St. Petersburg has a relatively new museum, and one of its first exhibits in a traveling show was of antiquities from Egypt, which dated back 4,000 years. It was amazing to me to think, as I was studying these objects of death and funerals, that if you went back to the birth of Christ, that was one increment, and then to go back again an equal distance in time would take you to the beginning of this exhibit. In some ways, it was sort of a downer, because it made you realize how transitory one's own time is on this earth, but it was very powerful. While there were some elements that were sort of disquieting, one element I found a little bit reassuring, particularly given my line of work, was one of the artifacts was a piece of paper. On it was a roll of the dead, but it had endured lo these millenia, and I think it's not too big a stretch to say that in some ways the power of paper, particularly in a discussion like the one we've been having today, can be underrated a little bit. So I thought I would speak a bit more about some of its advantages and sound a little bit of a note of caution about some of the things that we may be concluding.

You've heard Jef describe already some of the terrific advantages of the old technology of paper and ink upon it. It's portable; it's tactile; it's relatively cheap still, in this context of our businesses. But I want to talk about two other advantages that are often overlooked in this kind of discussion.

First, it is finite, not infinite. The quality that is usually ascribed to the Internet and the bold new era of electronic information as a huge advantage is sometimes, in fact, a drawback. I have at my desk a terminal that can allow me to look into various databases, more than I ever know to check, in addition to the fairly basic ones we use all the time of our own news queues, plus the Associated Press and the New York Times and Reuters and so on and so forth. And I could spend all day doing that if I wanted to, but in fact that's what I hire a staff of 350 journalists to do. And when you pay a quarter to us in the morning and put that in the box for our summation of the events and issues facing the world, I think that's what you've paid us to do, to sort through that for you and to impose - exercise, "impose" sounds too totalitarian - exercise some editorial judgment about what counts and what doesn't and try to bring that to you in a way that might reasonably appeal to a broad segment of the half million people who will trust us with a little bit of their money and quite a lot of their time.

The second big advantage of paper is an economic one, as a technology. Only about 20 percent of the cost of a newspaper is paid by you, the reader. The other 80 percent is paid by the advertiser who wants access to you, the reader, because we have developed in you a habit of reading and some loyal following. And paper allows those two revenue streams, the advertising revenue to go along with the interest of the reader. It marries up pretty effectively the economic component of the enterprise along with the artistic component of the journalism. So far, and I understand and would acknowledge that the electronic forms of journalism are not very far advanced, but we haven't been very successful in replicating that kind of marriage between the economic and journalistic components of our work in any other form of journalism. It's unfortunate that we didn't get to hear Tony Ridder today, because he in fact is moving the headquarters of Knight-Ridder from Miami to San Jose, and one of the reasons he explains he is doing that is to have his company closer to the future of journalism and the kinds of technical delivery that it may entail. So far, even in San Jose, Knight-Ridder is not making any money on its electronic forms of journalism. So, the economic power of this very old technology is still quite palpable.

So if it has been so powerful over the years, I thought I might explore some ways it might continue to be of great potential use in the future. Obviously there are going to be some powerful changes, even if we can't anticipate what they are going to be. But I think it's possible that ink on paper might continue to play a very important role in the kinds of journalism that we see. From my own limited perspective, trying to be provocative and to conjure up the future, I like to think about having instead of one big printing press, turning at very high speed in the middle of the night with then lots of trucks going out and lots of cars from those trucks so that we can deliver the paper, as I say across a very tight window of time, to half a million people - that we would be having thousands of printing presses and that they might be sitting in your homes or your businesses. They would be the next generation of printers, and they would be as much better compared to this set of printers as this set is compared to the ones of 20 years ago.

By doing that, we could give you a lot more of what you want and less of what you don't want, both in news and advertising, which would be of great value to us as a provider of journalism, and to our advertisers, who are trying increasingly to target their message to the people who are most likely to be interested and to act upon it. If you think about the stock tables in the newspaper every day, at most a third of the people pay any attention to them whatsoever. Out of those people who are even avid readers/consumers of the stock tables, they might have 20 stocks that they're following at any given moment. Imagine what else I could do with that money if I didn't have to devote three pages of what is for all intents and purposes wasted material, just so that I can make sure I can give you that small fraction of what you do want.

It would be the same way with sports scores, for example. I'm a big Indiana basketball fan, having graduated from that institution in 1976, when Indiana went undefeated and beat Michigan in the final game of the NCAA - the third time Indiana had beaten Michigan that season. I'm not sure we've ever beat 'em since, but we beat 'em three times that year. Obviously, some of that coverage winds up on the cutting-room floor, because it's judged by our paper not to be of sufficient breadth of interest. I have to have a talk with the sports department every now and again.

But imagine if I was getting my own individual issue of the St. Petersburg Times. I could get it with all the Indiana basketball that I wanted that comes in on the wire that we now don't have room to print. I could have it at any time I wanted. We now guarantee that the paper will be to you by six o'clock in the morning, but what if I want it at five o'clock? What if I'm an early riser? Or what if I have a very busy morning and I want to read the paper at night? There would be all kinds of things that we could do to tailor the paper to my individual interest. The advertiser would be seeking a target audience, and I might be part of it or I might not be. And there might be ways that we could send more of the right material to the right people. We do that now already. We do it with geographic zoning. We carve up our circulation area into small sets geographically; in fact, if you're an advertiser and you give us an insert to distribute with the paper, you can buy just one ZIP code of the St. Petersburg Times, and we'll send it just to that one ZIP code. By the standards of our industry, we do more to tailor delivery of both news and advertising to readers than just about anybody else. But even our system would look quite crude against a system where we could send a newspaper into your house created specifically for you.

If you think about it, that's what technology has done through the years, is to increase the quality of the item, to increase the customer satisfaction and to reduce the provider cost, and I think that's one of the things that makes this potential model maybe not all pie-in-the-sky.

It would come at a cost, though, and I'll close with some quick observations about that. I think one of the great things about the mass media, one of the strengths of a newspaper, for example, is that it does help create a common understanding and common agenda and conversation within a community. It's one of the few institutions left that can create that kind of basic agenda, that kind of basic level of understanding throughout a community, and this kind of specific tailoring and greater individual character would, I think, run a pretty substantial risk of diminishing that quality which is essential, I believe, to democracy. I'm a little old-fashioned, like my friend Jef, in thinking about newspapers and other media as institutions of democracy, and I think that one of the drawbacks of this kind of push would be to diminish that ability to help create in lots of people across lots of different kinds of circumstance a basic impression and a basic understanding of what may be happening in their community and their country.

I don't think that the technological change is the only threat like that. In fact, it may not even be the biggest one. We have huge demographic changes that are also going on in the country. We have increasingly a great distance between the rich and the poor. We have large segments of the country who I think may not be described as middle class or aspiring to the middle class values that have been both the bedrock of democracy and also part of the basic social contract that newspapers have sought to serve. So I would just offer that technological change may not even be the biggest of these factors that is forcing this kind of differentiation and that we might want to think a little more about that.

But I would say, by way of conclusion, that technological change - which often is spoken of with great trepidation by folks in my business - offers, to the extent that it does come, as much opportunity for improvement, and as much opportunity for a greater, more vital business model as it does a threat to the way we do business now. With that I'll turn it over to Graham.