What Does It Mean to be a Journalist Nowadays?

Many things, it turns out. But it’s been that way since the start.

Note: This is the essay I turned in for my History of Journalism class in 2013. We had to make use of selections from the professor’s chosen stock of sources while responding to one of a few prompts.

If you were to search for the essence, the definition, or the necessary and sufficient conditions of what it is to be a reporter, and found a hard and fast answer, you’d probably be mistaken. Those who now claim the moniker of “reporter” as an occupational title no more exhaust the possible attributes or goals that can attach to the term than does someone who as a profession practices philosophy. This is true retrospectively, since before modern journalistic conventions were conceived people still did what still could be called “reporting,” and it’s true presently as well.

Here is Christopher Columbus in a 1493 letter to Lord Raphael Sanchez, treasurer to the monarchs of Spain, in which he reports on his findings of the world unknown:

I saw no monsters, neither did I hear accounts of any such except in an island called Charis, the second as one crosses over from Spain to India, which is inhabited by a certain race regarded by their neighbors as very ferocious. They eat human flesh…