Newspaper Reporter Quotes & Sayings

A litterateur is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer ... He is just like an ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper reporter, because of his fastidiousness or from a wish to give pleasure to his readers, were to describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroad contractors. — Anton Chekhov

Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter. — H. G. Bissinger

I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college ... I did other things. — Jackie Kennedy

A moment from another world! Imagine a reporter dictating an exclusive story, a lead story, sourced from the President of the United States, from a telephone just off the White House dance floor to the strains of Lester Lanin's dance band. — Ben Bradlee

A girl had to do what a girl had to do and it looked as if this girl's immediate future included chicken Caesar salad, chocolate cake, and Cary Grant. — Leslie Meier

It's a small-town rule: Never speak ill of the dead until the estate has paid the outstanding bills. — Leslie Meier

It's one thing to put on your nation's uniform to give your life for your country. But to dress up in black-market khakis and head into battle in a borrowed bush hat, armed only with a Nikon camera, 10 rolls of film and notebook, is definitely another thing. — Peter Arnett

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

He was nice. But the waitress spilled a drink in my lap during dinner, and then I noticed he had a
piece of spinach in his teeth, and ... you know, there's nowhere to go but down from there."
"And then what?"
"I faked a work emergency."
"Do newspaper columnists have work emergencies?"
"I might have led him to believe I was an ace reporter. And that there was a robbery somewhere — Maisey Yates

When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example. — Tom Stoppard

I had decided that I wanted to earn my living as a writer and the only place in Waterbury where they paid you for writing was at the local newspaper. My opportunity came when the paper had an opening for a night janitor. Opportunities are easy to miss, because they don't always show up in their best clothes. Sometimes opportunities look like beggars in rags. After an eight-hour shift in the shop tossing thirty-pound crates I hustled down to the newspaper building and cleaned toilets, with a vague plan that it would somehow lead to a reporter's position. — John William Tuohy

As a newspaper reporter, I covered and was around a fair number of crime scenes involving juvenile delinquents, and few things bothered me more than listening to their parents. Crying, ranting, proclaiming how great their children were despite being kicked out of school or previous run-ins with the law. — LZ Granderson

On the rare occasions when a reporter asks if a criminal is an immigrant, government officials summarily dismiss the question as if it would be racist to discuss the defendant's nation of birth. Ricardo DeLeon Flores killed a teenaged girl in Kansas after speeding through a stop sign and crashing into two cars. "When asked whether Flores was a U.S. citizen," the local Kansas newspaper reported, "Deborah Owens of the Leavenworth County Attorney's Office said she had no knowledge of his citizenship status."33 Was the Spanish translator a hint? The ICE officials showing up in court? His Oakland Raiders T-shirt? Two families' lives were forever changed by the reckless behavior of someone who should not have been in this country, but the prosecutor refused to tell a reporter that Flores was an illegal immigrant. Owens must have felt a warm rush of self-righteousness, thinking how much better she is than all those blood-and-soil types who want to know when foreigners kill Americans. — Ann Coulter

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

Wherever we find news, excitement, mystery and adventure, there, too, we
find the newspaper reporter. Always on the alert for something new, ready to
risk his very life for a scoop and finding adventure in every corner of the
globe. — Stan Lee

My degree was in education, but the idea of being a teacher lost out to being a reporter. I worked at a newspaper for a while, then went to New York and worked in PR at RCA and NBC, and at 'The United States Steel Hour,' a drama series. — Joan Ganz Cooney

I wanted to be some kind of captain of industry. Then I wanted to be in advertising, and then I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. — Ken Follett

As a child growing up in the precincts of wealth, and later as a college student, newspaper reporter and resident of New York's Upper East Side, I got used to listening to the talk of financial killings and sexual misalliance that animates the conversation of the rich and the familiars of the rich. — Lewis H. Lapham

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

I am a former newspaper reporter turned church secretary turned vampire novelist. I wrote my first complete novel, 'Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs,' at night while I was working as the receptionist for a Baptist church. That was an interesting conversation with the pastor. — Molly Harper

Now listen,' said George angrily, 'I've been in a newspaper office all evening and I know better than you what's going on.'

'Nonsense. If there's one place in the world where nobody knows what's going on, it's a newspaper office. — Jack Iams

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

I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years. — Jennifer Weiner

As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can't prove, which means you can't put them in the newspaper. But they're good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story. — Pete Hamill

In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up for stealing a car or something relatively minor, and said, 'See this kid? He'll kill.' — Kevin Barry

There's not much a newspaper reporter can do about dead men. But a newspaper reporter and a cop and a judge can deliver some justice. That's why the founding fathers wrote it up the way they did, I suppose. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Everyone is entitled to those things. — Charlie LeDuff

My work on prime gaps lead to lots of media coverage, some good, some bad, some ugly, and some merely ridiculous. For example, a reporter of our university newspaper, who admitted that he is still learning English, wrote that "Prof. Goldston solved one of the most controversial problems in the prime number theory last month with support from his Turkish partner." — Daniel Goldston

She was halfway through the revolving door when the thought hit her; she was the one who had seen Junior and Luther fighting before the banquet. She was the one had told Detective Sullivan. Overcome with guilt, she grabbed Ted's arm and faced him.
"It's because of me," she said. "Junior was arrested because of me! — Leslie Meier

The thrill of working in this building, with its iconic globe on top, would never fade. — Gwenda Bond

I was a cub reporter on a local newspaper in Limerick city, and I used to cover the district court meetings. All of life passed through the Limerick courthouse. Misery, malevolence, the dark side of humanity ... I tell ya, it made 'Angela's Ashes' look like 'The Wonderful World of Disney.' — Kevin Barry

Right now I'm trying to figure out what I'm gonna do, 'cause I don't want to sit around on my backside all day. If I'm gonna do that I'll be a newspaper reporter. — Joe Paterno

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character. — Lyndon B. Johnson

A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke. — Joshua Lederberg

The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious. — Tom Wolfe

The lights were turned off and the film began to roll. It was eerie, thought Lucy, watching the images of Luther Read flicking across the screen. Maybe he was dead or maybe he was fighting for his life, but in the darkened room he was an enormous, living presence.
Then the film ended. The final image of Luther Read's smiling face had hardly faded when the announcement came.
"Luther Read, our Newspaperman of the Year, is dead."
That was incredible enough, but an even more shocking announcement followed.
"Remain in your seats, please, as the police will be collecting information from everyone. — Leslie Meier

Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan. — Geraldine Brooks

It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom. — Russell Baker

I didn't have the ambition to be a broadcaster. I was going to be a newspaper reporter the rest of my life, but that opportunity came along. — Charles Kuralt

My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing. — Gene Hackman

In my very early days as a journalist, as a cub reporter on a local newspaper, I used to cover the district courthouse in Limerick city - all human life passed through that establishment, and my time there remains a source of inspiration. — Kevin Barry

If looks could kill, she'd be a dead woman. — Leslie Meier

I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a newspaper reporter because we didn't have much television in those days. — Bob Schieffer

The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China's lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. — Matt Ridley

When I was a newspaper reporter, and later a television writer, I really felt my co-workers became a second family. — Jill Davis

Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer. — Ben Bagdikian

In fact, she realized when they finally found their table and sat down, every single woman at the banquet was dressed in some variation of back. Black silk, black chiffon, black with beads, black with rhinestones, short black cocktail dresses, black evening dresses, and even black pantsuits. All black. There was no way she was going to get lost in this crowd, not in her pink-and-orange poppy print — Leslie Meier

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