This set of quotes are divided in three parts, and the idea is to look at journalism through four diffrent lenses: online journalism (the future), what is bad with meaas media (the mess), what is bad journalism (past) and what is good with journalism (past, present and future).



Online Journalism

Every link is an editorial decision. - Anon.

The age of the mass media is just that an age. It doesn't have to last forever. - Jay Rosen

I get annoyed when people suggest that the only people who can deliver news to the public are newspaper journalists. I believe that is an arrogance based upon fear. - Joanna Geary.

In case some of the mainstream media haven't got this yet - 'THE WEB DOES NOT OWE YOU A LIVING'. It doesn't care that you have been doing this for years, you have to earn your eyeballs like everyone else. - Andy Dickinson

Anyone who sold their stock on the basis of a pseudonymous post on the web was a fool who deserved what they got (are these the same people who invested in subprime mortgages?). - Jeff Jarvis

To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear. - Clay Shirky

With blogging, an awkward term, we designate a fairly beautiful thing: the extension to many more people of a First Amendment franchise, the right to publish your thoughts to the world. Wherever blogging spreads the dramas of free expression follow... A blog, you see, is a little First Amendment machine. - Jay Rosen

We can’t expect consumers to come to us. It’s arrogant for any media company to assume that.- Quincy Smith, CBS Interactive

Most [PR] agencies are a waste of time and you should fire them…I will never have a separate budget for new marketing. - Alan Scott, Dow Jones

What is wrong with Mass media

With all the mass media concentrated in a few hands, the ancient faith in the competition of ideas in the free market seems like a hollow echo of a much simpler day. ~Kingman Brewster, Jr.

The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness. - Eric Sevareid, "The Press and the People," television program, 1959

You can crush a man with journalism. - William Randolph Hearst

Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism. - Graham Henry Greene

A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes. ~Lemony Snicket

Television has a real problem. They have no page two. Consequently every big story gets the same play and comes across to the viewer as a really big, scary one. - Art Buchwald, 1969

What is Bad Journalism?

What's the difference between a 3-week-old puppy and a sportswriter? In 6 weeks, the puppy will stop whining. - Mike Ditka

The idea that media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that's about tenth or eleventh on their list. - Abbie Hoffman

Most rock journalism is people who can not write interviewing people who can not talk. - Frank Zappa

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.- Frank Zappa

Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive. ~G.K. Chesterton

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. - Oscar Wilde

What is Good Journalism?

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself. ~Arthur Miller

Sometimes good journalism is bad public relations. - Steve Capus

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people. - Daniel Moynihan

There aren't any embarrassing questions - only embarrassing answers. - Carl Rowan

Journalists aren't supposed to praise things. It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something. - P.J. O'Rourke

The secret of successful journalism is to make your readers so angry they will write half your paper for you. - C.E.M. Joad

When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news. - Charles Anderson Dana

In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has. - Mark Twain

When I’m Reporting, I am a Citizen of the World. - Bob Franken (CNN)

Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over-verification. - James Gordon Bennett

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. - Anonymous, linked to a Texas newspaper editor

[In Katrina, CNN] learned from Jon Stewart how to use simple juxtaposition to make a point, ... Clip of a federal official explaining how no one anticipated the strength of the storm. Clip from the Weather Channel proving plenty of people did. - Jay Rosen

If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check It Out - CJR

A journal should be neither an echo nor a pander. - George William Curtis

In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right. - Ellen Goodman

The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses. - Nikolai Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets. - Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I)

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description. - Anna Quindlen

I always turn to the sports section first. The sports section records people's accomplishments; the front page nothing but man's failures. - Earl Warren, quoted in Sports Illustrated, 22 July 1968

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. - Ben Hecht

Comment is free, but facts are sacred. - C.P. Scott, in the Manchester Guardian