Harold Evans: If Rupert Murdoch wants to charge for content online, he...

The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.

Harold Evans

cameras photography lying

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

Harold Evans

paradox understanding action

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

Harold Evans

sweat journalism sound

The credibility of a newspaper or news magazine is essential so you can check it for accuracy. I'm not saying it's not valuable. One can make a case for just running everything. Just run it! That's one of the advantages of the web, you can run everything - but you don't help the reader find out what's important.

Harold Evans

essentials important running

The democratization of news is fine and splendid, but it's not reporting. It's based on a fragment of information picked up from television or the web, and people are sounding off about something that's not necessarily true.

Harold Evans

news information people

[The web] is going to end up being a tremendous advantage, providing we can work out the financial structure. I think we’ll see newspapers survive, being printed at home... Or you’ll have a local print shop, so that rather than waiting for the newspapers to arrive by truck, which is 30 percent at least of a newspaper’s cost, you’ll go in and push a button, and it will take your dollar bills without anyone having to be there. And it will print the newspaper for you while you wait. It will take seven minutes. There’s a terrific future for print in my view and it gives me great heart.

Harold Evans

home heart thinking

Television and radio are what I call sequential media; they're not simultaneous media. With simultaneous media, you can scan your eye down an electronic or print page and pick among six or seven stories you might like and want to read. With television and radio, you have to wait until the guy's finished talking about the balloon boy, which I don't have the slightest interest in, to find out that all hell's broken loose in Baghdad. Because they've chosen that day to start with the balloon boy.

Harold Evans

media eye boys

My wife [Tina Brown] co-founded the Daily Beast, so I have no hostility to the web or Internet. A number of print friends of mine regard it as the worst thing that's ever happened, but I don't.

Harold Evans

internet wife numbers

I wrote about Bosnia at the time. Somebody looked out their window and saw gangsters coming down the street and doing ethnic cleansing. I said that was the thing that would happen in the future, someone phoning in what they were seeing on the scene. Whether it's the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Drudge Report or the BBC, all those reports, you have to assume there's a real person [who] has credibility.

Harold Evans

cleansing bosnia real

I think a lot of newspapers have lost touch with that sense of community, which so impressed me as a teenager when I had to knock on people's doors.

Harold Evans

teenager doors thinking

I love craftsmanship of any kind, a job well done either by my chiropractor or carpenter, and I am addicted to print, the type, the ink. But my basic passion is journalism and I can't live without being online.

Harold Evans

ink passion jobs

I had been at the newspaper for a few months. It wasn’t regarded as the paper, it was their paper. There was a sense of community because they reported, we reported, I reported the little things, the whist drives, the weddings, the funerals, the little speeches. In one sense it was the most boring copy in the world to anyone picking it up, but, on the other hand, it was crucial to the people who lived in those communities.

Harold Evans

funeral hands people

I often see cases of Internet news where there's no reconciliation for what's gone before and what's newly arrived. That training for me - which was absolutely brutal and I was terrified - was so important, especially later in life when one was faced with conflicting stories and conflicting evidence.

Harold Evans

training later-in-life important

People were murdered for the camera; and some photographers and a television camera crew departed without taking a picture in the hope that in the absence of cameramen acts might not be committed. Others felt that the mob was beyond appeal to mercy. They stayed and won Pulitzer Prizes. Were they right?

Harold Evans

departed cameras people

Transmitting information is easier than creating understanding.

Harold Evans

creating information understanding

When came the invasion of privacy.That kind of thing turns the newspaper from a friendly organ - not necessarily appeasing everybody - into the enemy. It's one reason why newspapers have suffered circulation falls.

Harold Evans

friendly enemy fall

Some blogs have become the best check on monopoly mainstream journalism, and they provide a surprisingly frequent source of initiative reporting.

Harold Evans

blogging thoughtful funny

Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them.

Harold Evans

tyrants mind people

When I first came to the United States in 1956 I fell in love with things - mainly the vitality and the freedoms.

Harold Evans

vitality united-states firsts

Internet news cycles are by the minute, and any fool can take a headline from the Associated Press and send it out as news.

Harold Evans

fool news internet

If Rupert Murdoch wants to charge for content online, he will succeed in so far, but no further than what he provides that is unique and can't be found anywhere. It doesn't seem to me that if he wants to charge it will be a blow to universal freedom and liberty of mankind.