• New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has long used his widely read blog, PressThink, to argue for journalism that somehow combines the best of the traditional media with the energy of bloggers and citizen journalists. Now Rosen is attempting to put that into practice. His latest project, NewAssignment.Net, is devoted to what he calls “pro/am” or “open source” reporting — professional journalists and the “former audience” working together, applying more human capital to a journalistic endeavor than even the best-funded investigative team would be able to muster. It’s too early to tell whether NewAssignment.Net will be successful, but some of its projects — like “Off the Bus,” presidential-campaign dispatches produced by amateur correspondents and uploaded to the Huffington Post — are intriguing.

• Across the country and around the world, people are setting up local blogs to cover the comings and goings of their communities. They range from slick efforts like Baristanet, a for-profit site in Essex County, New Jersey, to a wide range of amateur (and often amateurish) projects slapped together by activists and cranks alike, read by just a handful of people. With even small weekly newspapers getting snapped up by large, out-of-state corporations, these local blogs — “placeblogs,” as they have been dubbed by Lisa Williams, founder of H2otown in Watertown — are emerging as a vital alternative.

Clearly, the industrial, top-down, corporate-controlled news media of the past 150 years are in the midst of giving way to something else. The late social critic Neil Postman was not alone in pointing out the fallacy of thinking about new technology as nothing more than a better, faster version of that which it replaced. Superficially, radio was the audio equivalent of print, and television was radio with pictures. Because each of these developments required less work and less engagement on the part of the consumer, each led to an increased reliance on emotion over reason, on received certainty over critical thinking.

Radio, and especially television, are passive, one-way media. Since the advent of television, radio has been the medium of choice mainly for people doing something else (driving, cooking, exercising), which at least ensures a certain amount of blood flow to the brain. Television, though, can only be taken in while sitting reasonably still, the better to receive messages in all their packaged totality. It’s an alternate reality that seems as real, or more real, than what’s taking place outside our homes. It has created a society of alienated, atomized individuals; a decline in civic engagement; and an expectation that entertainment and information are merely to be received, not acted upon.

This passive model of media consumption was the inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution, whose giantism influenced the media as fully as every other sphere of life. As Yale University law professor Yochai Benkler shows in his 2006 book,  The Wealth of Networks , as recently as 1835, James Gordon Bennett was able to found the New York Herald, perhaps the first truly modern newspaper, with an investment of just $500 — $10,400 in 2005 dollars. By 1850, the cost of launching a daily paper had risen to $100,000, or nearly $2.4 million in 2005 dollars, thanks to the introduction of high-speed industrial presses, the telegraph, and the concomitant rise of wire services. Needless to say, once the 20th century rolled around, the cost of launching radio and television stations was exponentially higher than that of starting a newspaper. All of this led to the media environment with which we’re so familiar today: enormous organizations controlling nearly all of our television and radio stations, newspapers, books, magazines, music, and film, with little or no competition and virtually no meaningful way for citizens to interact with them.

But then the Internet happened. And rather than being simply the next phase of industrialization, the Internet mode of media proved to be distinctly post-industrial. To be sure, huge corporations have tried mightily to stake their claims. Every media organization, large and small, has its own Web site, and the online incarnations of the  New York Times , the  Washington Post , and MSNBC, to name a few, are among the most-visited news sites on the Web. But, in contrast to the industrial media, the Internet enables small players and individuals to engage on a roughly equal footing with Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch. Moreover, the Internet is uniquely suited to talking back, thus transforming what had been a we-speak/you-listen model into something approaching a dialogue. “Statements in the public sphere can now be seen as invitations for a conversation, not as finished goods,” writes Benkler.

But what of the cacophony of voices? If everyone is shouting, can anyone be heard? This is not an insignificant problem. The level of Internet discourse can be quite low, and it’s a challenge to weed out the consequential from the irrelevant. Yet this problem is not insurmountable. For one thing, judging the relative credibility of various websites and blogs is not all that different from deciding that the New York Times does a better job than the New York Post. News and political websites and bloggers must earn trust by doing good, reliable work over time, just like mainstream-media organizations.