journalist

A journalist is someone whose job is finding out what happened and writing it up for other people to read, hear or watch. The reporter standing in a flooded street with a microphone, the name at the top of the newspaper column, the person phoning a minister's office for a comment before the piece goes out.

A journalist works for a newspaper, a website, a radio station or a television channel, or freelance, selling stories where they can. Reporter is the closest word to it: a reporter is out gathering the story, while journalist covers everybody doing the job, editors and columnists included. The work is journalism and the adjective is journalistic. An investigative journalist is the one who spends months digging at a single story. A journalist writes what happened — somebody who writes stories out of their own head is a novelist.