Is the paper you’re holding right now soaked in formaldehyde?

Because I’ve heard that newspapers are dead, so I’m worried that we might be in need of some post-mortem preservation. However, here I am writing for a newspaper, and here you are reading one, so perhaps we are not quite flatlined.

Since the inception of the internet, the fear that journalism will die has crept its way into every newsroom. Journalism majors have sat at dinner tables explaining the necessity of their career choice to hesitant degree-funders. Fearful followers of traditional newspapers have scoffed at the papers that switched completely from printing to uploading without a wink of trepidation. Skeptic social scientists have predicted that we will all soon be a society of citizen journalists, where everyone and anyone is “reporting” the news.

I, personally, see our world responding to these concerns by pressing on news sources with the hope of seeing where these news sources crack. Where are they weakest? What is fact, and what is editorialized? What do we really know? Because these loaded questions already float around in our heads, it is easy for a news source’s audience to be swayed into abandoning the smudged ink of a traditional newspaper and turn to bolder online sources.

The radical truth always seems more engaging than a sensational report. We want our news to be ground-shaking, and we want to hear the ground shake almost immediately. The faster we can know about something, the faster we can take to our soap boxes, log in to our Twitters and rise in a rally.

This brings us to our present situation.

Print newspapers are becoming too slow and too ordinary. News, 24 hours after it has occurred, is no longer news: it’s history. And with that truth, enters the online newspaper.

Serving as a constantly updated and technology-friendly way to know what’s going on around the world, we have found online news sources as the only reasonable step forward. With that, we’ve darn near abandoned print sources.

And that’s OK.

I said it. I work here, and I said it and that might seem strange, but that’s what’s happening. Online newspapers are OK. In fact, they’re brilliant. We no longer need to regard the printing press as our greatest invention.

Leading to a shift in the way we communicate, this invention revolutionized our world, but now, we have MacBooks and PCs, and iPhones and tablets. We have smart watches and Google Glass and Alexa. We have Amazon shipping us paper towels on demand and vending machines that distribute cupcakes. We have TVs that talk to us and headphones that need no cords. We are advancing at a ridiculously rapid rate, and we should expect news sources to evolve along with these advancements.

This is especially important because news sources are often the ones reporting on a new invention or receiving guest columns about a new idea. We are aware of what is cutting edge, so shouldn’t we be?

The death of a newspaper will come when news stops being needed. So, our responsibility is secure and our jobs are, as well, because the news will always be needed. People are inherently desperate to orient themselves. We must know. This is why we explore oceans and search through space.

We want to know everything we can, and we want to know how we fit into what we discover.

In fact, as our world is provided with more information, we will see an increased need for organizations that help us be effective consumers of information.

We need news sources. We need reliability. We need translations and explanations. We need watchdogs. We need no-spin zones. We need the truth to be told, and we need someone to do it. And if that job just so happens to be done on a page that can only be turned with the click of a mouse or the swipe of a screen, even better.

Everything else is digital. Why shouldn’t the entity that knows about everything be digital, as well?