Newspapers: The future ?

I have USA Today to thank for its coverage of an article by Carla Johnson of the Associated Press in Chicago a few years ago about older bloggers and what we wrote about, and why. At the time, I was blogging on a community blogging site here that had been set up as a test site while Drupal was being further developed, and when that article appeared in USA Today, the guys downtown doing the developing got all excited, and called me up to tell me I was famous.
It got them "mentioned in dispatches" too, and they eventually sold out, hopefully for a profit. When that happened, I moved on to start this blog on Google's Blogger, where I'm not nearly as well known.

Back in the 1990s around here, we had some provincial politicians in power who really shouldn't have been, and me being recently retired and needing a hobby,
I decided to polish my writing skills by heckling Dear Editor at our biggest daily here with a tersely-worded one-page fax every morning after breakfast. I had a great little Canon Starwriter word processor and a Sanyo fax (both still alive and well) and I used those daily. I'd read the paper which arrived at my door before 6:00 a.m., and then pick three or maybe four topics, and do one pungent paragraph on each, so it all fit on one page of the daily fax, and then I'd fire it off to Dear Editor. 

It was fun, and good practice, and Dear Editor often used some of my thoughts as inspiration for getting her crew to go after "the bad guys" and "hold their feet to the fire" so to speak. We made a great team, and we eventually kicked ass and got the bad guys out of government. And I learned a little about writing, just by doing it regularly. 

I hope newspapers do survive, because it's going to be Hell trying to wrap the garbage in a computer screen. And how can I heckle Dear Editor if I don't have the email address? Or the Editor is in Bunga Bunga and Google Translate takes too long for me to be truly impulsive...