How people get quoted in the news

Reporters use quotes in news articles for various reasons. Sometimes the person being quoted expresses an idea in a clever way. When I was reporting for The Associated Press we used quotes as credibility: newspaper editors who didn't know us personally might relax if some knowledgeable person were quoted. So very often a quote went right into the second paragraph, or "graf" as we called it.

One of The AP's top writers saved his career with a quote. He wrote: "A nuclear missile was launched tonight in New Jersey." The career saver: the sentence ended with, "state police said." They said it. No matter it wasn't true.

Michael Kinsley, an editor at Atlantic Media Company and former editor of The New Republic, addresses the matter of quotes in an excellent piece in The Atlantic. Even if you don't report the news, you can learn something about how the sausage is made.

Quotes from outside experts or observers are also a rich source of unnecessary verbiage in newspaper articles. A New York Times story from the November 8 front page provides a good example here. It’s about how the crackdown on some Wall Street bonuses may have backfired. Executives were forced to take stock instead of cash, but then the stock went up, damn it.

This is an “enterprise” story—one the reporter or an editor came up with, not one dictated by events. And the reporter clearly views the information it contains as falling somewhere between ironic and appalling, which seems about right. But it’s not her job to have a view. In fact, it’s her job to not have a view. Even though it’s her story and her judgment, she must find someone else—an expert or an observer—to repeat and endorse her conclusion. These quotes then magically turn an opinionated story into an objective one. And so:

“People have to look at the sizable gains that have been made since stock and options were granted last year, and the fact is this was, in many ways, a windfall,” said Jesse M. Brill, the chairman of CompensationStandards.com, a trade publication. “This had nothing to do with people’s performance. These were granted at market lows.”

Those are 56 words spent allowing Jesse M. Brill to restate the author’s point. Yet I, for one, have never heard of Jesse M. Brill before. He may be a fine fellow. But I have no particular reason to trust him, and he has no particular reason to need my trust. The New York Times, on the other hand, does need my trust, or it is out of business. So it has a strong incentive to earn my trust every day. But instead of asking me to trust it and its reporter about the thesis of this piece, The New York Times asks me to trust this person I have never heard of, Jesse M. Brill.

Of course this attempt to pass the hot potato to a total stranger doesn’t work, because before I can trust Jesse M. Brill about the thesis of the piece, I have to trust The New York Times that this Jesse M. Brill person is trustworthy, and the article under examination devotes many words to telling me who he is so that I will trust him. (By contrast, it tells me nothing about the reporter.) Why not cut out the middleman? The reason to trust this story, if you choose to do so, is that it is in The New York Times. What Jesse M. Brill may think adds nothing. Yet he is only one of several experts quoted throughout, basically telling the story all over again. 

Reporters have always done it that way. "Quotes from outside experts or observers are also a rich source of unnecessary verbiage in newspaper articles," says Michael Kinsley, an editor at Atlantic Media Company and former editor of The New Republic.