One of the best of the real journalists of today that I've seen is a guy named Michael Totten. I started reading his blog because of a nice piece of writing he did about vacationing in southeast Oregon—so you know, there's pretty much a whole lot of desert there, and people don't vacation there as a rule. A few months after that, he basically said, I wonder what's really going on in Iraq, what with all of these "journalists" staying in Baghdad. So he got the funds together, went over himself, and started going around and talking with people.

Since then, he's gone to the Middle East a number of times. I appreciate his writing because it's lengthy, in-depth, and doesn't come with a framing story, because real life usually doesn't. He does state opinions, but he makes it clear that these are his opinions. Most of the time, however, he just states what he saw, not conclusions that he drew from minimal information. And he takes nice photographs, too.

I've heard good things about Michael Yon's writing too, particularly about the theater of war, but as I haven't read his work very much I can't speak to it as well.

(Seriously, in my journalism classes, I was surrounded by a bunch of people whose life ambition was to be a talking head. The one non-tech person who I thought would do well was from the Arab Emirates, I think, and English was her third language. While there are curious American journalists, they are a small, sad minority.)