The paperless world

When I was in elementary school (three thousand years ago), one of my teachers decided to do a What Will It Be Like in the Year 2000? exercise. All kinds of wonderful things were discussed, but the one that stuck in my mind was that we'd have a paperless world. We wouldn't need paper, you see. We'd have computers instead.

I'm sure that my teacher was thinking of the paperless office (and hey! How did THAT work out?). Odd that we're going to end up with a paperless news world instead.

I'll admit that even though it's a bit sad in a nostalgic sort of way to hear that newspapers are disappearing, it's not going to change the fact that I get my news from the internet (or, in the case of local news, from our mostly useless local television station). I've never really been much of a newspaper person, actually. The only time I've ever subscribed to one was in university, and if I'm going to be totally honest it was more for the daily crossword puzzle and the comics than anything else. Since then -- and even before the rise of internet news -- I've had no desire to waste that much paper daily. Why would I subscribe to something that I'm probably not going to read half of anyway? At least with internet news I can find the stories I'm interested in, ignore the rest, and not feel guilty about dumping the whole thing in the recycle bin at the end of the day.

The ironic thing, of course, is that a lot of the news sites I'll go to are run by the very newspapers that are failing. It'll be interesting to see how they cope with that. Is a newspaper still a newspaper if it depends entirely on internet advertising revenue and doesn't put out a paper edition? Will the currently free news sites start charging a subscription fee? I obviously don't have a clue, but I don't see newspapers lasting as newspapers too much longer.