The qualities essential to journalism thus extend far beyond an ability to write.
Repeating this fact is essential service journalism: as the Times has reported, about half of America's non-Puerto Rican population was unaware of that fact — and, as my colleague Amy Davidson Sorkin has written, Trump's remarks did nothing to inform them otherwise.
Davies writes that "Neutrality requires a journalist to become invisible, to refrain deliberately...from expressing the judgments which are essential for journalism.
In other worlds, the Times represents the clash of ideas that is essential for journalism, higher education and democracy, but that has not been properly valued in the quest for Utility U. The clash of correspondents' ideas was followed by Appiah's account of free speech controversies in Utopia U., warts and all.
"As well as being, or in fact because they are, essential to Reuters journalism, these characteristics can also drive huge commercial success".
When is a reporter doing the essential work of journalism by interviewing a victim, and when is it an invasion of privacy that yields no benefit to the public?
It is certainly less ambitious now than in its peak years, when it sent reporters to cover every big national story and maintained a half-dozen foreign bureaus, but it remains a force in its region and capable of the kind of "watchdog" journalism essential in cities like Philadelphia, which seem to breed corrupt politicians.
In order to secure the Guardian's financial and editorial independence "in perpetuity", however, it's essential that our journalism is matched by an efficient and profitable company that takes a long view of how to deploy resources – for instance, in managing the difficult transition from the print marketplace to the turmoil of the digital world.
This all makes curation an important, even essential, part of journalism.
Neither style of writing does the essential work of journalism: to investigate and inform.
