📰Journalist

The word comes from the French journal, a daily — someone paid to fill the day's record. The function is far older than the name: Rome posted the Acta Diurna in the Forum from 59 BCE, Tang-dynasty China circulated hand-copied court gazettes, and Venice sold handwritten news sheets by subscription before Johann Carolus of Strasbourg printed the first newspaper in 1605. Finding out what is happening and telling the public has been an organized trade, in some form, for more than two thousand years.

It is also one of the least gated major professions. Almost no country requires a license — Italy's state-recognized order of journalists is the famous exception — and no exam stands between a school-leaver and a byline. What gates entry instead is the portfolio: published work, and the sources behind it. That openness cuts both ways. The trade is easy to enter and hard to stay in, modestly paid at the median, and, in a growing list of countries, dangerous to practice honestly.

This page follows the trade from Caesar's gazette to the Panama Papers: how war reporting, the interview, the byline and the two-source rule came to exist; what a working day actually demands; the route in through student papers, traineeships and beats; eight practitioners from William Howard Russell to Anna Politkovskaya; and an honest accounting of which parts of the job artificial intelligence is already doing, and which parts still require a human being willing to knock on a door.