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The future of newspapers may have more to do with news than papers.

Subscribers in 2020 may turn pages with the click of a mouse or get their daily news fix on the drive to work via a dashboard-mounted computing device.

Then again, maybe not.

Print has proven such a convenient, cheap and portable way to get news to people that the early morning thud of the daily paper on the doorstep may be heard long into the future.

"As other media continue to fragment and live on a smaller share of audience, the general news feel and department-store approach of newspapers is going to be unique. Newspapers have a fairly bright future," said John F. Sturm, president and chief executive of the Newspaper Association of America, in Vienna, Va.

Your Daily Bugle may have roots as old as Egyptian papyrus, but newspapers have modern-day staying power even as the portion of Americans who go online for news at least once a week tops 35 percent.

It's hard to beat the amount of diverse information that can be crammed into a paper and read at a glance -- without plugging anything in.

Consider, Sturm said, that the typical nightly network newscast contains 3,600 spoken words, while the average daily New York Times offers 100,000 printed ones.

"That," he suggested, "is a differentiating aspect of newspapers as we go forward."

Yet, even as newspapers invest in multimillion-dollar press projects and automated mailrooms, they're diversifying into electronic media, buying TV stations and expanding their Web sites. In almost every U.S. market with a daily newspaper, its Web site is the most or second-most visited Internet site for local news, Sturm said.

As readership fragments, newspapers may turn to targeted subscriptions, where readers can order news by topic or locale, or make "micropayments" for portions of the paper, or even a single article.

And the Hollywood version of a newspaper-on-a-screen may well lie in the future, if it can match a newspaper's portability and readability.

Going paperless does bring dilemmas: How would you share the funnies with the kids, snip out an obituary to mail to Aunt Sue or blissfully read on when the batteries give out?

Worry not. Inventors are testing "refreshable paper," treated with metallic elements that allow the paper to be scanned at kiosks so stories can be updated, says Warren Watson, vice president of American Press Institute in Reston, Va.

Call Star reporter Jeff Swiatek at 1-317-444-6483. 35 percent

Number of Americans who go online for news at least once a week.

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