Media Quotes of the Week: From it's the privileged who get the plum journalism jobs to should journalists be objective about Donald Trump?

NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet on the union's submission to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility inquiry into Access into Leading Professions: "The media is still over-represented by people from privileged backgrounds who went to private schools and then on to elite universities. The union looks forward to hearing the employers' responses to the All Party Parliamentary Group inquiry and what they are doing to open up the industry to the socially disadvantaged. Because too many people are being simply priced out of the profession. They also lack the networks of the old school tie that still hold sway when people are recruited to the plum jobs."

Roy Greenslade, quoted by the Guardian: "Since I started in the 60s, there has a been a geographic and demographic shift (towards wealthy journalists from the south-east). It’s partly because of the closing down of Glasgow and Manchester offices, which were a talent pool. People once saw a career ladder, from a local weekly, to a regional paper, onto a national. But people are now going straight from master’s [degrees] to Fleet Street.”

Award winning ex-Croydon Advertiser journalist Gareth Davies‏@Gareth_Davies09 on Twitter: "V. sad that this is what Trinity has reduced @croydonad to: running crap listicles in the paper on consecutive pages...A paper with a proud 147-year history reduced to being a thrown together collection of clickbait written for the web...Well, it breaks my heart. I couldn't stick around to watch the paper be destroyed & I would not help them do it...The few reporters who are left are not allowed to meet contacts unless there is a guarantee of a story...Without any prior warning they were put on shifts, including working on Sundays. Every six weeks reporters have to work 12 consecutive days"

Glenn Ebrey ‏@glennebrey on Twitter: "Tweets from @Gareth_Davies09 paint a very sad &, regrettably, accurate picture of what's happening at paper I loved editing for six years."

Neil Benson, Trinity Mirror's regional editorial director, in a statement to Press Gazette: “We are disappointed and baffled by Gareth’s Twitter outburst and do not recognise the claims he makes. The culture at the Croydon Advertiser, particularly since Gareth left and we introduced the new structure, has been one of positivity and excitement about what the future has in store and how the newspaper and website are evolving...The days when reporters could choose, arrogantly, to write about what interests them, rather than what interests the audience, are over. Newspapers are not funded by government or charity donations. As publishers the country and world over are realising, you have to make a profit to survive, and you have to have an audience of significant scale. Without an audience, there is no sustainable future.”

A Trinity Mirror spokeswoman quoted by HoldTheFrontPage: “None of the claims made by Gareth Davies stacks up. Every one of his points is either a misinterpretation of basic standard practice or completely untrue. It is clear he is intent on misrepresenting the Croydon Advertiser and Trinity Mirror, the people who work here and the journalism we produce as part of a personal crusade. We, meanwhile, will continue with our strategy of evolving to ensure a future for our titles.”

Liz Gerard who ran an article by Gareth Davies on her SubScribe blog and got no response from Trinity Mirror when she asked for a comment: "It seems extraordinary for the company to decline to respond to the article on the site where it was published, and then to use another platform to impugn the integrity of a reporter it was happy to claim as its own when he was collecting prizes. Davies is not the man in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, but he is a lone figure standing up to a big organisation and it isn't good PR for that organisation to be seen to be trying to silence or squash him."

Glenn Ebrey ‏@glennebrey on Twitter: "The people at TM south-east are among the most dedicated, talented you will find in the profession...They don't need pushing to work hard - they'll just do it. Try to treat them like human beings with a bit of decency eh?... And the tone of Trinity’s responses – catty, personal, lacking in class – is much more telling than the emptiness of their words."

Guardian production editor DavidMarsh in a farewell blog after 20 years on the paper: "Like many journalists I started off wanting to be Robert Redford in All the President’s Men. But my favourite job was, less glamorously, editing local papers (long before a proposed new newspaper called the Independent decided, inexplicably, to add me to its launch team 30 years ago, almost to the day). At a local level it’s easier to work with the community to change things for, you hope, the better. Campaigning is the lifeblood of a good local newspaper although, given the way they have been grotesquely mismanaged for many years, with staffing cut to the bone, many find it increasingly difficult to do so."

Peter Preston ‏@PJPrest on Twitter: "Flags in San Serriffe at half mast today. Geoffrey Taylor, master of those legendary Guardian April 1 revels, has died, aged 89."

City media analyst Lorna Tilbian writing for the News Media Association on the circulation rises for newspapers sparked by the EU referendum: "The referendum circulation bounce unequivocally demonstrated that print newspapers remain an important source of information and, at times of instability and uncertainty, they become even more valuable to their readers. Advertisers who are shifting their money away from print need to give this some serious thought."

Roy Greenslade on MediaGuardian: "At times of crisis, people need facts and the identification of terrorists, whether dead or live, is an indispensable part of the required information. Indeed, there is clearly a need to know as much as possible about individual terrorists, about their lives and backgrounds. How else can we understand the reasons for their willingness to commit such acts? We should seek more information, not less."

The Times [£] reports: "The Times has been blocked from reporting explosive details in a £132 million lawsuit brought against two of Britain’s top property developers.The Candy brothers and Mark Holyoake, a former friend who is suing them, each employed libel lawyers who argued that a crucial development in the case should be kept secret. In the action the brothers have already been accused of tax evasion, money laundering and blackmail."

John Witherow, editor of The Times, quoted in The Drum: “Appealing for donations of £49 is not the answer, because it's not enough. You need a million people donating £49 to pay for the journalism at the Guardian which is very good but it's expensive. They have to really rethink their model.”

David Mindich in the Columbia Journalism Review suggests journalists cannot be neutral about Donald Trump: "We’ve reached a turning point, and the two criteria for journalists to abandon their objectivity have come to pass: Trump is widely criticized, even by his own party, giving journalists a lot of company in their criticism of him. When Trump suggested that Judge Curiel was incapable of trying a case because of his parents’ birthplace, even House Speaker Paul Ryan, a fellow Republican, called the comments 'racist.'And Trump’s views appear increasingly deviant. No respected journalist would seek a balancing quote from someone who held such a view about a judge or who suggested, as Trump did after the Orlando shootings, that a sitting president was in cahoots with a mass murderer."

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