News Value Quotes

TV is set up to be just a shout fest: Is this good for Republicans or bad for Republicans; is this good for Cain or bad for Cain... tell me something that I need to know.

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

Be it true or false, so it be news.

Sensationalism seems to sell more than wonderful-positive news.

Negative is always more newsworthy than positive.

First of all, tabloid stories are some of the richest and most important stories that we have. There's nothing wrong, per se, with tabloid stories.

Let me go back to a fundamental thing we all used to agree on: information is power. That's why we became journalists in the first place.

Too many newspaper advocates utterly and completely fail to understand this; the truth is that newspapers made money in the past not by providing societal value, but by having quasi-monopolistic control of print advertising in their geographic area; the societal value was a bonus. Thus, when Chavern complains that “today’s internet distribution systems distort the flow of economic value derived from good reporting”, he is in fact conflating societal value with economic value; the latter does not exist and has never existed. This failure to understand the past leads to a misdiagnosis of the present: Google and Facebook are not profitable because they took newspapers’ reporting, they are profitable because they took their advertising.

TV news is not very instructive.

The news is best when it's serious.

If the front-page news is a comedian doing a joke that people think is naughty, that proves there's no real news that day, does it not?

Everybody wants a sensational story.

For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.

It had become boring to write: 'I like Clare Balding'. To say: 'I don't like Clare Balding' is much more newsworthy.

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

I think people ought to realize that if you're doing investigative reporting, you're putting something on your newspaper or on your website that no one can get anywhere else, and theoretically at least, that should make people subscribe.

Television's very dependent on images. That's not what news is.

News is something that happens that matters to you, which is not most of what we watch on television.

I'm confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name's in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it's your news and they're taking it and selling it as their product. ...If people didn't give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn't have any news.

I have always argued that newspapers should not have any civic purpose beyond telling readers what is happening... A reporter who doesn't quickly tell readers what they most want to know - the score - won't last long. Better he should teach political science.

No news is good news. No journalists is even better.

To a journalist, good news is often not news at all.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

It is hard news that catches readers. Features hold them.

Millions of people are married. I've never picked up a paper and seen a headline that says, Man Gets Married!