a writer. I've been a journalist for my whole adult life.

If you're in the media, particularly newspapers, you are in the thick of all the interesting things that are going on in a community, and I can't imagine any other life that one would want to dedicate oneself to.

I had sort of given up on conventional journalism. I found it far too restrictive.

If there is anything good to be said about my particular line of work, it's that we get to tell people the news they need to hear, and to put it in context. To get to that - for one hour every night on the 'PBS NewsHour,' and for an additional half-hour every Friday night on 'Washington Week,' we have to slog through a lot of tough stuff.

A journalist gathers information for a media outlet that disseminates the information through a broadly defined 'medium' - including newspaper, nonfiction book, wire service, magazine, news Web site, television, radio or motion picture - for public use. This broad definition covers every form of legitimate journalism.