The thing with newspapers is that they are a filter. We're relying on the editors of that paper to be a filter and to tell you that this is worth reading about, this is quality, and this is quite reliable.
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.
But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate.
People who watch news are pretty smart. Most of them don't just go to one channel for all their news anyway.
Things that happen every day are, frankly, what we in the news business aren't good at covering because there is no one day in which they are news.
I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.
You can't expect that because you find a story and report it out that your newspaper and broadcasting company is going to want to publish and broadcast it - and you're going to be a hero.
I've been intrigued by 'Le Monde' ever since work took me to Paris once, and I noted that on a day when there was some huge worldwide story, the paper led its front page on some cabinet changes in Turkey. It implied a magnificent disdain for the quotidian folderol of mere news.
But here's my point to the LA Times. If you had a serious story to run, if you thought there was serious misconduct, you don't wait until the Thursday before the Tuesday. You run it early.
A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.
Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me? Does it mean it's a good story or just a seductive one?
I never understand why 'economist makes forecast' is ever a headline. Whether the economist in question is from the International Monetary Fund, a City forecasting group or the Treasury - a forecast is still not news.
The newspaper offers something very different from Google's aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.
Having been in the newspaper business for a long, long time, I often wonder, Why do we actually need to know about something like a bus crash in Bangladesh that has no effect on us at all? That can be nothing other than voyeurism.
A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.
A news sense is really a sense of what is important, what is vital, what has color and life — what people are interested in. That's journalism.
One of the important things about being a small-town reporter is knowing what not to put in the paper.
