Journalism

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2 newsgirls deliver newspapers in Wilmington, Delaware (May 1910)

Journalism is the discipline of gathering, writing and reporting news, and broadly it includes the process of editing and presenting the news articles. Journalism applies to various media, but is not limited to newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. While under pressure to be the first to publish its stories, each news media organization adheres to its own standards of accuracy, quality, and style — usually editing and proofreading its reports prior to publication. Many news organizations claim proud traditions of holding government officials and institutions accountable to the public, while media critics have raised questions on the accountability of the press. The word journalism is taken from the French journal which in turn comes from the Latin diurnal or daily. The Acta Diurna, a handwritten bulletin, was put up daily in the Forum, the main public square in ancient Rome, and was the world's first newspaper.

[edit] Sourced

  • You go all over America and you see small papers that do really good jobs in their communities of reporting. The modern New York Times, the modern Washington Post, the modern Wall Street Journal are better papers than they were at the time of Watergate in most respects. But if you look at the rest of the field, ... real news based on the best obtainable version of the truth was becoming less and less a commodity, less and less a real part of our journalistic institutions.
  • Grassroots journalism is part of the wider phenomenon of citizen-generated media - of a global conversation that is growing in strength, complexity, and power. When people can express themselves, they will. When they can do so with powerful yet inexpensive tools, they take to the new-media realm quickly. When they can reach a potentially global audience, they literally can change the world.
  • The Web sites of interest groups generally advance the cause of journalganda, in that everything is presented through the filter of the interest group. […] It is an odd, unreal world but very important because it's where partisans can go to have their thoughts re-enforced. There's nothing like journalganda to make you feel absolutely certain you are correct, no matter what your position. […] Real journalism can always be identified by the way it makes normal people sometimes feel very uncomfortable about the world.
It is my hope that future journalists will adhere to the true principles of the profession and understand that they play a vital role in helping to keep democracy and the exchange of free ideas alive at home and abroad. – Helen Thomas
  • I do not think that journalism is a dying art. If anything, I believe it is more important than ever, and journalists worldwide are adapting to our modus operandi - to make public officials accountable to the people. The role of the journalist is indispensable, and as reviled as reporters may intermittently be, they are still highly respected when the pursue the truth and obtain positive results. It is my hope that future journalists will adhere to the true principles of the profession and understand that they play a vital role in helping to keep democracy and the exchange of free ideas alive at home and abroad.
  • My problem, and our problem — I think this is a view that's pretty widely shared in the news business — is, you know, we, and I don't just mean The Times, are too ready to publish the blandest of quotes, or, sometimes, the idlest of gossip and innuendo, behind a cover of anonymity. I think it cheapens the currency of source protection.
  • I suppose, in the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'We didn't know - no one told us.'
  • Secretive power loathes journalists who do their job: who push back screens, peer behind façades, lift rocks. Opprobrium from on high is their badge of honour.
    • Pilger, John (2005). Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed the World. Thunder's Mouth Press. p. xv. ISBN 1560257865. 
  • The duty of journalists is to tell the truth. Journalism means you go back to the actual facts, you look at the documents, you discover what the record is, and you report it that way.
  • Controversy? You can't be any kind of reporter worthy of the name and avoid controversy completely. You can't be a good reporter and not be fairly regularly involved in some kind of controversy. And I don't think you can be a great reporter and avoid controversy very often, because one of the roles a good journalist plays is to tell the tough truths as well as the easy truths. And the tough truths will lead you to controversy, and even a search for the tough truths will cost you something. Please don't make this play or read as any complaint, it's trying to explain this goes with the territory if you're a journalist of integrity. That if you start out a journalist or if you reach a point in journalism where you say, "Listen, I'm just not going not touch anything that could possibly be controversial," then you ought to get out.
  • Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned.
    • Anthony Burgess, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)
  • So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.
Today's serious nonfiction writer is important to society because from a solid background of social sciences, combined with the journalistic skills of a reporter, one moves beyond the reporter function to the front edge of our emerging society. – Betty Friedan
  • In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the public. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
  • The freedom of speech and of the press, which are secured by the First Amendment against abridgment by the United States, are among the fundamental personal rights and liberties which are secured to all persons by the Fourteenth Amendment against abridgment by a state. The safeguarding of these rights to the ends that men may speak as they think on matters vital to them and that falsehoods may be exposed through the processes of education and discussion is essential to free government. Those who won our independence had confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning and communication of ideas to discover and spread political and economic truth.
  • 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.
    • Evelyn Waugh (1938) Scoop, I, Ch. 5, Sect. 1 — Quote reproduced in Crystal, David; Hillary Crystal (2000). Words on Words: Quotations about Language and Languages. University of Chicago Press. p. 277. ISBN 0226122018. 
  • When journalese was at its rifest the Ministry of Health was established - possibly a coincidence.
    • John Galsworthy (July 1924) On Expression, Presidential Address to the English Association, p. 12. — Quote reproduced in Crystal, David; Hillary Crystal (2000). Words on Words: Quotations about Language and Languages. University of Chicago Press. pp. Page 276. ISBN 0226122018. 
  • Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
    • Elbert Hubbard (1914) The Roycroft Dictionary of Epigrams — quoted in Epstein, Joseph; Shapiro, Fred C.. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. pp. 374. ISBN 0300107986. 
  • Never forget that if you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.
    • Arthur Brisbane (c. 1900) quoted in Carlson, Oliver (1937). Brisbane: A Candid Biography. pp. Chapter 5. 
The Press is at once the eye and the ear and the tongue of the people. It is the visible speech, if not the voice, of the democracy. It is the phonograph of the world. – William Thomas Stead
  • The Press is at once the eye and the ear and the tongue of the people. It is the visible speech, if not the voice, of the democracy. It is the phonograph of the world.
  • Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, - very momentous to us in these times.
    • Thomas Carlyle (1859). On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History: Six Lectures: Reported. Wiley & Halsted. pp. 147, Lect. V: "The Hero as Man of Letters". 
  • Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
    • Charles Lamb (1833) "On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia — Quote reproduced in Crystal, David; Hillary Crystal (2000). Words on Words: Quotations about Language and Languages. University of Chicago Press. pp. 276. ISBN 0226122018. 

