The genie is out of the bottle. The mid-nineties dream of news and information “anytime, any place, through any device” is all but realized. But with it comes a torrent of information from the masses that may lack the necessary context, relevancy and sense-making that society requires to make well-informed decisions about life.

Terry Mazany, president and CEO of the Chicago Community Trust, talks about bringing shape and organization to a community's ecosystem. In Chicago: more than 200 sites, blogs and Chicago's news cooperative as the city's major newspapers slip and slide.

News moves through walls. Suddenly it can redistributed, revalued, repurposed, altered, shared, linked, commented upon, enhanced, mashed up, and discussed – piece-by-piece. The long-standing model of organizing news and advertising in a tidy, once-a-day package called the newspaper has blown up.

Knight and community, place-based organizations seek to reconnect people to the news and information impacting them. That’s the missing counterweight to the democratization of media: There's a void in communities when the scale tips to volume and popularity at the expense of knowledge and understanding, proximity and context.

Through public hearings, research and investigation, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities has found that access to quality information serving geographic communities in the U.S. is in jeopardy during the transition to digital media.

"The business models we've relied on to provide news and information to our communities are stressed and changing. New platforms offer an astounding array of choices, creating the most connected world we have ever known with the greatest volume of available data," Alberto Ibargüen says. "But as those choices proliferate and those virtual communities connect us globally, we see little evidence that the World Wide Web is effectively replacing the local news and information function of traditional media -- the kind of news and information that binds and defines community and that is essential for a well-running democracy."

The Commission, which includes Google executive Marissa Mayer among seventeen representatives from journalism and public policy, was launched in June 2008 with an agenda to assess the information needs of citizens to make concrete recommendations to public policy makers about improving local information flow and filling information voids.

— Dale Peskin