[News] When will printed media become obsolete?

Before you read on, if you haven't read Mr. John Watkins Jr.'s predictions of today's society from the year 1900, take a look. There were definitely more people with grander (more bizzare?) expectations of the future throughout the middle of the 20th century, and many of those expectations sound seriously misguided in retrospect.

Looking at the situation with computers and the Internet, it's becoming clearer to me that some day in the future newspapers, magazines, and potentially even books will be almost exclusively, if not 100%, digitized and never see a printing press in their lives. Within the last couple of decades we've seen the early stages of this change, with many publications now having online counterparts to their printed versions...and, in some cases (The Rocky Mountain News, Electronic Gaming Monthly) the print versions no longer exist.

Between the increasing costs of labor, printing materials, and delivery, and the decreasing ad revenues, subscription numbers, the increasing popularity of electronic book readers and mobile devices that have Internet access, and, of course, the ease and price of getting news and information online, I believe we'll be seeing a paradigm shift in the field of publication over the next century or more.

Jam it back in, in the dark.