Jeff Gannon, Real Journalist

As Jeff Jarvis noted just over a month ago, there are two stories that may be of interest regarding Jeff Gannon, the former White House press corps reporter for the fledgling (and apparently restructuring) Talon News.

The first potential story is that if Gannon was a ringer, a fake reporter put into the White House by a fake news service. The second story was the series of personal attacks against Gannon, wrapped in a very thin guise of legitimacy.

Quite frankly, I could care less about Gannon's personal life, but I was very interested to keep hearing from liberal pundits that Gannon "wasn't a real journalist."

So, what, exactly, is a "real" journalist?

The best way to answer that question would be to talk to the people who hire journalists. I was lucky enough to have access to such a person, and so I posed the following questions to a regional newspaper's executive editor here in New York:

• In your experience, can you give me a rough percentage of journalists you've hired over the years that had journalism degrees, versus non-journalism degrees?
• Have you hired reporters without college degrees?
• In your opinion, what are the most important qualities that make up a good journalist?

For this particular executive editor, the vast majority of his hires had to have at least some journalism experience before he would consider hiring them. Most picked up their experience writing for weeklies or small daily papers. He only rarely hired people straight out of school, but a college background was very important. Ninety-percent of the people he has hired have a four-year degree, and about half of those held journalism degrees (or about 45% overall).

This particular executive editor specifically said that he "liked to take a chance" on people who didn't come from journalism schools, and that he liked to hire people, "with different life experiences, who come from different backgrounds and can offer varied perspectives."

Does that sound like anyone in the title of this article?

I thought so, too, and I'd estimate those sentiments are fairly common across the breath of most hiring editors at most print publications, and they are in line with the kind of comments I vaguely remember hearing during my interview to be a real live, newspaper editor at a small-town daily many years ago.

So, would Jeff Gannon be hired as a "real" reporter by a real news organization on merit alone? Let's look at the facts.

Gannon obtained a bachelor's degree from West Chester University, which would have qualified him among the 90% of hires that hold four year degrees, and among the roughly half of non-journalism degree holders that work as journalists.

Another fact many also choose to omit, either by ignorance or design, is that Gannon didn't just jump into a career as a paid journalist. In college he was the school newspaper's sports editor for a year and occasional opinion columnist as well. He first wrote for Talon News as a voluntary contributor, and wrote many articles for them before he was hired full-time. This is consistent with what many hiring editors would appear to deem as an adequate display of ability and experience. At the time Gannon joined the news service, Talon News was staffed almost entirely by volunteer writers, just as the fledgling Blogger News Network is today.

It was only after establishing a track record of articles for Talon that he was hired as a full-time correspondent. To date, Gannon has written hundreds of articles, which would satisfy the amount of experience apparently desired by even the most discerning executive editors.

Jeff Gannon has a four-year college education. He has writing experience first as a voluntary contributor, and later as a paid correspondent. Whether or not you like his attitude, his past, or his unabashed conservative bias, Jeff Gannon does indeed have solid journalistic credentials.

Whether liberal pundits like it or not, Jeff Gannon is a real journalist, and perhaps not surprisingly, may have a more legitimate claim to that title than many of his critics.