Are bloggers journalists?

This week's topic is about are bloggers journalists?

First we have to know what is Journalist and Blogger.
JOURNALIST

Journalist collects and disseminates information about current events, people, trends, and issues. His or her work is acknowledged as journalism.
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the citizenry. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and business, journalism also covers cultural aspects of society such as arts and entertainment. The field includes editing, photojournalism, and documentary.
(www.wikipedia.org) 
In a short explanation, Journalist is a professional job to search, process, writing news from citizen to citizen again. They have to learn about Journalism to become a Journalist.

Blogger write and post something on blog. 
Blog is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting).Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

from year to year science communication has been growing rapidly, including journalism.journalism is no longer  guaranteed work all of the time, but it is most certainly in my eyes one of the main focuses of future careers for students.

The actual differences between Journalist and Blogger is a journalist has to comply with the code of ethics in his writing , while the bloggers, they are given the freedom to write anything without having to worry about the code of ethics. That's why Journalist often called Blogger as an amateur.

But back to this era, journalism not longer impact to citizen, we are more often to read news from someone's blog than a truly website for news. 

Actually blogger just a new transform of journalism.The three way transformation :

1. A decline in the authority of the journalist as holding a superior or ‘well informed’ position vis-à-vis anyone else.
2. A transformation in terms of where ‘old-fashioned’ journalism gets its stories and information from. A good example of that is the Clinton/Lewinski scandal, which originated from the Drudge Report; at the time a pretty disreputable gossip page.
3. It reflects a fundamental shift from mass media to niche media. Within journalism, this means that instead of everyone being forced to watch a narrow number of news sources for a narrow selection of stories deemed significant. People can now seek out the news that they want to hear, from the sources they want to hear from. This leads to a much more Balkanised public sphere as people seek out what they want to hear, and blogger/journalists increasingly preach to the converted.For example, right wing nationalist bloggers comb the Internet for any stories related to certain ethnic minorities (not always the case, but as a generalisation) and feed them to a specific audience who are deliberately looking to confirm their prejudices. Similarly, anti-EU bloggers will publish any anti-EU story or rumour to support their cause without any desire for verification, explicitly for the purposes of motivating their political audience.

So for the question are blogger, journalist? Yes, blogger just a new transform on Journalist, and easier to share news than Journalist.