Moving forward, investigative journalists need to train themselves to be media amphibians - just as comfortable with the classic verities of great journalism as they are with video, Twitter, Facebook, and, most importantly, citizen journalism.
Journalism is organized gossip.
My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip. What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.
Journalism is often simply the industrialisation of gossip.
Journalism is a messy business. For every prize-winning story there's plenty of gossip and garbage.
I'm on a strict gossip diet. No gossip websites, no gossip magazines. Otherwise, I find it paralyzing to exist.
All animals communicate. What's special about gossip is that it's not about the here and now. You don't gossip about lions. You don't gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people - this is the basis for forming larger communities.
Every journalism bromide - speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the powerful - that otherwise would be hopelessly sappy to a journalist of any experience, has become a Twitter grail. The true business of journalism has become obscured because there is really no longer a journalism business.
Anyone who does investigative journalism is not in it for the money. Investigative journalism by nature is the most work intensive kind of journalism you can take on. That's why you see less and less investigative journalism at newspapers and magazines. No matter what you're paid for it, you put in so many man-hours it's one of the least lucrative aspects of journalism you can take on.
The public's appetite for what sensible newspapers call 'personality journalism' and what I call gossip is insatiable. It will never, ever stop growing because everybody dreams.
Journalism continues to go south, thanks to big media and its strangulation of news, and there's not much left in the way of community or local media. Add to that an internet that has not even started thinking seriously about how it supports journalism. You have these big companies like Google and Facebook who run the news and sell all the ads next to it, but what do they put back into journalism? It isn't much.
Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
You maintain hope for humanity as an infinite skeptic of gossip and slander. In all mankind's desires for entertainment and exaggeration and sensationalism, when it comes to gossip, the individual always sounds worse than he really is. This is why adhering to gossip subtly affects the mental state of the listener - he goes on holding shady opinions regardless of where the realities of their lights and darknesses may stand.
Go to faeries for gossip about vampires, to werewolves for gossip about faeries, and do not gossip about werewolves, because they try to bite your face off: that was Magnus's motto.
A lot of people say about 'Gossip Girl,' 'Well, how do you feel about gossip?' Well, who really likes gossip? No one likes to be talked about if it's not flattering or a compliment.