News Prioritization Quotes

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.

Not every item of news should be published: rather those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.

I'll give anything for a good copy now, be it true or false, so it be news.

The old newspaper adage, 'If it bleeds, it leads,' is as true today as it was a century ago.

It's gonna be short if it's news; put it at the top. Style's not an issue, just make it news.

A handful of us determine what will be on the evening news broadcasts, or, for that matter, in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Indeed it is a handful of us with this awesome power.And those [news stories] available to us already have been culled and re-culled by persons far outside our control.

Let's not kid ourselves. You pick up 'The Washington Post' and find O.J. Simpson on the front page; 'serious journalists' covered Anna Nicole Smith.

Before the web and these highly focused entities, journalists got to decide what was important to tell their audience and educated their readers. Now, journalists have to try and understand what their consumer actually wants to read and what angle they are looking for in order to keep audiences engaged in a highly competitive world.

We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story.

There is a certain comfort in waking up and finding that Michael Jackson is still the Big Story. At least it tells you that nothing horrible has happened in the world that would force them to move on to real news.

Television has certain imperatives that CNN had the luxury of ignoring for a long period of time. CNN could take the position that the news would be the star, because in most of the programming day, they were the only all-news operation on the air.

Journalism has become a sort of competitive screeching: what is trivial but noisy and immediate takes precedence over important matters that develop over time.

I think we - "we," meaning the media - have generally caused Americans to consume news in smaller, less contextualized bites. I think we have sugar-coated the news. I think we have provided news that is consumable, at the expense of news that is more important. I think we have created a world in which extreme views push out moderate views.

Bad news is dramatic. It makes good TV. If there's a firefight on the same day that a school opens up, the media will show the firefight even though the school is way more important and will affect the community for much longer.

The day that I spearheaded the passage of America Fast Forward... the newspaper of record did not put it in the newspaper; what they put was my breakup with my ex-girlfriend. I took umbrage with that. A great newspaper ought to be printing things that people care about, issues that people care about.

If I want to spend the rest of my life reading one day's output of information, which is about what it would take, OK fine. But I personally prefer calibration from an aggregator or newspaper, where the No. 1 story is one they consider important, [and] they're usually right.

We shouldn't get lost in the bombastic tweets of Trump. He provides such great fodder every day. You don't want to lose sight of the other stuff that's going on that's even more important.

Sure enough, as merger has followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than "the news we need to know to keep our freedoms"

Financial pressures, the demand of ratings, the changing tastes of the American public all led to new decisions in newsrooms about what to cover and how.

And given that there's been probably a ten-fold amount of information about terrorism through the media than there has about climate change; I think that's quite an interesting statistic.

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.

When you do a piece of journalism, you may have to cut away 95 percent of what you are experiencing.

The focus of entertainment is taking away from what the public needs as news. I think investigative journalism will always be important and always find its way, be it on the Internet or wherever.

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.