You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.
CNN was one of the first news organizations in the world to train and equip its journalists before deploying them to dangerous areas.
It's harder and harder for journalists to get out in the field and interview Iraqis. The Web can get these voices out easily and cheaply.
I covered Katrina, I've covered the tsunamis, all of them, the Haiti earthquake... you get to a certain point in your career where you say, 'I want to now cover what I want to cover.'
I always saw the best reporters as ones you hardly ever saw other than when they were back in the newsroom, writing their stories.
The photographers I worked alongside loved the news cycle and the hustle and getting that front page of the newspaper. But I wanted to be out in the field in conflict areas, documenting real life rather than political theater.
Working on The Daily Show, I co-produced all those field segments, and that's another huge thing.I probably did more than 100 field segments.
It's very important to get out, to do reporting. It's also really interesting. I come at it as a journalist, and I think that's helped me, and I come at it as someone who sees nature wherever he looks, and that helps.
If the interview was done in the studio, Frank McGee would automatically do it. But if I went out and got it, then the interview was mine. So I was considered a pushy cookie, because I would get the interview.
Professionally, I remember Cronkite as a kid growing up, and more so for me, the importance of Cronkite was not him sitting there at the anchor desk, but him out there doing things.
How much of the national news that you report to the public each night consists of information you've actually gone out and dug up on your own?
In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.
The highest admiration I have for my colleagues is not for someone in a studio in New York but for somebody on the ground in places that they've gone to fight to tell the story.
I can report from the field with a tiny camera and a laptop.
I much preferred the peaceful life on the road, where I didn't have to ask embarrassing questions and do all the things real reporters have to do.
This is reporting the way I like it... in the field, gritty and aggressive.
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.
I've always loved reporting from the field most of all. There's something about doing live TV and being there as it happens that's always appealed to me. I think there's great value to bearing witness to these events as they're actually happening.
I started at the 'Wall Street Journal Report' as a production assistant typing chyrons and rolling the teleprompter, and then I became a producer, producing stories in the field, then the show's line producer.
So I just got on the phone and the engineer just patched me in and I did reports. I'd get a community leader and bring him to the phone, call up the station and do an interview over the phone with the guy.
I don't find an advantage or disadvantage in being a woman when reporting. What little advantages there might be in some instances is cancelled out by the basic lack of lavatories round the world for women.
