What is a Journalist? From Herodotus to the Digital Age

To answer the question of what is a journalist and how the profession is changing in the digital age, we must first lay down some parameters and define what constitutes a journalist. This will not be the only possible definition of the profession, but one that fits within the scope of this essay. It can be argued that a professional journalist is one who works for an official media outlet, independently or freelance, to tell stories of the present in the pursuit of uncovering truth and relay their findings presented as news to the public sphere (Schudson 2003, p. 11). To do this, they conduct research and analyse with intention, with the goal of creating an informative piece on topical news, or a specific subject they deem important to the discussions of the time (Schudson 2003, p. 11). As Findley puts it, a journalist is someone who “is writing history on the fly” (Findley 2009, p. 13). Because of this, as Kitzinger (2007, p. 137) points out, the journalist acts as a consummate “framer of reality,” weaving the narratives of our time and helping to mould public opinion. This is true of the professional journalist, but as we will explore within this essay, one could argue that there have been forgotten pseudo-journalists that existed long before the term was coined, (Saltzman 2010) as well as an increasing influence of the citizen journalist, who although always played a part throughout journalism history has become ever more prevalent since the advent of the digital era. Despite these debates, there is agreement that the professional journalist has always had to adapt to new mediums of communication throughout time, with the digital era being no exception (Deuze and Witschge 2017). However, with the internet's ability to grant anyone in society a platform, how successfully the profession of the journalist has and will adapt to this ever-changing digital landscape is a topic of deep contention in a digital world where the line between consumer and producer has never been more blurred (Perreault and Ferrucci 2020, p. 1305).

Before delving into the digital era however, it is important to look to times when these distinctions were more apparent. Many scholars such as Pettegree (2014) point to the creators of news pamphlets in sixteenth century Europe as one of the first such examples of a professional journalist, but other scholars such as He (2014) date the practice back much earlier to the Song Dynasty in China, citing Stephens’ (2000, p. 100) claims that journalism history had too often been explored narrowly through nationalistic narratives, obscuring the truth of its eastern origins. However, being a multimedia profession, few would argue that it is the fate of the journalist to live and die by the newspaper. Today, the newspaper industry in anglophone countries is falling into decline, with studies showing that in 2022, the estimated daily newspaper circulation in the USA fell by 8-10% from 2021, (Pew Research Center 2023) and as Hare (2016) and Hanusch (2019, p. 259) point out, a 2016 study cited “newspaper reporter” ranking as the worst job in the US due to decreasing opportunities and poor salaries, with similar trends following throughout the western world.

Although it has been a mainstay journalistic medium for centuries, the advent of television, radio and more recently, the digital realm have allowed the role of the journalist to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing mediums of communication within modernity (Perreault and Ferrucci 2020). Thus, the idea that the journalist is not reliant on one media and can exist outside of the newspaper, continuing on into the future, can act as a catalyst into a search of the past for pseudo-journalism and the first known application of the profession's fundamental principles and characteristics which we discussed earlier.

One could argue that the principles of journalism existed long before the advent of the professional journalist, and we can look to the earliest ancient historians as a case study of this pseudo-journalism (Saltzman 2010, p. 153-4). Today, the distinction between a journalist and a historian is evident, as modern historians concern themselves with the events of the past, in the hope of analysing it for future posterity, while journalists, as they have always done, remain concerned with capturing the here and now (Findley 2009). However, the origins of the term history are intertwined with the key tenets of journalism, as the word itself comes from the ancient Greek term historia meaning to enquire and few would argue that it is not the role of a journalist to enquire (Saltzman 2010, p. 155).

Moreover, the supposed father of written history, Herodotus, states in his opening statement that he wrote “so that things done by man may not be forgotten in time” (Herodotus 1921, 1.1) acting as a framer of the world of his present whilst looking forward to the future, rather than like a modern historian, who looks back to the past in the hopes of enlightening the present (Kitzinger 2007). What’s more, Saltzman (2010, p. 154) notes of how modern historians often acknowledge that ancient historians ‘hardly live up to the definition of what a historian should be,’ believing that the term journalist better fits our modern interpretation of these early writers. Pritchett (1993, p. 1) agrees stating that Herodotus was in a sense “a reporter of what he had seen even if he did not understand it.” Therefore, Herodotus arguably has more in common with modern journalists than modern historians, as their fundamental goals to enquire on the issues of their time are intrinsically parallel (Saltzman 2010; Boskov 2020). He represents a plethora of pseudo-journalists who existed before professional journalism, whilst still displaying journalist-like principles and thus as Saltzman (2010 p.154) argues, Herodotus’ true moniker may be more fittingly placed as the father of journalism, making us ponder exactly who and what we consider a journalist today, where the digital rise of the citizen journalist battles to change the definition of the profession much in the same way.

