Last February, comedian Sarah Silverman appeared on her then-boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel's ABC late-night program, surprising him with an outrageously funny short film: "I'm F---ing Matt Damon." Sung to a tune on Silverman's guitar, even Damon - the good-natured Good Will Hunting star and People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" in 2007 - danced and sang the chorus ("on the bed, on the floor, on a towel by the door, in the tub, in the car, up against the mini-bar"). It was an instant hit.

Eventually, technology for electronic paper displays will improve, and the clunky book reader will become a flexible computer that looks like a single sheet of paper. It'll be flexible enough to drop down the stairs and sturdy enough to take to the beach. While most displays currently use backlight to produce images and words, which can strain your eyes, electronic paper uses reflected light, which will feel, to your eyes, just like reading this page.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, Esquire became the first magazine to publish an electronic cover. Its October issue features words and images scrolling across the page, using electronic ink, with a battery life of 90 days. "Magazines have basically looked the same for 150 years," says editor-in-chief David Granger, who hopes the issue will end up in the Smithsonian (though it might be more at home in Times Square).

When I was asked to write about the future of radio, I felt I was being asked to step into, chronicle, and pay homage to a house I once lived in that has been renovated beyond recognition. Rather than give voice to the rising tides, the glorious future, the spectacular new delivery systems and the consolidation of mono-media into media stations, since it's my turn to speak, I am going to tell you first what radio was. All the futurists, modernists and media developers can wait. It's their world and their future. But a writer is permitted to go into …

Stepping out of the under-renovation airport in the Indian capital New Delhi on the Fourth of July, it was impossible to miss a giant billboard announcing the launch of People magazine. A U.S. title launched in India on American Independence Day with a striking Indian flavor: Is a phase of reverse cultural colonialism under way?

In the summer of 1995, during the height of early Internet media hype, my stepfather, Paul Bernick, asked me what all the fuss was about. To illustrate the potential magnitude of the new medium, and to do it in a way that might register at a very personal level, I told him that using technologies that existed at that very moment, I could "instantly beam you from New York to Hong Kong" via the Internet. The Star Trek-like analogy had come to me in a flash, and the truth is it startled me as much as it startled him. But …

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 …