What Is A Journalist?

Starting to study multimedia journalism as an undergraduate this year, I had no idea what to expect. I started asking myself, “What exactly is a multimedia journalist? How exactly do they get their news out into the world? What exactly am I getting myself into here?” As it turned out, nobody in my first ever journalism lecture this week could pinpoint a definition for the title of a multimedia journalist – not even the lecturer herself. 

Delving straight into the topic, we talked about traditional perceptions of journalists, and how we were all up for a bit of a challenge from the public; as it so happens, journalists are not widely-trusted, liked, or respected in the general community. In fact, I decided to pursue this thought a little further, and after doing some research, I came across a study that showed that Australian consumers rate newspaper journalists 1/10 for their honesty and ethicality, whereas television and talkback radio journalists are both given 1.8/10. This had me a little bit worried, but after thinking about it some more, I decided that views on traditional journalists weren’t quite going to be enough for me; after all, the JN1001 cohort are not studying to become traditional journalists, we’re here to become multimedia journalists. 

As I discovered in both this week’s lecture and tutorial, being a multimedia journalist is much more than simply learning how to write an effective column for a weekly newspaper. In our first tutorial, we were all told to create Twitter accounts to track news updates and current affairs, and to start blogs to log both our learning experiences and newsworthy stories of our own. Through this very first lecture, it could be seen that in the last decade journalism has expanded from being presented in straight, serious, and sometimes staid forms such as newspapers and nightly television bulletins, to being presented in highly engaging ways such as through vlogs, blogs, and photo journals. These forms of journalism not only allow the journalist to reach wider audiences than typically possible through traditional news methods, but also allow the audiences to interact with the journalist and the story, offering opinions, feedback and additional information. 

Through studying this course, I really hope to be able to not only identify what the confines of ‘traditional’ journalism are, but to absolutely obliterate them. Many popular journalists of today have come about through very modern media, like video blogging, such as Lonely Planet journalist Natalie Tran who started her career as a university student on YouTube, and now reaches audiences worldwide with both her professional and personal vlogging. Through doing this, Tran can not only present her ideas and experiences with millions of viewers, but also actively collect feedback, and interact with her viewers to hone in on exactly what kind of content they are looking for in her work. This helps her break away from traditional forms of journalism while giving her the upper hand in presenting the precise form of journalism that modern audiences are demanding.

Through shifting the medium in which contemporary journalists write, public perspectives too are shifting; where the journalist was previously untouchable and remote to the audience, they are now tangible, personal, and delivering news on a whole new level. With a lot of hard work and dedication, I can only hope to follow modern journalists like Tran with my ventures into the massive world of multimedia journalism.