Tree House Media Project Debuts. Self-reliance for angry journalists, preached by a former member of the tribe. Plus: "Last gasp of the curmudgeon class." NEWSROOM ID EXPLODES LIKE FIREWORKS OVER INTERN'S UPBEAT BLOG POST. Newspaper revanchism 'splained.

"Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable."

David Cohn is moving on to figure out if crowd funding can be made to work for news. Another young web-savvy journalist is moving in: Patrick Thornton. He's going "scour the Web for the people who are pushing the practice of beat reporting."

OffTheBus and NewsTrust.Net ran a little test two weeks ago. It's a crowdsourced week in review feature for high quality John McCain coverage, June 2 to 9. Here's the background and results.

"Trust me because I mask my true feelings about the matter" is not an inherently better way to journalize or gain cred. "Trust me because I show you what my true feelings on the matter are..." can also work. And if it has pro and amateur wings maybe the press can fly again.

I never expected McClellan to write a book about being the jerk at the podium for Bush, or to make connections between his experience and the larger wreckage of the Bush presidency. But he's done just that.

"The imagery is geological: the release of trapped deposits. He thinks we can reverse the time sink for people once marooned on the receiving end of a one-way system that didn’t care what you thought or brought to it, since it couldn’t afford the costs of interacting with you."

The Cap Times was re-born to Madison on Saturday. Ambivalence was felt about the lost authority of print-on-paper news. Generational blues were sung, a flying leap taken. Now a progressive newspaper must make real progress on the Web.

It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?”

In between there is uncharted territory. Mayhill Fowler's report quoting Barack Obama at a fundraiser ("It's not surprising then they get bitter") was posted at OffTheBus Friday afternoon. By Sunday morning Tim Russert had it top of show. How it happened. Why we did it.

"Though I await further reports, talk of some blogospheric war makes little sense to me. We're in a dynamic situation here. And one of the biggest unknowns is: will Obama match McCain in radical openness with the press?"

"Maybe Iran is training Al Qaeda is McCain's way of signaling that he intends to pick up where Bush and Cheney left off in discarding the whole reality-based approach to policy-making and public communication."