eBay and Craig's List To Merge Creating a P2P Media Giant

What does a 21st Century media company look like? What should it embody and who, if anyone ... or maybe that's everyone, will run it? NOTE - This post is speculative, not actual reporting. These are certainly good questions and they are discussed this week by sages like NYU Journalism Chair Jay Rosen, the PressThink weblog. The question comes down in my mind to what is a sustainable media business model. While Rosen points to a couple of projects that will try hard to create a profitable business around hyper-local citizen journalism when they launch next year, I believe they will face massive competition from a successful company that's already right under our noses - eBay. eBay and Craig's List are already the leaders in facilitating person-to-person commerce. They have also been steadily growing closer together - in August eBay eBay acquires the rest of Dan Gillmor Dan is right. We have been trained to categorize Internet companies into little discrete buckets. Yahoo is a portal. Google is a search site. eBay is an auction site. Amazon is an online retailer. That's all well and good, but I bet the the brilliant executives who run these innovative firms, however, are taking a much larger view of where the online medium is headed and they're watching blogs create trusted communities that can spur future revenues. You should too. Senior Vice President with Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.