Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
'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 started at 'The Daily Telegraph' as a daily news reporter. I moved then to 'The Guardian,' and then I moved to New York as the correspondent for 'The Guardian,' moved to 'The Times of London.' And really, it was the best job you could imagine. You could cover any story you wanted in America.
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.
As a reporter, I spent a great deal of time in court. During brief breaks in testimony, I would often look at the spouse, usually the wife, of the accused. I began to wonder how listening to the details of a crime purportedly committed by your spouse would affect that person's view of her husband.
If you've read my New York Times bestseller 'Stonewalled', you know that I'm a fan of an intellectual exercise I call the Substitution Game. It involves comparing how the press treats similar events or people depending on how the reporter or news organization feels about the issue or the newsmaker.
For those of us who spent our careers competing with David Broder, the hardest thing to abide was the inevitable comparison. If someone said Jack Germond - or Jules Witcover or Walter Mears or whoever - 'is a pretty good political reporter,' the default response would be, 'but he's no David Broder.'
If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.
For 30 years I've been schooled in everything from government, and economics, to medicine and international relations. But don't be impressed. Someone once said being a general assignment reporter simply means you are equally ignorant about most everything. In other words, I know a little about a lot.
Working in local news makes you very self-sufficient, which is a good thing because you know how all the different jobs work. I've worked many of those jobs in the newsroom, from my first job answering the phones and working the prompter, to producing, to being a reporter who does all of those things.
When I got out of undergrad, I had a degree in theater and telecommunications. My first job, I was a news reporter for the local stories for NPR. Then I was a country-western DJ. I did data entry for a yearbook company. In my mid-20s I went back to grad school at NYU, and I specialized in playwriting.
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.
A new book by 'New York Times' reporter Charlie Savage, 'Power Wars,' suggests that there has been little substantive difference between George W. Bush's administration and Obama's when it comes to national-security policies or the legal justifications used to pursue regime change in the Greater Middle East.
When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.
I would like to be remembered as the reporter who snuck back stage to all the off-limits shows, be it the Vatican dressing room, the Pentagon war room, or the Celtics locker room. Some curtains ought never to be pulled back; others deserve to be ripped down. When appropriate, I want to be the curtain remover.
When you lose a parent at ten years old, the world seems like a much scarier place. It makes complete sense to me that I took survival courses when I was a teenager and started going to war zones as a reporter. I didn't ever want to be taken advantage of, and I wanted to be able to take care of those around me.
During the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, Britain was rampantly jingoistic: anyone who opposed the war was cast as a traitor. The 'Guardian' stood against it and ran a campaign for peace while the brilliant 'Guardian' reporter Emily Hobhouse exposed the concentration camps for the Boers run by the British.
I don't think a reporter necessarily becomes an arm of law enforcement. I think a reporter is like any other citizen. If a citizen can do his or her duty as a witness, if they have information about a crime, or if they have information about a criminal group, I think that there's a duty on the part of the citizen.
Trade shows such as the wire tappers' ball are highly secretive and ban journalists from attending. None of the U.S. agencies that attended the wire tappers' ball - including the FBI, the Secret Service, and every branch of the military - were willing to comment when a reporter queried them about their attendance.
For any reporter, education is a topic where everything else - money, politics, et cetera - intersects. I have four kids in K through 12, so I'm knee-deep in it. I'm really interested in the philosophy behind it all. Should you just memorize your multiplication tables, or should you understand the concept behind them?
I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.
When my TV show, 'Sports Jobs with Junior Seau,' assigned me to be a 'Sports Illustrated' reporter for a weekend, I didn't realize I'd have to squeeze it in around another sports job. I had planned to retire from the NFL to enjoy the cushy lifestyle of a full-time reality TV star, but I wound up getting run over by a bull.
I'm a novelist - not an expert on coal mining. I'm not a politician with an agenda to push. I'm not a reporter presenting facts, and I'm not a sociologist documenting the last struggling remnants of blue-collar America. I'm simply an author who sets her books in coal country because it's where I come from, and it's what I know.
I studied journalism at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. I did my graduate work at Emerson in Boston, and I was actually a reporter for a year in New York and New Jersey. It dawned on me that I wasn't cut out for that line of work. I mean... there's a certain thing that really good reports have that I just didn't.
I was asked by an NPR reporter once why don't I talk about race that often. I said, 'It's because I'm a neurosurgeon.' And she thought that was a strange response... I said, 'You see, when I take someone to the operating room, I'm actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn't make them who they are.'
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.'
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.
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.
I've had a lot of fun, and when I talk to kids in journalism schools, I say, look, I know what the journalism teachers tell you that this is a great way to perform public service and all that, but I say the main reason, if you decide what you want to do is be a reporter, the main reason you want to do it is because it's just so much fun.
We have entered a time when a writer's first idea is his best idea, when the first thing a reporter hears is the first thing that she reports. We live in a time now when we have seen major television networks take video off of YouTube and broadcast it to millions of Americans without verifying whether the video had been fabricated or not.
In 2014, I knew my English was not so bad, but I had no confidence in talking directly to an English-speaking reporter. I had to do a short interview with, I think, Reuters from France. I was so nervous. I practiced memorizing three sentences for two hours. But, I think that these kinds of interviews make me develop a lot, and that helps me.
Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler.
For me, the biggest thing I've learned is how to be myself and the fact that viewers actually want to feel like they're getting to know you as a person. They value you because you're a reporter and you're bringing them new information, but they also want to feel like they get a sense of your sense of humor and what things you're interested in.
Yes, I did move to New York when I was eighteen to do sports broadcasting. I didn't know how I was going to do it, so I got a job at ESPN Zone, thinking I would meet people in the business. People give me a hard time for it, but they don't realize that they shot 'Sports Reporter' there and that folks from ESPN and ABC were in there all the time.
