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Don't bring up the word "professional" to Americans...

I did several months back and it wound up being a spiral thread.

Basically in America - if you get paid for ditch digging you are a professional. Anything you get a dollar for makes you a professional. A child who gets a weekly allowance is a professional child.

The term in the U.S. is merely $$$$=Professional regardless of what it is.

The way you use the term is correct. I am professional teacher and if I do something out of character or dishonest the teaching profession can take my certification away from me. The professional body of my peers can remove me from the field of work. Same for Lawyers, Doctors etc. A so called professional reviewer could be doing all sorts of illegal and criminal things and get caught for it and go to jail - but can come out and still be a reviewer. They are not banned from the field for life - if your best friend is an editor then you can theoretically have a job for life regardless. The owner of the magazine can make the sole judgement (at will) where as professional bodies make the decision and even if the company owner wants to hire the teacher or lawyer - he/she can't. And that's a big big difference.


That said I don't think any reviewer is a professional reviewer because there is no "college of professional reviewers"

I don't think it has to do with writing style either. Srajan's style may not be your cup of tea but that is a very subjective standard - people think Steven King is a hack who can't write either - but he's easier to understand than reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, or even Dickens. What style one reader likes another may not so writing style doesn't have anything to do with being a professional.

Knowledge of the technical side of the gear. Well I assume JA is a member of an engineering school or professional body of engineering - Colloms is. So this gets us to part way there. Colloms being a certified electrical engineer can talk "professionally" about the engineering of audio components and the measurements section in Stereophile can be trusted at least in terms of what they measure (which doesn't cover stuff people can actually hear most of the time but that's another issue).

But it doesn't follow that because Colloms or JA can measure an amplifier's impedance curve or box resonance that they can evaluate the sound of music coming from the stereo any better than a 15 year old girl who plays the cello. Indeed, the latter will likely have vastly superior hearing to any 60 year old audio reviewer. They may not have the so called experience but they will very likely have much better hearing sensitivity and can detect more problems in the entire treble band than any 60+ year old or for that matter any 40+ year old "professional."

I think the term should simply be reviewer. Or "Paid Reviewer"

I taught in South Korea - they hired any white person (a bit racist there) with a degree in anything to teach children. There is a difference between a trained professional teacher and a guy with a degree in (enter any subject here) who is hired to teach kids. It's like having a doctor do heart surgery on you versus a guy with a journalism degree who watched the TV show House and operates on you. Both may get paid - but which one are you going to want and call a professional.



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