It's Wednesday, which means there's lots to sink your teeth into in this week's New York Observer: Alexandra Jacobs' tale of survival on Jet Blue 292; Rebecca Dana's take on the CNN's youth demo-baiting blog reporters; and of course Tom Scocca's profile of Nick Denton, charming host and this week's coverboy. It's a fascinating tale, to be sure, but our attention was caught by this account which marries a fanciful fairy-tale with oddly jarring savagery:

This is the story of blogs: Once upon a time, there was the Mainstream Media. The Mainstream Media lived in a tall, impregnable castle, where it paid people to write and paid other people to edit the writing. It printed the results on paper and tossed it down from the balconies, ordering the public to buy and read it.

Then a bunch of people - unpaid, many of them dressed in sleepwear - discovered that they could publish their own writing on the Internet, for free or close to it. Armed with their opinions and raw strength in numbers, they laid siege to the castle: amateur against professional, democracy against autocracy, new against old. The Mainstream Media retreated to an upstairs bedroom and barred the door, as the masses streamed into the throne room, waving Dan Rather's head on a pike.