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despite the fact that the few readers they had were willing to pay for it. As a long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan, I need to get the news first-hand on the team's trials and tribulations. The Tribune has some pretty good news articles, too, although I'm not too wild about their flashy redesign-doesn't seem to be as much to read anymore.

When the Tribune discontinued the home delivery, they politely informed me that I could still read the paper online. I knew that already. But it's not the same. I can find the same six or seven Cub stories that run during the season and read them individually, even finding reader comments that I didn't get before. But the reading experience isn't as free. With the paper in front of me, I scan willfully, using those 100 billion neurons or whatever it is in the human brain to determine what interests me.

It allows writers and advertisers to do their best to reach out and grab me: That's the democracy of communication. The fact that this package still comes in an old ink-on-paper package doesn't really matter. It just works.

As a 59-year-old, lifelong newspaper reader (chiefly sports as a kid growing up in Boston), I know I'm not the "choice" audience that the newspaper wants to reach-those 25-to-54 year-olds that carry so much weight in our economy. But I also know I'm not alone. Reading a paper online is not the same as having the paper in your hands.

There I've said it. At the risk of being labeled a Luddite or dinosaur or whatever anti-tech term you choose to use, the fact is that a paper is easier to read when I can spread it out, fold it and bunch it up than the sterile version that arrives online. I won't waste time extolling the virtues of the Internet because that's done better elsewhere. The fact is that the World Wide Web is a blessing. There's a tremendous amount of information at everyone's fingertips and it keeps getting refined.

But Internet success doesn't mean that the newspaper becomes obsolete. It does mean that the newspaper has to change, an awareness that the industry is already working on. A conference at the University of Missouri in September celebrated the journalism school's 100th year but also addressed the many challenges facing the newspaper industry.

A New York-based outfit is now doing investigative pieces on an as-needed basis. Journalists are paid by the job. It's part of that new business model, I mentioned. We heard about some of those Internet-only papers. They're struggling because of a lack of ad

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