That's the title of this recent Wired article on newspapers and the future. It notes that The Washington Post organized a series of focus groups with younger readers and discovered - surprise!! - younger readers don't like newspapers:

...focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I'm not making this up): They didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses.

I recently wrote on my personal blog about how I've come to loathe even the once-celebrated "New York Times". And it's not just about newspapers. I noticed last week that John Cleese is now performing regularly on his website -- his quote: "It's like having a tiny TV station or a magazine. The simplicity is delightful."

Early on this blog I could feel podcasting coming, but I wasn't sure what that meant. I'm becoming increasingly obsessed with podcasting - and working with Tim to build an online radio station in our office. Some would tell you that my primary motivation is my personal satisfaction at hearing my own voice "on the air". There is no doubt some truth in motivating factor of the egoism of it (as there is in blogging), but more importantly I want to figure out alternatives to our major media machines. It's very clear that the major news outlets in this country aren't covering the war in Iraq with the seriousness and integrity it deserves. Political campaigns spent hundreds of millions of dollars in this last political cycle on television ads, arguably to no effect (except to enrich political media consultants).

I tend to think of the internet - especially blogging - as the "end of mass media". Instead of one source speaking to a massive, passive audience, you've got lots of little sources speaking to each other. Dave Sifry at Technorati has made it clear that some blogs still function more as mass media - but regardless they're an alternative to the existing established media channels. Blogs, podcasting, video games, wikis, instant messaging, SMS - in the immortal words of Van Morrison, it seems like a brand new day for communication.

What exactly these new mediums mean for politics, for issue advocacy, for movement-building remains to be seen. Zephyr writes over at the Personal Democracy Forum:

...in the political evolution of the Internet, we have barely touched the surface of its potential to shift the locus of real political power. Never before in history have we had a tool that enables--with so little work--local groups to act in coordination with other local groups elsewhere. Never before in history have we had a tool that at its core holds the solution to the most difficult collective action problems in democracy. And almost no one used it.

She's looking beyond the media side of the medium to the organizing potential. And I think she's right - we're just at the very cusp of, as Trippi says, "the Empowerment Age". One of my thoughts about the Internet and politics is that on the Dean campaign we used the internet to level the playing field - but once we used it to catapult from polling behind Al Sharpton to front-runner, it provided a slim-to-none competitive advantage. That suggests to me that the internet is most valuable to underdogs, to those without the benefit of the establishment's media outlets and fundraising machines. The next political candidate to make impressive use of the internet will probably pop up where we least expect it.

There is undiscovered country - we don't know what's ahead for the field, and we're not even that sure about what just happened. But more than anything else, it's up to each of us to do the hard work to figure it out. I was struck by a recent Dave Winer post on scripting.com --

We're as far as we ever get from an election right now, it's two years until the mid-terms, four years to the next Presidential election. Let's start raising money for a truly open blogging network, out of which candidates for local office can emerge, and new journalists, and empowered voters, money-givers, an army of citizens ready to listen, to learn, and feed back to all of us what they learned.

Newspapers should really worry. So should network news, posturing politicians, and just about every top-down established power structure - especially those with no feedback mechanism to the very people they're supposed to be serving. I know people have been saying it for a while now - The Internets Are Coming - but it's true. And it's going pop-up again where we least expect it.