Journalistic Practice Quotes

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

A journalist uses the most precise words he or she can. An artist does the same sort of thing. You gather material about a particular subject, you refine it as best you can.

You know journalists. You know the media. They are going to hang on to anything negative they possibly can.

Now, academics are not always the easiest people to talk to, and the scholarly papers aren't always the easiest papers to read, but frankly, psychology papers, especially papers and books on terrorism, are very easy to read, and journalists should be reading them.

Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism.

It's the nature of cable news that we [TV hosts] do a lot of clipping and quoting of other broadcasts and outlets, sometimes to make a narrative point, sometimes to make a political one, and sometimes just to make a joke.

It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.

The advent of the Internet exposed the fact that the old business model for newspapers was broken. The world wide web fundamentally changed the media eco-system, challenging established journalistic practice in what is known as the mainstream media: radio, television, newspapers and magazines.

I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.

The press is always more comfortable with factual determinations than moral ones, although in day-to-day life, a lot of people care a heck of a lot more about morality than every precise actual fact.

The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people.

Certain political figures think when you call them and ask them for a comment; that you are somehow doing something that you shouldn't be doing.

I think it is quite untrue that it is standard journalistic practice to name the interviewer when quoting from an interview.

I've definitely written people e-mails telling them I've loved their stories, but that seems more like a professional journalist thing to do.