Journalism and context

One of the criticisms of blogger journalism is that bloggers aren't professional journalists. What's so great about professional journalists, anyway?

But should reporters be "average" Americans? Surely there could be some requirement that people who write the news have enough sense of history to put the news into a rational context. They're great at putting things into a political context (will this give one party an advantage over the other?). But a historical context would require that the reporter actually know something. Which would imply that back in college he took courses in something other than journalism. If I were running a newspaper, I would hire only history majors to be reporters, and completely shun the graduates of the almost-universally-Leftist journalism departments -- not on political grounds, but on the grounds of competence. History students are still taught to work from facts, and to keep in mind a broad understanding of where the facts fit into a larger story.

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