The crisis that has the greatest potential to undermine what the craft of journalism does best is a quiet one that rarely draws the big headlines: the crisis of paper. Paper’s long career as a medium of human communication, and in particular as a purveyor of news, may be ending.

Paper is an increasingly subordinate medium. Like a brain-dead patient on life support, it lives because other technologies allow it to live. The only question, it seems, is when we will put paper out of its misery.

It just sits there, mute and passive, like a dog that knows one trick, waiting to perform it again.

The pertinent question may be not whether the old medium will survive, but whether the new ones will ever escape paper’s enormous shadow.

In a time of distractibility, a paper also keeps you focused.

What if paper somehow influences or shapes the information that newspapers and other paper media produce? It’s a strange idea, one that requires us to imagine paper not just as a container of content, but part of the content itself.

In Baghdad in the year 1226, there were more than one hundred papermakers and booksellers operating on a single street.