"The Digestive Tract of the Disinfotainment Industry"

"If your calling is journalism, you enter the job market at the same time that that the long and honorable history of American journalism is traveling through the digestive tract of the disinfotainment industry," declared writer Howard Rheingold in his recent commencement speech at Stanford University. "But at the same time, you arrive on the scene just at the moment something broader, faster, and perhaps more democratic than the invention of journalism is emerging. ... Young people in every part of the world are using and inventing blogs, wikis, mobile messaging, desktop video, digital music, online animation, social software. ... You can -- you MUST -- innovate faster than your ability to innovate can be enclosed by laws, regulations, and technological fences."