The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias listened in to a webinar this Wednesday on the vanishing newspaper, based on the title of a new book by U.S. journalism professor Philip Meyer.

Apparently Meyer has calculated the last newspaper reader will be gone by April 2040.

Some excerpts:

The panel, archived at http://www.mediacenter.org , brought together five media visionaries who, along with moderator Jeff Jarvis (http://www.buzzmachine.com), made it clear that the industry is at a crossroads.

"We're running out of time here," warned Tim Porter of Tomorrow's Workforce, a newsroom development project.

Trouble is, he added, newspapers "really don't know how to change." ...

Some of the waves missed? Blogging, the trend to free content. A growing desire by readers to participate in the newsgathering process.

I listened to part of the seminar. Part of the problem is that newspapers are currently based on the notion of high operating profit margins.

Most newspaper companies aim for 20 to 25 per cent.

Meyer has argued (I haven't read his latest book) that newspapers can produce a socially useful product with margins of five per cent.

Telling executives that, in order to increase their market share, they must massively reduce their profit expectations, is a hard sell.

But history and technology might force that change on newspapers.