The Future of Journalism

I turned on my television and saw Perez Hilton hosting “The Bad Girl’s Club Reunion” on Oxygen. . He then introduces himself as a “celebrity gossip columnist. My jaw dropped and I could not believe what I heard. Hilton of PerezHilton.com writes news about celebrities on his blog and uses digital paint to draw things on celebrity photos. He occasionally posts the link where he found the article and he always inserts his opinion. Ironically, he will always post the link where he obtained the images he defaced, but he is not as concerned with posting the link where obtained his news. Hilton is one of the many bloggers on the Internet claiming to be columnists and citizen journalists. When is blogger considered a journalist?

Most bloggers, like Hilton, obtain news from other sources and then put in their own comments and analysis. I would consider that as someone doing a review of the news and relaying the news to others, which is something that many people do in order to let other know about the news. This is done verbally without the person calling him or herself a columnist, but when Hilton creates a blog, copy and pastes news from a source, and then gives his opinion, he considers himself a columnist? Wouldn’t that make anyone who has ever showed an article to someone else and then given commentary about the article a columnist?

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Contemplating between "bloggists" and "journaloggers"