Paper or plasma – how do you like your news?

The digital age is whirling faster than a cyclone. Just learned today that the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News are combining editions and only printing four days a week. I already get the News, now I’ll be getting the power of two papers packed into one.

Good thing that I just renewed my Wall Street Journal subscription. I was feeling an information gap after having gone without the Journal for about a month just to see if I could. But, I couldn’t – the information and editorials of that paper are just too powerful and timely. I need to keep my brain cells functioning. Now, the question becomes, “Do I subscribe to the New York Times to keep things balanced?”

Will we still be reading newspapers one year from now? Papers are messy and tend to pile up. But do we want to read everything on line? The chasm between reading online or holding a tactile paper is looming large, and the solution is still a few years away, even at today’s frenetic pace.

Along those lines, I attended a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) workshop hosted by Pure Visibility in Ann Arbor, MI. They are on the cutting edge of showing business owners and corporations how others can find them “on-line,” to bring better visibility to their products and services. Right now, the Web is like a candy store and most of the information is free. That’s a good thing. But I still want my news, I just don’t know what format works best: paper or plasma? (aka digital news). Heaven help us if we have to get our news from corporate websites because traditional newspapers couldn’t make a go of it in the digital age.