Not quite sure what you're trying to do here, but if journalist is a group (otherwise you would have just put them in the staff group), then how about using the procmail contrib and set up a mail rule that fowards any mail for 'staff@domain.com' to 'journalist@domain.com'.
The procmail rule will need to be set up for an individual user, so set it up for one of the users in the staff group that is likely to be around for years...