As gatherers and purveyors of information people need to know, netpapers will need to create relevant but comprehensive links, providing a road map for the information superhighway, to kill an already overused metaphor. Such interactivity is not a given for public access to the world of the internet, and journalists committed to their role as guardians of free and open public debate will need to ensure that the netpaper of the future is not a glorified form of channel surfing. If journalists are information providers, essentially story-tellers gathering facts together for publication, their job will not change, except that they will need to gather the video clips and the internet links to bring the story to life in ways far more elaborate than the current newspaper account. The critical decisions, however, will remain the same. Good reporting will be good reporting, electronic or otherwise, and editors will need to work with their writers to produce a product that is comprehensible and useful to a broad range of users.
Information wants to be expensive.
Collecting tangled tidbits of information and transforming them into coherent strands of thought is the essence of a journalist's profession. I know what I love most about reporting is the exhilaration of tracking down chunks of fact and opinion and weaving it into a story thousands of people can read and understand the next day. Newspapers, like public education, were a central part of the democratic process. A completely on-line information universe could easily choose to sell information by the byte. For the Michael Crichtons of the world, Jurassic Park and Rising Sun royalties in hand, buying knowledge is no problem.