Kurt Loder

“Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.”

“Unless you're doing a feature piece, which is going to be longer, and you have more time to get into stuff.”

“Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.”

“And you can't really cover people critically that you're friends with.”

“Television's not going read stories to you.”

“Whomever you're going to interview, you have to be interested in what it is you want to know from them. You have to be interested in the subject.”

“And that's very important, too, 'cause a lot of people just assume everyone's a Democrat, or everyone's a Republican or whatever, and they're not. And that's a really important thing to adhere to.”

“Some of the most important stories don't lend themselves to television treatment.”

“So no one should rely on television either for their knowledge of music or for news. There's just more going on. It's an adjunct to the written word, which I think is still the most important thing.”

“It's not a good thing to be friends with people you're covering. There's just no point in doing it. It's tempting, but they're not going to consider you their friend anyway. They just know that you're somebody that can do something for them.”

“If you ask questions that interest you, you'll get answers that interest your audience.”

“And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture.”

“Well, news is anything that's interesting, that relates to what's happening in the world, what's happening in areas of the culture that would be of interest to your audience.”

“I think television often has dismissed younger people. They figure, well, they're not really watching news, that's not our audience.”

“So, yeah, I think it had a major effect. I think in franchising younger people, it was just an idea that's never been trotted out before, but it makes perfectly good sense.”

“I spent time in, like, criminal courts, and covering murder trials for papers.”

“It's gonna be short if it's news; put it at the top. Style's not an issue, just make it news.”

“And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.”

“I know what the structure of the language is.”

“If your audience is young, it'd be youth culture, if your audience is older, it'd be older people, if it were senior citizens, it'd be senior citizen issues. So you try and hit the target audience.”