Lowell, MA – Saturday, the New England News Forum convened a gathering of professional journalists, journalist educators, bloggers, citizen journalists, and others interested in the future of journalism to discuss ‘Sharing the News’. The most important thing I learned from this gathering is that I am not a Citizen Journalist.

There were many ways in which the phrase or idea of Citizen Journalism was challenged. Some wanted to see it broadened. Why ‘Citizen’? What about people who are not citizens? Do not people visiting from other countries also have a say? Should we instead use the word ‘Resident’, instead? Yet others spoke about journalism as a civic duty, similar to being called to serve on a jury. From their perspective Citizen Journalism has everything to do with citizenship. Everyone is likely at one point or another to report about what they have seen in a journalistic manner, and people need to understand that and how best to do it.

The word journalism received even more challenges. Some people recognized that not everyone who writes something online, even if they are writing in a journalistic style, even if they are writing for an organization that provides news created by professional journalists, such as people that participate in CNN’s iReports project, consider themselves journalists. This is compounded by the issue that many journalism professionals seem to think that if you don’t have a journalism degree, aren’t a member of a professional journalism guild, and aren’t getting paid for what you do, then you aren’t a journalist.

Various other names were presented, such as ‘resident correspondent’, which seems to fit much more nicely, especially for those resident correspondents that are corresponding with a traditional news organization.

Doug McGill led a fascinating discussion about discussion about the ‘Journalism in a Day’ workshops that he has been leading. One of the ideas that he presented is that it is unethical to write “I went to a meeting” type reports, listing out what happened in chronological order and expecting the readers to make sense out of it. I’m not sure that I agree with that. There are times that what is needed is simply for someone to document what happened, without trying to make sense out of it or present it in an easy to read, coherent story.