“A lot of the discontent with traditional journalism is because too many reporters have forgotten that the highest calling of journalists is to ferret out the truth, consequences be damned. Unfortunately, this is a concept that has fallen out of favor with too many journalists, who are obsessed with a false view of “balance” and “objectivity” and have become addicted not to the tireless pursuit of truth, but to the tireless promotion of the misguided notion that every story has two sides. And that the truth is supposed to be found somewhere in the middle. But not every story has two sides and the truth is often found on one side or the other. The earth is not flat. Evolution is a fact. Global warming is a fact. And there are definitely not two sides to the proposition that Iraq is our generation’s greatest foreign policy disaster. It is. Period.”

–Full interview with Arianna Huffington at Poynter Online

“The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land they were living on–also called their business model–no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to live on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on a new ground, or as we sometimes call it, a new platform.”

Professor Rosen has hit upon a pretty good metaphor. You can read his full piece here.

If I were a young person interested in doing journalism, I’d find a wagon train with a good wagon master (like Ward Bond) and a good scout and get on board.