Define "Journalist"

With absolutely no offense intended to the site or any of us, I've always hated the term anyway.

I've usually replied with specifics when people ask what I do, and I've never referred to myself as a journalist.

 

I've hated the term "copy editor" a lot more than I've hated the term "journalist." Just not quite sure why. But if I'm asked what I do, it's either just "I'm an editor," or I'm specific about what all I do on the desk.

 

I generally tell people I'm a writer or reporter. I leave "sports" out of it until the need to get specific arrises. I'm not a loser fan boy hanging around for free food and tickets, so I prefer not to give people room to make that assumption. It also keeps me from having to answer questions about sports 24-7.

This weekend I do not know what label to give myself. At the rate I'm going on a rather lengthy profile due in the morning, I'm inclined to think I'm none of the above.

Help :-\

 

We're not journalists or writers or reporters, we're information delivery technicians!

 

A lot of people here seem to have attended journalism  school, not sportswriting school or copy-editing school or news-gathering school or reporter school.

 

Many definitions are going to have exceptions, and I this is one of those definitions. If you take the dictionary reference I used ("a person who writes for newspapers and magazines"), there are newspaper companies -- I used to work for one -- that make little pretense of journalistic endeavor. The one I worked for at one point went as far as to decree that it was undergoing a -- and I'm using their words here -- "paradigm shift to a marketing communications company." I wasn't real clear on what exactly that was supposed to be, but I knew I didn't like it, and I soon parted ways with said company.

Here's a tangential question: Should doctoral candidates publishing their theses be considered journalists?

 

I've got to think that the reason for publication has to be a factor here. No.

 

I don't think of myself as a journalist.
When someone else describes me as a journalist, I cringe.
Journalist is a word that conjures up old men dressed in bowties discussing lofty affairs, and not a guy like me.
I just work for a paper.

 

I've referred to myself as a journalist on several occasions. Each time, I feel like an ass. There's something about the term that makes it sound as though you're claiming superior status.

I prefer to say that I'm a writer. That gets the point across, and people can ask if they want to know more.

 

i believe joe morgan just called jon miller a journalist, during sun nite broadcast.

agree or disagree?

 

Agree. He accumulates notes before the game, reports what he sees, at times conducts interviews used as anecdotes during the game. Yes, journalist.

 

I'm not sure why I find this thread so discouraging, but a couple of thoughts here.

First, we seem to be having trouble with "journalist" in part because we haven't defined "journalism." That the one dictate the other seems obvious.

From Webster's Third New International, the bane of copy-editors everywhere:

The collection and editing of material of current interest for presentation through the media of newspapers, magazines, newsreels, radio, or television.


There are at least 8 further entries, all of which refine that first assertion. I presume we can now include the Internet among those media as well.

Ergo, a journalist is someone who does those things in those places. Ignoring, that is, the thousand other qualifiers we've already mentioned. And the fact that the definition specifies nothing about that "material of current interest" being true.

That "journalist" is something some of you want very much to be called - and from which others shrink - has more, I think, to do with the inflation of middle-class American language than it does with what we do. "Journalism" now has gathered around it the class status of an actual profession. It's not, of course, it's a craft. In the hands of the masters, it's an art. But an actual profession - like law or medicine - implies a governmental certification process, and the oversight of a central governing body having the independent authority to discipline or expel its own members should they screw up. We have none of that.

"Journalism" became a "profession" when we started charging more to go to school for it. Because the word seemed to bear a little more gravitas and a lot more uptown stature. It grew out of our own inferiority complex, and out of the long history of bad, biased reporting in a hundred yellow newspapers. It sounded better than "scribe," or "scribbler" or "newshound," and was meant to do away with the shotglass, the cigar butt and the battered fedora.

And this will sound insensitive or chippy, and I don't mean it to, but the words "journalist" and "journalism" didn't start getting thrown around with any real frequency in this country until the television folks, mostly anchors, started feeling insecure about what it was they did for a living. This is in the early 1970's, at the dawn of the local Happy Talk formats. What do you call yourself when your job is to sit on a stage and read aloud the words that someone else has written? Ignoring for a moment the fact that you were supposed to have collected the material yourself, the word "journalist" was just vague and grave and tweedy enough to imply a contributory role in our ongoing democratic experiment.

Most writers and reporters were and are happy to be called writers or reporters. Most editors, too, copy- or otherwise.

This issue of naming ourselves seems to come up whenever a new technology looms, or whenever nonfiction content providers like us take a beating in the public opinion polls. What do you mean you don't trust me, Mr. John Q. Public? I'm a journalist! I went to a special school for it! I spent $160,000! I had two semesters of ethics and I can type 25 words a minute!

Which situation is further aggravated when the J-schools start teaching Public Relations as part of the journalism sequence. Can flaks and hacks be on both sides of a story at once? One pitching and one catching? Does it make any sense as a public service to teach the secrets of unearthing information to people who'll eventually use those same secrets to bury it? The public doesn't seem to think so.

At its best, "journalist" delivers the gravity it promises, and implies a calling to speak truth to power, and to spend shoe leather in service of telling the stories of what it means to be human. At its worst it's a pretentious figleaf for telegenic halfwit baritones and avaricious gossipmongers.

As it always has been.