Tom Rosenstiel Quotations

What he's saying may be good press criticism but I'm not sure it's good law.

We know from various studies that women do not consume news in the same numbers as men. These numbers suggest that one reason may be that women don't see themselves in the news as much as men. The numbers suggest that the news does not fully reflect the breadth that women now play in American culture.

The onus is increasingly on the news consumer to seek out what they should be interested in, rather than being passive and saying 'I'll watch CNN and this will tell me what I need to know'.

There are elements to the story that, if handled well, can help improve the way the public perceives the press. The other thing is that the press is doing a bunch of things that are new. They are reading e-mails, saying, 'I am looking for my nephew ... so-and-so, if you can hear me, please call.' That's community journalism on a national scale and I think that will go a long way to demonstrate that the press is doing more than just thrill seeking.

Some Americans will be curious, but I suspect most will be wary. Some will be infuriated.

had the respect of the hard-boiled editors and investigative reporters, but he managed to thrive and triumph in the more corporate environment of today.

He looked like the king of muscle beach and he was a surfer. But he had vision. He believed that for a city to be great, it had to have a great newspaper.

Journalists are trying to make the distinction between leaks that are political and leaks that are whistle-blowing.

Maybe part of their brilliance is they're not as guilt-ridden about it.

When a president is popular, there's a tendency to describe events describing his popularity. When the numbers are falling, you use that as a lens to explain why his popularity is diminishing.

While the piece hardly clarifies everything, the Times should be praised for its candor.

What distinguishes Nightline - the heart of its appeal - is its intelligence, seriousness of purpose, integrity and its depth.

Power is shifting from the journalist setting the agenda, to the consumer becoming their own editor - deciding what their media diet will be. We're in the fast food news culture, where you've got a huge buffet. (And) we do almost nothing in the media world to teach people what they need to know to be an intelligent consumer of news.

Normally, the press imposes a sports template and tends to create a winner,

Do you not cover today's car bombing because you want to do a longer piece about the return of the agricultural economy?

This is the dark side of synergy. One of the few things that people still trust about the American media, unlike media in other countries, is that you can't walk in with cash and pay for a story. That perceived integrity is a lot more valuable than any one interview.

This is about managing images and not public taste or human dignity.

At a time when newspapers need to make a major long-term transition into the new kind of online journalism, companies are driving off the old-school editors. They burn out because they spend all their time on budgets, not journalism.

It's not up to a news organization to let its source substantiate the news for them. The news organization has to be skeptical of the information it receives, verify it independently, then run it by the subjects of the story for comment.

It's not unheard of to wait for a news peg. It's not unusual to discover the existence of something and not know the context of it until later.

It's the illusion of more information, but it's actually a lot of repetition.

Then, when she embroils you in a legal tangle over the matter, instead of monitoring the situation as closely as possible, you put the discretion nearly entirely in her hands. You do not know what's in her notes. And when you believe you are backing her because she is defending a principle, she then brings in a second attorney. To people outside journalism all this looks just weird,

each one synthesizing and adding to what others are learning. If only one or two news organizations do it, it won't have the same effect.

(It's) indicative of larger trends that are going on in journalism, in which citizens are becoming their own editors, and even their own producers, of news. It's much easier to get information from distant places now than it was a generation ago.

It varies by market, but you can generalize and say this: 2005 was a very difficult year for newspapers. If you don't see this cutback, you do see others.

Citizens should be very nervous anytime that courts are ordering news organizations to hand anything over.

These are people who know each other producers, TV executives, book publishers a relatively small group of people.