"As digital media become ubiquitous and more and more of us communicate and collaborate online, every person is capable of doing something that has journalistic value," Dan Gillmor has pointed out on Salon.com. "In the anyone-can-publish world," he writes, "who is a journalist?" Rather than answer, he believes the question is not about journalists and should be "what is journalism?"

He cites BBC News and New York Times as practicing clearcut journalism, while social videos on YouTube are clearly not journalism. However, problems arise when one digs "deeper into into new media, and the answer starts to get complicated." Does "commentary informed by knowledge" automatically become journalism? How about a Facebook wall which provides news to someone else? Or community members writing about local conditions on websites, can this be considered journalism?

Yet, "relatively few of these folks imagine themselves as journalists, and they'd laugh if you called them one." One of the reasons he gave for this is the amount of baggage which comes with the tag of the journalist. "The journalism business has fallen on hard times for reasons beyond the loss of advertising revenue," he explains. "Epic failure to do our jobs...combined with an obsession for sensational, trivial topics has contributed to plummeting respect the public has for the craft."

Maybe a new name is needed for those people creating and passing along relevant information through new media. Gillmor believes that the future lies in everyone participating rather than passively receiving; meaning while passing along information, the responsibility of being ethical should not be forgotten.

"We are all creating media," he emphasizes. "Any one of us can, and many of us will, commit an act of journalism. We may contribute to the journalism ecosystem once, rarely, frequently or constantly. How we deal with these contributions - is going to be complex and evolving. But it's the future."

Source: Salon.com