Travis Loose, writing on Medium, under the Society For Professional Journalists banner:
Citizen journalists are springing up everywhere, and in some cases they’re skewing the definition of what actually makes a journalist, which is no good for a number of obvious reasons.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t spent the past four years of my life accruing $40,000 in student loan debt just so I could compete against some blogger with zero journalistic training who Snapchats stories and calls it photojournalism, or posts grammatically atrocious, subjective columns on Medium and calls it reporting.
Hang on now, your point is that because you spent time and money you didn’t have, you shouldn’t be competing with people who didn’t? That’s not just whiny, that’s downright stupid. There is absolutely nothing to gain by bashing citizen journalism, bloggers, or whatever you want to call people who add to the debate, the reporting, and to journalism. If you spent all that time and money wisely, you’d surely realize that you’re not only well equipped to meet reality as it is (as opposed to what you might think it should be), as well as understand that you don’t know everything.
The linked piece ends by declaring it is, in fact, what journalism is now. I’m sure you all are capable of coming up with a snarky comeback to that on your own.