critic or journalist?

A reader writes...


Hey, Jerry

This is too long for Twitter, but a month later your little rantlet is still bugging me.

Think about it: what is your job? Truth be told, very few people genuinely give a crap whether you like a song or not. I mean, your best friends might, but almost everyone reading anything you like only cares about whether they are going to like it or not. Your job is to describe it well enough for them to consider whether they might like it. If you say you like it and they like most of what you like, then that makes it easier - just giving a description with no measure of endorsement doesn't really help. The question we ask our friends of anything they've experienced is normally "is it any good?" That's all: describe; recommend.

To do either, you have to be using the most appropriate words that you can find - not the cleverest or longest words, but the words that best fit. Is "music critic" a good fit for what you do? Yes, so long as you're just criticising music. It doesn't work very well if you're interviewing bands, unless you're impersonating Simon Cowell as you ask the questions. If you're a freelancer who also picks up a few spare pennies to write advertorials and press releases, it's not an appropriate description at all.

So what to call you, then? Music writer? Probably the safest term, but unless you're a book author then "writer" sounds insufferably pretentious. Wordsmith? Scribe? Hack? Pen-botherer?

Journalist.

The word to me conjures "diarist", which is probably the way I see what you do. You record your experiences. It's a pretty broad term that can cover things like interviews or even the reportage side of things like those endless features on "is this the end for copyright?" - or "is this the end for freelancers?"

There's a bit in Third Rock from the Sun where trashy Viki is in labour and says to Dr Mary Albright, "You're a doctor, ain't you?" and begs her to deliver the baby. The canned laughter confirms it - no sane, intelligent person would confuse an anthropology professor with a doctor of medicine. I think you're reasonably safe that nobody will dispatch you to a war zone any time soon.

Besides, what do we call all the other scribblers? What do we do with Charlie Brooker, for a start? (I suppose that largely depends on your opinion of Charlie Brooker), but he's not solely a critic. Perhaps he's a columnist, except for when he's writing creatively? Wikipedia calls him a journalist, because it's a simple easy-to-grasp term that everybody understands.

You could call yourself an opinionist, but then you'd just sound like a wanker.

Hope all is well in kangaroo-land

Jo x