I met my first citizen journalist 32 years ago. You might even call her an early blogger. Ollie Hoyes from Olyphant, Penn., wrote the "Mid Valley Medley," a free-flowing column for her local weekly newspaper. When I arrived at the paper in the autumn of 1976, she'd already logged 20 years recording births, deaths, visits from relatives, church picnics, bad behavior, downed street signs, weather calamities, lost pets and sightings of local celebrities, such as the police chief, doctor, tax collector. (Now that is hyperlocal content.) Hoyes told me she assembled a little bit each day, starting on a Tuesday …

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 …

Media magazine: Chairman Martin, regulations and policy obviously will influence the near- and long-term future of media. What's on your docket over the next X months in terms of policy-making, and what could really fundamentally shift the way we consume media?

It's something we've all given a great deal of thought to, in one way or another: Who knows what the future will be? We rounded up a panel of distinguished figures from all corners of the media world and asked them what's next. This issue's guest editor, Bob Guccione Jr., led the discussion through twists and turns, a bit of infighting, and plenty of creative brainstorming into some breakthrough territory (such as when Roland DeSilva apologized to John Huey - sans the "I love you, man" and beer-sharing, sadly). The panel convened at MP's secret underground bunker, where we often …

The Future of Media is coming, and it's not what you think.