and, half of the time, it's not clear if they're showing those police brutality videos in order to expose the violence or to drill into your head what happens when you disobey.

maybe we don't have a centralized or coordinated press, but we have more press today than we've ever had before, with less censorship than we've ever had before - it just operates at the level of individual blogs, rather than the level of centralized papers. if you ask these people how they survive, they'll tell you they sell tshirts instead of ads. and, at least a tshirt has use value.

to an extent, i think this discussion is pining to recreate or morph something that ought to be abolished. if we go back in time to the early days of the printing press, we see independent zines and pamphlets created by guilds and unions and independent publishing houses that would publish all kinds of things. but, as the gilded age developed, there was a process of consolidation that took place to create these institutions called newspapers, which developed into radio stations and television networks. it was with this consolidation that the corporatization of news developed. this discussion seems to see the corporatization of news as a norm, and is seeking to recreate it in a shift in the mode of production.

but, the early days of the printing press were more democratic, and there's an argument that the corporatization of the blogosphere should be resisted - that independent bloggers and media creators are preferable to centralized news sources, if the aim is a purity of the source, and honesty in media to produce an educated populace.

the news is admittedly different now, and it requires more effort to locate. but, i think we're better off, and the best thing to do is plug away at models just like this one with the hope and expectation that it wins, in the end, and puts the msm out of business.

in the end, you can lead a horse to water, right? people will decide what they want. you can't force people to consume insightful news and analysis if they don't want it, you can just make it and throw it out there and hope they like it. 

twitter + blogger + indymedia have, together, done more to create substantive movements on the ground than anything that cbc or pbs could ever do.