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"Stanford had no journalism program so I just learned by doing, effectively."
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"Deep Throat did serve the public interest by providing the guidance and information to us."
"The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends...."
"So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here--not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms."
"The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know, the second, is to find out who will tell you."
"If we're going to live as we are in a world of supply and demand, then journalists had better find a way to create a demand for good journalism."
"Where journalists have gotten themselves in trouble over the last few decades is that their skepticism often extends only to American officials, the U.S. military and Republican politicians."
"What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve."
"As electronic journalism came to be evaluated for its cost effectiveness, the network world began breaking up."
"Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they're lazy and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous."
"Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening."
Explore more quotes by John Pomfret
"When I see somebody being mistreated, my eyes tear up and I want to stop it. And I believe that the best thing I can do is to write about it, because if I insert myself into the equation it doesn't really do much good, but if I write about it I think it could do more good."
"I grew up in New York City in the late '70s, at a time when U.S. - China relations were something that was on the front page of The New York Times on a regular basis."
"I think to a certain extent in Bosnia and among the Hutus in Rwanda and also among the Tutsis in Rwanda who then took revenge on the Hutus, there is a sense of being swept up and a sense that the society in which they live has gone mad."
"One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life."
"The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it."
"A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life."
"I went back to the States and started at a small newspaper in Riverside County, California, covering the police; I was making $280 a week covering the police."
"I think some of the best reporters are the ones who can really illustrate the differences between societies, at the same time trying to connect the fact that there are a lot of shared values in addition to those differences."
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