A Journalist Writes for the Public

For Article: Who's a Blogger, and/or Who's a Journalist?
Posted by Jane Abao 5/24/2007 8:02:19 PM

The way to tell a journalist from a mere blogger is to look at a considerable portion of a person’s work, including the story at issue. A journalist would follow principles from the way she writes her titles, to the way she structures her story, to the way she treats data, and to the way she is oriented.

A blogger cannot tell a well-crafted headline from a text line. They are usually long and taken from the body text of the story; hence these are called bloglines, not headlines. A blogger has no idea of structure and does not respect why structures should be so. She plays her story writing by the ear and imitates what she thinks are proper. Mostly, a blogger is self-oriented and has no consciousness for societal needs in news. For example, she would be writing more for her own interests than the interests of the public.

I would take the last as a measure of last resort. If she wrote her story such that society can benefit from her publication of the story, then she may be considered a journalist and entitled to all the rights of a journalist.

It should not be the medium that should determine whether one is a journalist or not. Whether she was writing for a newspaper or merely using Google or Wordpress or Yahoo or any other site to beat her story is of no consequence.