I live in the Silicon Valley, where the big story of the day is the sell-off of the San Jose Mercury News (and many other publications) from Knight-Ridder to McClatchy.  Knight-Ridder is not just a longtime news giant...it joins companies like Adobe as a part of the downtown San Jose skyline.  To watch the Merc falter is an interesting cultural dichotomy for us; the very Internet that drives our Valley's economy is putting the brakes on one of our longtime friends.

Our company works with a Who's Who list of leading newspapers and magazines, so they probably don't want me to say this, but I really don't see the value of printed news.  Perhaps this is a generational thing, because I know people just ten years older than me who absolutely love their morning paper.  However, many of my peers see the obvious limitations of printed news:

• You pay for it, whereas digital news is generally free
• It is, by definition, outdated by the time you get it.  Digital news alerts deploy as events occur.
• Single-source news cannot possibly be as unbiased as multi-source news.
• It contains a bunch of stuff that I don't want to read, whereas I can subscribe to only the digital news topics that are interesting to me.

I'm not saying that news is any less important than it once was.  (I am seeing a generational shift where each generation cares less about current events, but I'll save that topic for a different discussion.)  What I'm saying is that printed news is not nearly as beneficial as digital news alerts.

What's my favorite source of news?  My RSS reader (I prefer using the one built-in to Firefox), bar-none.  The Merc can't possibly compete with my system of organized folders on subjects ranging from online marketing blogs to loyalty email best practices to the Oakland A's to my personalized stock watch.  They are welcome to call my house a couple of times a week to try to sell me weather reports for 25 cents a day, but I'd rather hear it from WeatherBug.

I'm not yet ready to send out the grim reaper for publishers.  However, their window of opportunity to retain subscribers and credibility via email, blogging and RSS is quickly closing.  It's no longer a "nice-to-have"...it's a "needed-to-have-yesterday."