&&headingdata=The Transformation of the Newspaper &&bylinedata=Mindy McAdams &&articledata=The newspaper has already burst out of its inky paper pages.

Simulations of the newspaper appear on the Internet. Wireless technology transmits bits and pieces of the newspaper to the tiny screens of cell phones and personal digital assistants.

Bigger changes lie ahead. Expanding into non-print media, the newspaper confronts new rules, constraints and possibilities for how it presents information.

A familiar consequence of the new rules can be seen on newspapers' Web pages. In contrast to the printed paper's Page One, the online front page often dilutes the importance of the two or three really important stories you might find there. Your focus snaps to the bright blue ad for Tiffany and Co. in an upper corner of <i>The New York Times</i> home page before drifting down to a headline announcing that war broke out today in a distant country. 

Wireless transmission imposes other constraints. Imagine yourself with a cell phone or PDA that delivers brief news bulletins to you as part of your local newspaper subscription. What kind of news bulletins will you request?

You don't want to be interrupted by a beeping alert without a good reason. If you own stocks, you might want to know when prices are rising or falling. If you love the New York Yankees, you might want to see the score inning by inning.

You probably would not choose to receive regular bulletins on meetings of the city council and the school board.

Databases today can store the "content" (text and pictures) separately from the design, making it simple to send the same story to different devices in different formats. Databases also make it easy to store and act on "meta information," or information about the information. Stories are tagged with keywords so they can be matched with a customer's specific preferences.

Digital production advances soon will make it feasible for local newspapers to offer a broad variety of subscription options. For example, you might decide to receive only the sports and the business news, and you might also choose to print it out yourself, in extra-large type. That option might be bundled with other desirable services, such as wireless news delivery.

If you prefer not to waste paper, you might select "electronic ink": Applied to a thin sheet of plastic film, this material creates flexible, portable pages of text and images that can be updated, erased and replaced again and again. It's not science fiction: E Ink Corp. in Cambridge, Mass., demonstrated working prototypes last November.

Newspapers respond to market demands for particular kinds of information and to a lack of demand for other kinds. The same is true for the printed product, but the difference is the package: In the print newspaper, editors still bundle in the civic news -- the reports on local government plans and actions, charity events, public protests -- along with the sports, the gardening columns, the classified ads. It arrives on your doorstep, the news you want and the news you don't want, all together in one package.

As the newspaper of the (near) future serves its customers with more and more "made to order" information, editors and publishers will receive detailed numerical reports on what kinds of news people are buying-and not buying. As a result, they will face difficult decisions about deploying reporters and what the newspaper will offer.

The information "menu" will shrink for some topics and expand for others. The spirit of the newspaper is being transformed, both on and off the printed page. &&notedata=This article originally appeared<br>in <i>Florida Today</i> on March 21, 2001. &&