Careful writing is important for many reasons, not least that intelligent but hurried reporters will trust the presser, resulting in a cascade of secondary damage.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.
If there's anything that's important to a reporter, it is integrity. It is credibility.
Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.
A basic rule of life for reporters is that you should spend your time talking with and learning about people who are not sending you press releases, rather than those who are.
Writing is taking a risk, and it is actually fighting invisible and invincible enemies. They are over-confidence, stupidity, expectation and narcissism.
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.
Journalists are supposed to put the people first, even before themselves. Around the world and throughout history, journalists have died to get the truth out.
The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome.
The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.
Journalists don't have audiences - they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.