What is Journalism?

First off, welcome to this new blog that I have set up for my Journalism class at RRC.

The blog is an assignment for class to discuss various things in the world of Journalism and our first post was to look into what journalism was...

This is a pretty broad question but perhaps that is appropriate because Journalism is a broad field and it seems to be changing everyday.

The interesting thing is that some people argue that journalism is dying, while others believe that it is simply evolving with the times and getting more and more exciting.

The answer, as usual, probably lies somewhere in the middle. The traditional forms of journalism such as the print newspaper and idealistic images of 1950s style families sitting around watching the national news are dying. They are products of a simpler time and there just isn't time for them in todays day in age.

Today, Journalism seems to have morphed into this wild new world with words like Blog, Twitter, and App taking over.

Simply put, the world moves so fast nowadays that Journalism has to be faster and more instantaneous. This has lead to a much more independent and less structured form of journalism moving to the fore where anyone can blog and stay connected through social media.

Reporters roles have changed as well. Instead of being able to be experts in one field and sticking to it, they now need to be jacks of all trades. You cannot simply write for print any longer, but rather need to write your story, take photos for it, film footage to be posted on Twitter and so on and so forth.

I guess what I am saying is that Journalism has become harder than ever to nail down into one specific definition. It is now a million different things.

It is different to everyone.

I sometimes long for the old days of journalism. I always wanted to be that press reporter in the fedorah with the suspenders and the notepad out roving for the truth.

While that image may be lost, the core values of Journalism have not really changed. The goal remains to find stories that will interest people or that people need to know and to bring them to them in effective ways.

What has been altered is the way that we do it and what we can be sure of is that the changes will not end.

Despite this long winded post, it has become clear that you can answer the question in the post title in simply one word.

What is Journalism?

Changing.