Newspaper Editor Quotes & Sayings

Just a week earlier, coincidentally, he had quietly terminated a little known year-and-a-half-long stint as silent co-owner of Springfield's German language newspaper. Lincoln had invested $400 in the publication in 1859 to ensure its total loyalty to the Republican party. Mission accomplished, he now turned over full ownership of the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger, presses, type, and all, to his neighbor, editor Theodore Canisius. (Later, Lincoln further rewarded Canisius with a more valuable commodity: the consulate in Vienna.) — Harold Holzer

and he became a communist. He was court-martialed but allowed to resign from the army. In the revolutions of 1848 he fought to overthrow his king and, failing, fled to America. There he became first a carpenter and then the editor of a German-language newspaper in Cincinnati with a slant so leftist he earned the nickname "Reddest of the Red." When the Civil War came, Willich recruited fifteen hundred Cincinnati Germans within a matter of hours and helped organize the Ninth Ohio-now marching with the XIV Corps. — Steven E. Woodworth

In 1981, Ms. Ebtekar was made editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper 'Kayhan International.' The man who gave her the job was Mr. Khatami, who was then head of the Kayhan publishing house. — Elaine Sciolino

If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

I got married three days after graduation, and the first thing I did what I was expected to do which was to work on a small newspaper. So we were in Chicago where my husband worked for the Chicago Sun-Times and we were having dinner with his editor and he said 'So what are you 'gonna do honey?' and I said 'I'm going to work on a newspaper', and he said 'I don't think so, because Newspaper Guild regulations said that I couldn't work on the same newspaper as my husband. — Madeleine Albright

I've always been a writer, and in high school, I was the editor of my school newspaper and I got a writing scholarship. It's always been a passion of mine. — Zoe Lister-Jones

Show me a contented newspaper editor and I will show you a bad newspaper. — Arthur Christiansen

I think there's a lot of benefit in letting people vent. When I was on the Manchester Evening News, we got 500 letters a day, and part of my job as editor was to edit them. And I thought that was one of the best things in the newspaper, and it was instituted by an editor known as Big Tom, who said 'this is the voice of the people.' And he was quite right. — Harold Evans

But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter. — Michael Pollan

In the early 1950s, Fanny Rosenow, a breast cancer survivor and cancer advocate, called the New York Times to post an advertisement for a support group for women with breast cancer. Rosenow was put through, puzzlingly, to the society editor of the newspaper. When she asked about placing her announcement, a long pause followed. "I'm sorry, Ms. Rosenow, but the Times cannot publish the word breast or the word cancer in its pages. "Perhaps," the editor continued, "you could say there will be a meeting about diseases of the chest wall." Rosenow — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Do not enter the ministry if you can help it ...
If any student in this room could be content to be
a newspaper editor, or a grocer, or a farmer, or a
doctor, or a lawyer, or a senator, or a king, in the
name of heaven and earth let him go his way; he is
not the man in whom dwells the Spirit of God in
its fullness, for a man so full of God would utterly
weary of any pursuit but that for which his inmost
soul pants. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I worked at my high school newspaper at Andover, which came out weekly, unusual for a high school paper. Then my first day at Penn I went right to the 'Daily Pennsylvanian' and pretty much spent most of my college career working both as the sports editor and then editor of the editorial page. — H. G. Bissinger

This impressed me when I was the editor of the Sunday Times [of London] - we had the "Bloody Sunday" killings of 13 unarmed civilians by British paratroopers. We interviewed 500 people for our report, and not one of them could give us a total picture of what was happening. It was like the Rashomon effect multiplied a million times. For a website or even a newspaper to be a collector of information flow is not the highest form of journalism. — Harold Evans

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college. — Tony Hillerman

I personally made lots of mistakes during my 10-12 years as a newspaper editor. Some of which I felt were big mistakes I have tried to address. — Rebekah Brooks

He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of making sow-ear purses out of sows' ears, he moved up-town and went to work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year, doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career. On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the horses' hoofs in the snow ... This he handed in. Next morning a marked copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note: "Fire the man who wrote this." It seemed that Squadron A had also seen the snow threatening - had postponed the parade until another day. A week later he had begun "The Demon Lover." ... In — F Scott Fitzgerald

