There’s a certain efficiency in vertical organizations. Decisions can be made quickly. Channels of responsibility can be clearly defined—”the buck stops here.” If you want to get something done, and quickly, a vertical model will generally prove more useful than any other we humans have yet to develop.

At the other extreme is the completely horizontal organization, with no command structure — all decisions come through the group as a whole. Town-meeting governance, for example, works this way. The most obvious drawback of a horizontal structure is that its very nature can impede resolution.

One of the universes of human activity where a real horizontal structure is actually possible is the World Wide Web. By providing tools and not structure, and by freely distributing the tools, Tim Berners-Lee insured that the Web would resist any impulse to impose a vertical structure upon it.

Without boundaries but with plenty of opportunity, a “new” sort of journalism is springing up on the Web, that is re-imagining the role a blog, a story, a Web site, a newspaper, a newscast or any other “thing” can play. Instead of recognizing these in a vertical fashion, each chain rising independently, new journalistic entities are trying to develop paradigms for journalism on the Web that is horizontal.

One example is ePluribus Media, an organization less than two years old that tries to use the horizontal possibilities of the Web to create a different type of news organization.

ePluribus Media began with a call on The Daily Kos on January 26, 2005 by a blogger who uses the name “SusanG.” She was responding to a question from someone using the name “Jeff Gannon” during a televised White House Press conference.