Then the multimillion-dollar printing presses churn out hundreds of thousands of copies of the same newspaper that are bundled together and tossed into a fleet of delivery trucks. These trucks drive all over in the middle of the night, handing the bundles to the delivery people, the last link in the assembly line, who then drop the papers at each house. This method of delivering news has worked fine for generations. But it's on a collision course with the Digital Age. That's how Nicholas Negroponte, the director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes the fundamental schism between the Industrial Age economy, which primarily produces physical things, and a Digital Age economy, which will primarily deal with intangible information.
Newspapers are now in the atom business, producing a physical product.
But what they're really selling is pure information, which is easily converted to intangible bits. This version, roughly the dimensions of a magazine, would weigh about 2 pounds. This changeover opens the newspaper industry up to direct competition from some pretty big players. For one, all players in the media business are beginning to translate their products into digital form. In this digital world, everything gets reduced to the 1's and 0's of computer language and transmitted as streams of simple electronic pulses.