Refining Journalism

Journalism is, as I have said before, the task of putting information into context. That is, at its most basic, what it is. You’ll see people saying ‘this is news, that is journalism,’ and trying to define down what journalism is, hoping to hide journalism away in a box. Ironically, those people who do so often have to try and remove many other things from that task, of putting information in context – as if watching the news is not a task of taking your own day-to-day life and casting it against the context of other events that have transpired today.

Journalism is performed by almost everyone in the videogame industry, some poorly, some well. A lot of advertising copy lands on the desks of journalists after having been written by a journalist. It’s remarkably easy to convince people to print your words verbatim if you already speak in the language they want to use. Press releases are written, typically, by journalists. Charity fundraiser letters are written by journalists. News reports, even comedic ones, are written by journalists.

Lately, John Oliver and Jon Stewart have both been on my mind, because both have said they are comedians, not journalists, which shows how the word is used in their parlance. The idea that ‘journalists’ are some sort of special class of people; that using a half-hour show at night to tell jokes about a factual thing that happened, using the tone and tenor of a news program to make fun of it, but still to provide information in a meaningful context. In order to tell you jokes about a thing, they need to make sure you’re aware of and understand a thing. For their jokes, the news is part of the context. Rather than just shoot one-liners from the hip, though, they then put that information into context, as part of their presentation. It becomes part of the texture of what they do.