David Kirkpatick's excellent article for Fortune on the level playing field that online publishing offers would be a must-read on any day, but it's underscored by today's New York Times article on how print tabloids' "exclusives" on photos are getting upstaged by online upstarts and John Battelle's post for FM Publishing noting how GM chose to reply to a Tom Friedman column [premium] that took a few slaps at the motor giant. The GM case is of particular interest: as John notes GM wanted to reply with a full op-ed piece, which the NYTimes wanted whittled down to a couple of hundred words - basically a letter to the editor - and the word "rubbish" excluded. Instead of going this route, GM posted its full reply on its corporate FYI blog, reaching the world in its own venue just fine, thank you very much. While GM's corporate blogs may receive a trickle of the overall traffic that the NYTimes receives, their point is made - without any editorial filters, facilitated by the level playing field of Web publishing.

When people talk about a level playing field for publishing oftentimes people think of fanatic citizen journalists holed up late at night in their jammies pounding away. But as this incident underscores corporations and other major institutions are very active members of Content Nation also. Every entity on the face of the earth can publish today and reach a global audience on that level playing field with the most nominal technical commitments - and many have value propositions for their publishing that support one or more personal or corporate bottom lines. So when the U.S. House of Representative decides to take a pass on "net neutrality" they may think that they're doing corporate campaign sponsors a favor, but they should think again: there are a lot of corporations out there that do not want to add to their cost of doing business by having to dicker with "fast lane" fees to be heard equally. Some simple math would show that there are a lot more of those publishers on the Web at this time than traditional media and telecommunications companies. Egalitarianism can work for giants, after all, if it's given the chance. It's a concept to which publishers are still trying to adjust -but adjust they must.