Journalism Gems

"Especially in a place like this, where we are pretty much the only news source, people read the paper really closely. You get away with nothing." Jeffrey Good, ME at Valley News in Lebanon, New Hampshire, quoted in the American Journalism Review for May, 2002.

"The weekly reporter is hired to do everything, to work a whole territory, to follow the leads he finds himself, and to write in a variety of styles to suit material. He takes his own photos, writes his own captions and headlines. A daily may have already reported the bones of his major story before his weekly goes to press, but [the weekly reporter] can't ignore the story. His must be rounder and better and longer, or what's the point of writing it at all? He must rise to that challenge no matter how unassuming his subject may be. I have employed several superlative reporters who failed as weekly journalists, because in squandering themselves on their big stories they disregarded their minor ones. The children's walkathons to raise money for a local cause bored them, and their reports, if they wrote any, showed it. They failed because they fancied that most community news was beneath their notice. Readership stagnated, and resentments formed. Wasn't what the kids did important enough for the Star?"

Brook, Alexander R. THE HARD WAY: THE ODYESSY OF A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER EDITOR, Bridge Works Publishing Co., Bridgehampton, N.Y., 1993

"The best journalists always have been story tellers, not theoreticians, Homers, not Aristotles. Storytelling is surely an honorable calling. Journalists have always been specialists in immediacy, chroniclers of the day. This, too, is an honorable calling. Out of the frustration of trying to deal with complexity and perhaps out of a feeling that what they do is less worthy, good journalists may become bad social scientists. The market in bad social science is already glutted."

Hess, Stephen, THE WASHINGTON REPORTERS, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 1981

"I check the spelling on engagements and weddings. If the least bridesmaid's name is wrong, indignant visitors and phone calls will let me know, and we'll have to run it again, correctly so that extra copies of the paper can bought and the piece scissored out and saved in scrapbooks by family, neighbors and friends. We are the paper of record and each citizen's steps from hospital delivery room to cemetery must be accurately reported. . . .

Trivial work from a reporter's point of view, but I am producing family heirlooms here. . ."

Holland, B. "bingo night at the fire hall - THE CASE FOR COWS, ORCHARDS, BAKE SALES AND FAIRS" Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1997