Journalism hates Change. That’s Good.

I realized last week at SRCCON 2025 that journalists need to spend more time defending the industry on its value, not its past.

The trigger was a session about Rethinking Journalism that featured an energetic and familiar debate about “who is a journalist” in the age of declining trust and TikTok news influencers.

Later, one attendee commented, “Didn’t we talk about this 20 years ago?” Yes, we did. But the industry has yet to move past the “are bloggers journalists" rage-bait of circa 2003. That's because, —intentionally or not— we often approach these questions with a sense of entitlement and defensiveness rooted in a pair of assumptions:

1. Journalism is valuable. (True)
2. Journalism still has market power. (False)

As a consequence, we still think we get to (or have to) decide who is a journalist or what counts as journalism. Back in the day, when news organizations were characterized by their single distribution channel and geographic monopoly, we had the power to enforce that gatekeeping. But in the age of ubiquitous smartphone cameras and free global publishing, isn't everyone a journalist?

No. And this is not my main point, but let's talk about it for a moment.

While the reporting of news still requires some training, experience, and intent, the practice has been decoupled from its industrial-age institutions and anyone can commit individual acts of journalism. Four amateur photographers have won Pulitzer Prizes. Twitter used to be famous for citizen reporting. And other examples abound.

But, “journalist” also describes a profession, not just a single act, and practically speaking, semi-porous barriers to entry apply. If you publish community-relevant information and honor journalism's mission, ethics, and goals, then yes, you are a journalist. After that, it's just a scale of sometimes-to-often and volunteer-to-paid.

The real question here is about what keeps this an active debate. One reason is the strong conservatism within the industry we can summarize as “Journalism resists change.” This is both usually True and counterintuitively quite often Good.

It is Good because (see above) journalism has value and values worth defending against inappropriate and externally-imposed change. Journalists are justifiably cautious when a shiny new piece of technology shows up with an “innovation” sticker slapped on it. When we reject the “new” out of an appropriate concern for quality, ethics, community, or sustainability—especially when past innovations delivered by tech platforms promised to help but delivered harm—then resistance is Good.

But “tech” has played such a dominant role in newsroom "change" for the past 30 years that we tend to conflate the two and misunderstand what we are resisting and why. As I discussed in my SRCCON session, GenAI is neither inherently good or bad (nor is it neutral), but our naïve adoption of any new tool without understanding how it works, what it benefits, and what it harms is always a mistake.

And for newsrooms, these mistakes matter more because journalism has a duty of care to its communities. This is why we can seem overly-precious about change, and why that caution can inappropriately cross the line into cynicism and obstruction. What we should be defending is not "who is a journalist" or "can a stage play be journalism" but rather: who and how are we upholding journalistic values in service to the public good.

We should always be looking to change, adapt and improve, even when doing so challenges our assumptions and traditions. But only when the terms help us better serve our readers and our own sustainability.