Tom Rosenstiel Quotes on Media & News (9 Quotes)

It's not unheard of to wait for a news peg. It's not unusual to discover the existence of something and not know the context of it until later.

The onus is increasingly on the news consumer to seek out what they should be interested in, rather than being passive and saying 'I'll watch CNN and this will tell me what I need to know'.

It's not up to a news organization to let its source substantiate the news for them. The news organization has to be skeptical of the information it receives, verify it independently, then run it by the subjects of the story for comment.

This is the dark side of synergy. One of the few things that people still trust about the American media, unlike media in other countries, is that you can't walk in with cash and pay for a story. That perceived integrity is a lot more valuable than any one interview.

The question is how many news organizations have the investigative muscle to handle a story this complex, and how many can afford to lose a team for the time it will take to do that, especially in TV, ... I fear the list of news organizations that can do that today is not very long. And sadly, it gets shorter if ad sales go down and other news pushes Katrina off our radar screens.

Research suggests these kids are only running with the curve. A June survey by the Pew Research Center found that while most respondents look favorably upon their local media, their perception of the press in general is more negative than ever. The public is not rejecting the principles underlying traditional journalism, ... Rather it suspects journalists are not living up to those principles.

(It's) indicative of larger trends that are going on in journalism, in which citizens are becoming their own editors, and even their own producers, of news. It's much easier to get information from distant places now than it was a generation ago.

We know from various studies that women do not consume news in the same numbers as men. These numbers suggest that one reason may be that women don't see themselves in the news as much as men. The numbers suggest that the news does not fully reflect the breadth that women now play in American culture.

Power is shifting from the journalist setting the agenda, to the consumer becoming their own editor - deciding what their media diet will be. We're in the fast food news culture, where you've got a huge buffet. (And) we do almost nothing in the media world to teach people what they need to know to be an intelligent consumer of news.