SacredFacts: Quotes of the Year

Some of the quotes I noted through the year - feel free to add your own favourites..

Newspapers, including at least a few very good newspapers, will survive, simply put, because of that basic law of market economics: supply and demand. The supply of what we produce is sadly diminishing. And the demand has never been greater.

(Bill Keller - Hugo Young Lecture)
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"It seems to be a great time to be starting out in journalism. Just don’t ask advice from anyone who has been in the business for more than five years."

(Saul Hansell - NYT Blog)
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You can get junk food on every high street. And you can get junk journalism nowadays in
every outlet there is. But just as there is now a movement for Slow Cooking, I should
also like to see more of a demand for Slow Journalism
(David Leigh - inaugural City Uni lecture)
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The adjustment we’re being asked to make is to a world of increased access, new competition and different business models. It’s not about easing onto the obit page.
The journey to the next generation news begins with us believing in ourselves and what we do.

(Tom Curley - speech)
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the people of Burma "demonstrated that the tools of information technology can have a strong impact on the global coverage of events as they are unfolding and sometimes on the events themselves. The events in Burma also provide a chilling example of the limitations of the internet, access to which was ultimately vulnerable to the unilateral choices of a repressive regime.."
(OpenNet report into internet shutdown in Burma)
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we are too willing to surrender privacy for an illusory sense of emotional connection and security. Perhaps we will realise what a poor bargain we have struck only after it is too late.

(Jeffrey Rosen - Spiked Online)
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It's not an appeal to better standards, it's not an appeal to quality or tradition. It has no aspirations to honour. It's disingenuous to the core, manipulative of the people, anti-progressive, cynical and hypocritical.
(Tom Coates on Andrew Keen)
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I lived through things which before I would have struggled to imagine and maybe, in the end, I will be stronger for that. I have gained too a deeper sense of the value of freedom. Perhaps only if you have ever been some kind of prisoner, can you truly understand its worth.

(Alan Johnston on his release)
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the fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out.

(Tony Blair speaking at the Reuters Institute)
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"Online is where the action is...print is there to amplify. Social networks are the new cities;most news breaks very quickly on these networks."

(Mario Garcia - World Editors Forum)
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"News stories should answer questions and tie up loose ends. Blogs should pose questions and leave some ends dangling to encourage debate."
(Kevin Anderson - The Innovation Forum)
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Our sense remains, too, that traditional journalism is not, as some suggest, becoming irrelevant. There is more evidence now that new technology companies have had either limited success in news gathering (Yahoo, AOL), or have avoided it altogether (Google). Whoever owns them, old newsrooms now seem more likely than a few years ago to be the foundations for the newsrooms of the future. But practicing journalism has become far more difficult and demands new vision. Journalism is becoming a smaller part of people’s information mix. The press is no longer gatekeeper over what the public knows. Journalists have reacted relatively slowly. They are only now beginning to re-imagine their role.

(State of the News Media 2007)
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the internet is "a mass medium providing mostly illusory interactivity and mostly illusory diversity....
"The evolution of the online news agency has laid bare the news industries' near total dependence on a few wholesale news providers and the limitations on public discourse that it inevitably yields."

(Leeds University research into dominance of news agencies on the internet)
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