Does Blogging=Journalism?

An interesting essay from Jay Rosen @ NYU Department of Journalism looks at a quintessential question - what is a journalist?

By "journalism" we ought to mean the practice of it, not the profession of it. Journalism can happen on any platform. It is independent of its many delivery devices. This also means that journalism is not the same thing--at all--as "the media." The media, or Big Media as some call it, does not own journalism, and cannot dispose of it on a whim.

Nor does any professional group own journalism, any more than museums and galleries can "own" painting. Although the best journalists around today are professionals, this has not always been the case. During Benjamin Franklin's time, printers were the people who served as journalists. They were stationed at the right point in the information flow, and they had the means to distribute news. Printers were often postmasters too, which helped.

If printers and postmasters, who didn't set out to be journalists, can wind up as that, then in any era we should think it possible for people to wind up doing journalism because they find it a logical, practical, meaningful, democratic, and worthwhile activity.