So my question is, do you feel safer, should we all feel safer, and are the values of a free and open society safer when all the typically byzantine and backdoor nabe politics gets exposed to the relevant public audiences well and thoroughly?

I think the answer is yes, in part because merely spreading public information about public hearings and individual rights currently gets you looked at as a provocateur liable to be knee-capped one day. To the extent those default reactions of fear exist in urban neighborhoods, they are probably good predictors of their current and future health. I have been dismayed many times by the realization that much of my community appears to think and act as if it lives under a mafia controlled regime.

@Snowflake : What’s a local “news-paper?” They’re dying because their share of the total ad space real estate has shrunk due to the emergence of so many low-cost post-paper channels. MS, Google, Yahoo, etc. are getting in position to give media dinosaurs their death blow in the same way that Craig’s List mortally wounded them: by offering hyper-targetted, hyperlocal advertising to the world via thousands of these toeholds.

Who will produce original news content–filtering, framing, contextualizing, and interpreting the facts, including facts not fed into MSNBC…and will it be enough to sustain a good and free society? I am not opimistic about “the crowd,” just small bits of it.

MSNBC bought Newsvine a little while back. Take the Newsvine user-base (aka columnists) and provide them a tool for doing local “investigation” into their neighborhoods.

You get a recipe for building a crowd-sourced local “newspaper” were the “reporters” are invested in talking about themselves and are constantly fed new data about their immediate surroundings.

And as Newsvine is vote-based news ranking service, the best local writing bubbles up (in theory) providing a more personal competitor to news wire services like the AP.