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Comment by ksdale | Hacker News Reader

I respectfully disagree completely. I'm an attorney, and my profession is completely beholden to this kind of credentialism, where you can't possibly do the work if you aren't a member of the club.

I happen to believe that the work is the work, and it's done well or poorly regardless of your membership in an organization or an association. And at least for attorneys, most of the work isn't nearly as difficult as we like to pretend. It's just more lucrative for the profession to be scandalized at the idea that people who aren't trained professionals could do many of the things we do.

Journalism does require standards, but I'd say as long as the standards are adhered to, journalism is happening.

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I respectfully disagree with your disagreement. The point isn't that journalists need a more rigorous passage into a professional association or credentialling. Its more that journalism is a team effort, where writers, line editors, fact checkers, designers, data folks and others work together to produce an accurate and complete work.

You wouldn't take on a big case of national impact entirely solo and expect, and journalists can't produce a trustworthy product in isolation, not in the long run at least.

> Its more that journalism is a team effort, where writers, line editors, fact checkers, designers, data folks and others work together to produce an accurate and complete work.

And yet it produces so unbelievably large and frequent issues with the accuracy and completeness that this either does not help, is not the goal, or journalists not working for large publishers must get this wrong all the time, all over the place. I don't think that's the case, and I do think that the belief that it somehow helps is specifically why there are so many giant issues with the current media products.

Or possibly standards in journalism have fallen and this is the next step.

I would say most of what passes for journalism, is no longer journalism.

Journalism is about passing on the who-what-when-where-why. Factual information to the public. You see very little of that these days. Too many opinion in basic article.

People are always mentioning Gell-Mann amnesia as well. I think this is one area that independent writers, especially ones who have a lot of experience in a particular industry, can add a lot. They can write about events, technology, and scholarship, from the perspective of an expert. They can be better at passing on the who-what-when-where-why because they know enough to not just have to take anyone's word for it, and if they're good, they're confident enough in their position that they don't have to signal any sort of ideological credentials to have their facts accepted, so they don't signal. Obviously this is an ideal, but I think it's a very plausible one.

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