Double bagging is useless

As my wife put it this morning when bringing in the water logged LA Times...

Double bagging is good unless you decide to throw it into a river.

The open end of the outer bag wound up pointing uphill in our driveway (once described by a friend as the steepest driveway he'd ever seen, known by my mom as frightening and when Jon was very small, known by me as a giant PITA until I learned that I must park pointed downhill), filled with water and defeated the entire purpose. When it's raining, each side of our driveway becomes an active spillway, with water from the rooftop, hillsides and every other surface trying to find a way down. The steep, smooth concrete is the path of least resistance. In the end, they wasted twice as much plastic while accomplishing nothing.

I am quite tired of paper (and worse, heavy gloss paper, like magazines). It's not only a problem on the disposal end, but a waste of resources on the production side. I don't even need a newspaper for kindling in my fireplace anymore (something we used papers for when I was a youngster). As displays capable of handling extremely high resolution media become more ubiquitous, our need for always printed material should be lessening.

I'm not advocating the paperless office, something I've no hope of seeing in my lifetime, but how about the mostly paperless newspaper? Every newspaper worthy of the name has a web presence of some sort. It's been more than a decade since Adobe introduced PDF (Portable Document Format, a full featured descendant of PostScript) which works on every computer in my house, even the really old and crusty stuff. It seems obvious that we should be moving toward a convergence of some sort.

Would I be willing to pay for some kind of electronic delivery mechanism? You bet. Would others? I can't say. I can think of one advantage outside of the sogginess issue... delivery while away. There would be no need to ever stop delivery. Just let it pile up and read the sections when you want (even better, the idea you can keep up while being thousands of miles away). I'd also be spared my weekly happy hunt to assemble my Sunday paper (A, B, C, D and M; C and M are usually hidden away in all kinds of weird places by the LAT elves).

The hard part of a purely electronic delivery mechanism is limiting distribution rights. IMO, using shame and personal liability suits is more appropriate than waiting for DRM — I'm not interested once we get to a place where I am no longer trusted. I pay for a lot of content today that comes via PDF and understand the trust relationship. It's not really much different from the idea that I'm not going to reprint a any paper (local, or not).

There are some serious implications.

• Yesterdays paperboys have been superseded by small professional delivery organizations; those would largely go away.

• Unless it's easy to search and print coupons, a significant chunk of the weekend advertising revenue would be lost (I'm guessing this is a big part of the revenue stream for newspapers). The flip side is that tailored links and searches could be added much more easily. I don't know how you'd go about duplicating the ubiquitous presence of Fry's on the back page of the Sports section each and every weekend but I'm sure it can be done.

• Finally, new distribution metrics will be required. Something that combines daily circulation, electronic delivery and web impressions would seem appropriate as long as advertisements could be spread relatively evenly among them all.