I keep telling myself to calm down, to take less of an interest in things and not to get so excited, but I still care a lot about liberty, freedom of speech and expression, and fairness in journalism.
It is true that the Internet can be used to disseminate falsehoods quickly, but it just as quickly roots them out and exposes them in a way that the traditional model of journalism and its closed, insular, one-way form of communication could never do...
After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.
I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.'
My only advice is, follow your dream and do whatever you like to do the most. I chose journalism because I wanted to be in the places where history was being made.
I'd been involved in journalism for a long time - my dad's a journalist, he's written many books, and when I was twelve years old I wrote reports on local football matches for the newspapers.
Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.
There's that old journalism rule that sunshine is the great disinfectant - which is how reporters bust their way into meetings and such all the time. In sports, I really think winning is the great disinfectant.
I went into broadcast journalism. I loved every class I took, I just got anxious because I came to the realization that you're groomed in high school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college or else you're done for.
It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in.
Good journalism, I think, represents life and if you try to organize something too neatly it usually blows up in your face and doesn't really happen the way you want it to.
I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.
What happens is I speak to people outside of my circle of friends and they have already formed an opinion of me based on the things that people have written. That is the effect of journalism on my life, and sometimes it isn't very pleasant.
The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words - without locks, open on my shelves.
I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume...
I guess I went into journalism to save the world. I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.
I've taught a college journalism course at two universities where my students taught me more than I did them about how political news is consumed.
I'm very committed to and interested in CNN's journalism and our magazines and our movie studio, not just HBO, where I grew up. But I do have a fondness for subscription television.
I would be lying if I said the journalism doesn't reflect my own choices as a reporter and a writer: what to say, what to emphasize, how to say it, what is true or untrue.
Ever since I was a child, I've kept boxes and drawers and pages of things that I liked. I suppose that it constitutes a journal of sorts, but it's not in a ledger or a notebook.
My grandfather was very into horse racing, and I found some of his old journals and got into it from there. It has a lot of parallels to skiing. It's a fun lifestyle, being around the racetrack.
