• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 5, 2008

Pay careful attention to this sentence, because by the time you finish reading it, a new media outlet will have been born. That's right, a new media outlet is created somewhere in the world - or at least, on the World Wide Web - every few seconds. And while a personal blog or a page on myspace.com may not seem to have that much consequence, every one of them has the potential to compete with the biggest media operators on the planet. In fact, the only thing separating my Facebook page from CBS, Yahoo or The New Yorker is the quality of the content I place on it and how effective I am at convincing people to spend some time with it.

Granted, the photo of my son and I standing on a hillside in Florence may not attract much traffic beyond my few Facebook buddies - and my mom - but had we instead been vacationing last spring in South Africa's Kruger National Park, and stumbled upon a herd of cape buffalo battling a pride of lions and a crotchety crocodile, well, then my content and promotional platform might be every bit as compelling as, well, you name it.

Go ahead, I defy you to tell me the difference between these three sets of numbers: 69.63.176.12, 199.239.137.245 and 77.92.74.1. Don't recognize them? Your browser does. The first is the universal resource locator, or numeric Internet address, assigned to facebook.com. The second is for nytimes.com. The third is for guimp.com, the smallest site on the Internet, according to the terms I plugged into Google. It's really small - the site's dimensions literally measure only 18 by 18 pixels - but it has the same global reach as nytimes.com, my Facebook page, even Google's home page.

What really separates these media outlets? Clearly, it is more than a few numerical digits demarking an Internet address. Yes, it's also their content. Most important, it is the relationships people have with them. The way I interact with The New York Times has changed a lot since the days when I read it in print, but my relationship with the publication has not. For me, it is still the definitive source for news, information and perspective on the events that shape my world and my community. I just relate to it online now because it is faster, more convenient, and yes, cheaper, than when I read it in print.

Those are certainly big issues for the Times and many other big media outfits that have traditionally dominated our world, but they are nothing compared to what they may encounter in the not-too-distant future. At least, that's what I concluded after reading the material in this special double issue of Media - one devoted exclusively to the subject of the future, both near and distant. It's also the first issue ever produced by a guest editor - Bob Guccione Jr.

Bob was an inspired first choice - for so many reasons. First, he is a genuine visionary who has one foot planted deep in the roots of our media heritage, and the other tiptoeing into the uncharted waters of its future. Second, two of Bob's greatest passions are media and science. Before guest-editing this issue, he was editor and publisher of Discover magazine. Early in his publishing career, he worked for the great, forward-looking science-fiction magazine Omni, which was founded by his father. And of course, Bob went on to conceive both Spin and Gear magazines, two titles that defined their genres.

A third reason that Bob brings a distinct vision to this issue is that when it comes to the future, he is fundamentally optimistic about media. And not just the newfangled kind. Bob, if you couldn't already tell, is a firm believer in the future of print media - especially consumer magazines. In fact, I was a little surprised to discover just how committed Bob is to print. All the pieces he wrote for this issue were by hand, and the first time Bob ever used Microsoft Word was when he had to type his pieces into electronic files so we could have them typeset. The hand-scrawling method apparently works exceedingly well for Bob. Don't take my word for it. Read the last feature in this issue, "A Town Without Media," Bob's vivid and insightful portrayal of media life in America's Amish community. It's an apt metaphor to conclude an issue about the future of media, and a great reminder that there's a diversity of media habits that extends well beyond Madison Avenue, and it goes deep into the hearts of humanity - in all its individual varieties.