Journalist with a Capital “J”

When talking about journalism, I often take a kind of pride in my knowledge of the field and how it operates. I have after all spent quite a bit of money learning just what being a journalist is all about. In the age of bloggers and BlackBerries I’m afraid that the ideal I’ve held about what being a journalist means is under siege. This is not to say that technology and the Internet are not effective ways to communicate – but these people are NOT journalists by nature. As a journalist, I hold my news senses higher than most, as I think most journalists do. This is not to say that everyone must spend thousands of dollars to learn the trade – but I do feel they have to be trained, and learn how to effectively and accurately convey the news. Most reasonable people would realize a news story when they see it – but not everyone can see the context and implications of a news item. It is this sharpened macro sense of the news that gives the journalist something more than the average joe.
The role I feel I am best suited is one in which I am informing and presenting the news in the most appropriate way possible.

In this information society, the most important aspect of obtaining that information is determining the credibility of the source. Why I may find it interesting what a blog has to say, I’m not going to rely on it fully as the most relevant source of information. Blogging is by nature a subjective and opinionated enterprise, and likening it to journalism does the trained and learned journalist a disservice. In its defense, it has become a useful tool for newspeople to keep their readers updated – but in these cases the reader knows that the person’s work they are reading is credible – they’re working for their favorite news source.

I read a column George Kennedy wrote a few months back, defending the idea that anyone can be journalist when they live in a country conducive to public discussion and democracy. I found this a little shocking – Professor Kennedy is a prominent and well-known journalist with oodles of formal training. When I read more closely, however, his point was simply that members of a community should have a right to participate in the discussion that the media and journalists have about the goings-on in the world. While I fully support this participatory view, particularly as a policitical science double major, this is not Journalism in my understanding of the word. My Missourian is a wonderful and useful outlet for Columbia residents to write about their lives and their pursuits. That’s great! But its labeled as “citizen journalism,” which serves an entirely different purpose than a newspaper (or any other news medium) does. (Kennedy, George “Let’s define journalism broadly,” 12 June, 2005, 7A)

This is not to say that citizens should not get involved in their communities, or that their points of view are not valid. My point is that citizens should react to the news and get involved. But how much the citizen should be involved should be a choice left to them. A hybrid of the two could potentially be fruitful, although there is a danger that a sort of slanted agenda setting could occur which would not do much good for either party involved, as the news would no longer be objective. Democratic societies work in their prime when citizens get involved – but the value of the news is something that could be severely compromised if the journalist regards to intently what every person has to say.

Technology, and our increasingly digitized world have dictated that journalists change, and now perhaps that journalism itself change. With access to the Internet in the palm of our hands, information flies swiftly from source to reader (or viewer), and thus we have to work twice as hard to give the public information they can’t get anywhere else. Herein in lies what I think makes professional journalists a powerful force – we have access – and a desire to objectively and diligently find information and share it with the world.

Although I do hold my profession in the highest regard, I acknowledge that the professional American journalist often receives a negative view from its consumers, or as Dan Gillmor notes “we journalists enjoy roughly the same public esteem as politicians and used-car salesmen (Gillmor 127).” In this way the role of the journalist is often dictated by the view the public holds of them. This less-than-friendly view of journalists is perhaps why citizen journalism has become increasingly important to many people. As I have outlined here, I think that well-trained and professional journalists are an indepensible part of our democracy, and their role, however chanigng, remains as crucial as it ever was.