At any rate, after culling the sources and analyzing each conceptualization of a journalist, we identified common elements and offered this definition of a journalist (the italicized words represent the elements): A journalist is someone employed to regularly engage in gathering, processing, and disseminating (activities) news and information (output) to serve the public interest (social role). Breaking things down, to be employed means the person’s primary source of livelihood comes from journalistic activities, including the gathering, processing, and disseminating of news and information. The person’s role is to serve the public welfare (e.g., reporting on issues central to society’s well-being in matters of health, safety, order, morality, economics, and politics). As an output, news and information reflect not only journalistic activities (e.g., processing in the form of analysis) but also the ethical principles (e.g., fairness) that govern those activities. Finally, the person must engage in the journalistic activities on a regular basis (the exact meaning of regularity is open for debate).
FATAL BLOW TO NEW FORMS OF JOURNALISM
To be clear, we did not offer that definition as normative. It’s descriptive. It simply unifies the conceptions of the three domains and the elements that others have used to define a journalist. In other words, the study states 1) this is how a bunch of sources have defined a journalist, 2) this is a definition that unifies how they have done so, and 3) this is why that definition is unwise. The third point is critical because, as we conclude in the study, it would be unwise to adopt a definition that excludes unpaid bloggers and citizen journalists who gather, process, and disseminate news and information on matters of public concern.
via www.pbs.org
Be sure to follow the link to get the full set up and the full conclusion.
I ran into a variation on this problem when commissioned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2010 to do a census of journalists at local public broadcast stations. For our purposes we defined journalist as anyone with a “primary responsibility for the gathering, processing or presenting of local news or public affairs” at the station. It was a pretty wide net that essentially allowed the station respondent to define who to count as a journalist.
One surprise that shouldn’t have been was that many small stations require general managers and program directors to help assemble and present news content. Another surprise was that for every employed journalist, we found somebody providing news who was an unpaid volunteer, in-kind contributor or student.
Thus the well-respected public media news you get from NPR and PBS stations requires a lot of hands beyond reporters and producers… and goes to show that not only is the definition of journalist changing but that it often takes multiple “journalists” to do journalism.