Helen Skelton Quotes

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.

It won't make for a quiet life but it will make for an interesting paper vastly more significant because it is doing something only a daily paper can do.

I love covering stories that have huge historic impacts.

Just ask my boss - any time a major story breaks, I'm banging on his door to send me.

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 didn't care for beat reporting, covering the same thing day after day - short attention span.

Journalism seems to have recovered its reason for being.

My suggestion to newspapers everywhere is to give the public a reason to read them again. So here's an idea: get on a big story with widespread public appeal, devote your best resources to it, say a quiet prayer, and swing for the fences.

There's nothing more exciting than to watch a story break and grow, and to be the first one to present it to the world.

Journalism is about results. It's about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way.

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

I do know something about the news world. I was sitting on the floors of newsrooms since I was seven years old, and I've been around them my whole life. I understand that someone looks at a story with famous people in it, and you want to put it out.

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

The big story of the day is always going to be driven by what's happened and by the facts and the events.

When I'm in studio, we cover the news. But no one says the news has to be boring.

The function of journalism is, primarily, to uncover vital new information in the public interest and to put that information in a context so that we can use it to improve the human condition.

I have such respect and awe for journalists who are able to communicate important information to the masses without sobbing.

Obviously I love doing newsmaker interviews, and if I can contribute in any way to that, I would love to. I love reporting, getting out in the field and talking to people about various issues.

You break the story first, and then you go into the specifics.

That's a paradox I've noticed, too: The news business held little romance for me, yet writing about it somehow stirred my affections.

Al Jazeera is not a tool of revolution. We do not create revolutions. However, when something of that magnitude happens, we are at the center of the coverage.

My job is to get to the heart of a story, to find out what's really going on; to get it verified and, then, to get it out to as many people as possible as fast as.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

When I'm anchoring, I miss chasing stories in the field.