From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media, devoted this week to the future of the newspaper.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

I predict that soon the phrase reading the newspaper will be as quaintly outdated as dialing the phone.

I predict that paper newspapers will be a

luxury reserved for those willing to pay a lot for the Sunday ritual of swapping sections

with loved ones. I predict that newspapers will cease to be one-stop info shops and begin to focus

on reporting in specific areas while also serving as reliable aggregators, collators, and filters for the rest of the news.

I predict that many of America's great newspapers will survive.

I predict these things at very little cost to me, because nobody will remember anyway.

For instance, Douglas McIntyre, editor of 24-7 Wall Street,

predicted that eight of the country's top 50 daily papers would cease publication within 18 months.

That was about 19 months ago, and all of them are still publishing.

No, I think what we did is we picked our fault the wrong newspapers. We looked at the

large markets and what happened is that Denver went out of business and Seattle went out of business

and Arizona went out of business. So I think from the standpoint of sentiment, we were right from

the standpoint of picking the markets. We were wrong. I think newspapers will be around in one form or another for a long, long time.

Margaret Sullivan is the editor of the Buffalo News in New York. If McIntyre's glass is half empty, hers is half full.

I think there was a period of catastrophizing about a year ago. The combination of the recession and a very quick decline in newspaper revenue

combined to make it seem as though newspapers were about to close their doors, but they really

haven't. But many smaller papers have passed away. The Tucson Citizen, the Rocky Mountain News,

the Baltimore Examiner,

...