Daily Inspiration Quote by Allan Sloan

Sloan is issuing a warning disguised as a pep talk: the quickest way to lose authority as a columnist is to start behaving like one. The chant-like repetition - "Report, report, report. Dig, dig, dig. Think, think, think". - mimics a newsroom mantra, the kind you can tack above a monitor when the job gets abstract and ego-driven. It also reads like a corrective to the modern media career arc, where visibility often outruns verification: once you get a platform, the incentives tilt toward hot takes, speed, and brand maintenance. Sloan’s cadence insists on muscle memory instead. Reporting isn’t a phase you graduate from; it’s the metabolic process that keeps opinion from turning into performance.

The subtext is about status. "Columnist" can sound like promotion - fewer calls, more opinions, a recognizable byline. Sloan punctures that hierarchy. He’s implying that columnist without reporter is a downgrade: you become an interpreter of other people’s facts, or worse, a recycler of consensus. The line "Don’t stop being a reporter because you’ve become a columnist" lands because it reframes the job as continuous accountability. Your argument should be earned, not merely arranged.

Contextually, Sloan comes out of a business journalism world where error has a price tag and certainty is often a fraud. "Dig" signals documents, balance sheets, phone calls returned, inconvenient numbers hunted down. "Think" is the final gate: not just accumulating facts, but testing them for what they actually prove. It’s a credo against punditry-as-content, and it still stings because the industry keeps rewarding the opposite.