Back to Steve 'coas' original point, you might find our citizen-based model of governance/non-profit ownership of local Issues Forums to be of interest.

See: http://e-democracy.org/if

We've been building our sustainable model since 1994, from the perspective of 'online citizen participation.' This whole 'media' thing seems to flow from the idea of making media more participatory online while our approach is to add publicness (and civility) to natural patterns of more or less private interaction online. 'Media' also seems to imply a headline or news, where we have no such expectation.

One new example of adding publicness is our campaign to encourage people to 'tag' there content across many sites like YouTube and Flickr 'mnpolitics' See: http://e-democracy.org/voices

This is tied to our MN Gubernatorial E-Debate.

Cheers,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org