Matthew and his Feelings

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The age of the institutional media today looks like a flash in the pan, an aberration from the more-normal mode of citizen publishing. It’s not something we should seek to preserve artificially through laws. When we do, we end up trying trying to divine principles that can help us draw lines between journalists and everybody else. Well, what is their practice? we ask. Do they have sources? Do they have notebooks? Does this person look like a journalist?

These questions are good proxies for the ones we mean to ask: Does this information aid us as citizens? Does it help us understand government, or help to right some wrong? It’s the quality and content of the information that matters to press freedom, not the people spreading it. The “who” proxy will work nine times out of 10, but for the sake of that tenth time, we should try to ask the more central question of “what” the information is that’s at stake.

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Why We Should Stop Asking Whether Bloggers Are Journalists, The Atlantic