Based on an ongoing Twitter conversation that’s spread into various threads (and since this wouldn’t possibly fit within even a half-dozen tweets), I thought it would be interesting to break down the idea of who counts as “the media.”  The following list is ordered from broadest to narrowest, following the branch that ends on “reporter.”

• Media: Includes all people who produce content for popular consumption through the senses, mainly sight and hearing, whether for informative or entertainment purposes.  The information side probably ends somewhere short of scholarly journals, and the entertainment side probably ends somewhere short of fine art.
• News media: Includes all people who produce media content that has mainly to do with current events.  May or may not include explicit parodists.
• Journalist: Includes all members of the “news media” who seek to provide information about current events in a way that treats subjects as objective areas of study (whether or not they provide their own opinions), with some effort to expand the reader’s amount of knowledge about it.  Includes “opinion journalists.”
• Reporter: Includes those journalists whose primary occupation is the provision of new information about current events, through research and investigation.

The subject of the tweets was whether talk-radio hosts are members of the “news media.”  By this taxonomy, they would definitely be members of the “news media” (distinguished from, say, radio DJs, who would stop at “media”), and depending on the nature of their shows, they would count as “journalists” who sometimes do actual reporting.

To answer a question from Phil Eil of The Providence Phoenix, I would probably count as “news media” and sometime-journalist.  When The Current was my full-time gig, I was a journalist who could be classified as a reporter.