"The comfortable one-way model of publisher to editor to journalist to reader has changed forever. There is no turning back. It kind of happened before our eyes, but like those frogs slowly boiling in water as the heat is turned up, we may not have noticed – unless of course you run classified ads at the local paper. For anyone in any doubt of this fact I have two words for you – blogging nuns.

A week back a news report in the Sunday Times in London caught my eye. It reported that a group known as the “sister bloggers” had formed. The online diaries of the “sister bloggers” were giving a behind the scenes look at what life was like inside the convent... Blogs are so ubiquitous now that they are appearing in the most unlikely of places - convents. So, you heard it here first - the tipping point for social media – nuns."

Great anecdote from, Tom Glocer, Reuter's CEO, from his eloquent speech to the Globes Media Conference in Tel Aviv yesterday (via Mediabistro). The speech offers many good points on today's two-way media pipe, but it also throws up a few challenging notions on impartiality - slightly reminiscent of what Peter Horrocks, BBC's head of news, received so much flack for recently. It's not easy to get this impartiality thing right, as Wikipedia's entry on Reuters bears witness to.

How do 'beacons of objectivity', such as BBC and Reuters, respond to a new media reality where opinions are all over the place, and people have come to expect openness and dialogue? Glocer's answer seems to be transparency, which is commendable, but that still doesn't make the notion of balancing the marginal terrorist with the equally marginal pacifist less problematic, although perhaps I'm reading too much into this. The speech, well-worth reading in full, is also a great plug for Reuters, an elaborate attempt to justify Reuters' continued relevance in today's shifting media landscape, and as such it's quite a convincing one.