"I think we'll have a good potato crop this year," a newspaper editor told his housekeeper one morning. "No such thing," asserted the housekeeper. "I think the crop will be poor." Ignoring her remark, the editor caused to be inserted in the evening paper his estimate of the crop situation. That night when he returned home he found the housekeeper waiting for him with a sheepish grin on her face and a copy of the paper in her hand. "I was wrong," she said apologetically. "It says right here in the paper that the crop will be excellent this fall." — James Keller

In a highly competitive newspaper market, every editor needs to appeal to female readers to boost their circulation. — Rebekah Brooks

I had worked for a newspaper of sorts, word got around, and I became editor of our local school newspaper, The Drum. I don't recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointed. My second-in-command, Danny Emond, had even less interest in the paper than I did. Danny just liked the idea that Room 4, where we did our work, was near the girls' bathroom. "Someday I'll just go crazy and hack my way in there, Steve," he told me on more than one occasion. "Hack, hack, hack." Once he added, perhaps in an effort to justify himself: "The prettiest girls in school pull up their skirts in there." This struck me as so fundamentally stupid it might actually be wise, like a Zen Koan or an early story by John Updike. — Stephen King

I was a newspaper editor in high school, and I truly thought of journalism as a career. I loved it. — Ed Asner

As editor of the largest newspaper in West Virginia, I scan hundreds of reports daily ... and I am amazed by the frequency with which religion causes people to kill each other. It is a nearly universal pattern, undercutting the common assumption that religion makes people kind and tolerant. — James A. Haught

It was Dominick Gleeson, aka Big Dom, editor of the city's only newspaper, the Bohane Vindicator. Of course, it was in no small part thanks to Logan Hartnett that the Vindicator remained the city's only newspaper. Its masthead solgan: 'Truth or Vengeance', as inked above a motif of two quarrelling ravens. — Kevin Barry

I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one. — Mark Twain

I was sports editor for my high school newspaper, but I think I shied away from journalism. — Jenna Bush

I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper. — Jeffery Deaver

Why, it appears that we appointed all of our worst generals to command the armies and we appointed all of our best generals to edit the newspapers. I mean, I found by reading a newspaper that these editor generals saw all of the defects plainly from the start but didn't tell me until it was too late. I'm willing to yield my place to these best generals and I'll do my best for the cause by editing a newspaper. — Robert E.Lee

Every newspaper editor says the heart of the paper is the reporter - which is true - except for the pay! — Jack Germond

When the late Lord Northcliffe found a newspaper using a picture of him which he didn't want published, he wrote the editor a letter. But did he say, 'Please do not publish that picture of me any more; I don't like it'? No, he appealed to a nobler motive. He appealed to the respect and love that all of us have for motherhood. He wrote, 'Please do not publish that picture of me any more. My mother doesn't like it. — Dale Carnegie

In my second year of Harvard Divinity School, where I was studying to be a minister like my father, I met a guy named Robert Cox, who had been the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the Dirty War in Argentina. Bob used to print the names of those who had been disappeared the day before, above the fold in his newspaper. It was a kind of an awakening to me to see what great journalism can and should do. — Chris Hedges

So often, environmentalists and others working to slow the destruction are capable of plainly describing the problems (Who wouldn't be? The problems are neither subtle nor cognitively challenging), yet when faced with the emotionally daunting task of fashioning a response to these clear and clearly insoluble problems, we generally suffer a failure of nerve and imagination. Gandhi wrote a letter to Hitler asking him to stop committing atrocities, and was mystified that it didn't work. I continue to write letters to the editor pointing out untruths, and continue to be surprised each time the newspaper publishes its next absurdity. At least I've stopped writing to politicians. — Derrick Jensen

I was the editor of the school newspaper and in drama club and choir, so I was not a popular girl in the traditional sense, but I think I was known for being relatively scathing. — Tina Fey

