I get a fair number of emails at this point. First, I apologize to those of you who are sending me emails for whom it is not part of your job who I haven't responded to. Stuff gets lost in the din. Second, I'm rather busy right now, so that's why I haven't been posting much, and won't be doing so for a few days. But I wanted to throw out a weird question: am I a journalist? What does that mean? Journalism, unlike law and medicine, is a field without licensing. But unless you count certification as a necessary precondition (I don't) computer programming doesn't have licensing either. Nevertheless, we understand that someone who only does HTML/CSS isn't a programmer. Someone who works with Python is a programmer (please no jokes!). And so forth. I've never given thought to a similar issue in regards to journalism. I ask because sometimes I get email referring to my status as a journalist, often in an upbraiding tone in relation to my objectivity. The main issue I would enter into the record is this: I don't presume any great objectivity beyond what a typical person off the street would bring to the table. In other words, I'm not going to make it an attempt to package my "product" in an objective fashion. I'm pretty frank about my preferences and biases, though often I will pull my own opinion back out of the foreground when I think it gets in the way or is not relevant to the issue at hand. There are many times where I'm motivated to offer my own perspective up front, and other cases where I just let the chips fall where they may for those reading this weblog. This all comes to mind because a reader wondered as to my "shilling" for 23andMe. My image of a journalist certainly doesn't include encouraging the purchase of a particular product in the forthright manner which I've been doing, so if I am a journalist that's kind of weird behavior. But my reason for encouraging the purchase of a 23andMe kit is pretty self-interested:
I want more people to participate in, and, start up do-it-yourself genomics projects.
I myself have two which I'm spearheading, the African Ancestry Project, and a private one for friends and family who want more detailed analysis than 23andMe's tools can provide. Obviously the purchases of 23andMe kits will increase the pool which would participate in Harappa, Dodecad, Eurogenes, and Artemis. And I'm totally in favor of that, and try and do everything possible to further the ends of D.I.Y. genomics. In fact, I have to admit that I'm strongly biased toward D.I.Y. nerdery more generally. I've been doing what I've been doing for over 9 years now. I started blogging April of 2002. There's been almost no reflection on my part in terms of what I've been doing, and where I fit into the media ecosystem. The main reason is that too much focus on the "meta" aspects often gets in the way of my main aim: learning as much interesting stuff as is possible before I die. Life is basically a race against the clock, I'm not a person who is much afflicted with the need to "kill time." Whether what I'm doing is "journalism" or not, I plan to continue doing it until it is no longer feasible.
