what is good journalism?
TRANSCRIPT
What is Good Journalism?
Pramit Singh
Founder, Bighow.com
World’s Best Tool For Local Journalism
Give Voice
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
- Arthur Miller
Truth over everything else
Sometimes good journalism is bad public relations.
- Steve Capus
Assume Nothing
If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be
filled with good people.
- Daniel Moynihan
Ask and you shall…
There aren't any embarrassing questions - only embarrassing answers.
- Carl Rowan
Doubt is Good
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
Incite Conversation
The secret of successful journalism is to make your readers so angry they will write
half your paper for you.
- C.E.M. Joad
Go after the unusual
When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news.
- Charles Anderson Dana
Make sense out of nonsense
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
You are doing it for the world
When I’m Reporting, I am a Citizen of the World.
- Bob Franken , CNN
It will never be enough
Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over-verification.
- James Gordon Bennett
Show, don’t tell
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
Provide context
[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
Verify, Verify
If Your Mother Says She Loves You,
Check It Out
- CJR
Be Original, Be Yourself
A journal should be neither an echo nor a pander.
- George William Curtis
Get it right
In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting
it right.
- Ellen Goodman
Work up the people
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
Use your power wisely
Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Be Passionate
Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.
- Anna Quindlen
Prioritize
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
Focus on why and how
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
Less noise, more signal
Comment is free, but facts are sacred.
- C.P. Scott, in the Manchester Guardian