Recently, a friend of mine asked me if I thought newspapers were going to vanish.  Here’s what I said.ADHERER

I think they won’t vanish so much as completely take on a new form.  I also think that they will consolidate.  The NYT will become just "The Times" and will have versions for every major metro area with national and world news being constant and then local news being targeted — after having bought out local papers.  There’s always a need for true journalism; how many bloggers are in Afghanistan, for instance?

The distribution medium will change.  As more and more people have mobile reading devices (I expect the iPad to take this mainstream) that are up to the challenge of this kind of content (random, rather than serial, quick rather than slow, iPad rather than Kindle — although I foresee better content formats for slower readers such as the Kindle), there will be subscriptions to those devices.  There will also probably be pared-down versions for distribution on the web… along the lines of a headline and a paragraph with a “read more” link to the full story which will be behind a pay-wall.

Someone will have to find a good way to monetize the new newspapers; I suspect Google will lead the way with that.  Right now they aggregate the news, but as that falls off, they will see potential for placing ads on news stories and will buy Reuters or AP or start their own.  The term "Google News" will no longer mean just aggregation.

Those are my predictions.  What are yours?  Let me know in the comments below.