Defining journalism is a lot easier said than done

The ripples continue to spread from a recent Oregon court ruling involving a blogger who was sued for defamation, and argued that she should be covered by the states media shield law. The judge decided that she didnt qualify as a journalist, which in turn reignited the old debate over whether bloggers are (or can sometimes be) journalists. Some have argued that instead of this question, its more important to define what journalism is, and ensure that it remains protected. But in many ways, that is even harder to define than who qualifies to be a journalist.

To recap the case, Crystal Cox who refers to herself as an investigative blogger was sued for defamation as a result of some blog posts she wrote about a company and its CEO. The judge who heard the case looked at Coxs blog and ruled that she wasnt a member of the media, at least for the purposes of Oregons media shield law, because she wasnt affiliated with any traditional media outlets. This caused a wave of outrage in the blogosphere from many (including me) who believe that bloggers can be journalists regardless of whether they work for a mainstream media entity.

We shouldnt be protecting journalists, but journalism

In the wake of the ruling, several bloggers includ! ing Kash mir Hill at Forbes and David Carr of the New York Times noted that Coxs behavior went way beyond what most journalists (professional or not) would describe as journalistic: among other things, she created domains aimed at tarnishing the reputation of her targets, and then apparently sent an email to the company offering her services as an SEO consultant to repair the reputation she helped destroy.

As Rebecca Rosen at The Atlantic pointed out, this allowed journalists everywhere to heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: Shes not a journalist; shes just a crazy lady with WordPress! We dont need to protect her. But this avoids the real question, said Rosen not who is or isnt a journalist, but what is journalism and how do we make sure that it is protected? The framers of the U.S. constitution werent concerned with journalists, she said, because they didnt even exist yet as we know them. Instead, they wanted to protect free speech regardless of who engages in it.

Journalism professor Jay Rosen has made a similar point: we should be talking about protecting journalism, he says, not just trying to figure out who is a journalist. But how do we define what constitutes journalism? The judge in the Oregon case tried to come up with some qualities that he said Cox didnt exhibit, including:

proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest
keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted
mutual understanding or! agreeme nt of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources
creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others
contacting the other side to get both sides of a story

All of these are excellent examples of things that some journalists do but there are plenty who dont, and practices are all over the map. The point about confidentiality alone is probably ignored by more journalists than adhere to it (not to mention the confusion over the exact meaning of phrases like off the record, on background and not for attribution). Should licensing bodies be giving tests, the way they do for doctors and lawyers before they are accredited? Some think they should. Josh Stearns of the non-profit group Free Press, who has been tracking journalists arrested during the crackdown on the Occupy movement, argues that actions should speak louder than labels.

How do we classify random acts of journalism?

Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, who has been using Twitter as a one-man newswire about the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere, noted that he wouldnt meet many definitions of a journalist because he isnt actually a reporter and I doubt that he maintains detailed notes of the conversations he conducts with people in the Arab world over Twitter, or discusses confidentiality agreements with them in depth. He also does a lot of assembling the writings and postings of others, as the judge put it. But I dont think anyone would argue that wh! at Carvi n is doing isnt journalism.

When a Pakistani Twitter user posted observations about the Osama bin Laden raid while it was happening, a debate sprang up about whether what he did qualified as journalism, and Carvin argued that there are more and more examples of what he called random acts of journalism, where someone happens to be in a certain place and provides on-the-scene reporting or takes a photo of a plane that has landed in the Hudson River, for example.

Are these people journalists? Not really. But what they are doing is clearly one of the crucial elements of journalism now as journalism becomes an ecosystem that anyone can become part of, rather than a static concept associated with a specific group of professionals and a specific group of platforms. Learning how to work within that process, to add journalistic skills (however we define them) to the streams of information that are flowing over us, is more crucial than ever, regardless of what we call the people who do that.

I think we have to resist the temptation to restrict our definition of journalism, just because there is some bad journalism out there (something there was plenty of before the internet and blogging came along). As Jay Rosen argues, journalism gets better when more people do it, and we should think about how to make that easier, not harder.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Yan Arief Purwanto and Petteri Sulonen

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