There are plenty of instances where someone can fit into the article's definition of "journalist" where they probably shouldn't.
Yes, without question. It's tautological.
And as a Molotov-cocktail-throwing opponent of the regime, I want to raise the number of arrests of journalists, because that makes the regime look bad, as shown by this thread. Even if every single arrest is of someone like me - a left-radical with a Twitter account, not Walter Cronkite or whoever - it's unlikely that anyone will bother to check, and even more unlikely that, if anyone bothers to check, very many other people will hear about it.
I would say the focus is on opposite sides of the spectrum. When you are defining a group, the primary focus is on who should be included. The focus of gatekeeping is on the people who should be excluded. This is usually done in order to raise the status of those who are included or those who are setting the rules for inclusion. Those rules are often arbitrary or draconian and are usually set by some central authority (or someone who feels they have such authority). This authority will then be the one who doles out permission for others to participate.
That is where the software developer example comes in. Anyone can join the open source software development community and they will only be judged on the merit of their contribution. They might have never contributed to any OSS. They might have never been paid to develop software. They might have no formal education in software development. None of that would matter if we are defining people based on the merit of their work. However they would likely be excluded in a system that relies on gatekeeping.
Not really. Just track the statistics for full-time journalists. Then you don't have to engage in gatekeeping of journalism, you're just sensibly excluding full-time bounty hunters who wrote a news article that one time from the statistics on arrests of full-time journalists, even if the bounty hunter was, in that one instance, a journalist.
Yes, you are, and should be protected.
> If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist.
This is a horrific definition. Being a journalist can't be defined by the willingness of the subjects to be covered. That's stenography.
> If it's a side gig you don't intend to make a living doing, you're very likely not a journalist.
So belief in anything is evidence that you aren't a journalist. Journalists are defined by their income.
> Yes, you are, and should be protected.
Protected from what? Being arrested for recording a public event, surely. Being arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail, surely not.
So the crucial distinction is what are these journalists being arrested for, and also do we have a surge of people who are trying to cover their own knowing illegal behavior by wearing a PRESS badge.
But if you would, you might still not be. I once got press credentials (and a steep press discount to an event) because I wrote for a group blog and knew a guy.
Maybe you'll argue that it's authoritarianism either way, and maybe you're technically right, but a top-down directive to arrest journalists sounds a lot different (and scarier) than the situation I described above.
If you have more unrest than usual (and it shouldn't be usual at all to have unrest) it's even more important to have more journalists circulating freely and writing/publishing freely: that's how you get to see and understand what's actually going on.
If you don't have journalists doing their job freely, you only have the state propaganda to listen to.
That's a symptom of the fact that the establishment does not want the press to document what it's doing, to the point that it's arresting journalists.
... or it's the other thing: more journalists in closer contact with crankier cops. Or maybe even some combination of the two. This is my point--we can't draw conclusions from an observed spike in arrests.