In this, ever more digital, world we are about to experience, yet another, paradigm shift; the disappearance of the daily newspaper.  There are many who will argue that this can’t happen. Yet, last year, 120 of the 400 or so remaining daily newspapers ceased to exist and that was before ad revenues from retailers took a severe hit in the fourth quarter.  High profit Classified ads have already faded away as people sell things and look for work on the internet.

Personally, I am not among the 50 million or so who need to absorb their news through contact with a daily paper.  My wife, Melinda, is my news aggregator and staunch defender of the need for tactile news.  Even though she is finding more and more of her information on the web, the switch from newsprint to pixels will hit her hard.

Beyond the loss of comfort we  really need to think about a much more significant problem as the very green digital news becomes common place; who is now delivering your information?  Newspapers, or more properly news reporters are supposed to be members of the Fourth estate, impartial investigators and accurate authors of the who, what, where, when and how of activities in our society.   Publishers together with their Advertisers decided what stories to print, which words and phrases to edit and whether something should be headlined on page one or buried on page B-23.  Consumers would decide which newspaper to read sometimes based upon it’s accuracy, but, more often, based upon it’s ability to deliver the most information about what they were interested in.

As the printed Fourth Estate vanishes we have the opportunity to create something much more egalitarian.
And, if we do, we also need to invent a way for people to find it amongst all the other “facts” on the web.
And if they find it  we need to, somehow, convince the consumer to support it with real dollars so that it can thrive and continue without having to rely on a single “word from our sponsor”.