Flash forward, perhaps five years to 2015, news print is hardly used anymore, save for a few local or regional papers - there has been consolidation of dailies, many papers with circulation under 200,000 readers have simply folded. The top five, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Time, The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post are all being delivered or zapped to readers each morning - zapped to an e-reader...

Sound far fetched? Consider the following; if you started out free you can't expect people are going to then pay for the same content, unless a paper can come up with something new by way of content or a way to read it. What is going to motivate me to re-subscribe to Business Week after they tried to double my yearly rate? Whatever I need I can get on-line, either from the source or to paraphrase Mr. Murdoch, other sites that are making money and taking eyeballs from a paper's only real asset, their original content reporting, their intellectual property.

If content were zapped to my e-reader then it could be protected from re-use on another site in a slightly different form. No, not DRM that failed model of the music industry, think more like IPTV over a closed network, a network that WSJ or the NY Times owns, operates and profits from.

What about Cost?

So what that an e-reader costs $200 or more dollars today, that is today, estimates put the cost at around $100 by 2011. Did you think five years ago you'd go into Radio Shack and purchase a disposable cell phone for $15? Did you think a netbook would cost $99 with a mobile phone subscription? Thumb drives are give away items that cost next to nothing - how many do you have from trade shows? The list only gets larger...

The direction seems clear, the future of newspapers has little to do with paper. The future has to do with content - content that is delivered to either an e-reader or perhaps a flexible plastic substrate that will roll out (no pun) into mass production over the next five-ten years. When the cost of these devices drops to a point they become commodities a new mindset will emerge about their use and replacement. Not only will these devices change the way people read, they will create a new market and new groups of people who have not picked up a daily in their lives, or for a long time.

R&D

If I were at the New York Times, I'd be pouring money into R&D and or partnering with a company to see how far and how fast the price could drop on these technologies. When economically viable, I'd bundle a slimmed down e-reader with a yearly subscription, or perhaps offer it for rent much like your cable box. Not only would you get a year of your local, regional or national newspaper, you also have a device you could use for any other book or magazine from any publisher without restrictions on download.

The time frame is unclear however, the direction is very clear - if these organizations start thinking future forward then perhaps they may be able to turn the ship so as to avoid the inevitable oncoming iceberg.