The reporter wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in the Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.
I'm still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people at the center of events.
So much of journalism is conveying a place and time that existed, to someone at a later date: giving a person the context and trying to make them feel as informed as if they were actually there.
A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom - it's gone.
I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.
In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.
Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the 'Washington Post.'
The only thing I'd ever done with news was to read copy sitting at the microphone in the studio.
Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.
If anyone was talking about journalism in the '50s - it was Edward R.Murrow.