Professional Journalism Quotes

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

The Boston Globe's award-winning journalism as well as its rich history and tradition of excellence have established it as one of the most well-respected media companies in the country.

I wrote newspaper articles professionally for seven years, and I love newspapers.

I've written for 'The Times' because they have valued what I do enough to pay me. The 'New Statesman' magazine also asked me to write an article, but they didn't want to pay me anything. To me, that shows how much they value quality journalism.

We need ethical journalism. There is also capacity limitations in journalism.

In the '50s and '60s, journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for - it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job.

When I was a kid growing up, I always thought I would be a journalist, and I thought, you know, I'd cover stories about other people, and we're always taught never to make the story about yourself.

Given what the media have put the country through this past decade, it must come as a surprise to most Americans that the press has a code of ethics.

As to the journalist himself, it is clear that to get a living he must write to order, that is, he must write in accordance with the views of his paper, in so far as he writes at all on current topics.

In the United Kingdom at various stages, journalism has been the profession of gentlemen amateurs. And some of them even pride themselves on being amateurs. Their quality is not comparable with the quality of intelligence services even if most of them harbor a remarkable degree of corruption and incompetence.

The Huffingtonpost.com does not pay its writers. Tina Brown's thedailybeast.com does pay its writers. You have to be paid because this is not a hobby. You have to keep that standard. You can't ask grandpa to loan you money because you have to go to Afghanistan. I walked the picket line for that to continue.

Some journalists are schmucks, in it for themselves, willing to cut corners. But in my experience the vast majority of journalists are trying to contribute to their communities, honestly and reliably.

All that crap, you're putting in the paper ... Katie Graham is gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published.

I never met David Kelly, but I knew from what he told other people that this was not his view. The BBC were saying that Tony Blair was making up lies so that he could send young men and women to war, maybe to die. I think that if the BBC had done their jobs professionally, they'd have realised that you couldn't justify what they said. And nothing has emerged since to justify that report.

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

There aren't enough good journalists. There are too many who really weren't groomed to be reporters and, as a result, some of the reporting is shallow.

There won't be editors in the future with the Internet world, with citizen reporting. That doesn't scare me.

It simply is not cost affective to cover stories from independent sources.

I would trust citizen journalism as much as I would trust citizen surgery.

Everybody has an iPhone; everyone can be a reporter now. Everybody can tell a story from every part of the world. Why places like CNN matter is that it is still important to bring them together, put context around it, and explain it.

The competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can't do better, so be it.

I have a degree in journalism, which is something that I make very clear very frequently just so people are aware of it. I went to school to write... Editorial integrity is very important to me.

Veteran print editors and reporters at places like the 'Times' and 'The New Yorker' manage to feed and clothe their families without costing their companies a million bucks a month, and they produce a great deal more valuable reporting and analysis than the network news stars do.

One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters.

As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.