From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Bob Garfield is away this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Six months after Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, we went down there to survey the media landscape.

We found that the aging infrastructure had been washed away, leaving little but opportunity.

The TV stations were coping with a newfound hunger for news.

The Internet was becoming a crucial source for citizen-generated information, and there was a new and

growing Spanish-speaking population rebuilding the city in need of a voice on the airwaves.

New Orleans seemed to be a kind of media petri dish, a clean slate on which a new definition of urban

media could be written. Now, on the eve of the second anniversary of the disaster,

we decided to check in to see how the experiment was going.

In April of 2006, Greg Meffert was New Orleans chief technology officer

trying to wire the city with free Wi-Fi.

You know, we have a scenario now where we can sit there and say,

we're like a laboratory for everything new.

I don't want leading edge.

I want bleeding edge.

Meffert has since left, but Earthlink has stepped in

with a two-tiered Wi-Fi arrangement,

which offers service to everyone but faster service for a price.

Another innovation following the disaster was Spanish-language TV.

During the storm, Ernesto Schweikert was begging for supplies,

gasoline to keep the generators going for the city's only Spanish-language radio station.

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