Mainstream media wants to catch up with the internet. The most controversial event last week seems to have been the Reuters/BBC WeMedia event, a gathering of "Executives, Investors and Activists" (although Richard Dreyfuss came closest to what I have come to know as media activism). Suw Charman reported on Strange Attractor:

There were two entirely separate conferences happening - the one that went on onstage and amongst the big media attendees, and one that happened in the backchannel and in the coffee breaks amongst the more clueful attendees. And never the twain shall meet.

Or shall they? Maybe not at conferences like WeMedia, or their civil society counterparts like eCampaigningForum or Web of Change. In the meantime, here in The Netherlands, mainstream newspapers are experimenting, building on their existing readership base. (The newspaper sites linked below are in Dutch.)

Earlier this year, de Volkskrant has opened a blog site where anyone can start a blog, and the most popular or noteworthy contributions may end up in the newspaper. Some day. For now, they are summarising and selecting. And researching the new role of the paid journalist/editor in a citizen journalist world.

And last weekend, NRC Handelsblad opened a "We the people" wiki about the EU Constitution. In a referendum on 1 June 2005, Dutch voters rejected the proposed constitution, after French voters did that a few days earlier, 29 May. Now NRC invites their readers to come up with an alternative text, in an analogy to the "we the people" US constitution. They had to relocate their site after one day due to the amount of traffic it attracted.