Harold Evans Quotes
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This impressed me when I was the editor of the Sunday Times [of London] - we had the "Bloody Sunday" killings of 13 unarmed civilians by British paratroopers. We interviewed 500 people for our report, and not one of them could give us a total picture of what was happening. It was like the Rashomon effect multiplied a million times. For a website or even a newspaper to be a collector of information flow is not the highest form of journalism.
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Internet news cycles are by the minute, and any fool can take a headline from the Associated Press and send it out as news.
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I think there's a lot of benefit in letting people vent. When I was on the Manchester Evening News, we got 500 letters a day, and part of my job as editor was to edit them. And I thought that was one of the best things in the newspaper, and it was instituted by an editor known as Big Tom, who said 'this is the voice of the people.' And he was quite right.
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The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.
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I think America has a brilliant future.
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If Rupert Murdoch wants to charge for content online, he will succeed in so far, but no further than what he provides that is unique and can't be found anywhere. It doesn't seem to me that if he wants to charge it will be a blow to universal freedom and liberty of mankind.
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Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.
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In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.
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When I first came to the United States in 1956 I fell in love with things - mainly the vitality and the freedoms.
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Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.
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What I'm driving at is let's not lose sight in our excitement of the democratization of the media that some things are bad, false and ugly - and no amount of electronic gloss will make them true, beautiful and accurate.
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For 50 years my father worked for the railroad.
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When came the invasion of privacy.That kind of thing turns the newspaper from a friendly organ - not necessarily appeasing everybody - into the enemy. It's one reason why newspapers have suffered circulation falls.
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Throughout America's young history there has been a necessary tension between the individual and the group.
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The democratization of news is fine and splendid, but it's not reporting. It's based on a fragment of information picked up from television or the web, and people are sounding off about something that's not necessarily true.
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The credibility of a newspaper or news magazine is essential so you can check it for accuracy. I'm not saying it's not valuable. One can make a case for just running everything. Just run it! That's one of the advantages of the web, you can run everything - but you don't help the reader find out what's important.
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Some blogs have become the best check on monopoly mainstream journalism, and they provide a surprisingly frequent source of initiative reporting.
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By the end of this century, of course, America is the dominant world power, economically and militarily, and it has not only enlarged the freedoms of its own citizens -- which was very circumscribed in 1889 -- but by 1989 it has enlarged the freedoms of millions and millions of people around the world.
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It's a fascinating time, I think. I do believe that with all the qualifications I've said - [such as] the uncertain accuracy of the web - nonetheless the access to speeches, documents is unparalleled with the ease of gathering information. If I had had that access when I was an editor or coming up, it would have made my life so much easier. As it was, everything took so much longer.
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[We need to] protect copyright at all costs. Don't do cheap deals with Google and these other cyber-monsters. Recognize that the creative artist has to be maintained.
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Once we get further into the irrigation season and start using more water, we'll get all of it flushed out.
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[The web] is going to end up being a tremendous advantage, providing we can work out the financial structure. I think we'll see newspapers survive, being printed at home. Or you'll have a local print shop, so that rather than waiting for the newspapers to arrive by truck, which is 30 percent at least of a newspaper's cost, you'll go in and push a button, and it will take your dollar bills without anyone having to be there. And it will print the newspaper for you while you wait. It will take seven minutes. There's a terrific future for print in my view and it gives me great heart.
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I wrote about Bosnia at the time. Somebody looked out their window and saw gangsters coming down the street and doing ethnic cleansing. I said that was the thing that would happen in the future, someone phoning in what they were seeing on the scene. Whether it's the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Drudge Report or the BBC, all those reports, you have to assume there's a real person [who] has credibility.
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I had been at the newspaper for a few months. It wasn't regarded as the paper, it was their paper. There was a sense of community because they reported, we reported, I reported the little things, the whist drives, the weddings, the funerals, the little speeches. In one sense it was the most boring copy in the world to anyone picking it up, but, on the other hand, it was crucial to the people who lived in those communities.