“News is something someone wants suppressed. Everything else is just advertising.”

— Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliff), publisher, Times of London

“We believe in a journalism of verification rather than assertion.”
– Jill Abramson, executive editor, N.Y. Times

“The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is truly one of the sacred and priestly offices in a democracy.”

— Walter Lippmann: ‘Liberty and the News’

“I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.”

— LBJ

“I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college… I did other things.”

— Jacqueline Kennedy

“An editor should have a pimp for a brother so he’ll have someone to look up to.”

— Gene Fowler, 1927

“Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.”

— Walter Bagehot

“Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn’t write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn’t any doubt at all that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.”

— JFK, 1962

“Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion on a ukulele.”

— Ben Bagdikian

“A Journalist makes himself the hero of the story, a reporter is just a witness.”

— ‘Deadline USA’

“Your search returned Zero matches.”

— MotivationalQuotes.com on “Journalism”

“Cybermedia will make every man his own editor, which in turn makes every writer a fool.”
— Neal B. Freeman, National Review, Dec. 11, 1995

“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.”

— Gandhi

“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”

— Hunter S. Thompson: ‘Generation Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80’s’

“Where the press is filled with good news, one can be pretty sure that the jails are filled with good men.”

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Senator

“I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the “barebones’’ of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.”

— Dave Barry, columnist

“A news story should be like a mini skirt on a pretty woman. Long enough to cover the subject but short enough to be interesting.”

— Reputed statement from a Texas newspaper editor

“Television news trivializes significant stories and signifies trivial ones.”

— Some East Bay Fool

“Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.”

— Anna Quindlen, columnist

“Some years ago I discovered to my horror that news media companies need to make money.”

— Steve Doig, journalism teacher & former Miami Herald reporter

“Being a newspaper columnist is like marrying a nymphomaniac – It’s great for the first two weeks.”

— Lewis Grizzard, columnist

“Spade scowled thoughtfully at the floor, asked ‘What’d he do before he started not making a living writing poetry?’

“ ‘Anything — sold vacuum cleaners, hoboed, went to sea, dealt blackjack, railroaded, canning houses, lumber camps, carnivals, worked on a newspaper — anything.’ “

— Dashiell Hammett: ‘Too Many Have Lived’

“In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.”

— Voltaire, 1764

“Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

— Reportedly shouted by a British TV reporter in a crowd of Belgian civilians waiting to be airlifted out of the Belgian Congo, c1960; Edward Behr: ‘Anyone Here Been Raped & Speaks English?’ (1981)

“The nature of bad news infects the teller.”

— Wm. Shakespeare: ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (1606-7)

“A reporter meets interesting people. If he endures, he will get to know princes and presidents, popes and paupers, prostitutes and panderers. And always, in the back of his head, there will be a dozen men and women he will never meet. And always, he will feel the poorer for it.”

— Jim Bishop

“To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.”

— James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions, 1798