About a year ago, an editor at Hong Kong's major English-language daily newspaper, The South-China Morning Post, spoke to my class of second and third-year journalists at Hong Kong Baptist University. She told us not to think of journalism as a calling, or as some kind of higher profession for which we are destined. Journalism, she said, is just another job, and journalists should not consider themselves special in any way. Bringing the news to the people is not a noble duty, but just another societal task that needs to be handled properly. She was a stern, British woman in her early forties - and she frightened the class into an even deeper silence than was normal. She was far from inspirational, but perhaps she was right about journalism in societies like Hong Kong, Great Britain and Canada, where reporters are free to do and say as they please.

I didn't like the woman, but I agreed with what she said, and I buried her talk somewhere in my memory for future reference. Then I read this week's New Yorker. Michael Specter's "Kremlin, Inc." tells the disturbing story of government corruption in Russia. Driving the narrative is Anna Politkovskaya - an outspoken journalist who was murdered in her apartment building for speaking out against Vladimir Putin's Kremlin and the atrocities in Chechnya. I wonder what the Post's editor would have to say about Politkovskaya. To work through years of death-threats, abuse and torture, Politkovskaya must have felt compelled to do her duty as a Russian. Though her family begged her to give up, she persevered, saying "How could I live with myself if I didn't write the truth?"

What bothers me now about that Post editor one year ago, is that our class, of around twenty students, probably contained at least five students from Mainland China. A couple of those students might remain in Hong Kong after University, but some would inevitably return to China - where journalistic freedom is far more limited. If they followed that editor's advice, there would be none among them who might contradict the Chinese government - or question their practices.

As a fourth year journalism student, I am sometimes disappointed with a profession that appears to be driven by money, advertising, and celebrity reporters. But there is something to aspire to beyond Editor-In-Chief of the Globe, or polished anchor on CBC. There are still journalists in the world who pursue the truth, and do so with the purest of intentions. And for that small percentage of our profession, I can graduate Journalism school optimistically.