Good for them, but I agree with Eisner. Justin.TV is content, and content is still king, whether or not it includes audience participation. The web is a revolution in distribution, and in lowering the barrier to entry for content creation.
They tell a compelling story that's interesting & new and fits in with the zeitgeist. That's really all that PR is.
Right after I graduated high school, I worked for an all-teenage dot com. We were a dozen or so high schoolers, ages ranging from 15 through 19, building a "teen content" site with indirect venture funding (we were a wholly-owned subsidiary of a venture-funded startup). This was the summer of 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom. The NASDAQ had just peaked, but nobody knew it yet.
We got picked up first by the local community newspapers, then the Boston Herald, then the local TV news. Then we ran out of funding, but we continued getting press inquiries for several months after we were technically out of business.
We had a $20k PR budget (which we inflated to $50k whenever we talked to people), but we never spent any of it. Instead, our (18 year old) PR guy would just cold call newspaper editors with "Hi, this is Trip Guray, I'm at an all-teenage startup called inAsphere.com, and we have a story you might be interested in." If they weren't interested, fine, we'd say thanks for your time and try someone else. If they were, we'd send them a press release over e-mail or arrange for an interview.
Press coverage tends to snowball: if you get a story published in a community newspaper, you're much more likely to get picked up by a major metropolitan newspaper. If you get picked up by a major newspaper, other major newspapers will go after you. If a bunch of newspapers are interested, TV will soon be too.