If we look to today’s digital era, the diversification of media channels and audiences, as Bruns and Highfield (2015, p. 59) point out, have caused a drastic decline in audience sizes among the established news outlets, with this audience now being spread across a multitude of platforms. Thus, they argue that this audience no longer forms the unified public sphere which Habermas (1974) envisaged, instead splintering into more niche and ever polarising groups and therefore, the journalist now must accommodate for this more specific audience. Almost inevitably therefore, because of the pressures and challenges these new dynamics present to the modern journalist, (Lepore 2019) there is often a narrative presented that because of the rise of the digital era, the journalist is in crisis, with the Pew Research Center (2022) pointing out that in 2022, 67% of US journalists believed that social media has had a negative impact on journalism. However, evidence suggests that this overall negative outlook from journalists within the digital era is a fairly western-centric problem (Hanusch 2019). Many places in the developing world which have a sustained importance on radio, newspapers and television, such as India or many African countries, show good levels of job satisfaction from their journalists (Hanusch 2019, p. 272). Therefore, it appears that the rise of digital dominance in news media within western countries has made the task of the journalist to appeal to a more specific, smaller proportion of the public sphere within a far more competitive and volatile landscape than before.

Another key reason for these negative sentiments from journalists in western countries could be, as Johnston and Wallace (2016, p. 850) point out, because of the blurring between the definitions of professional and citizen journalists within the digital era. West (2014, p. 2438) argues that now more than ever, it is important to distinguish the professional journalist from that of the “occasional public commentators” as their specialised knowledge and training allows them to play an integral role in modern democracies. Moreover, journalists today are serving as “gatekeepers” (West 2014, p. 2444) of news in a world where the torrent of misinformation blurs fiction from reality. Although it is true that fake news flourishes in a media realm where anyone can have a platform, this argument alone does not acknowledge that although professional journalists may be experts in communication, as Hallin and Mancini (2004, p. 33) point out, journalism has “no systematic body of knowledge or doctrine.” Thus one of the key ways journalism is changing in the current digital landscape is that as a society, we are more exposed to the first-hand knowledge of experts in all professions (Sill 2011, p. 6) who are far more able to act as citizen journalists, without the need of a press journalist to act as an intermediary or “gatekeeper” (West 2014, p.2444) of information. This subsequently provides us with useful opinions or insights unimpeded by the ideology of the established journalistic institutions who may have deemed them for whatever reason unnewsworthy in previous times. Thus, in this way it can be argued that the digital landscape has democratised journalism, (Bowman and Willis 2003, p. 9) providing a simpler and more far-reaching avenue for an abundance of citizen journalists to play an active role in framing the narratives in the news through collecting, reporting and analysing news and information.

To conclude, in this essay we have displayed the scholarly consensus on the key characteristics of a journalist and how the profession adapts to whatever forms of media are prevalent at the time, relying on no specific medium to perform its role as a framer of reality (Deuze and Witschge 2017, p.167). Moreover, because of this lack of formal training throughout the history of the profession, it is fruitful to consider beyond the boundaries of the label journalist, as the fundamental characteristics of the journalist are prevalent throughout time in the form of pseudo-journalists and can be traced all the way back to the first enquirer, Herodotus (Saltzman 2010).

Much in the same way that the label of the professional journalist can restrict us in our search through the past, it can also do the same when we look to the present digital era, as definitions of the term have become all the more obscure due to the sheer number of citizen journalists who play wide-reaching roles within current digital news media (Barnes 2016). Throughout all of this discussion however, a key conclusion seems to be, as time has passed, the number of journalistic voices framing the narratives of our time has been increasing exponentially. Herodotus’ single pseudo-journalistic voice framed our perceptions of an entire continent during the Iron age. The voices of professional journalists since the 17th century have collectively framed the public sphere since the enlightenment. Now, in the digital era, the professional journalist's voice can seem like one drop in an ocean as you swipe to the next post on your social media timeline.

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