As newspapers’ war against online news wages on, an evolution of powerful proportion is taking place in television news – a transformation of the traditional roles and personalities of broadcast journalists. Sharing his view of the changing landscape of journalism in a recent video interview produced by Beet.TV and aptly posted on YouTube.com, a generational mile marker in today’s world of user-generated news, Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News and consultant with Marketspace LLC, a business unit of the Monitor Group, notes that journalists are “more of a peer or representative of the viewer herself” than the “carefully groomed” and seemingly untouchable correspondents of yesterday.

Driving the trend toward authenticity, today’s world wide web of multiple content sources and news providers offers more opportunities than ever for ordinary individuals to become news people. News audiences are increasingly “sophisticated about finding, choosing and adapting news of particular interest,” says Heyward, and are “much to savvy about media to accept relatively superficial formulas that have come to dominate” traditional television news.

So while the role of mainstream news organizations to cull and summarize news from around the world continues, it now exists alongside an ever-growing population of user-generated content that “gets to the heart of the matter.”