Twenty years after the World Wide Web's sprung into the world more than 75 % of the Swiss population is connected to the internet. The advantages over the printed paper is obvious: it's faster, can link every information to further information – also, it takes up less resources. Not only financially, but environmentally too. Why then reading the paper copy? Because it's horrible to read a long article on a screen. The eyes start to blur. And, a screen isn't very mobile and needs energy, unlike paper. But this will change. E-paper technology is making portable screens readable just like printed paper and using very little energy. E-paper is starting to get mass produced and becoming better and cheaper. Therefore it will not matter if news are consumed printed or digitally soon.

This accelerates a process which is happening already: The internet delivers news faster than newspapers ever can. Somebody who is present on an event as it happens and feeds this information into the world wide web will always be faster and more credible (direct) than a newspaper story which selects, edits and distributes news one or two days after the event happened. This is the end of news journalism, but not the end of journalism, but more a devision into two different extremes:

1. News: News should be delivered digitally, as fast as possible, as accessible as possible and as direct as possible. Reader will consume news from many different sources (blogs, social networks, different news agencies, ...) which are selected by each reader and their algorithms from trusted sources. And the reader will not be willing to pay for this.

2. Analyses: Analyses should should be done profoundly through considering different sources, with time, should be opinionated and have a price. Pinted and digital. Reader will also combine different sources as analyses, for example trust NZZ in economy topics, but prefers social analyses from Le Monde Diplomatique.

The consequence is that newspaper, such as Tagesanzeiger for example, should stop their daily newspaper press before they loose out more money, and divde their staff into one editioral office offering latest minute news digitally, and another editorial office providing analyses – along with facts – in a slower pace, such as every week, month, or year. A good few years later they will also have to consider if they want to keep the latest minute news and focus entirely on analyses, which will be very much valuable with the quantity of information which will be available by then.

Zurich, October 2009