As it should be. I like to think of journalism as the softest science in that it has a lot of subtlety - hidden connections and dimensions - but ultimately the objective is to be able to infer the state of the world at some time - be it past, present of future - based on some partial information. And just like in regular science, collective knowledge can be leveraged and built upon if enough people take it upon themselves to do spot checks verifying the accuracy of accounts of events to which you might have an informational advantage. This can be via witnessing events first hand or have pre existing depth or via direct consumption of the raw primaries or just going on a dive.

Absolutely. I agree, and did not intend to imply ist should be otherwise. We must all be journalists in a sense, as each of us is to the societal macro-organism as a single sigmoidal node is to a neural network. It's why I think the whole "thou shalt not bear false witness" is actually a severely underrated aspect of reasonable behavior as a human being.

I would say it's a matter of intent, and of capability.

Intent, in that the organization, and the people making it up, genuinely seek to find truth and publish it, rather than seeking to push one agenda or another regardless of the facts.

And capability, in that they can, in fact, do the research and possibly fieldwork necessary to get truths that are interesting enough to be worth publishing, as opposed to just reposting stories someone else researched, whatever their truth value.

Having the intent described above but not the capability makes you something of an aggregator. Having neither capability nor intent makes you, more or less, a partisan blogger.

Having the capability to be journalistic but the intent to push an agenda regardless of the truth makes you an incredibly dangerous propaganda outfit.

Given, but even that test is somewhat dangerous. Where is the line when the Government refuses the truth you are seeking and tries to shut you down for clearly being a propagandist even if you are on the right track?

I'm incredibly leery assigning a particular set of qualities to the essential journalist, even if by and large I do agree with the criteria you state.