Narrative Journalism Quotes

I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I've covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that's what this book started out to be.

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

Even the two novels I've written were based on true stories. It's how I'm wired - real life is fascinating and fantastical enough. The kind of journalism I did unpeeled lids from cans otherwise sealed.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

I find it interesting, the different rules that apply to journalism and drama, even though journalism has become more and more about entertainment, and entertainment has become more and more about journalism.

With years of experience doing whatever it takes to get to the bottom of each story, I am looking forward to covering the stories in the human dimension and impart the passion and visceral reactions the audience seeks.

When I started 'This American Life', one of the reactions I got was, 'When is the adult going to show up who will host the show?' At some point, people just got used to it.

Lilian Ross was a - veteran writer for The New Yorker. She, in fact, brought me to The New Yorker many years ago.

At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that.

I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter - nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.

Traditional news feels quite sanitised, quite statisticky. We're bombarded with images, but often, you don't see the human stories, or if you do, it's only for 60 seconds, max.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

Journalists in newspapers and in many magazines are not permitted to be subjective and tell their readers what they think. Journalists have got to follow a very strict formulaic line, and here we come, these non-fiction writers, these former journalists who are using all the techniques that journalists are pretty much not allowed to use.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.

Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the 'Washington Post.'

I'm trying to grow more as a journalist and understand the story I'm photographing in order to communicate it in a better way.

Art is art, and journalism is journalism.

So much of journalism is conveying a place and time that existed, to someone at a later date: giving a person the context and trying to make them feel as informed as if they were actually there.

Journalists always explain that people are mad at them because they tell the truth, which is often unpleasant or uncomfortable to hear. However, they fail in situations where there is more than one truth.

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

There is a bias in the press for facts over fiction.

Some of the most important stories don't lend themselves to television treatment.

I have no idea who coined the term 'the New Journalism,' or when it was coined. I have never even liked the term. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with 'new' in it is just begging for trouble, of course.

The alternative to the corporate media is a renaissance of citizen journalism emerging around world - exploring the different avenues that do exist, like podcasts, to tell whatever story you want to tell.