By the summer of 2008, it had become clear that a crisis in media was under way in Canada. The media giant Canwest was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, local television stations were being closed, thousands of media workers had been laid off, and community radio and television were barely supported. At the same time, publics linked through social networks were producing and distributing a growing range of their own content through new media. Old media had collided with new technologies, national policies were facing global political and economic challenges, and the need to develop new approaches to media models had become urgent. Although these questions were being debated in some communities—among academics, labour unions, media producers and policy activists, for example—in various media, and at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), we felt there was a pressing need to increase dialogue between and beyond these groups. For all of these reasons, we organized the Making Media Public conference. Our aim was to bring people together to critically assess the current media situation, to envision ways of building sustainable media models that address the experiences of diverse Canadians, and to increase public contributions to and dialogue about policymaking. The conference, held at York University from May 6 to 8, 2010, was designed to enable sustained analysis of the current media crisis and to gain insight into the challenges and opportunities for transforming media in Canada. We were able to bring together a range of publics that does not usually have opportunities to gather for discussion: academic researchers, media workers, policymakers, union members, community members, alternative media producers, students, and media educators. As academics and graduate students who have actively participated in the production of alternative media and policy engagement, our aim was to dissolve the boundaries between academic researchers and those involved in media production and policy development, both large-scale and community-based. We hoped the conference would