Traditional Journalism Quotes

I pine for a return to the type of old-school journalism and the tough newspapermen and women of the Thirties.

I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing.

Traditionally, what we in the news business do is cover what happened yesterday.

You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

If I'm hip, we've got a problem in this country. I really shouldn't be held up as any model of hipness. If anything, I think I'm sort of old school in my approach to objective reporting and not wearing my opinion on my sleeve. There's a lot of that in American TV news these days. Too much, in fact.

The more I watched cable, the more I realized the value of newspapers.

'The Guardian,' with its deep journalistic traditions, is careful about context and explanation. It sees itself as a gatekeeper, and it worries about consequences.

I am not a new journalist, whatever that is. I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.

The one thing I didn't do that was kind of controversial was go work for a daily paper, because I didn't like that kind of journalism, and I'm glad I didn't because that's the business model that's going totally extinct.

The whole sort of debate of classic objective journalism versus a new immersion journalism - that can go on forever... I made no bones about my position: I don't think you can be objective.

I do not subscribe to the advocacy journalism school. It's not who I am and not who CNN wants me to be.

With the Internet today, it is possible to do some mixed media things where you can write about an artist and link to a song or video by that artist. But that was unheard of in the years I was at the paper.

I think people are sort of waking up to it now, how probably the biggest change in Internet media isn't the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability. Which is actually terrifying if you're a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like.

I enjoy watching Chris Matthews a lot. He reminds me of a throwback to the older school kind of pundits like Tim Russert.

In a time of transition for journalism all around the world, it's reassuring to know that some of the old ways endure.

It is true that the Internet can be used to disseminate falsehoods quickly, but it just as quickly roots them out and exposes them in a way that the traditional model of journalism and its closed, insular, one-way form of communication could never do.

People can say: Okay, it's not the old-fashioned traditional journalism that took place in the 'Houston Chronicle' in 1975 - it's different. But that's also why newspapers are having a hard time staying relevant, you know?

To write long pieces - or not even long pieces - to write stuff like the columns of Red Smith and people like that - they're different then what it is today. Everything today is based on x's and o's. Inside baseball, it's all, 'Who's gonna win?' or you're comparing things - it's not as thoughtful as it used to be.

Internet journalism is not a world we know very well at all. It's conducted more on the screen and less in bars, which makes it rather less useful for getting stories about people throwing up over one another, which is what one's after.