I had pictured journalism as I'd seen it in the most ennobling films, where the reporter battles for the truth, propelled by conviction, and is triumphant. There are journalists who fit that ideal.
I always like to have a buffer between me and journalism in general. Not just a reporter, but journalism.
As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.
When I lived in London, I worked at the U.N. for a while as its human rights and refugees officer. I have two degrees, and my second was in radio. I was a programmer and news reporter in Canada. My CV looks bananas.
I'm still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people at the center of events.
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.'
Only al-Jazeera is allowed to report from Zimbabwe, but it is unwatchable. Their Zimbabwean reporter Supa Mandiwanzira was one of Zanu-PF's praise-singers at the reviled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.
I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.
I'm pretty much a documents reporter. I'm a public records geek.
My job as a television anchor or television reporter is not to proselytize.
Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in making my prose even more clear and direct, and in avoiding complicated digressions.
The most important ethical issues and the most difficult ones are the human ones because a reporter has enormous power to hurt people.
There are some movie stars in Hollywood that are so scared, they also tell the reporter that they are recording them, in case there is something wrong with what they wrote about them in the papers.
Walter Cronkite was a personally decent and convivial man, who literally couldn't kill a fly, was kind to his children, generally helpful to juniors, authentically curious about the news, and, in his time, an energetic reporter.
And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same.
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.
I have been a print reporter my whole career. It's all I ever wanted to be. I specialize in political profiles. I have probably profiled hundreds of people over the years, people in very powerful positions. People don't always like what I write, but most people still talk to me.
I've been in several situations where police officers and district attorneys have had the cooperation of people in the news media without either endangering the reporter or compromising their sources.
'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.
I've been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at 'This American Life,' it's how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying.
Every newspaper editor says the heart of the paper is the reporter - which is true - except for the pay!
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.
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.
When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree.
I want to be a Kid Reporter because I would like to meet interesting people, and I also love being in front of the camera! As a Kid Reporter, I would love to learn how to be a better writer and interview people.
I was a police reporter, so I got into the worlds that I write about, and I think many of the details in my books come from those days.
I had a reporter ask me how much I weigh. I said to him, 'You go first: How much do you weigh?' People always ask me what I eat. Other artists don't get asked these questions.
I really see the vocation of politics like I see every vocation - whether it's being a reporter or serving in public life or being a plumber - as an extension of ministry.
As a reporter in Israel, I have interviewed hundreds of people in its intelligence and defense establishments and studied thousands of classified documents that revealed a hidden history, surprising even in the context of Israel's already fierce reputation.
Years ago, I did an interview about my mother for a publication called 'Info' magazine, and during that interview I told the reporter about my mother's leiomyosarcoma. She had had a hysterectomy, but at the time of it, the doctors didn't even think to look for sarcoma.
I have always argued that newspapers should not have any civic purpose beyond telling readers what is happening... A reporter who doesn't quickly tell readers what they most want to know - the score - won't last long. Better he should teach political science.