There’s a lot more interaction between the advertising side and the editorial side. Stop the presses, I know — many Peepshow readers learned this years ago. But as NBC once said, touting reruns of its critically acclaimed but low-rated shows: It’s New To You!

I’ve discovered that a call from an ad rep can help get a meeting with an editor. I recently attended a major trade show, and learned that editors and publishers or ad reps typically make the rounds together — the editor looking for stories, the publisher looking for ad sales.

The traditional media are coming around to this model. At newspapers and magazines, the old “Chinese Wall” between editorial and advertising is breaking down. Newspaper editors are consulting with their ad departments on what kind of content they can produce that the ad people can sell against.

Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, is launching a nationwide multimedia content initiative called ContentOne, which will distribute information across the chain. According to the Gannett Blog, which has an excellent track record on these things, ContentOne will be run not by Gannett’s news department, but by its corporate communications department. If so, I suspect that sponsored content will be prominent among ContentOne’s offerings.

I think we’ll increasingly see editorial content produced by traditional media with an eye toward overtly leveraging ad opportunities associated with it. In fact, given the ease with which online content can be produced, I see no reason why corporations and businesses won’t just begin producing their own news sites, bypassing the traditional media to get their messages out.

Moyers is an old-fashioned Texas populist, working the same territory as the late Molly Ivins. Although his approach is more serious and less satiric, you might be surprised at how bluntly he addressed his topic: the danger to democracy from media consolidation.

Corporate media “refuses to speak the truth while our country is being plundered,” he said. “The dominant media are embedded in the power structure of our country.”

“Without a truly free press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-governance will not make it,” Moyers warned. “As journalism goes, so goes democracy.”

In his 45-minute address, Moyers was quietly passionate as he made his case against media consolidation and the profit imperative that has led the traditional media to cut journalists and give more space to “trivia, propaganda and entertainment.” It’s a case that many media critics have been making for years, but Moyers’ professorial demeanor and intelligent delivery lends it a particular credence.

I think I’ll disagree with one aspect of his speech, though. He touched on the subject of branded content and warned of the mixture of advertisement and information. “Imagine the Camel News Caravan returning as a branded YouTube channel,” Moyers said.

The Camel News Caravan was one of the first regular, national nightly news broadcasts. Hosted by John Cameron Swayze (at right), it appeared on NBC from 1949 to 1956. The early days of television news, of course, have long been remembered by commentators as a golden era in which the networks put content before profit. The sainted Edward R. Murrow was at CBS and news divisions were prestigious loss leaders. It doesn’t seem, in hindsight, as if Camel’s sponsorship of the news led to any ill effects.

If some corporation today actually did sponsor a YouTube channel or other programming, I don’t see what harm it would do. There’s so much content competing for attention that the sponsored programming would rise or fall on its own merits. Granted, if an Archer Daniels Midland, for example, decided to sponsor a YouTube channel devoted to the wonders of genetically modified food, it would probably not contain much content from opponents. But ADM already has many avenues for getting its message out, and its opponents now arguably have more opportunities than ever to counter that message.

If net neutrality is maintained and the average person continues to have unhindered access to the Internet, then I think the playing field will be more level than it’s been since the days of Thomas Paine and the colonial pamphleteers.

For Valerie Traina of Denver, it’s because of a passion for the environment. Traina is leaving her job as a fund-raiser for a child abuse prevention agency and going to grad school to become an environmental journalist.

“Environmental stories are suppressed by the corporate media,” she said. “Finally, with the rise of the new media, we have a chance to really get some of these important stories before the public and help do something about the environment. Because if the environment goes, none of us will be here, anyway.”

Dr. Jim Brancato teaches communications at Cedar Crest College, a small liberal arts college for women in Allentown, Pa. For him, it’s a matter of keeping up with his students, who grew up with new media and effortlessly incorporate it into their lives. But Brancato also believes that the mainstream media have actually ventured far from the American middle.

“The corporate media have really gotten away from what the majority of Americans believe in,” he said. “I actually think the ‘alternative’ media are much closer to the mainstream these days. On issue after issue, they really reflect the values that most Americans have.”

Arthur Lies showed up at the conference after realizing that an octopus had invaded his life.

“I grew up with a newspaper called the Fargo Forum,” said Lies, a retired schoolteacher from — where else? — Fargo. “Then it became just the Forum, and then it became Forum Communications. I was looking at their Web site recently — do you realize they own 34 newspapers? It’s an octopus. And then you look at our TV stations in Fargo: four stations, and it’s Disney and General Electric and Rupert [Murdoch]. The big corporations own everything.” (A century ago, the Standard Oil monopoly was often depicted as an octopus, as in this cartoon. That’s the kind of feeling I get from people here when they talk about the corporate media.)

There’s definitely big change happening in the media world, and it’s not stretching the point to call it people power. This conference features several political bloggers — most notably Jane Hamsher and Duncan Black — who were unknown three years ago, but now have followings in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. They are mobilizing people, influencing elections and having an impact on public policy at the highest levels of our government.

That would have been virtually inconceivable 10 years ago, or even five years ago. But it’s a fact of life today, and there’s no going back.

Political bloggers have learned to harness these forces more effectively than most bloggers on the commercial side. For people like me, whose job it is to market things, the challenge is how to find the key to getting people to feel as passionately about a product as they do about politics.