Section 1: Professional Journalism

The professional status of journalism is frequently contested. Unlike doctors or engineers, questions about a journalist’s capacity to do her “job” are not put to sleep after obtaining a university degree. The origin of such doubts might lie in the apparent simplicity of the practice of journalism.

The American Press Institute defines journalism as the activity and the product of "gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information." The API argues that anyone can produce journalism as long as they put the public interest at the top of their priorities, and follow methodic steps to verify the information they use and publish. So where is the line separating professionals from citizen reporters who meet the API's criteria? Is there a line?

Professional journalism is often defined in terms of its relationship with mass media. Decades ago, that would mean newspapers, television and radio, media that set the standards to the practice of journalism. Media managers and organizations, with their years of experience in the industry and their circulation and rating numbers behind them, must have some criteria that allows them to identify the news from a sea of irrelevant information, and to present that news in a meaningful way, right?

Hopefully, yes. However, today’s media environment is more complex than 50 years ago. Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and other free platforms are also media, and they facilitate the spread of information to a degree that pretty much anyone can conduct research, write and distribute stories to the public.

Conceptualizing professional journalism as traditional media output is evidently problematic and misleading in today’s media environment. A journalist does not have to be part of a traditional media organization to do journalism, and Twitter users or bloggers are definitely not journalists just because they can publish content online.

Some believe ethics set journalism apart from mere content production and sharing. The notion of journalism as a public service establishes its relationship with values such as impartiality, non-partisanship and benevolence. As factual as this ethical dimension might be, it is irrelevant when it comes to differentiate professional and citizen journalism because highly organized forms of citizen journalism also submit themselves to codes of ethics. Moreover, individual “non-professional” reporters have followed journalistic ethical principles *motu proprio* for a long time now.

Evidently, journalism as a profession is hard to define. Some institutions and scholars have even started to talk about journalism not in terms of a profession but in terms of a practice. We increasingly hear about individuals who, instead of being journalists, “commit random acts of journalism.” The phrase, coined by journalist and author Dan Gillmor, has functioned to embrace as journalism the content produced by those who engage in the distribution of information that has been collected, fact-checked, produced and distributed in any way. The quality and format of information itself along with the medium and the diploma (or the lack of a diploma) of the producer are thus taken out of the equation that defines what an “act of journalism” is.

Therefore, the notion of journalism as an act opens up the possibility of incorporating citizens and non-professionals to the development—and improvement—of journalism in any of its venues. In the next section, I discuss some definitions of citizen journalism so that we can start considering the ways in which it contributes to and challenges professional journalism and traditional media outlets.

Please share your own definitions of professional journalism, and provide links to journalistic texts in which citizens and trained journalists have collaborated. It would be good to discuss how all these somewhat abstract concepts translate into real-world journalism practice.