License fails to address issue

Part 2: Misdirected anger

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When journalists start talking about licensing and credentials, at the surface, the discussion focuses on preserving and enforcing professional standards, such as those espoused in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. The thinking is that a formal rite of passage of some kind will ensure that those standards will be held firmly and thereby raise the quality of our craft.

Licensing would kill journalism

Part I: Government can’t oversee the watchdog

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The words shocked and alarmed are too strong to describe my reaction to a discussion thread begun among the Society of Professional Journalists group on the professional networking site, LinkedIn. But certainly I was annoyed and more than a little concerned that, once again, someone within the profession was advocating that journalists be licensed.