Jeff Lindsay Quotes

We are in the business of gathering the news. We're not in the business of talking about the news.

I was given a White House - well, you will have to ask the White House that. But I asked to attend the White House briefing because I was, you know, because I wanted to report on the activities there.

Among journalists, there is a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads.' This can result in some serious hustling - and some serious sloppiness - whenever a crime occurs. The public's longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless.

No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.

I remember thinking about how fun it would be to be a reporter. I had a dream, when I was little, to become a police officer and a crime investigator. It depends on what kind of stories you're reporting, but it's very similar. You're finding out the truth.

Reporters are not merely recording devices that take down what people say and repeat it in print; we are expected to use our knowledge and experience both for triage - deciding what's important to cover and what isn't - and for contextualizing, analyzing and such.

Journalism, to me, is just another drug - a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight.

I think there are a lot of great journalists out there. I don't find much fault in the journalist in general; I think everybody would like to break a good story.

The Press blew, the public stared, hands flew out like a million little fishes after bread.

I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter.

In the eight years I worked at newspapers, even during a little stretch when I was a film critic, I was never, ever doing exclusively criticism. In the daily newspaper world, much more value is placed on reporting than on thinking abstractly about art. The eight years I was in newspapers, I was mainly a journalist in the conventional sense, and just doing criticism when there were opportunities.

REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.

A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

When you do 10 interviews in one day, and 10 different sources want to talk to you, that means you're doing good. I think about that every day.

Reporting in general makes me pretty nervous. But I realized: all the amazing work experiences of my life were thanks to reporting. So that forces you to go do it.

I met journalists that were on both sides of things. People who are young, enthusiastic and hard working journalists working on the online side and people who had been there forever. There was one journalist who had running shoes under her desk in case she had to kick of her heels and go out and cover a breaking news story.

I think our primary function is to create the strongest, deepest, most interesting news report there is in the world.And whether it's on the front page of the newspaper or leading the home page doesn't really matter. We reach a huge audience on the Web. And really, you know, the journalists, whether they are reporters or editors or Web producers or multimedia specialists, we're all creating, you know, the journalism that is the bedrock of our news report. And that's true for the newspaper, the Web, our apps, and you name it.

That is the White House, where you can fit four times the amount of people in the press conference, allowing more press, more coverage from all over the country to have those press conferences. That's what we're talking about.

Newsman are the ones who - without them we don't have a civil rights movement, we don't have a women's movement, we don't have a Vietnam movement.

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

Of course, no matter how hard we try to be objective as reporters, our life experiences and personal circumstances influence our journalism, including the choice of topics we pursue.

Taking pleasure in the dark side may be some sort of occupational hazard for reporters.

As a war correspondent, you have to weigh the risk you run against the story you can get.

Journalism is caring where the fire-engines are going.

[On journalists:] We are a noisy, imperfect lot, struggling to scribble what has been called the first draft of history.