[Disclaimer: I don't speak on behalf of the Media Co-op, but I speak from the Media Co-op. Others may very well disagree with things I say, or wish to express things differently. I hope that they do.]

Recent controversies have resulted in a few people contacting me and asking me, and pressuring me, to take stuff down from the Media Co-op web site. My answer is the same for each one: I cannot.

The baseline assumption seems to be that this organization is top-down in the same way many others are. Because I'm one of the people who has been working on the Dominion and the Media Co-op since the beginning (that being 2003), I'm assumed to have some kind of omnipotence or at least massive influence when it comes to the operations of the project.

In fact, we're working to make an organization that is the exact opposite of that state of affairs, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

Our current overlapping structures

The Media Co-op consists of a few different, overlapping things:

• The Locals (Halifax, Vancouver and Toronto, so far) which are responsible for operating their respective web sites. These web sites all feed into the central MediaCoop.ca site, where people can post work that does not pertain to a particular Local.
• The three kinds of members: readers, contributors and editors. If they are geographically situated within a local, members may also be a part of a given local.
• The Dominion, which draws from the coverage of the locals, frequently pays local members for their work, and has its own editorial standards and policies.
• A central staff, which overlaps to a very large extent with the Dominion's editorial collective, which is responsible for many of the daily operations of the co-op and its publication, the Dominion.

Since it's inception two years ago, the Media Co-op has been in the process of building a structure that embodies participatory democracy, and is resolutely bottom-up.

Media from below

Our decentralized structure has been one of the main contributing factors in the rapid growth of the Media Co-op, from nothing a few years ago into a network that generates thousands of posts per year, not including comments.

What bottom-up means to us, is that the central body of the Media Co-op serves the membership and the Locals, and it doesn't get to tell the...

An ongoing discussion about the decline of newspapers seems to have reached a critical point in the last few days.

First, Chronicle-Herald columnist Dan Leger lamented the lack of funding for hard news coverage due to massive fragmentation of the advertising market:

Last year, Google collected more than a million dollars from advertisers here. Yet it doesn’t have a single representative in Nova Scotia, let alone a reporter or editor.

The Chron-Herald is planning major cuts to its newsroom.

Today, the discussion took a new turn, with an Op/Ed in the NY Times proposing a radical shift in funding models for newspapers: from advertising to endowments:

Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance.

. One response points to an existing example in the St. Petersburg Times.

What's strangely missing is any sense that not relying on advertising would result in a different structure or way of doing things. If a newspaper not a for-profit anymore, should not different standards of say, participation, transparency, democracy and accountability apply? Right now, the NYTimes can lie in the leadup to a war, and to the extent that they aren't embarrassed, just say "don't buy it if you don't like it".

When other funding kicks in, that logic fades out, and other standards start to appear.