Good journalism? Probably not. Public outcry over the subjective, corporatized distillation of "news"? Yes. People are taking back control over how news is disseminated to them and that's terrific, but it's important to realize that this is not solely an "innovation" in the Web or news or technology. It's a social movement. People are mad as hell about the pasteurized news reporting they've been getting for the past 10 or 20 years, and the Internet is allowing them to counter it with facts and useful information.

The only problem is that the average person doesn't understand or respect what made journalism great in the early days: objectivity and accuracy. There are tons of great bloggers out there, committed to getting facts right and referencing sources whenever possible. But there are also blowhards, idiots, and liars who will fake it -- and fool a lot of people. It will become just as important as it has always been to read news with a critical eye -- and that may be harder to do with so many more voices fighting for attention.

Good point, Jill. With TV news media pulling audiences to the right and left, and the walls coming down on publishing as noted above, one really has to be a smart media consumer.

One point in your argument I'll take to task, however, is objectivity. Journalists must be fair and balanced (a couple of words that have become trashed by Fox News) but objectivity does not exist in any stage of the process of news. It is a goal that actually hurts good reporting, IMO. Balance is what we are after. News is news, but its gets placed in pages based of its importance to a newspaper or TV audience (at the cost of a story that may be more important but less sexy, often). And reporters go after stories that they are told to (by their audience-focused editors) or have an inclination to go after, based on their values. Nothing wrong with that.

Objective-centric reporting to me always comes off as if there was nothing learned in the reporting, and I am happy to see that go away. So much of the storytelling gets stripped away. That's why I think people like news-focused blogs, because it is all there.

Newspaper readers have learned to understand the slants of their papers, and that leaves us with some hope for the new media landscape of user-generated content.

People are pretty media savvy already; it's just that they tend to go with sources that support their belief systems, rather than challenging themselves. And that is accelerating now. Much more worrying than opening up the process and making it more real-world.

So journalists must be fair and balanced, but news need not be? How does that work itself out? News is certainly news but the way it's presented -- quoting some sources but not others, timing the release of it, omitting facts that provide perspective, etc. -- determines the journalist's objectivity and hence, the value of the story, does it not? There are lots of ways to report news and the judgment of the human doing the reporting determines how reliable it is.

There is news -- which is supposed to provide facts -- and there is editorial. Journalists know the difference but does the average blogger? I don't want my news filtered by corporate interests or an entertaining journalist (no matter how much I might agree with them!). Storytelling is great, as are editorials and opinion columns, but news should be purer, shouldn't it?

Really, this is weird coming from me because I really do enjoy getting information from certain bloggers! But I am also aware that the bloggers I like provide links to their sources and I've often followed those links to get the "meat" of the story or confirm a quote. Bloggers who don't provide that kind of background material are suspect in my view because they're taking news and potentially slanting it to make me believe that it means one thing when in fact, it may mean something else.

I don't think the average person is media savvy, especially in this country. They are too accustomed to consuming media without processing it or thinking about it because they've always trusted that everything they read is "free press" and uncensored. It's only lately that they realize they've been lied to. Okay, so I'm a little jaded. :)

I completely agree with you that it's easier now than ever to obtain information only from sources with common belief systems. So everybody's happy but are they as informed as they could be? That's the question I'm not sure I can answer "yes" to.

For a quick answer I may use 'Wikipedia', BUT for answer I can trust - ALWAYS check 3 independent sites. And not Digg or other aggregator because they have the hot site repeated, NOT verified. As our leaders demonstrate personal opinion or agenda overrides personal integrity.