I'm curious if you think this is relevant today. Don't get me wrong I respect the author but I haven't picked up a newspaper in forever and I'm old enough to remember Mr. Cronkite doing the news.

So do you think stories are written the same way today? I agree the first paragraph is usually the most important it's loaded to get you to read more. However do you think journalists / bloggers have the time to think a story through and not add opinion?

I think it's still relevant to some degree, for two slightly related reasons.

[1]Good journalism still exists online. You just have to find it. RealClearWorld does a good job of finding quality stories, and the CSM is still top notch. Even mainstream news sources such as CNN still have good pieces; my rule for them is the shorter the better though -- just the facts.

Everyone has inert baises when they write, no matter how hard they try to hide them. But this has happened for decades, so take them with a grain of salt.

[2]Bloggers aren't journalists, they're just bloggers (sorry bloggers). If anything, they're editorialists. Cronkite's rules still apply to this crowd as well. Bloggers add opinion by their very nature. If they didn't, then they'd be classified as journalists, and held up to the same standards of integrity.

This is also my own bias showing -- I really do want Cronkite's rules to still apply today, simply because he was the standardbearer for a generation of news.

I think the advice to pick a story on the TV news and research it in more depth is wonderful, and even easier to do today with the variety of news sources from around the world easily available on the web.

But did Walter Cronkite really mistakenly write "effect" for "affect" twice, or was this the fault of some later transcriber?