When Am I a Journalist?

In the wake of the Quadrant hoax affair, there has been a continuing and sometimes quite heated debate on this blog and others about the similarities and differences between bloggers and journalists. (Start here and follow the links if you are coming in late). Now media academic Jason Wilson has given the issue a good thinking through on the Gatewatching blog. He asks what I think is the most important question. Not “who is a journalist” or “are bloggers journalists” but “when am I a Journalist?” He focusses on what journalists do, rather than who they are.

Says Wilson:

“In the moments when they’re deciding whether or not to publish a piece of news or gossip that’s not generally known or available, I suggest that the best strategy is for bloggers to think of themselves as journalists. My answer to the question in this post’s title is: you’re a journalist when you’re publishing news. In that situation I think it’s a good strategy  for bloggers to behave as journalists ideally would, and ask themselves the same questions that journalists do. That means trying to confirm information, and not just because truth is a defence against defamation in every Australian jurisdiction. If you can get confirmation from a reliable source – preferably the person, people or organisation that the news is about – legally, you’re in the clear. You can also have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re telling the truth.  There are many ways to make sure of information, but I still think that it may mean occasionally picking up the phone. Notwithstanding John Quiggin’s point about journalists having a kind of professional licence that excuses such intrusions, if bloggers want to avoid trouble they may occasionally need to steel themselves and ring the subject of their rumour.

I agree almost entirely with Wilson, but would add a few observations. The Quiggin post that Wilson references makes the point that journalists operate with an extraordinary licence, that allows them to ring up the great and powerful and fire questions. It’s not so easy for a blogger to get an interview (not that it is always easy for journalists, either).

As a journalism educator I know that the biggest psychological hurdle wannabe journos have to vault is the act of picking up the telephone or collaring someone in person in order to ask annoying or intrusive questions.

Students will Google for hours, do public record searches, bury themselves in the clippings files – anything to forestall the need for actual human confrontation.

Yet this is the main way in which journalists find things out, and finding things out is the core trade skill of a journalist, and our main claim to usefulness. It is also the reason why journalism is, at its heart, dirty work, particularly when it is done well. We should worry when the business of journalism becomes too neat and tidy, too clean. Interviewing well involves overcoming a psychological barrier to do with being “nice”. Journalists leap the barrier to ask questions face to face or voice to voice in a way that often makes everyone uncomfortable. Academics and bloggers generally do not do these things.

Finding things out involves trying hard to talk to people you don’t know and who have no reason for wanting to talk to you. Often it involves making people angry, or hurting them.

It involves opening yourself up to rejection and anger. It involves building relationships of trust with sources – and not only and not chiefly political professionals or spin doctors. Sometimes one must get close to the loud, the objectionable. The smoother the source, the less likely they will tell you anything that is both important and new

So the reluctance to pick up the phone or collar someone is very understandable,  and the social licence given by the title “journalist” certainly helps – although most professional journalists still find it difficult.

And the fact that journalism done well is often dirty work is the reason why the search for new business models to support journalism is so important. It is not because professional journalists are the only ones who can do journalism. As Wilson shows and we all should know by now, lots of people can do it. And many people who call themselves journalists don’t do it well or often enough.

But the fact is that if you want journalism done constantly, consistently and well, with disinterest and with experience, then it will be necessary at some stage to pay for it, including after the industrial superstructure of Big Media has declined.

UPDATE: An interesting perspective on this bloggers and journos thing from The Guardian