Done with Rehash

Our journalism textbook has a lot of good rules. A lot. One really sticks out to me (because I break it): don't rehash what the quote is saying.
    So often in high school and even in college, we're taught to explain a quote. I was taught to introduce a quote with a short sentence, insert the quote, and then explain what the quote says. Too often, I fall into a lazy pattern of rewording what the quote says while thinking it explains it to the reader. I forget that the reader may not have my pre-existing knowledge. While I constantly do it wrong, here's a passage from The Boston Globe that has it right:

       ...But because so much of the Earth is ocean, only about once a century does something comparable occur over an inhabited area.

“Objects falling over the oceans could be almost completely missed,” Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote in an e-mail. “Only the Air Force and Department of Defense have information on a lot of the airbursts that are unobserved from the ground.”
       The atmosphere largely protected the Earth this time, Binzel said, heating up the meteoroid and causing it to break apart....

      At the end of one paragraph, there is a line that could introduce a quote. Then, a quote is introduced from a valid source. After the quote, the beginning of the next paragraph does not sum up the quote or rehash it, like I would have done. It paraphrases another quote and moves on with the story. The quote itself explains what the reader needs to know. I've learned that I don't need to dumb down everything and be so redundant. 
     The benefit to not explaining each quote is that it saves space and time. It also keeps the writer from forming opinions about the quote. Readers triumph! Writers are saved! Bias is prevented!