Quotes of the Year: The Best of the Rest...

I am ending the year with the best quotes that don't fit a category.

Adopting the Piers Morgan approach:

Kelvin MacKenzie on publishing a picture of himslf and pop sensations Jedward in his Sun column: "I have decided, late in life, that I too wish to adopt the Piers approach."

Why you shouldn't read the Daily Mail:

Chris Mullin, retired Labour MP for Sunderland South, to Clive Anderson on BBC Radio 4's The Heckler programme: "I remember once I had a woman come in who was really on the edge of a breakdown. She was talking about civil war and chaos, immigrants coming up the lanes of Sunderland with knives between their teeth to murder her. She was really in a terrible state. I just said to her 'What paper do you read, love?' and, of course, it was the Daily Mail. I just said 'stop reading it and you'll find life gets better.' "

Public Relations:

David Hepworth in The Word magazine on showbiz PRs and their increasing demands: "PR control reduces mystique. It acts on charisma like bromide on erectile tissue and sets up stars for an inevitable fall."

The worst mistake newspapers ever made:

Marc Reeves at news:rewired:"To all of you who are saying 'Sorry I’m just a journalist, I don’t sell advertising or organise events,' I say 'tough' that’s just the way it will be from now on. We tried it the other way and it broke. That artificial divide we created when we put the noisy people in a room marked ‘advertising’ and the studious types in another labelled ‘editorial’ was the biggest mistake newspapers and other media ever made."

Getting loaded:

Outgoing Loaded editor Martin Daubney looks back in Press Gazette: “I set fire to writers, bailed them from Russian jails, shot them from cannons, threw them in ice pools, blew them up with napalm, made them wrestle grizzly bears and had them commit all manner of foul sex acts in the tireless pursuit of our readers’ entertainment."

Career opportunity or suicide?

Girish Gupta, who billed the Independent after doing two weeks' work experience: "I'm sure I won't be having too many bylines in the Independent anytime soon but I hope that other editors can see that I'm doing what I believe to be right. Journalism is meant to be about outing what you think is wrong so hopefully I am doing that."

PM on the BBC:

David Cameron "teases" the BBC: "We’re all in it together, including, deliciously, the BBC, who in another negotiation agreed a licence fee freeze for six years. So what is good for the EU is good for the BBC”

For better and worse:

Stewart Kirkpatrick editor of Scotland's online newspaper, the Caledonian Mercury, at JEEcamp: "There's never been a better time to be a journalist. And there's never been a worse time to work as one."

Priceless:

Katie Price asked by the Guardian if she has read her own books: "What, my autobiographies? No, cos I know what's in them."

Don’t tell Mum I’m a journalist:

Rowan Pelling in the Daily Telegraph remembers an email from dandy Sebastian Horsley who died this year: "Don't tell my mother I work as a journalist. She thinks I am a prostitute."

(That's enough quotes - ed)

Happy New Year

Quotes of the Year:

Hacks on hacks;

Super-injunctions;

Blogging and Bloggers;

Ethics and entrapment;

Phone-hacking;

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange;

Paywalls, Rusbridger and Murdoch;

The General Election;

The Regional Press.