This month’s issue of threemonkeysonline should make some professional journos tug their collars with unease. After all, with an interview with one of the filmmakers behind the documentary The Corporation, a discussion with Greg Palast on American politics, and a talk with Sarah Hall, a rising author recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the online zine gives the traditional arts supplement inserted into your high-minded broadsheet a run for its money. What’s interesting about threemonkeysonline and other sites like it is that it has no real staff–each issue the editor, Andrew Lawless, assembles an ad hoc group of writers who contribute only if they think they have something interesting to say. The age of sleepwalking hacks will finally come to an end when reasonably clever people realise they can do better if they’re knowledgeable about a subject (and can craft a half-literate sentence–although the existence of Dublin’s Evening Herald is evidence that even this skill is not indispensable in newspapers). If you’d like to join this free-floating group of contributors, check out the site’s submission details. On a related topic–how electronic media is threatening the traditional few-to-many paradigm of information distribution–Dan Gillmor’s book We the Media (O’Reilly) is available online under a Creative Commons licence here. I’ve just browsed it so far but according to a review in the Guardian, “anyone plotting the future for a media organisation – or any organisation that deals with the media – would be foolish to do so without first reading Gillmor’s book.” In the next day or so, I’ll try to post details on some other “open content” books available on the Web.