Matthew Heineman Quotes

I never take ideas from the headlines. I feel that if a story is good enough, a real story that is, then it's already been covered by the media, and if it's not good enough, why would I want to bother with it?

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

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.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

Unless you work for '60 Minutes', your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result.

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

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges.

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

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

Forty years ago, we were on the tail of the Front Page era. There was a different point of view. Reporters and editors were more forgiving of public people. They didn't think they had to stick someone in jail to make a career.

You have to go where the story is to report on it. As a journalist, you're essentially running to things that other people are running away from.

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.

I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.

I tend to gravitate toward reporters who cover all aspects of the story: from personal aspects to the big picture that answer the 'so what' of a story.

One thing that happens on the 'Newsroom' is that every time a real story does get incorporated into the show, there's always an angle that's provided that hasn't really been dealt with yet.

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.

There's fierce competition between all the networks to get the guest who can bring the most pertinent information about whatever the story of the moment happens to be.

I love covering stories that have huge historic impacts.

We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren't enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase - long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative.

Journalists follow authority as sharks follow a liner, dining on the scraps that are thrown overboard.

Nothing is so tantalizing to journalists as some answer they can't get. If you want to appeal to political journalists,…you hide something from us …

if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

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

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.