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The commentators are right. Journalism is not "Communications." Communications is public relations, sometimes mistaken for journalism by readers when newspapers reprint press releases without changing a single word, giving it an undeserved patina of news. Corporations within publishing have had a profound effect on how newspapers are presented to readers: journalists writing for USA TODAY are taught to write in pyramid form, so that each paragraph can be the last paragraph. The first paragraph is the tip of the pyramid, and technically, the paste up editor can just snip off the rest of the article after that first paragraph, and it would stand alone and seem complete. Each following paragraph would have that quality, so that the paste up editor can simply shorten any article with impunity to suit page layout.

The chilling part of that description is that it would seem complete. It might be argued that the best journalism digs below the surface, and perhaps what is found could not be presented in any kind of balanced or accurate way in paragraph/soundbites. Writing under such rules of constraint might arguably be viewed more as the domain of Communications than Journalism. It is Communications that addresses functional writing for a purpose-- not only public relations, but speeches and advertising.

Marshall McCluhan said back in the 1960's that "the media is the message." We see in 2004 that this is true. On television we hear sound bites, and it seems possible that one sound bite of Howard Dean, picked up by a highly directional microphone that exaggerated its impact, may have ruined his chances of a run for the Democratic nomination for pregnancy. That incident was communication, but not journalism.