The future of newspaper and the web

The future of newspapers and the web will be the future of newspapers and the web.  What I mean by that statement is that their will be a future for both newspapers and the web.  These two are not mutually exclusive.  The success of one does not preclude the existence of the other. 

When I say newspaper, I am not talking about the bleached, pressed and printed sheet of wood pulp that is delivered to our door step.  That is merely a medium for getting the news to consumers.  To me, newspaper is an old-fashioned word that refers to companies and people that deliver news.  The act of assigning stories, chasing leads, and checking facts all leads to information that can be distributed via various mediums.  People pay for the information, not necessarily by what means the printed word gets to them.

Will paper news go away?  We all know it will.  The march of progress will do away with the use of trees for paper.  This is inevitable.  News will never go away.  As population grows and we become more of a global economy there will be greater demand for news.  It is just the way it gets to us that will change.

Email Versus Snail Mail

During class we were able to come up with quite a few examples of how email and snail mail were similar.  As you may recall they are similar in pretty much every area except one.  That one thing is when you physically need to send something.  Whether it is a Christmas present or Grandma's cookies, you simply cannot send that digitally.....yet.

My blog title is "living the digital life".  I must therefore find a way, any way, to prove that we can send items digitally.

Lets say you want to sent little Billy a model car for his birthday.  You could design one in a CAD program and email it to him in a file that wasnt accessible until his birthday.  Then when the big day came, he could open the file - import it into his special 3D printing software and print it out in a matter of hours.  Viola, a physical item sent digitally!

Here is an example of a 3D printer:

As technology improves, an edible substrate could be used and flavors added during the printing process.  Can anyone say instant Grandma's cookies?

Anyone who has seen Star Trek knows where all this technology is headed, "The Replicator".