i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
One can write for newspaper and not be a journalist. Columnist for example.
Ah yes! The elusive columnist! None of those ever attended J school or are held to journalism standards. They can definitely print whatever the fuck they want without any sort of fact finding or double checking.
In fact, at our newspaper only about a quarter of the writers are ‘real’ journalists with journalism degrees, including myself.
From my personal experience (20 years in radio, 8 in newspapers), even most actual journalists don’t really call themselves journalists. I tend to refer to myself as a writer in general, since I also do commercial copy, I write reviews and handle all sorts of general writing and public contact.
Journalist is not a protected job title. Anyone can call themselves a journalist. Even that other poster. Because of that, I tend not to use it as a job title, since it’s been devalued a bit by everyone with a blog or vlogging channel calling themselves journalist.
I’m seriously wondering what the other poster’s point was…
