Sascha Meinrath, research director of the Wireless Future Program at the New America Foundation:

For almost 10 years now, I've been involved with the global justice movement and Indymedia, which at the turn of the millennium pioneered this notion of on-the-streets, participatory journalism. Back in the late 1990s, we created novel ideas about community blogs and open publishing systems that have really caught on since. We really need to take those sorts of ideas and ideals to the next level to create a next-generation public soapbox.

When I think of the crisis that journalism is facing right now, it really centers around the notion of a professional journalist class within our society. They were endowed with both a steady paycheck and with the responsibility to be critical analysts. Clearly, what's happened is that critical analysis and investigative reporting have atrophied -- not that they are not existent but that journalism is not fulfilling that role. And I think people in our society are responding to that.

There's a reason why local media have ceased to be as relevant as they once were. That needs to be recaptured in some way. The role that media play is fundamentally important to civil society, but we need to rediscover what that means in a 21st-century economy and communication society. Community intranets and local control of media are critically important. Maintaining open networks free from censorship is also foundationally important to what this future media might look like.