Define "Journalist"

In my definition -- true storyteller -- yes. He's not all that popular on here, but personally I think he meets your criteria of doing it artfully.

 

Ditto. Saved me having to write much. Thanks.

 

Great post, jg ... but gulp. 

Cigar Butt and Battered Fedora have already PM'd me with their outrage.

 

jgmacg,

I can't explain the dynamic of a television newsroom. Having worked in both a newspaper newsroom and a television newsroom, I can tell you the television newsroom is more collaborative. In fact the art itself is highly collaborative. In the field-- the "shoe leather" part you talked about-- you work in teams. And if you can't do that, you won't make it.

If you're familiar with the test for getting a job with the State Department... There are written and other "individual" parts of the test that most smart folks ace. Then the test-takers are put into groups and given a conflict to resolve. That's where most people fail the test, because of ego, poor communication skills, inability to cede power, whatever. Working in a group requires a special skill set that simply isn't recognized by some print folk.

So, if your idea of anchoring is simply reading prompter, you couldn't be more wrong.

I know you were referring to the 70's, but I just anchored a half hour show and wrote every word I read...

 

But what if D-O-G spelled cat?

 

You and the Codas are safe, Shotty. After brief debate, the Poynter Center voted overwhelmingly to keep the shotglass. The big butt and the bad hat are going back to grad school to retrain themselves, however - perhaps toward a career in the theater.

 

Luggy,

Having begun in television myself, back before the earth cooled, I know how collaborative that medium is. Especially at the local level, where there's a lot of overlap from one responsibility to another. Shooters often edit their own tape, anchors are often reporters and reporters are often producers. (Go to the small markets, and the reporters are like one-man bands - shooting their own stand-ups, running around in front of the camera, cutting their own pieces, etc..) And while this isn't nearly as true at the network level, where there's a torrent of money, television tends to spread its work out horizontally, across the number of bodies available for the doing of it. And as you say, the minimum number of people needed to shoot a medium-market field piece nowadays is two or even three. Teamwork, as you say.

Print work tends to be more vertically integrated, and compartmentalized, with the stories being passed up a ladder of individuals until the stories arrive on the page. Reporters and photographers working on the same story often don't even work on it at the same time.

Having said that, I will also say that I began my career in 1975 at a network affiliate newsroom in what was then the 13th largest market in America. Our lead anchor never wrote a word or worked on a story. Occasionally we would prop him up in front of something - City Hall, say - if we were doing a sweeps piece on prostitution or runaway teens, and let him read the intros from the field, so that he at least gave the appearance of being a correspondent/journalist. He was very good at what he did, reading aloud, and went from our market to market #3, where his career continued to flourish over the course of decades and he became much beloved.

He was a good man, not given to self-deception, and refreshingly honest and modest, and never once tried to call himself a journalist. He referred to himself only as an anchor.

I held my last TV news position in 1998. Maybe things have changed since then. But while I understand that things have improved somewhat - that there's more enterprise reporting being done in TV, and that there are more people with more training and more talent than ever before on more outlets than at any time in our history, I would still ask you and your colleagues at every level of broadcast journalism this question: If we all awakened tomorrow, and because of some newsprint Rapture, some hard-news Apocalypse, and there were no newspapers or magazines or wire services left behind, would television outlets - "news aggregators" before that term even existed - still be able to put on their news shows?

 

Sometimes.

Someone who reports news.  This could come in a lot of forms...beat writer, feature writer, columnist, TV, radio, or Internet reporter...I'm pretty liberal about it.  But if a columnist or talk show host basically just spouts opinion without doing any real reporting, those are the people I would eliminate from being "journalists."

Much easier to give examples of whom I don't think is a journalist:  The Boston Sports Guy and Mike and the Mad Dog, for sure.  But then there are some people I would say are sometimes journalists and sometimes not.  People like Whitlock and Bill O'Reilly would fall under that category.  Sometimes they're reporting, sometimes they're just bloviating.
       

 

Interesting. And I'm not saying you're wrong, Jack. But here's a side question: Does the act of entertaining disqualify a writer from being a journalist?

 

Not at all.  For example, I find good feature writers to be both highly entertaining and completely within the bounds of being a journalist.

 

A journalist is an unemployed reporter.

 

Sort of like a "consultant"