Quotes of the Week

Channel 4 News' Jon Snow speaking at a meeting of the Association of Journalism Education:"Now is the most exciting time ever to be a journalist."

NUJ's campaigns organiser, Miles Barter, on the Suzanne Breen and NightJack court cases: "The Breen case has demonstrated that journalists mean what they say when they promise not to reveal their sources. However internet companies - like Yahoo in China - have revealed the names of people posting on the web when pressurised by the state. So whistleblowers are more secure giving information to a professional journalist than writing a blog themselves. A blogger who is a professional journalist would protect a source - just like a journalist in any other medium."

Former Guardian journalist Martin Linton, now MP for Battersea, hits back over the expenses scandal in the Letters Page of the Guardian: "Congratulations on your coverage of MPs' expenses-gate. It made me cringe and squirm to read about the scams that some MPs got up to - though I seem to remember some pretty horrific expenses fiddles that journalists got up to at various newspapers I worked on before joining the Guardian."


Joe Stalin, courtesey of this week's The Word magazine's email:"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."