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Comment by steadicat | Hacker News Reader

She lost me at

   1. A journalist is trained in journalism

I'm a designer and I'm trained in design, but I would never define a designer as someone who is "trained in design".

There are many ways to learn, and various paths to success. Traditional education is definitely not the only way. I know designers who aren't formally trained who are better designers than I ever will be.

I'm pretty sure the same thing can be said about journalists. We've all seen amateurs blow formally trained journalists out of the water, especially when reporting on highly specialized topics.

Besides, her only motivation for that statement is "a journalist requires specific training."

[edit: got gender of author wrong]

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I don't have a huge argument either way, but to back her up a little- I think what she's getting at is a primary split between blogger and journalist. Or, put another way, old media vs. new media. Formal education is by far the easiest way to break them up. You can argue that bloggers are journalists and journalists can be bloggers, but I think for her purposes she's deliberately putting that arbitrary split in between the two to differentiate the two a little better.

The rest of the points she makes are a lot of what's taught in traditional education- impartiality, attribution, things that aren't particularly stressed in the blogosphere. Again, they're not confined to journalism in particular, but if you're trying to argue journalism vs. blogging in particular (like she and everyone else seemingly wants to debate), they're definitely values held higher in journalism than blogging.

I would postulate that more than specific training, there are journalistic (sic?) conventions that you have to adhere to and that you learn during your course of study. I'm not saying that one cannot learn this on their own with some effort, but that most bloggers don't know or don't care to learn it.

To compare it to design/designing/designer wouldn't be accurate. There are certain aspects of design that natural artistic ability and skill covers, while in journalism there are rules (investigation, disclosure, etc.) that must be learned, you're not born with them. I've seen bloggers ignore these (ignorance, refusal to adhere to them, and so on) and some of their end products make me cringe.

Not to say that journalists themselves don't ignore this from time to time, take for example this recent Breitbart brouhaha, but I think it all boils down to the terminology: Bloggers would like to be known as journalists, and journalists would like to keep that distinction to themselves. Each have a case. But I think there is still a need to distinguish one from the other.

(edited to clarify an opinion)

Then you should have read a sentence further where she says, "Whether in the hallowed halls of higher learning or in the less-hallowed halls of a professional newsroom, the journalist has been trained as such." She doesn't say that traditional education is the only way.

In my profession of software, there are many accomplished programmers who do not have a college degree. If you want to be a programmer, a CS program is a great way to get there. If you don't go to college, you'd better be learning through books, pair programming, or through other avenues. Just because you are writing code does not mean you're a programmer.

If you had of kept reading you would have seen them say that it doesn't matter if they were trained in higher education or in the newsroom as long as they were trained.

And then if you read a little more you'd see that this blogger hadn't structured it very well and seemingly contradicts one para with the following one:

A bachelor’s degree in journalism, media studies, mass communication, or some similarly named program along with at least a few years under the tutelage of editors is the best preparation for calling oneself a journalist.

Suggesting that one needs a BA along with years of tutelage.

In any case I'd like to retitle the piece "No true journalist". She sounds like a cabinet maker bemoaning the Ikea-isation of furniture.

Best case not only case. Having the formal education then adding a few years experience. The alternative case she listed was just the experience in the newsroom.

Best case to prepare to call oneself a journalist sounds like it would be essential to actually doing it, rather than being preferential in preparing to do it. But yeah.

She sounds like a cabinet maker bemoaning the Ikea-isation of furniture.

No, she sounds like a hacker bemoaning the rise of learn-to-program-in-24-hours 'app' developers.

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