I find media fascinating. And I'm obviously not alone.

Recent reports acknowledge that while the media industry is a driving force in today's economy, it's going to be even bigger in the years ahead.

Media investment banking firm Veronis Suhler forecasts that consumer media consumption will increase to over 10 hours per person per day by 2004. While one may wonder how anybody will find time to do laundry, it appears that the appetite for media products and services is nearly insatiable.

"Americans have become expert media multitaskers," said James Rutherfurd of Veronis Suhler. Consumers are "sending e-mail and Web surfing while watching an episode of 'The Sopranos,' maybe downloading music at the same time, or tracking an online trading account while listening to a CNBC business program and perusing the latest issue of The Industry Standard."

What's propelling this heady consumer interest?

The emergence of the Internet as a bona fide mass medium and an explosion of new technologies have created what is probably the most dynamic and tumultuous era in the history of mass communication.

Our media landscape is in the midst of a major transformation, as elements of everyday media use are colliding and being reworked for delivery over myriad new channels and devices. Traditional newspapers, magazines, books, television, radio, and movies certainly don't look as familiar when they're accessed through e-books, cell phones, pagers, personal digital assistants, and other Flash Gordon-ish gadgets in the pipeline.

Professionals in all areas of media, from editorial to advertising, understandably are concerned about what this activity means for their businesses and future livelihood.

New technologies and other business forces raise many important questions: Will the Bertelsmann alliance with Napster help spread the file-sharing model from music to other media formats? Will digital video recorder services like TiVo kill off regularly scheduled television? Will online editorial ever find a successful revenue model? What will be the repercussions of mammoth corporate marriages like AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal? How will the coming broadband revolution transform our lives even more?

A few weeks ago, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch predicted that people will soon receive their magazine subscriptions through e-book devices. A new PriceWaterhouseCoopers report said that in the near future half of all music singles and professional books will be transmitted digitally. At the Internet World conference in New York in October, AOL's Barry Schuler claimed that the next phase of the Internet would converge the PC, television, stereo and telephone.

Will all of these grand visions actually come to fruition? Who knows for sure?

High-definition television was once projected to be mainstream by early in the millennium, but its audience, for various reasons, is far from mass right now. A few short years ago, some Net pundits prophesied that as newbies became more confident with navigating the Web, the days would be numbered for a proprietary network like America Online. Now, of course, AOL is preparing to swallow one of the world's largest traditional media companies.

No one person, survey or trade group can provide definitive answers about our media future. Not Steve Case, not Sumner Redstone, not Martha Stewart, not the FCC, not even the consumers who are the ones who are actually going to have major influence in the outcome of all this.

Our best sources are likely to be the media-focused news operations that track this daily evolution. Several media news outlets, among them Brill's Content, Inside.com and Variety's eV magazine, have sprung up within the past few years to report on and analyze this turbulent environment.

As insightful and resourceful as they may be, some journalists have dismissed these "media-on-media" services as narcissistic and contributors to a media glut.

"There are now over 20 separate media news outlets in the United States, and the growth doesn't seem to be abating," wrote Andrew Sullivan in London's Sunday Times (and reproduced on andrewsullivan.com). "What they find to write about is a little beyond me, and that sound you hear surfing through the websites is a scraping at the bottom of the barrel."

Perhaps. But in the wake of today's media upheaval, who is best suited to help navigate through this tangled terrain than the media itself? Even the operations that indulge in industry gossip -- such as Drudge Report and Jim Romenesko's MediaNews -- provide a valuable watchdog role and a valid forum for debate. Market forces will dictate whether there's room for all of these news services anyway.

When I launched my media industry resource site, IWantMedia.com, a few weeks ago, I was asked if, indeed, there wasn't already too much media about media. But I would be hard pressed to name another industry that has so much promise forecast for it yet remains on such shaky ground and in need of 24/7 support and up-to-date information.