Media Minded "If I ever start a paper ... MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense." - James Lileks
Monday, July 07, 2003
Posted
7:28 AM
by Peter Fallow
I'M BACK ... AND I'M GONE AGAIN: Well, I've enjoyed my month-plus blogging break so much that I'm going to make it permanent.
I'm retiring from blogging.
I know, I know. I did this once before. Last spring, I got fed up with blogging and quit, but I was eventually lured back.
That's not going to happen this time.
Why am I doing this? The main reason is that I want to get involved in life again. Blogging, even on a shorter schedule, simply took up too much time in my already busy day for me to do it as well as I would like. My morning blogging constitutional began to feel too much like work, and that's never good.
That doesn't mean I've completely soured on blogging. I still think it's a wonderfully democratic new medium, and I've discovered many interesting writers. I'll be reading all my favorites every day, several times a day, so I'll still be a part of the show.
I just won't be posting anymore.
I want to thank all of you folks who have seen fit to stop by over the past year and a half, and I'd also like to thank all the people who have linked me on their blogs and corresponded with me via e-mail. I've really treasured the experience.
The Media Minder is a copy editor at an American newspaper. The opinions presented here are those of the author, and do not reflect the views of his employer.
Quote, unquote
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." -- The First Amendment
"Despite project committees, civic journalism stunts, newsroom cake parties and even Wingo, average weekday readership in 85 metro markets fell from 60.7% in 1997 to 54.7% in 2001. Let's see. What radical things were newspapers doing before the slide started? Should we return to, say, covering breaking news even if it happens at inconvenient times? Defending readers from shady politicians and businesses, even advertisers? Shedding political correctness and boosterism? Not locking up the good pages with weeks-old design-driven pap? Answering phone calls from schoolkids needing help with their homework? Not quivering in panic when we get an angry letter to the editor? Sending half of the four-meetings-a-day committees out to chase ambulances? Just a thought." -- Charles Stough, The Burned-Out Newspapercreatures Guild's Bulletin, July 2002
Journalism "largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive." -- G.K. Chesterton
"A newspaper is a device unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." -- George Bernard Shaw
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." -- Thomas Jefferson
"If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast." -- William Tecumseh Sherman
"To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity, over error and oppression." -- James Madison
"I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust." -- Charles Baudelaire
"No news is good news. No journalists is even better." -- Nicolas Bentley
"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." -- Frank Zappa
"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself." -- Arthur Miller
"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
"I think I understand what military fame is; to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers." -- William Tecumseh Sherman
"Newspapers are a unique, irreplaceable and essential part of any community." -- Marshall Dana
"I am not an editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one." -- Mark Twain
"No wonder the newspaper is rotten. We need more drunkards." -- Edward G. Robinson in "Five Star Final"
"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist.' If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced I should despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up." -- Soren Kierkegaard
"If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist." -- Norman Mailer
"A journalist is a person who works harder than any other lazy person in the world." -- Anonymous
"Nothing is more idealistic than a journalist on the defensive." -- Melvin Maddocks
"The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character." -- Lyndon Baines Johnson
"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier." -- H.L. Mencken
"A journalist is a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." -- Napoleon
"No intelligence system, no bureaucracy, can offer the information provided by competitive reporting; the cleverest secret agents of the police state are inferior to the plodding reporter of the democracy." -- Harold Evans
"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers." -- Gandhi
"It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper." -- Jerry Seinfeld
"On behalf of the newspaper industry (new, cost-cutting motto: 'All the News That') I wish to announce some changes we're making to serve you better. When I say 'serve you better,' I mean 'increase our profits.' We newspapers are very big on profits these days. We're a business, just like any other business, except that we employ English majors." -- Dave Barry
"A newspaper is an adviser who does not require to be sought, but who comes of his own accord, and talks to you briefly every day of the common wealth, without distracting you from your private affairs." -- Alexis de Tocqueville
"A 19th century Irish immigrant named O'Reilly called the newspaper 'a biography of something greater than a man. It is the biography of a DAY. It is a photograph, of twenty four hours' length, of the mysterious river of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year's newspapers -- which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue, than the greatest book ever written -- and we use them to light the fire.' " -- Adair Lara, columnist, San Francisco Chronicle
"We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight." -- Conrad Black, F. David Radler, and Peter G. White "A Brief to the Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media from the Sherbrooke Record, the voice of the Eastern Townships," 1969
"The average American newspaper, especially of the so-called better sort, has the intelligence of a Baptist evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a Prohibitionist boob-bumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines and the honor of a police-station lawyer." -- H.L. Mencken
"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." -- Thomas Jefferson
"People everywhere confuse what they read in the newspapers with news." -- A. J. Liebling
"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier." -- H.L. Mencken
"Journalism depends on uncredentialed losers, outsiders, dilettantes, frustrated lawyers, unabashed alcoholics -- and, yes, creative psychopaths -- to keep its blood red." -- Jack Shafer, Slate
"You know what people use these for? They roll them up and swat their puppies for wetting on the rug. They spread them on the floor when they're painting the walls. They wrap fish in them. Shred them up and pack their two-bit china in them when they move, or else they pile up in the garage until an inspector declares them a fire hazard! But this also happens to be a couple of more things! It's got print on it that tells stories that hundreds of good men all over the world have broken their backs to get. It gives a lot of information to a lot of people who wouldn't have known about it if we hadn't taken the trouble to tell them. It's the sum total of the work of a lot of guys who don't quit. It's a newspaper, that's all. Well, you're right for once, stupid. And it only costs 10 cents, that's all. But if you only read the comic section or the want ads -- it's still the best buy for your money in the world." -- From "-30-", directed by Jack Webb
