The Case Against “Professional” Journalists

Amateurs!

Let me be very clear from the start: I am a product of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University where we were taught to be professional journalists.

Big mistake. Not the school – the entire concept.

It turns out that most great achievements in this world were accomplished by non -professionals.

Once we start to ‘professionalize’ things, we close to door to real innovation.  Because the ‘professionals’ are members of a cult whose interest it is to keep their profession ‘special’.  It breeds mediocrity.

Around the 15th Century, the United Kingdom suffered what was the world’s first energy crisis.  Britain had, since the time of the Romans, and before, been dependent upon charcoal for their cooking, their heating and their smelting of iron ore.  By the 15th Century, they had essentially cut down all the trees in England.  There was no more wood.

Instead they turned to coal, present in great abundance.  But even the mining of coal became problematic.  As soon as the coal pits got deep enough, they began to fill with water.

In 1712, a marginally employed ironmonger named Thomas Newcomen invented the first steam engine. Its purpose was to pump the pits dry all the time.  It worked.

In 1763,  James Watt, a ‘self educated instrument maker and repairman at Glasgow University was instructed to repair a Newcomen Engine*.  He took it apart, experimented with it” and found a way to make it run far more efficiently. The industrial revolution was off and running.

It was not long before Watt’s engine was placed on a set of rails and used to drive a carriage forward under its own steam.  This was accomplished by Richard Trevithick, the son of an illiterate Cornish mine captain.  Trevithick was, so Ferris reports, “a bar-brawling wrestler, baffled by books but at ease taking apart every mechanical device”.

The invention of railroads, one does not need to point out, had a massive impact on the world we inhabit today.

Railroads opened up vast swaths of new land (much as highways and later the Internet would) for development.

The world’s first commercial railway opened in 1830, running between Liverpool and Manchester.  The actress Fanny Kemble reported taking a ride on George Stephenson’s Rocket and found the sensation one of flying. The train moved at what was then a breath-taking 3o miles per hour.

By 1874 English trains were routinely clocking 75mph and the English were taking 330 million rail trips a year.

Not everyone was so enamored by the ‘rail revolution’ which had suddenly opened the formerly pristine English countryside both to the clanking steam engine and to the peasantry from the cities that they carried into the formerly pristine countryside.

The poet William Wordsworth, who described himself as a ‘sensitive being’ and ‘creative soul’ protested strongly against a rural rail line in 1844, declaring that ‘uneducated persons lacked the capacity to appreciate the beauty of the English Lake District.’ “It is not against railways but against the abuse of them that I am contending”.

By abuse, as Timothy Ferris notes, he seems to have meant the selling of train tickets to passengers less sensitive and creative than himself.

And now we come to journalism, or more properly to the notion of the ‘citizen journalist’.

The ‘professional scientists and engineers’ of 18th century Britain did not invent the first steam pumps, the working steam engine or the railway engine.  That was left to the ‘amateurs’, who thankfully, did not need the permission of the ‘professionals’ to get access to the tools of experimentation.

They were drawn to their craft and their avocation, as well as their later vocation, by pure passion and interest. And they delivered a very good product.  A very good product.

Throughout history, it has time and again been the outsider, the amateur, who has proven most successful in bringing about real innovation and change. This is because the outsider, the amateur, has no vested interest in defending the status quo, no stake in the continuation of the status quo and no formal education in what is possible and what is impossible.

Now we come to journalism.

The so-called ‘professional’ journalists of our own era have done nothing short of an appalling job of reporting on the world and educating the public.  One need only look at their stellar performance in the run-up to the War in Iraq to see that the ‘professional system’, despite its paying its stars in the neighborhood of $14 million a year, is a complete failure.

Now, the technology has emerged that puts the power to report and produce and distribute into the hands of millions who never had access to any of this before – it’s having been far too expensive and complex – and the world of the ‘professionals’ are up in arms.

The ‘dangers’ of Citizen Journalists.

Better to leave it to the ‘professionals’.

They sound, more than anything else, like William Wordsworth (if ONLY they wrote 1/10th as well!).

The great iron railways of the Internet are bringing vast hordes of the great unwashed into their pristine communities and they don’t like it.

Too bad!

Unleash journalism from the control of the professionals!

Maybe one of them will invent the online equivalent of the steam engine, or the railway, or decent reporting at a reasonable cost.

*For these and other historical insights, I am deeply indebted to Timothy Ferris and his new book, The Science of Liberty.