In Define “Journalist”, Scot Hacker says:
At the J-School, we’ve been exploring the question of whether bloggers are journalists for a couple of years, in both classroom experiments and in conferences that have drawn fascinated/scared journalists and the blogging elite from around the world. The question can often be boiled down like this: Journalists may argue that “if it’s not edited, it’s not journalism” — a…
Over at Personal Democracy Forum (my other, other home), Chris Nolan takes Tapped to task for privileging “professional” journalists over the online variety: TAPPED Out:
Please God, would someone – anyone – make the people with salaried journalism jobs stop trying to draw a line between what they do for publications that appear on paper and what people like me, working almost entirely on-line do? Will I – will any of us – live long enough to see the silly caterwauling about subsidized punditry, fund-raising and partisan bickering die down to a dull roar? It’s nothing more than a convenient disguise for salaried journalists to use to assure themselves that their station in life is secure from the rabble in its pajamas. It’s short-sighted and silly. And everybody knows (or ought to know) it.
Chris’s perspective is particularly valuable given that she has at different times inhabited both sides of the street.