• MO | Meg O'Brien is associate business editor at the Chicago Tribune. She's dabbled in online, keeps her hand in design, did the metro reporting thing and teaches occassionally at Medill. E-mail her.


• DS | A copy editor at The Daily News Hole, a Midwestern major metro daily. As an 18- to 34-year-old, he is highly sought after by media outlets and advertisers. When not shoveling copy, he enjoys traveling, cooking and spending quality time with his iBook or TiVo.

Phillips Electronics announced at the end of January that it is ready to begin mass-producing a flexible display panel on to which users can download text and images, then roll it up and take with them -- much like tucking a newspaper under your arm. The February edition of the journal Nature Materials features a big cover story on the arrival of the long-awaited technology.

The first models have a display area of about five inches and can roll up into a case the size of a pen. It can be updated through connections to your computer or cell phone -- fetching you the latest Web pages, e-mail, books or news. Expect to see them on the market by 2005, say folks at Phillips who expect to make a million a year by then. "It's no longer a research project," one spokesman told Reuters.

Sure the first versions will be small, expensive, low-quality, short of memory and quick to run out of juice, but we'll be seeing a product that can hold a newspaper -- or rival it, with features like video -- within a couple years.

Our portability is the one key feature that no other technology has been able to match in all these years. It has kept us viable even while other mediums spread news and advertising faster, on more levels. Digital paper will change that, I think.

I wouldn't mind seeing the industry work toward something like the digital paper portrayed in the movie Minority Report. One scene featured a digital version of USA Today that looked more like a newspaper than a Web site, but changed as news developed. Something that wouldn't be hard to do today in a Wi-Fi hot zone. Add GPS to the mix and you could have ads appear in your paper for stores and restaurants within walking distance -- or local news for your neighborhood or about the businesses or institutions (or people!) you drive or walk by.

The possibilities are endless, really. But, I don't see any signs that we're thinking about this potentially fundamental change at all. Newspaper Web sites, for the most part, are still secondary and still run on a morning/lunch/afternoon news-cycle. Our newsrooms (and people) are not organized/prepared to publish constantly. Are we going to give away the technology or wait for people to buy their own digital papers? Do we know how sell location-specific advertising/base rates on radius? How are we going to design/present the news on these things? And, perhaps most importantly, how are we going to make money? Sure we'll save a mint on newsprint, but people still equate "digital" with "free."

The long-time broadsheet introduced a complete tabloid version of itself at the end of the September, targeting commuters in London and others who prefer the more easily flippable, compact size. The Independent claims it's the "first time in publishing history" that readers have been given a choice of formats.

I can't think of any others doing this, but I can think of many metros that should. Great idea. You've got to design your paper for how, when and where people use it. And several hundred thousand readers, obviously, don't all use it the same way. What a great way to grab more readers -- with the same content.

Ivan Fallon, the CEO of Independent News & Media, said in a release for a World Association Newspapers conference that the paper made the move to go after women, younger readers and commuters.

The tabloid edition, or the "compact" as they call it, sold 58,643 a day in December, up from 46,568 in November. (Before the launch, daily circulation of the broadsheet was about 178,000.) But despite the compact's popularity, Fallon said there are no plans to do away with the broadsheet because the company doesn’t want to lose the readers who are satisfied with it.

“If you walk into a supermarket and you want to buy a tube of Colgate toothpaste, you can get it in four different sizes," Fallon said.

While most broadsheets routinely print tab inserts, sections and special sections it may pose an operations challenge to do both on deadline if presses are near capacity. But the Independent's early numbers show this may be a problem worth solving.