[edit] Attributed

  • In America the president reigns for four years, and journalism governs forever and ever.
    • Oscar Wilde — quoted in Janis, Lois August (2003). Voyage to Insight. CMJ Publishers and Distrib.. pp. Page 70. ISBN 1891280406. 
  • Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
    • G. K. Chesterton, The Wisdom of Father Brown Shilling, Lilless McPherson; Linda K. Fuller (1997). Dictionary of Quotations in Communications. Greenwood Press. p. 120, Section: Journalism. ISBN 0313304300. 
  • When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.
    • John B. Bogartto, New York Sun editor. Attributed in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition, 1992, p. 554.
  • I do not care for the big 'ideas' of novelists. Novels are wonderful, of course, but I prefer newspapers.
    • Will Cuppy in Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft (eds.), Twentieth Century Authors, New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1942, p.342.
  • Experience has shown that newspapers are one of the best means of directing opinion - of quieting feverish movements - of causing the lies and artificial rumours by which the enemies of the State may attempt to carry on their evil designs to vanish. In these public papers, instruction may descend from the Government to the people, or ascend from the people to the Government; the greater the freedom allowed, the more correctly may a judgment be formed upon the course of opinion - with so much the greater certainty will it act.
    • Jeremy Bentham — quoted in Andrews, Alexander (1859). The History of British Journalism: From the Foundation of the Newspaper Press in England to the Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855, with Sketches of Press Celebrities. R. Bentley. pp. Volume II, Page 179. 

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