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. The man, representing something called “Talon News,” asked President Bush,

“How are you going to work — you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people [Senators Reid and Clinton] — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”

Something was wrong, and SusanG knew it. A question like this could never come from a “real” journalist of any sort.

Was Gannon a plant? What was Talon News? SusanG wanted to know, and asked bloggers to help find the answers. Other bloggers were asking the same questions. Within days, the answers began to appear: Gannon was really James Guckert. He had no background in journalism and, in fact, had recently advertised himself on the Web as a gay male escort. “Talon News” was nothing more than a Web site (and it disappeared almost immediately). Gannon had been refused credentials on Capitol Hill, but was attending White House press events on day passes intended for out-of-town journalists—and had been, for more than a year.

The group that coalesced around SusanG soon set up a private investigative Web site for collection of information and discussion.

Within months, we were calling ourselves by a new name, ePluribus Media, and had branched out into other areas of online investigation. Today, we have a Journal site, a Community site, a Timelines site, a Podcast site, and an investigative site that is open only to those actively involved in ePluribus Media investigations.

The vertically minded see a blog simply as a blog, for example, and not as just one piece of a network of activities and technological utilization. The idea that it might just be a small part of a greater interactive whole is never considered. Knowing their popularity some people bow to the necessity of incorporating a blog into their news sites (assuming that’s the business they are in), but they keep them as isolated pieces. They are not surprised, then, when their blogs become nothing more than glorified “letters to the editor” columns, or venues for complaint and diatribe.

In the hands of a new breed of journalists, however, blogs are an entry into a fascinating and fruitful new world of research, data management, discussion, and writing—all open for either participation or observation, or both.

ePluribus Media has evolved into a citizen journalism organization. We focus on research, fact-checking, and cooperative projects in a horizontal organizational model. Though we present a great deal that could be classified as “opinion,” we are also actual news gatherers, as our series on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the firings of US Attorneys (among others) attests. We also interview political candidates and review books—among other things. And our timelines have been used by commercial news organizations as well as by the staffs of prominent politicians. In other words, we have turned into a full news media organization—but without paid staff or structure.

Though ePluribus Media does have a Board of Directors (I serve on it), there is no pecking order, not even a central committee deciding what stories or projects to pursue. Everything happens organically, if it happens at all, based on the energy of the individuals focused on any particular project.

Members of the organization communicate and develop projects in a number of fashions. Email and Instant Message discussions, text messaging and voice phoning (even conference calls, when needed). Private queries on the restricted “research” site, and open calls on the “community” site. Different people have taken on different functions, though most everyone trades off: research, fact-checking, writing, editing, development of timelines, site maintenance and site oversight.

Though a relatively small organization working on a minuscule budget (compared to commercial news organizations), ePluribus Media can put together a network of stories and information (its timelines, for example) that can be useful to other journalists as a story continues to unfold and, more importantly, to a citizenry hungry for the information that can make it more able to participate effectively in the public sphere—as actor and not simply observer. By providing a horizontal structure, the organization provides something that can mesh (instead of competing) with the vertical structures of the commercial news media.

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Aaron Barlow, author of the upcoming book “Rise of the Blogosphere” (April 07), is a professor of English at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in Brooklyn, NY. He also sits on the board at ePluribus Media.