By King Kaufman: I've been surprised by some of the fiercely negative reaction in the comments to Katharine Mieszkowski's post yesterday about a bedding company sponsoring and hosting a one-person news site in a small Texas town.

To recap, the Carpenter Co., which makes mattress and pillow stuffing, hired former Raleigh News & Observer columnist Dan Gearino to spend a month writing about life in Stephenville, Texas, population 15,000. The company says it wants Gearino to write about the town, not the company or its products. It wants to drive traffic to its own Web site, but Gearino is not expected to shill for Carpenter.

The bedding company is headquartered in Richmond, Va. The reason it wants a Web site in Stephenville is because it has a marketing deal with the singer Jewel, who lives there and has a new album.

"Journalist in bed with a corporate sponsor?" writes cindy capitani, quoting the post's brilliant pun of a headline, which someone connected to this blog who isn't named Katharine wrote. "I don't think so. Lucky him that he found a PR-type job that isn't a snooze."

"I'm waiting for the NASCAR-like patches to appear on Brian Williams' and Katie Couric's clothing," writes Blackflon. "They could also wear baseball caps with the sponsor logo."

"It's the return of Yellow Journalism," writes Robert Young. "Just with a bit more cynicism and contempt for the public. Hearst is cooing in his grave."

I'm not sure yellow journalism -- sensationalism and scandal over legitimate news -- means what Young thinks it means. And I'm not sure yellow journalism, though it's not called that anymore, has gone anywhere it needs to return from.

At any rate, I'm also not sure how this project, which seems rather low-key and small-town feel-goody to me, raises yellow journalism flags, and I'm not seeing the cynicism or contempt for the public.

It would be hard to be more cynical than Hearst's yellow journalism, either the real or apocryphal -- "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war" -- version. But the idea behind the Stephenville site seems pretty straightforward.

The bedding company is saying, in effect: "We're sponsoring a reporter to cover this town, because we want people to come to our Web site." I think it's different only in a matter of degree from how it would be if there were a newspaper in that small town with one large employer/advertiser. That company wouldn't be the only advertiser, but it would have a whole lot of influence at the paper, believe you me.

In this case, let's face it, you're probably not going to get an exposé of Carpenter Co.'s hiring practices or something. But with no news outlet in town, and Carpenter's headquarters hundreds of miles away, you weren't going to get one anyway, even if there were a newspaper there. This way, you at least get some news.

Will you get an exposé about, say, the mayor's peccadilloes? The mayor who's a good friend of the bedding company, or a good friend of Jewel's? Good question. But let's not forget, the New York Times and NBC and your local newspaper are also powerful companies with corporate interests. Brian Williams or Katie Couric wearing NASCAR-like patches and baseball caps as they deliver the news, as Blackflon suggests, would at least inject some transparency into the process!

The newspaper or TV network or Web site such as Salon, like the Carpenter Co., promises you that it won't let its business or political interests stand in the way of reporting the news. You can choose to believe that or not. You can weigh the claim against reality as time goes on. You're savvy news consumers.

And what if the bedding company-news site is just so chirpy and happy-news and Carpenter Co.-promoting that it becomes ridiculous? It'll still be the biggest news outlet in town. The worse it is, the greater the chances that someone in town gets pissed off enough about it to start their own news blog, about what's really happening, in town and maybe even at the evil bedding overlord.

That would be the news ecosystem at work. It's the same process that's leading to the creation of hundreds or thousands of hyperlocal news sites around the country as newspapers fold or cut back on their coverage.

A news site with a single corporate sponsor that also hosts the site? That's the Future of Journalism? Oh, hell no. But it might be one small piece of a very complex, very interesting puzzle. It's not ideal, but it's a damn sight better than nothing.

And let's not kid ourselves: There's nothing new about corporate sponsorship of the news.