The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published without a print edition today and are the paper boys ever confused! (Lost in the coverage of all death-of-print stories are any memorials to the dying art of newspaper delivery, once a rite of passage for countless small-town kids.) It is impossible to tell yet if the decision, handed down by the P-I’s owner, the Hearst Corporation, is the end of an era or the beginning of a new one, but it’s fair to say it was inevitable. 
 

Last week I was decrying the new age of ignorance a world without newspapers would herald: Why, countless citizens would know nothing of what’s happening in Pakistan and care only about who was up on American Idol! Impossible to imagine! Though, snobby as it sounds, it has been that way for a while. I remember a stoner friend of mine in HS saying, “I don't know why you get all worked up about what’s happening in Cambodia or whatever. Dude, who gives a shit? What does it have to do with my life?”
 
His point, taken without the hair and hash residue, is one shared by countless others. We all have problems (and pleasures) enough without dispatches from East New York, let alone the Far East. But if history is any teacher (and why else make kids read , who practically invented journalism three hundred years ago?), journalism will exist as long as someone puts a farthing down for the news. And there will follow (history, again) all those arguments about trustworthiness, objectivity, influence and the other essentially moral questions that separate journalism from gossip and hearsay.
 
I suspect that in the not too distant future, we will look back on the time when a bunch of people were decrying the death of daily papers -- the kind you can hold in your hand -- as quaint. Because there will be -type devices that will convey the news in an easier to handle, take-it-on-the-subway form and we will gladly pay for it and argue with it (perhaps literally, shouting at our screens) and wonder how we can live without it.
 
Though I will still miss picking the paper up from the front stoop each morning and carrying it upstairs with my coffee. Just as Seattle is waking up to the notion that they can’t buy the Post-Intelligencer on the street today (though the inferior rival Seattle Times still exists, for a moment) but you can pick up a non-fat latte on practically any corner. And it costs a whole lot more.