Like many of you, including Dan Lyons and Dave Winer, I was irritated as hell by Techcrunch’s Paul Carr this weekend by his lambasting of all of citizen journalism, as he judged everyone who might participate in that activity by the actions of two or three Twitter users.

I won’t rehash the whole thing, mostly because I think being irritated as hell is sort of a benchmark of success for Paul. Of all the viewpoints I’ve seen on the matter, though, one that hasn’t gotten a lot of airplay is a post from Frank X. Shaw, who is analyzing Dan Lyon’s analysis of the debacle.

Here is where Dan is missed a key point:

What really cracks me up is how often I still hear people say that bloggers are mere "aggregators" and the "real journalism" gets done at places like the Times.

Um, Dan? TechCrunch is a news organization, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t paying attention. Ditto for GigaOm, for Engadget, Gizmodo and so on. Real reporters, doing real news. However you want to define it.

What’s changed is not the journalism, it’s the underlying business model. There will be plenty of journalism in the future. But it will look at the business and staffing level more like TC than NYT.

I don’t deny for a minute that he’s right: large blogs who engage in news discovery, aggregation and broadcast should be considered journalists.

Where does that leave the rest of us, though?  Although I editorialize in a number of different ways in my role here at SiliconANGLE, does that mean I’m a journalist?  In a certain sense, yes, but I’m curious about your opinions on the topic.

I mentally flip flop often on this topic.  I like to think what we do here at SiliconANGLE is a bit beyond journalism (though that could be me just elevating my own sense of self-importance).  We don’t tie ourselves to the news cycle, but it’s impossible to deny that we’ve delivered breaking news from time to time, albeit they may not be the most important news stories of all time (tech news rarely is).

Add to that the fact that any time you have a group of thinkers and writers together working towards common goals, news will happen on it’s own.  Does that make us all inadvertent journalists?

I’m legitimately curious on the community’s thoughts on this.  My thoughts on this used to be pretty well formed, but the very organic way that news-telling has evolved this year have put my previously well formed thoughts into turmoil on this.