Thirty-five years ago, when I started my company, becoming a newspaper publisher was an expensive business. You had to buy linotype machines to set the type (and pay the operators to run them). Newspaper presses cost millions. You had to buy newsprint by the ton and establish credit to pay for it. You had to organize a distribution system that, in those days, depended on hundreds of juveniles to deliver your product. You had to hire, train and direct a corps of staffers to report, write and edit the news and a bunch of sales people to sell the ads.

All these components were expensive. Taken together, they constituted high barriers to entry, effectively deterring most outsiders from entering the newspaper business.

Seven years ago, by contrast, a software program called PageMaker appeared. For just a few hundred dollars and a couple of weeks of intensive study - coupled, of course, with a commercial printer willing to take credit - nearly anybody could become a publisher. Of course, the news still had to be gathered, the ads sold and the newspaper had to be distributed once it was printed. But advances in software reduced substantially the barriers to entry to publisherhood.

Today, anybody can call my Internet service provider company and pay $19.95 for essentially unlimited 56K baud access to the Web. Once that connection is made, the subscriber can be reporter, ad sales person, compositor, press operator, publisher. All for less than $20! The information revolution has reduced the barriers hindering entry to the newspaper business to virtual nothingness in less than 35 years!

All this in turn is forcing a reconsideration of what the phrase "news media" means in today's information age. Traditionally, "news media" referred to a mass distribution system by which content from a central source was distributed by a mass medium - newspapers or television or radio networks - to a relatively passive mass audience. The economies of scale possible in the mass media, coupled with significant barriers to entry, tended to provide a perfect example of a highly concentrated industry through large metropolitan daily newspapers.

As improvements in information technology took place, barriers to entry were reduced, and segmentation strategies became possible. Publishers like me started little suburban newspapers underneath the big dailies. Cable television technology followed by satellites allowed a variety of programming to be distributed on a variety of channels. The cable TV industry started siphoning viewers away from the networks. Radio stations even discovered that selection of music defined audience preference, and segmented radio was born. Mass audiences, now presented with some content choice, began to be less passive, and began to make choices among various content distributed by various media.

But in the information revolution age, market imperfections have been largely eliminated. The Internet largely obliterates limitations of time or distance because an individual can access data files instantaneously at any time, from any place, with (in theory - theory being defined by the effectiveness of the search engine and the browser) complete information available about what's in the database. Moreover, the idea of largely mass audiences passively sopping up what is being spooned out has been superceded by the reality of individual, fully informed, active users.

Strict economic theory says that in a perfect market, perfect competition will prevail. Maybe it will, some day. But in the mean time, lots of people still will be buying old fashioned newspapers, and lots of editors will be adding value by offering readers the time-saving convenience of having sorted through lots of wire copy to distill the news. And, besides, who wants to read a lap top computer in bed or on the toilet?

All this suggests that the information revolution will over time provoke a wholesale revision of what news media companies call assets. The usual list includes capital and tangible assets and a stable of markets and products. A more accurate view of a news organization's assets might include people with marketing imagination to see the potential in a rapidly changing world, technologists with the capability to slice and dice databases to meet the needs of the market and the databases themselves.

This is so because most fundamentally, digitized databases make up the substrate from which an arpeggio of information products can be created and delivered to audiences of one or more individuals by a variety of distribution media-newspaper, TV, radio, Internet, whatever. In fact, I expect to see news organizations evolving to set themselves up as central storehouses of data, with choices made among various distribution media according to market and competitive expediency. The medium is no longer the message; the medium is defined by the market.

In my end of the industry, all this makes possible for the first time a business model through which we create networks of information media, all organized around the needs of local people, living in their own hometowns. We now link our local, community-oriented newspapers with local telephone directories, each serving the same hometown but using a different distribution medium to add value for users seeking a different kind of application. We provide access to the same information, both current and archived, through our pages on the Web. And we offer gateway access to the Web. Our objective is to offer folks a convenient way to get to know anything they want, from their own hometown to the world. If you imagine such a system being linked to the local public library and to the local city hall, you can easily conjure up a vision of a community information network that is transparent to the user that can be driven interactively by individuals in novel ways. The pothole in the street outside your driveway, for example, can be reported for filling to city hall, which in turn is on the hook for prompt service. Or social workers, who now spend more than half of their time repetitively filling out paper forms that vary entirely from local to state to federal to court jurisdiction, could fill out only one fits-all form to be submitted remotely to database entry.

So much for the potential of the transforming economics spawned in the news media by the information revolution. But every economic advance always contains a threat. In the case of the news business, this is most easily summarized in the question: Is news data? Using contemporary nomenclature, news traditionally has consisted of a bit stream that has been processed through the brain of an informed person with a high sense of implication. We call that process editing. And ever since the invention of newspapers, the notion that raw fact had to be processed through the head of a gatekeeper editor has been at the core of our assumptions about news. But in an information revolution environment, where every recipient of messages through the Web becomes a publisher, an anonymous generator of messages to be put out to the rest of the world, where is the gatekeeper? What is the news? Is it the rumor put out by the Drudge report? Is it merely access to a database? Is it a jumble of white sound? Where do we find solidity, perspective, context, experience, news judgement?

The techno-answer is to look to increasingly sophisticated search engines like Yahoo and Web browsers like Netscape. Push technology, for example, allows people to select for distribution items corresponding to individual interest patterns such as gardening roses or tasting wine. I'm not at all sure that I want my news future to be defined by some software program. I'm old fashioned enough to prefer to rely on people like Paul Tash and what I know about his brain and his sense of implication. The reason has to do with a simple point of epistemology, one that I learned as a Marshall at Oxford years ago. Ordinary language philosophy holds that the meaning of an utterance can be validated. I can say, for example, "It's raining," and the meaning of my utterance can be easily validated by going outside and checking to see if you're getting wet. For me, news becomes news as opposed to noise by undergoing the validation process of having passed through the brain of a good editor.

Perhaps that's why I'm attracted to simple, little hometown newspapers. Validation of news stories for hometown readers comes about through the course of their ordinary life in their hometowns, not through some abstract and impersonal bit stream.