To build on Tracy’s concerns in her last post: I recently took a look at Salon’s new user-generated content experiment, Open Salon.

I’m a real Salon fan–it’s the only site I pay for premium access. That’s why I received an invitation email to the new site, in which Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh explains:

Now that it’s public, Open Salon speaks for itself. Here’s the quick view: It’s part blogging platform, part social network. You don’t need an invitation: Just sign up, and you can start your own blog, maintain a profile page and connect with friends and writers you admire. Thanks to a partnership with Revolution MoneyExchange, members can directly pay writers whose work they admire, with no service fees. Open Salon editors curate a cover, but readers have power there, too – the cover features lists of the top read and highest rated stories alongside our editors’ picks. We’ll frequently choose the best posts to feature on Salon.

In short, you can use our audience to build your own audience. And if you’re too busy to keep up your own blog, you can also find a whole new world of great writing–and people who want to talk about it.

Use their audience to start your audience—smart, right? I even considered it myself for a moment, and then remembered that I have book chapters to write, myriad tasks for my job at the Center for Social Media, and this odd urge to actually have a life outside of one screen or another.

Fire it up this morning, and who do I find on the front page? Jay Rosen. Rosen has become a leading proponent of the idea that professional journalists aren’t the only ones who can dig up the news we need to run our country and keep the powerful in check. He’s pioneered fascinating experiments examining the limits of this concept, like the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus.Net.

He’s also got a day job, which subsidizes his work and provides him with a safety net. As he told a gathering of online media makers last spring, “I am a tenured professor of journalism, I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

Good for him; there are lots of tenured professors who are doing, well, fuck-all with their privileged status. But his situation points out the problem: without a subsidy or a salary, who can afford to endlessly contribute to the online forums and social media tools springing up on a near-daily basis?