A Journalist?

What is a journalist? Before I began reading the text or doing any sort of research towards answering this question - I thought it would be a good idea to describe my current idea of a journalist. When pondering this, the first image that popped into my mind was of a friend of mine, a uni student, who is a practicing journalist (and is in Beijing doing lots of exciting and wonderful journalistic things with the Olympic swimmers). For me, she epitomises what a journalist should be: hard working, a good writer, thick skinned, inquisitive, a good listener etc. I found that a lot of these things were mentioned in the reading as being core skills and attributes of journalists.

However, I hadn't really thought about journalists and the profession of journalism in quite as much depth as the reading went into - and I found it interesting to read about the changing landscape of this media profession. So, I have decided to pull out some of the most interesting aspects of the readings and share what I think about it all.

For me, Peter Cave puts it best: "... a journalist is an intermediary between the people who want information and the sources of information... at the same time, the journalist is a filter of information... and that's where the danger lies." (Tapsall and Varley 2008, 6). This got me thinking about the different 'filters' which journalists need to consider when writing a story - I don't think that journalists themselves are the filters of news, but I do believe that there are a number of factors which do influence the way they write (employers, advertisers etc - more on this later). Our textbook states that more than ninety per cent of journalists feel as though they should be responsible to the public and community - but how can this happen when there are so many other forces and pressures operating against the journalistic ideal of being the 'watchdog' or 'fourth estate' within society?

"News organisations have attempted to combat the slide in news consumers by 'dumbing down' serious stories and increasing the entertainment quotient of the news." (Tapsall and Varley 2008, 13). This is an issue which was also raised in the 'Media Watch' episode which was screened in the tutorial - I remember the example of 'The Sydney Morning Herald' and how it was dedicating more space to celebrity and lifestyle stories than to 'hard' news. I found this quite concerning - does this mean I can no longer get up on my i-read-quality-newspapers high horse/soap box when talking to friends who read 'The Telegraph'? What is a good newspaper in this day and age anyway? The reading also talks about journalists having to deal with the pressure of producing articles with sales impact rather than articles for the greater good - do people really want to hear about whether or not Britney has dropped her baby rather than an international crisis. Did Sales and co. hit the nail on the head when they stated: "It is possible to broadcast to the world, but is the world interested? Apparently not." How sad...

I also found the point about technology interesting, especially the quote from Kingston - "it's all so structured. You know, it used to be free. And new technology has not made us free, it has imprisoned us." (Kingston as cited by Tapsall and Varley 2008, 14). If anything, I would have thought that the internet would have made the practice of journalism more open and fluid - obviously not.

Overall, it is obvious that defining 'journalists' is problematic (to say the least). On one hand, there is this ideal which surrounds the profession, but on the other, is the reality of the matter. The modern day journalist has been pushed and pulled in so many different directions that the original form/profession is almost unrecognisable.