The future of journalism is increasingly depicted as a desperate, dystopian one, where failing newspapers are gobbled up by greedy, corpulent business men and suspect foreign interests, staffed by underpaid and belegured reporters eagerly printing verbatim the latest press releases and government reports, fronted by divisive shouting heads who want little more then to make money and generate interest by screaming even more ludicrous claims.

Perhaps the reason this idea endures is that we are seeing shades of it in our own time. The newspaper industry has been in a free fall for years, with some saying the bottom is near and others estimating far more billions will be lost. More and more, newspapers are being phased out, combined, bought and re-purposed. According to a study by the St. Louis journalism review, over 502 U.S. cities had at least two competing newspapers. In 2004, that number was down to 24, and it is smaller today. Anybody can turn on the television and see the increasingly loud farce that is cable news, and people readily subscribe to whatever news organization shares their world view, while denouncing the others as partisan, biased, ignorant and stupid.

This is nothing new. People have been forecasting the death and conglomeration of newsprint since the invention of the radio, and looking back at what passed for journalism at the turn of the 20th century, todays sensationalism looks downright tame. Edgar Allan Poe himself said, as far back as the early 1800's, that "of the newspaper press..their sole legitimate object [is] the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner." Harsh words for the time, but such sentiment has endured from the beginning of recorded history until now, and it won't change any time soon.

Much of the talk about the future of journalism, while still relevant and important, is merely an outgrowth of human nature and a continuation of conflicts that will persist forever. But what is novel about our time is also what is most important to the discussion, and it has many more ramifications and asks much more of the readers and users than it does of the creators and the industry itself.

Simply put, there are more ways to get news and more ways news is disseminated than ever before in human history, and we are only on the tip of the iceberg.

Today, you could watch BBC news on satellite television while streaming Al-Jazeera over the Internet, have headlines and articles from the biggest newspapers in America sent to your phone, all while reading a computer translated copy of The Prague Daily Monitor on your Kindle and listening to C-Span podcasts on your Ipod, and while one would never want to do all those things at once, even this ridicolous example only takes into account traditional media sources.

Today, technology allows people from all over the world, with access to the Internet, to share their stories, lives, experiences, and outlooks in ways and to a degree that would have seemed unfathomable forty years ago. Internet news groups empower motivated citizens from all over the world to videotape what is going on around them and send it in. Subjects that before were the sole domain of magazines like National Geographic and organizations with some serious funding behind them.

Of course one can't expect, but may sometimes find, things of the same quality as National Geographic, and most media executives are quick to point out that most bloggers and Internet news sites are not doing the work but merely commenting on and re-examining it- but this is a valuable next step that can often shed light. The collaborative power of a large number of dedicated people has yet to be truly tapped for online journalistic purposes, but user-grown sites like Wikipedia are a testament of what can, and will, be achieved.

Navigating the new world of journalism, however, with all these options and opportunities avaliable, will be the biggest challenge. There is a growing body of scientific evidence that too much choice creates apathy and confusion- and according to the most recent PEW study, people aren't any more informed today about what is going on in the world than they were 20 years ago, despite the so-called information revolution.

But for those that want it, information is everywhere- yet knowing where to find it, how to detect blatant and harmful biases and suspect information, and how to best integrate it into your life will be one the big challenges of the future, and nothing is going to get less complex. This struggle for media literacy will become increasingly important as media surrounds us, and though it is just a part of the future of journalism, is it arguably the most important, for it has the largest ramifications for the future, and the world's population as a whole.