Newspapers of the Future

Regarding your series on the “electronic newspaper” (June 2-3), perhaps the most telling line of all was the statement that Dow Jones made more profit from its various information services last year than from the Wall Street Journal and all its other publications combined.

Newspapers are enormously expensive to operate, being both labor and capital intensive. Further, once advertisers flee them, newspapers hemorrhage money, notwithstanding a sizable number of subscribers. For anyone other than well-heeled hobbyists, running this type of operation grows rapidly intolerable.

In consequence, the future for newspapers may well turn out to be a not necessarily painful conversion to news gathering institutions whose products are distributed over modems to home computers, to cellular car computers with voice simulators, and perhaps, for those who like the tangible, to be reproduced quaintly as disk-captured material republished on the family laser printer. Under these circumstances, the editorial and advertising departments of a newspaper would survive reasonably intact; circulation and production, however, would become the dinosaurs of another era. Fair to say that the spirit of a newspaper could well survive in this guise, even if its shape had changed.

Nonetheless, unless revenue rises again and advertisers clamor once more for newsprint, few companies in the future may be able to afford the now low-margin luxury of hand-delivered copies for personal perusal next to the morning cornflakes.

The old-time newspaper might become the next collectible.

PRISCILLA M. TAMKIN, Los Angeles