Forget newspapers, I need my internet

When I was working I believed that newspapers were going through a downturn, and that things would turn around when the overall economy recovered. Looking at things from the outside, as a news consumer has dimmed my view considerably.
No, I don't think that newspapers are going to become extinct, but I do think that when the dust finally settles and happy days are here again, newspapers will have lost a lot of their cache to the internet.
The internet, not newspapers is central to how get information and make informed choices.
The paper still hits the driveway every morning. And scanning the morning headlines is still one of the first things I do when I get up. But more and more I check my email and go online first.
I hate to say it, but too often I don't do anything more than scan. Not because I'm too busy to read, or because newspapers are cumbersome, but because most mornings the content just doesn't grab me. Some mornings there's not a lot there that I didn't know when I went to bed.
I'm sorry but in a lot of ways I just don't need my newspaper like I used to. Truly, I need my internet.
Most of the stuff I find in print isn't unique; I can get the same news story, albeit with a different viewpoint, from at least half a dozen other sites. Institutional information, which I'm more likely to want, can often be found on the entity's website or through a phone call.
A few weeks ago I wanted to know why my neighborhood was shrouded in smoke. After finding nothing on several local news sites, I called the fire department's non emergency phone number and found out there was brush fire nearby. I didn't get a locator map, but the person who answered did tell me where the fire was and how much engines responded.
I had a friend who used to have a weekend newspaper subscription, not because she just had to read the Sunday paper, but because she couldn't live without her weekly Target ad. That was more than 10 years ago. Today, newspapers are a small part of the retail scheme. She can now get her Target ad online whenever she wants it; forget sifting through the Sunday circulars.
Stores that I really like send me regular emails notifying me of sales and specials. If I was shopping for a house I could download real estate listings onto my Blackberry. Sooner or later the 13 year old Honda I drive is going to give up, so I'm creating an online search to keep up with replacement possibilities within a certain price range.
All of these things erode the relevance of newspapers.Most could have been prevented. For whatever reason, there were just too few people in the news paper industry, on the news side and the business side, who really wanted to embrace internet technology. Instead we clucked our tongues before burying our heads in the sand, all the time pretending that everything would be okay.