There are lots of ways to describe the newspaper industry and journalists. But we should probably leave it to the experts. The following quotes have been stolen, unabashedly, from the Press Gallery web site and I hope their information is accurate.
“A journalist is a reporter out of a job.” -Mark Twain
“Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.” -Tom Stoppard
“Every journalist has a novel inside, which is an excellent place for it.” -Russell Lynesc
“Facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper.” – Mother Teresa
“The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.” -Frank Miller Jr.
“The guiding ideological principles of most American newsrooms are entropy, chaos, procrastination and lunch.” -Renee Loth, Boston Globe
“Journalism is literature in a hurry.” -Matthew Arnold
“Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.” – Anna Quindlen
“It is hard news that catches readers. Features hold them.” – Lord Northcliffe
“It is part of the social mission of every great newspaper to provide a refuge and a home for the largest possible number of salaried eccentrics.” -Lord Thomson, The Times of London
“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.” -Stephen Leacock
“Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers – same thing exactly.” -Harold Ross, The New Yorker
“The modern editor of a newspaper does not care for facts. The editor wants novelty. The editor has no objection to facts, if they are also novel. But he would prefer a novelty that is not a fact to a fact that is not a novelty.” -William Randolph Hearst
“The great art of running a newspaper is the art of guessing where hell is liable to break loose next.” -Joseph B. McCullagh