Journalism -- Forward into the past?

Don Ross at Big Journalism offers the point that "professional journalists" are a very recent, and possibly fleeting, phenomenon:

 

The idea of citizens writing the news is not a new one. In fact, it is an idea that is as old as the newspaper itself.

There were no professional journalists around 50 BC when Julius Caesar, serving as the First Counsul of Rome, ordered scribes to publish the Acta Diurna, a daily report of governmental activities.

There were no professional journalists in the early 1400s to take advantage of Johann Gutenberg's new and exciting moveable type press. In fact, it wasn't until 1505 that a German printer in Augsburg named Erhard Oeglin put out a broadside that announced the discovery of Brazil.

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The first full-fledged program for journalists was started by Walter Williams at the University of Missouri in 1908 when he opened the now renowned Missouri School of Journalism. It took an astounding 30 years – from 1878 until 1908 – for any major school of higher education to notice a need for the training of professional journalists.

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How did the world survive without Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Woodward and Bernstein, the Society of Professional Journalists and the "Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manuel?"

They did it with citizens. Men and women (mostly men) who chronicled events by personal observation or by questioning people who had witnessed events and who put their stories down on paper and published them for others to read.

For 400 years, there were no professional journalists with pencils and notepads, and knowledge of lead paragraphs, inverted pyramids, nut graphs, cutlines and managing editors. They were just citizens who saw what was happening and wrote their observations and shared them in any way they could.

That's right, for the first 400 years of newspaper publishing, all the writing was done by citizens. By printers, business owners, teachers, ship captains, politicians, court officers, clergymen, scallywags, military officers and soldiers, dirt-poor civilians, wealthy industrialists, farmers, explorers, tradesmen, go down the list.

Everyone who journaled – who chronicled their activities and observations, were journal-ists. Not professional journal-ists as you and I know them today – but citizen journal-ists.

"So what?" you ask?

It's clear to me that today – the citizens are back.