GrowLab participants will spend three months in Vancouver and one in San Francisco, receiving $25,000, office space and mentorship, plus a promise of $150,000 from BDC Venture Capital upon completion of the program. That means effectively that GrowLab has matched Y Combinator’s relationship with Yuri Milner and SV Angel, which provide the same amount for all participating companies (though Y Combinator serves many more start-up teams–it expects to have 62 in its next class).

GrowLab is led by Canadian entrepreneurs and angel investors including folks from NowPublic and AbeBooks.com, and it will give preferential consideration to applicants from Canada. A previous Vancouver-based start-up accelerator called Bootup Labs reneged on its promise to fund some participants and seems to have been discontinued.

But this morning I got a missive from an employee at one of the cable news networks, who tells me I’ve got it all wrong. Speed is nice, but these days, there are other considerations that are much more important for media companies:

It’s not the speed of Twitter photo that’s remarkable. It’s that it’s FREE. In the past, we would have got that pic from one of the agencies. We didn’t need anything from the agencies yesterday. Anything we couldn’t get from our own crews, people sent us FOR FREE.”

See? Who says old media have been slow to adapt to the Web?

There are some Webby start-ups premised on this idea, too. NowPublic, notably, is trying to organize amateur reporters and photographers into something resembling a newswire, or at least an interesting site. But those guys still have to figure out how turn that into a business.

But the big guys already have a business. It’s a pretty good one, too: Selling TV airtime to advertisers for a lot more money than the Web guys will ever hope to get. And if they can squeeze a few more dollars out of free Internet content, via outlets like Twitter and Time Warner’s (TWX) CNN iReport site, so much the better.