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Sir,

In reference to your scurrilous column which appeared on MountainSky December 6... Writing and publishing columns at an obscure website is not journalism. What makes you think it is? As a professional journalist, I find it amusing that so many untrained people think they are doing   journalism just because they can type anything that comes into their heads and can display it on a webpage somewhere. Silly.

Response:

Journalism is like carpentry. Anyone can do it. Many people who do carpentry -- most, in fact -- are not professional carpenters. They do carpentry occasionally, as a hobby, or through necessity. The fact that anyone can do carpentry does not mean that anyone can do it well. A professional is likely to be more skilled than most amateurs, because the professional devotes more time to doing carpentry and because he's likely to have a passion to learn and improve his skills. Your profession -- journalism -- is like carpentry and masonry and landscaping and plumbing... and I could go on endlessly. These are all excellent trades, and all of them can be enjoyed by amateurs. An individual might do plumbing, brick laying and journalism, all in the same day and all with a measure of skill, even if he is a programmer by profession.

As a professional journalist, you will find that much of the  journalism you read on the web is not up to your own standards, just as the keen eye of a professional carpenter would find flaws in the way I hung a door on my garage recently. But the existence of flaws in my door hanging, can't change the fact that I did hang the door competently: it opens, shuts, locks and unlocks smoothly, it keeps out the weather... in short, it does everything a door needs to do. A professional would have installed it quicker, would not have asked any dumb questions at the hardware store, and wouldn't have needed quite as wide a caulking bead on the left side. Yes, you will see a lot of journalism on the web that doesn't meet your standards, but you have no more power to say it isn't journalism than a professional carpenter has the power to say I didn't hang the door.

I hope you are aware that being a professional is no assurance that your work will be superior to that of all amateurs. Do you know what a wood butcher is? A wood butcher is a carpenter who specializes in building forms into which concrete can be poured. A professional wood butcher may not be as skilled at carpentry as a hobbyist who builds cabinets or gun stocks. The journalism equivalent of a wood butcher (a typical AP writer, perhaps) will browse the web and find thousands of amateur journalists who produce finer work than he does, and if he's intelligent, he will admire their work, study it and learn from it, just as a form builder might admire a beautiful cherry dining table his neighbor built as a hobby. 

By the way, building forms for concrete (and by analogy AP copywriting), does require a certain amount of skill.  The form has to hold up under the weight of the concrete it is intended to hold. That could be a challenging task. Nevertheless, I suggest that building forms does not require as much skill as cabinet making. Nor does writing wire copy require as much skill as writing essays that make a point clearly and forcefully.

I'm aware that there is a small clique of arrogant journalists who regard themselves as belonging to a kind of gnostic society, with skills and knowledge beyond the reach of the common man.  Don't let these folks dupe you into believing that doing journalism requires an elite education and training. It doesn't. 

Peter Barry 12/7/1999

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