I know that Bill Keller’s Hugo Young lecture was last Thurday, but I have just read the
full transcript of what he said, and think it’s worth a post. And in the spirit of Bill’s main point – that journalism is about facts not opinions, I will not bore you with what I think. For those that do not know, Bill is the executive editor of the New York Times.
On the current president:
“He did not invent our great disrupter, the internet. (That, you recall, was Al Gore.)”
“As our media columnist David Carr once wrote: leaks tend to affect ships that aren't seaworthy to begin with.”
On what keeps the New York Times going strong
“and by executives who understand that you can't produce journalism without journalists”
“You turn on your computer and there is a media tsunami: blogs, Google News, RSS feeds, social sites like MySpace and file-sharing programs like YouTube.”
“When Saddam Hussein fell, there were more than 1,000 western reporters in Iraq. Today, at any given time, there are about 50.”
“The civic labour performed by journalists on the ground cannot be replicated by legions of bloggers sitting hunched over their computer screens.”
“Google News and Wikipedia don't have bureaux in Baghdad, or anywhere else.”
“(My own paper pretty much decided to overlook the Holocaust as it was happening.)”
“if I may borrow a phrase from the famous Downing Street memo, fix the facts to the policy.”
“The printed newspaper may eventually become a cult product, like vinyl LP records, but we are some years from that day.”
“If you want to sample the possibilities of high-quality web journalism, I invite you to go to
nytimes.com, click on the word 'politics' in the left margin, and examine how we have been covering the 2008 presidential campaign.”
