What is espionage? "The act of obtaining, delivering, transmitting, communicating, or receiving information about the national defense with an intent, or reason to believe, that the information may be used to the injury of..."
And, what's a journalist? Someone who publishes information/analysis. Some focus more on information-gathering, and then publish their discoveries. Others focus more on promoting a specific narrative, leaving information-gathering as a secondary concern. But a journalist who happens to obtain or publish information against their nation's interest is not automatically a spy.
You may choose to count saboteurs and assassins as spies, contrary to the dictionary definition, but consistent with popular usage. If you do, these represent a vanishingly small proportion of the overall number of spies, and are not germane to most discussions of espionage laws (laws against murder, theft, destruction of property, etc are not particularly controversial.)
For the most part, spies gather information and publish to a small audience. They are, essentially, doing journalism for a specific group and refraining from broader publication of their work.
The second most common espionage activity is propaganda - essentially journalism with a bias that is paid for by a foreign power. The audience may again be limited, as in spies dedicated to propagandizing only specific useful targets. But the goal is the transmission of information (false or true) rather than the gathering of information.
What distinguishes espionage from ordinary journalism is that the spy is paid by (or has her loyalty otherwise secured by) a power (nation, corporation, or other conspiracy) that we regard as hostile, and is willing to violate journalistic ethics in support of that employer. Simply limiting the scope of publication does not make one a spy; nor do violations of journalistic ethics; nor does targeted propaganda. It is the motivation that makes one a spy.
For the most part, spies gather information and publish to a small audience. They are, essentially, doing journalism for a specific group and refraining from broader publication of their work.
I cannot remember ever reading the word "journalism" used to refer to the act of providing information to a small, closed audience. Publication is an essential part of journalism, not an afterthought. And nobody says that handing over a report to your superiors constitutes "publishing".
If I watch a wealthy couple having sex for my enjoyment, I'm a ...
Sun Tzu said, "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." This is also true in rhetoric. The best way to get a belief accepted is to fool people into thinking that they have already accepted it.
(Note, first-year students, that I did not say, "The best way to convince people of a belief". Do not try to convince people! It will not work; and it may start them thinking.)
An excellent way of doing this is to embed your desired conclusion as a presupposition to an enticing argument. If you are debating abortion, and you wish people to believe that human and non-human life are qualitatively different, begin by saying, "We all agree that killing humans is immoral. So when does human life begin?" People will be so eager to jump into the debate about whether a life becomes "human" at conception, the second trimester, or at birth (I myself favor "on moving out of the house"), they won't notice that they agreed to the embedded presupposition that the problem should be phrased as a binary category membership problem, rather than as one of tradeoffs or utility calculations.
Consider the recent furor over whether WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange is a journalist, or can be prosecuted for espionage. I don't know who initially asked this question. The earliest posing of the question that I can find that relates it to the First Amendment is this piece from Fox News on Dec. 8; but Marc Thiessen's column in the Washington Post of Aug. 3 has similar implications. Note that this question presupposes that First Amendment protection applies only to journalists! There is no legal precedent for this that I'm aware of; yet if people spend enough time debating whether Julian Assange is a journalist, they will have unknowingly convinced themselves that ordinary citizens have no First Amendment rights. (We can only hope that this was an artful stroke made from the shadows by some great master of the Dark Arts, and not a mere snowballing of an ignorant question.)