Abstract
The newspaper industry has been referred to as the smoke-stack industry of the communications age. On the contrary, it is unsurpassed in its ability to gather and organize vast quantities of time-sensitive information. The weakness of the industry lies in its outmoded distribution and presentation of that information, as well as its inability to be responsive to the needs of both individual readers and advertisers. Mass media no longer need be monolithic, impersonal, synchronous, colloquial or prepackaged. Rather, newspapers can be redefined to be distributed, responsive to personal needs and interests, timely, international and dynamically presented.

In this straw-man proposal, we argue that in order to have maximum impact, the newspaper industry must provide timely delivery while facilitating local formatting, personalization and advertising acuity. This refashioning of the industry will be made possible by the intersection of mass media, personal computing and modern communications systems. Ultimately, it is the form in which the information is encoded and made available which will open or close doors to future applications and markets. The underlying premise of this proposal is that the future of not only newspapers, but also all forms of information dissemination, lies in cooperation between the information provider and the audience, both of whom will be operating in a computationally-rich environment.

Symposium on the Future of Newspapers, MIT Media Laboratory, Cambridge, MA, July 24-25, 1991.
http://mf.media.mit.edu/pubs/conference/StrawManProposal.pdf