NEWS (papers)

SOONER rather than later, the newspaper you're holding in your hands will be very different than it is today.A couple of fascinating new studies out this week suggest just how profound -- and potentially troubling -- some of those differences may be.One of those surveys comes from Britain, where the media research firm Nielsen/NetRatings reports that the online editions of Britain's two largest "quality" newspapers -- the Guardian and the Times of London -- now have more American than British readers. The Independent, a smaller serious daily, already has twice as many readers in the U.S. as it does in Britain, and, if the current trend holds, even the very Tory Daily Telegraph's online edition shortly will have more readers in the U.S. than in the Home Counties.What's up?You can't, of course, entirely exclude the snob factor. It's the same impulse that drives otherwise intelligent people to spend their evenings watching mediocre detective dramas on public television just because they're set in London. It's what drives American men of a certain age and inclination to buy English dress shirts, even though they have no breast pocket.Still, given the kinds of numbers Nielsen turned up, something else is at work. The quality British papers, particularly in their online editions, are much farther down the road toward what looks like the future of newspaper journalism, one that places a much higher premium on analysis and opinion than do serious American newspapers. When Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair complained in one of his farewell addresses that the British broadsheets had transformed themselves from newspapers to "viewspapers," Tony O'Reilly, the Irish magnate who owns the Independent newspaper group, proudly agreed, saying it's what his readers want.Then there's a new survey by the reliably nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: Roughly a quarter of Americans now use the Internet as their primary news source. Pew's study finds that the Web crowd is younger and better educated than most Americans and far more dissatisfied with their country's news media. It's fair to assume that a substantial number of them are among the British papers' U.S. readers, people who want a "viewspaper."There's something else about their reading habits worth considering. As Joseph Epstein, a commentator of generally conservative predilections, points out in a forthcoming essay on the future of newspapers: "Not only are we acquiring our information from new places but we are taking it pretty much on our own terms. The magazine Wired recently defined the word 'egocasting' as 'the consumption of on-demand music, movies, television and other media that cater to individual and not mass-market tastes.' The news, too, is now getting to be on-demand."