‘Ah, ye knights of the pen! May honour be your shield, and truth tip your lances! Be gentle to all gentle people. Be modest to women. Be tender to children. And as for the Ogre Humbug, out sword, and have at him’

William Makepeace Thackeray, 1861

Thanks to Roy Greenslade at the Guardian

In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while the article is still on the presses. — Calvin Trillin

‘I am not an editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one’ — Mark Twain

The Los Angeles Times has a monetary value of $2.5 billion and “a balance-sheet-engorging 20% margin”. So why does Wall Street hate it? Simple: Because newspapers are a rusty industry. They have tail fins. They print lists of readers every day on the obituary page. Worse, as a class they are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that.

Newspaper: A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation — George Bernard Shaw

‘The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands’ — Oscar Wilde