The "Florida bail bond racket" was, according to a former Orlando newspaper editor, the "most lucrative business in the state." The bondsmen worked hand in glove with employers to secure labor in exchange for fines and bond costs. Citrus grove foremen informed bondsmen how many men were needed, and workers were "secured from the stockades." If workers attempted to flee across state lines, they could be recaptured "without the formality of extradition proceedings." They had no choice but to work to pay off their fines at whatever grove or camp they were taken to, and they often worked under the supervision of armed guards, as they might on a chain gang. — Gilbert King

here that he learns of the disappointment of Ana's best friend, Kate, editor of the student newspaper, about not having original photos to illustrate the article. To see Ana again, Grey agrees to a photo shoot, and then invites the young woman out for a drink. A few hours after their date, she receives an original edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas — Bright Summaries

And The San Francisco Chronicle launched "an off-site startup-style incubator. " As Audrey Cooper, the managing editor, explained, "We hope to eventually get to the point where instead of being a newspaper company that produces websites, we think of ourselves as a digital company that also produces a newspaper. Unless you flip that switch, I don't think any newspaper will be truly successful at negotiating the digital switchover. — Anonymous

My father was a newspaper editor, so I was surrounded by journalists my entire life. I think the fact that he was so well known may be why I chose to go into magazines and move to the States at a young age. — Anna Wintour

The professions of novelist and journalist are very separate. As a novelist, you are ultimately working for yourself. Yes, you need the approval of a publisher and an audience, but what is valued in fiction writing - style, individual voice, insight - is scorned by the editor who is combing through your newspaper article. — Jon Weisman

Photojournalist? With a few exceptions, those of us working as photojournalists might now more appropriately call ourselves illustrators. For, unlike real reporters, whose job it is to document what's going down, most of us go out in the world expecting to give form to the magazine, or to newspaper editor's ideas, using what's become over the years a pretty standardized visual language. So we search for what is instantly recognizable, supportive of the text, easiest to digest, or most marketable - more mundane realities be damned. — Eugene Richards

I think about the question of perspective in reporting all the time, and since I spent 20 years of my career in Washington as both a reporter and an editor I'm keenly aware that a newspaper should not be dominated by stories in which the only voices and perspective come from those in power. — Jill Abramson

Musicians in my day had nicknames. My name was "Satchel Mouth," like a doctor's satchel. When I went to England this fellow was strictly English, and he was editor of the newspaper there. He shook my hand after I got off the train and said, "Hello, Satchmo." So right away my trombone player said, "Mmm, the man thinks you have mo' mouth than Satchel Mouth." So I was stuck with it, and it turned out all right. — Louis Armstrong

Only two or three months ago, one of the Tokyo newspapers (I can't remember which) admirably reported that a two hundred inch astronomical telescope in America was halfway toward completion. I should like to praise the editor of that newspaper. Articles about war, foreign affairs, and the stock market are not the only things that should be considered newsworthy. A two hundred inch lens can magnify our view of the cosmos considerably. The scope of human vision will expand tremendously. It will become possible to see what was once impossible to behold. It will be a momentous occasion, as though the whole human race, once blind, is granted the gift of sight. Its importance is unrivalled by any war. — Rampo Edogawa

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States memorably stated in a letter in 1807: 'nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle...Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the first, Truths; second, Probabilities; the third, Possibilities; the fourth, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.' If that was true as far back as 1807 when the technologies supporting the mass media were markedly less advanced - how much more true it is today. The — Jason Carter

Every newspaper editor owes tribute to the devil. — Jean De La Fontaine

What is to prevent a daily newspaper from being made the greatest organ of social life? Books have had their day-the theaters have had their day-the temple of religion has had its day. A newspaper can be made to take the lead of all these in the great heaven , and save more from Hell, than all the churches and chapels in New York-besides making money at the same time" "Shakespeare is the great genius of the drama, Scott of the novel, Milton and Byron of the poem, and I mean to be the genius of the newspaper press." James Gordon Bennett, editor ot he New York Herald in 1841 — Daniel Stashower

He announced his intentions to build a spaceport by walking into the office of a local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, and giving an impromptu interview to its bewildered editor. — Brad Stone

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed. — Elbert Hubbard

I always had to prove myself through my actions. Be a cheerleader. Be class president. Be the editor of the newspaper. — Halle Berry

At the same time that you've got to open yourself up to the fact that experience is going to teach you year after year, decade after decade. I remember I very badly wanted to write a newspaper column when I was only 21 years old, and I went to my editor and told him that, and he said, "You're a really good writer, but you haven't lived long enough to be qualified to live out loud." — Anna Quindlen