What is a journalist?

What is a journalist? There's an easy answer: A journalist is someone who reports the news. In earlier decades, when access to information was limited, journalists were invaluable. People needed newspapers, and radio and television broadcasts, to understand what was going on in the world. Journalists were the people on the scene who could obtain and share that information. There was really no other way to learn of news stories or important events.

I think that's still the case today, but accredited news organizations like newspapers and television stations not only compete against each other to report the news first, but they have to compete with civilians with camera phones who can capture the story and put it on the Internet instantaneously, and private bloggers who have no restrictions on what they can or cannot say on their personal web pages. Such pressure to provide the most interesting and timely story occasionally leads to severe errors, as there is no time to double-check all the facts.

For instance, the morning after the The Dark Knight Rises premiere, I opened Facebook and noticed that, amongst all the posts raving about the movie, several people mentioning a tragedy in Aurora, Colorado. I didn't hear about it first from a news article or a TV broadcast; I learned about it from Facebook. For me, my Facebook friends were journalists. In the aftermath of the tragedy, every news source out there was scrambling to report the best story, trying to bring me information that was impossible for my Facebook friends to know. During that mad scramble on Friday morning, ABC News reporter Brian Ross discovered an amazing new bit of information that was sure to make headlines: the shooter was a member of the Colorado Tea Party!

As you can see, his statement was not looked on too kindly by Tea Party members, other journalists, or intelligent members of the human race. Here's one response to Ross's insinuation, which also brings up some of his other mistakes in the past:

http://gawker.com/5927715/americas-wrongest-reporter-abc-news-brian-ross-demonstrates-yet-again-how-he-earned-the-title

Technically Brian Ross is a journalist, as he does report the news, but he is a very poor one indeed. I suppose if his goal is to bring attention to himself and his company, he has succeeded, but only if you have the mentality of Captain Jack Sparrow:

-You are by far the worst journalist I have ever heard of!
-But you have heard of me.

There are many examples of journalists who do their job well, but I chose this example because I believe that it's easy to "be a journalist." Finding the name of the shooting suspect on a Tea Party roster for the town in question was news. However, in order to be a professional journalist whom the public can trust, a person needs to be capable of providing honest, factual, relatively unbiased, and timely information. He or she needs to take the profession seriously, and realize the impact of the things they report.

So what is a journalist? Journalists are the eyes, ears, and mouths of our society. They observe the happenings of the world and let the rest of us know what is going on. No matter what happens to our society, there will always be a need for professional news reporting, and those who consider themselves true journalists must be able and willing to take up that mantle, regardless of their personal opinions and beliefs.