I had to quote your whole email because it was worth reading again.
Paul Hartzog and Richard Adler covered much of this in their approach
around “social publishing”. They presented this at the 2007 Political
Economies of Peer Production conference in Nottingham, UK.

Worth reading in this context is:
http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/02/social_publishing.php both
Paul and Rick collaborated on this thinking. Much of the basics of
this are now central to Forward Foundation approaches, so credit goes
to them for challenging assumptions about this.

I bring this up because I think it resonates with what you are talking
about here. You can’t do things that purport to be something new, but
still shore up the collapsing old model (unless you have a really good
reason to do that).

A cooperative could be a great model for a publishing initiative. But
cooperative model is not enough. You also need an adaptive way to
address the what is now emerging, which is an exponentially growing
system where people exercise choice in what they engage with. When
we’re listening to what people are asking for, and mapping them and
ourselves into the larger system, then we’ll see how it is possible
for us to be flexible enough as publishers, to anyone/anything else,
to address emerging needs that cannot be addressed with boilerplate
solutions.