The dust-up between Mayor Vico Sotto and veteran broadcasters Korina Sanchez and Julius Babao is more than showbiz chatter. It cuts to the core of journalism in the age of personal platforms. The question is simple: when journalists leave the newsroom and build their own channels, do they stop being journalists and become mere content creators?

Julius even defended his feature as “lifestyle, not news.” But journalism is not defined by labels. Whether it appears under “hard news” or “lifestyle,” journalism is defined by standards: verification, independence, fairness. Once you put a contractor-turned-politician on camera and present them as personalities, you enter the public-interest arena. There, the duty to ask tough questions and provide context remains.

Here lies the risk of the “journalist-as-content-creator” model. On YouTube or Facebook, there is no editor-in-chief, no newsroom ombudsman. The journalist becomes the publisher, the advertiser, the brand. Freedom expands, but so does temptation: to blur news with promotion, to substitute transparency with access, to trade credibility for clicks.

Audiences, however, don’t forget. Korina and Julius built their reputations in mainstream newsrooms. Viewers still judge them by journalistic standards. That is why Mayor Sotto’s criticism hit home. To dismiss it as “just lifestyle” is to miss the point. Journalism does not shed its obligations when it migrates platforms. If anything, the burden to be clear, ethical, and transparent becomes heavier.

In the new media economy, many journalists will straddle the line between reporter and influencer, storyteller and endorser. That is not inherently wrong. But credibility, the one currency that separates journalism from PR, can vanish the moment audiences sense image-laundering disguised as content.

The bottom line: Journalists do not stop being journalists when they become content creators. But when they forget the standards that made them journalists in the first place, they forfeit the very trust that gave them influence. Indeed, A journalist who forgets the standards of journalism is just another content creator with a camera.

In the end, it’s not the platform that breaks credibility. It’s the journalist who abandons it.