To recap, my vision of the new is of the melding of establishment and startup media into vertically integrated but streamlined wholes. And there are ever-increasing signs that this model is emerging. BusinessWeek’s new project to get its blogs into more serious journalistic shape is one good move. But the big news is this: Ezra Klein, perhaps the poster boy for citizen-media and partisan blogging, has joined the establishment, migrating from the American Prospect to the Washington Post. This supports another of my hunches that the WaPo company would be the first to arrive at the new content structure.

Here’s the killer punch: Klein rejects the knee jerk “citizens are better” ideology of many of his old confreres and admits that he’s doing better service to the public as a WaPo reporter than he ever could have done in TAP. Working at the Post, he says, “adds on a different level of responsibility.”

All of this, however, doesn’t take away the core problem, which is funding this mess. For that, all we have to rely on is humor: