What's with this media members phrase?
There is a particularly awful term that is having a stubborn moment in newspapers. I have never heard anyone use the term "media members" in speech, but it has become lodged in the lexicon of a certain sort of journalist.
Here's a quick test I did today, and you could do the same. I ran a Google search of the phrase "media member" and came up with about 399,000 hits, none of which had much to do with anything - mostly webpages about how journalists can get press passes for a specific event. Then I searched Google News and got 122,000 results, and of the first 10 results, eight were sports stories. Nobody outside of sports reporters uses this phrase, and so nobody outside of journalism understands it - and that makes it jargon, and jargon is no good. A good editor would strip this out, but imagine my shock when I saw it used in a particularly sloppy Sports Illustrated headline. (The URL for the piece, almost as a sort of apology, reads in part: media-circus-letters-to-my-younger-self-sports-broadcasters-advice-journalists. Rarely have I been so happy to see something dismembered.)
The term media member implicitly codifies the pernicious idea of media membership. When people complain about The Media, they are referring to thousands of people working for very different outlets to achieve very different aims. They lump reporters in with actors, authors, comedians, broadcasters and who knows what else. If the term was too broad in the past, it means even less now when any blogger or so-called influencer can fall under the umbrella.
The distinction may be meaningful for reporters, who might run in packs with broadcasters but wish to remain separate from them. However, the distinction is partly false. If a broadcaster is in a scrum with reporters, he or she is clearly reporting and there is no reason to not refer to the collective as reporters or journalists. (I can tell you from my experience this is generally the context in which a reporter uses the media members label. A group is attending a news conference or a scrum, or is waiting before an event or outside a locker-room. Generally one reporter is subjected to a barb from someone famous or they do something stupid enough that it warrants an anecdote. Whether the readers are interested in this inside-baseball reporting is worth a separate discussion.)
I'm not sure whether or not editors are meant to be the defenders of the language. What I do know is while language evolves, we should not accept change merely for the sake of accepting change. Stories should always be written with the reader in mind; journalism is meaningless if the reader takes nothing from it. And while we can expect a newspaper reader to have a greater interest in the newspaper business than the average Canadian, that disparity in interest is not large. We take shortcuts in conversations within newsrooms and the industry at large, but that journalism-specific language needs to stay separate from the journalism itself.
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