- a daily record of events or business; a private journal is usually referred to as a diary
- a newspaper or other periodical, in the literal sense of one published each day
- many publications issued at stated intervals, such as magazines, or scholarly journals, academic journals, or the record of the transactions of a society, are often called journals. Although journal is sometimes used as a synonym for "magazine", in academic use, a journal refers to a serious, scholarly publication that is peer-reviewed. A non-scholarly magazine written for an educated audience about an industry or an area of professional activity is usually called a professional magazine.
The word "journalist", for one whose business is writing for the public press and nowadays also other media, has been in use since the end of the 17th century.