An ABCNews.com column by Michael Malone on the death of the newspaper medium (thanks to Wayne MacDonald for posting the link to CAJ-L).

Some excerpts:

For a long time I rationalized that somehow newspapers would survive, that they still retained some inherent advantage over other media formats — especially the Internet — that would enable them to survive. I used to think it was portability and ease of use — until lightweight laptops and Blackberries came along. Then I thought it was the quality of the images — until I started regularly downloading MPEGs … who needs blurry out-of-register still images bleeding on cheap newsprint when you can watch a Quick-time movie on a 20-inch display?

The last redoubt for the survival of newspaper was, in my mind, accessibility. Hopping from section to section, story lead to story jump, just seemed so much easier than crawling through a long story on a computer screen. Then I saw the first links embedded in blogs. There was simply nothing in the physical world that could ever hope to match the ability to leap through cyberspace from story to story, file to file, with almost infinite extension.

Looking back, it was then that I stopped reading print newspapers. ...

Needless to say, I still read the news, much of it coming from the newspapers I used to religiously read. But I am not reading the "paper," either literally or figuratively, that the publishers want me to read. Throughout the day, I construct my own newspaper in cyberspace, a real-time assemblage of wire service stories, newspaper features, blogs, bulletin boards, columns, etc. I suspect most of you do, too.

In any other industry, a product that lost 1 percent of market share for two decades — only to then double or triple that rate of decline — would be declared dead. The manufacturer would discontinue it and rush out a replacement product more in line with the desires of the marketplace. So, let's finally come out and say: Newspapers are dead. They will never come back. By the end of this decade, the newspaper industry will suffer the same death rate — 90-plus percent — that every other industry experiences when run over by a technology revolution.

Before it is all over, the number of "newspapers" left in America will probably be less than 10 — and they might not be individual papers but rather new entities created out of the current large chains. They will become the primary sources of national and international news, delivered into multimedia form.

As for the local papers: they will be shut down, their presses depreciated and scrapped, their offices leased out and the newsroom reporters scattered to the four winds of blogdom and specialty Web sites … where they will provide local news, commentary, movie times and maybe even those long lost Little League box scores.

It's late and I'm tired, but I'll make one comment: With everyone predicting disaggregation of news, when does the reaggregation happen?