If you can shape their info-seeking habits when they're in their teens or twenties, you'll nab them for life. So the thinking goes.

But there is trouble afoot. The seeds have been planted for a tremendous upheaval in the material world of publishing.

Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines.

Today, the only way for media companies to survive is to own everything up and down the media chain -- from broadcast and cable networks to the sitcoms, movies, and news broadcasts you see on those stations; to the production studios that make them; to the cable, satellite, and broadcast systems that bring the programs to your television set; to the Web sites you visit to read about those programs; to the way you log on to the Internet to view those pages. Big media today wants to own the faucet, pipeline, water, and the reservoir.

The gulf between the American and Arab realities is the subject of "Control Room," a powerful documentary by Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American. She looks at Al Jazeera's coverage of the war, offering a sobering reminder that there are multiple ways of perceiving the same events.

The rush to sling mud is gaining momentum, and "Farenheit 9/11" marks the polarization of yet another form of media. One medium after another has found it profitable to turn from information to entertainment, from nuance to table-thumping.

Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation.

At its core, We the Media is a book about people.

In the case of The New York Times' Iraq war errors, which the paper finally acknowledged, we are now in the last act, aka Lessons Learned. This is when Wise Observers from all corners of the media landscape clear their throats in unison and agree that This Must Never Happen Again.

Yet it always does. Why?

The modern media have an insatiable need for exactly the kind of work that the news scandals are all about -- stories that are a bit suspect, tendentious, vaguely too good (or bad) to be true.

The news business often rewards people who get the story not quite right -- I'm talking about some of the smartest, hardest-working people in the news business.

Consider two news stories on the same hypothetical subject. Journalist A produces a balanced, especially gray report on the study. Journalist B does similar reporting, but in writing his piece, he winds up focusing on several prominent scientists who are particularly impressed with the claim. Better still, they are impressed in a memorable, quoteworthy way.

Media have been central to government efforts to reinforce sovereignty and define national identity, but globalization is fundamentally altering media practices, institutions, and content.

More than the activities of large conglomerates, globalization entails competition among states as well as private entities to dominate the world's consciousness. Changes in formal and informal rules, in addition to technological innovation, affect the growth and survival or decline of governments.

Even in the quietest of times, newspaper people live to be first.

There was a period in the not-too-distant past when editors stressed the maxim "Don't get it first, get it right." That soon mutated into "Get it first and get it right." The next devolution was an obvious one.