Defining Journalism

You might say I've been in training to do this kind of reporting not formally where journal students get crammed into classrooms and listen to an experienced teacher who has been there done that and his an image to look up to and study.  An accredited college with a good department of journalism would suffice.  No I was never in those classroom where they teach students how to become journalist.  I  spent eighteen years in the trenches working with postal workers on a crew of eighteen or more on a machine big and heavy and  wide as a locomotive called the LSM  and we were machine operators and more than a half of us were constantly tuned  into a radio news station.  These were real people experienced in other occupations sent here to do a  job and we would discuss the news as most of everyday people do we had to listen to the news or go insane with the same repetitive motions of being a machine operator.  We   became adept at zip codes and streets and addresses it was part of the job but most interesting was on the radio we got  paid to listen to the news or go insane with the  boredom.  No we were not drones a mere extension of a machine but we were people intelligent enough to make sense out of what was being discussed in the news on the radio.   It was the talk show hosts on the radio where I felt as they were talking to me  and in  fact I  would call the radio station where they did the discussions.  It was the news they talked about.  Soon I learned I would become a  part of it and I was known as one of the faceless talk show callers of a news station  with a first name and a city somewhere in the northern state of California.  I was a volunteer not a paid profession as I am now doing volunteer work discussing the news from what I read off the internet and in the web sites surrounding my web site.  I cannot be anymore candid.