Nancy Gibbs Quotes

Journalism is in fact history on the run.

The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?

I am a hard-news journalist. That is what I do.

At Al Jazeera, we are getting our local Somalis, Yemenis and Sudanese, local correspondents from within the society, who understand much better than the people who come from overseas. We will get a much better insight.

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

The function of the New York Times is to enter the battlefield after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.

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.

I have nothing to do with the selection of stories. I'm the reporter.

Most reporters are so transactional rather than strategic.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

There's never any time I think I'm a real journalist, because I don't have any of the qualifications or the intentions for that.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

Journalism, as concerns collecting information, differs little if at all from intelligence work. In my judgment, a journalist's job is very interesting.

The professionalism of wire service reporters is constantly being tested because reporters know that if they're late or sloppy on a story, it will show up because the competition is likely to be not late and not sloppy.

Good journalism, I think, represents life and if you try to organize something too neatly it usually blows up in your face and doesn't really happen the way you want it to.

I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a newspaper reporter because we didn't have much television in those days.

I started as a print reporter.

The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.

I think that a great newspaper is one that puts a real premium on digging to get the story behind the story.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.

If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

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

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.

I'm a journalist and that's what I do.

As a cub reporter, I devoured books about journalism.