Are Bloggers Journalists?

According to Wikipedia, "A journalist collects and disseminates information about current events, people, trends, and issues. His or her work is acknowledged as journalism.

Reporters are one type of journalist. They create reports as a profession for broadcast or publication in mass media such as newspapers, television,radio, magazines, documentary film, and the Internet. Reporters find sources for their work, their reports can be either spoken or written, and they are often expected to report in the most objective and unbiased way to serve the public good. A columnist is a journalist who writes pieces that appear regularly in newspapers or magazines." quote from Wikipedia

Bloggers are bloggers, journalists are journalists.

In my opinion, bloggers are "unofficial" and "journalist" are "official". Journalists will post their reports after doing their researches. Most of the bloggers post what they like and what they want. Most of them are not doing researches. Bloggers speaks out their own voice but journalists speaks out the voice of the community. There are some bloggers that really do research before posting but there are only little amount of them.

Furthermore, journalists work under their own code (Code of Ethics). Their rules are strict and I do not think that most of the bloggers can follow the codes. Besides that, people pay for journalist for them to write a journal.  If all the bloggers can work as journalists, there will be no journalist exist in the world because they do not have to pay for bloggers.

Most of the bloggers speak out their own opinion but journalists speak out other people's opinion. That is the difference among most of the bloggers and journalists.

Some of the journalists are risking their life to covering the truth when there is a war at Iraq. The International Women’s Media Foundation awarded its “courage in journalism awards” to those people. This news has been published in the New York Times.