Edward Eggleston once said that “journalism is organized gossip.” To me, this quote expresses the hardest part of journalism.  The part where you, as a journalist, have to find the thin line between truth and lies.

Gossip is not a reliable source if you’re a writer. You have to confirm the truth in gossip and dig out the lies in every rumor. Assumptions do not exist in the journalism world, there is no such thing.  

Publishing faulty information is one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer; it proves you to be untrustworthy. A true journalist has an intense passion for validating what they are writing about, double-checking the accuracy of every sentence, every quote, and every source.

Jack Levin, a Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts compares gossip and rumor in one of his books. “Gossip, then, is content, a message about people; rumor is a process. It takes a bit of gossip and reshapes it, modifies it in some way, and passes it along from individual to individual in different ways.”

In my opinion, this quote gives me more of an idea of gossip and rumor than any dictionary can. Gossip usually starts as a small truth, but as that truth gets passed around, it morphs into a big lie, spreading like wildfire.

Gossip is like Wikipedia, most of it is verified, but there are exceptions. You will come across subjects that seem unreliable.

Rumors are like People magazine, a picture of a woman talking to a man turns into an affair between the two strangers. And the worst part is, these People magazine writers call themselves journalists. They feed off lies, when they are supposed to be fueled by the truths.

Journalists find exciting stories all the time. The difficult part is picking out the lies, organizing the truths, and still making the story a hundred times more exciting.