2075: Newspapers for cyborgs.

DIGITAL METRO, U.S.A. -- Utley Gybeq wheels over to the computer. He grabs the electrode spaghetti with his artificial hand-pinchers and drops the tangle over his forehead.

"New Quark Gazette," he thinks.

That's his password for access to a daily subscription of one dozen favorite columns and 10 wire-service dispatches.

But Utley's eyes are tired, today. As his display screen fills with text, he speaks through his multilingual synthesizer:

"M3543." At that command, the onscreen text decomposes into particles and, simultaneously, a stream of data loads into his cerebral cortex.

It's good he has the option of receiving text several ways: eye to screen, brain to system, ear to audio.

Ah, now he can concentrate. And here is an excellent column. He likes the way Mordeen Owd portrays reality. She's right: It is foolish for the Redemopublicratic Party to be running Einstein's brain for president.

Utley presses a button and all the column data flow from his brain to the cyberarchive, while his download from exactly three months ago today automatically deletes.

Maybe later, he thinks, he'll lug Owd's words with him to the cyberbenches at the Interstellar Mall in his portable electronic tablet, or in the pages of his refillable electronic book.

Odd, how different things were back in the second millennium. Utley's newspaper, the Phoenix Herald-Advance, had offered free cryogenic freezing to its top executives. Though skeptical of the process, Utley said yes; to his surprise, he was re activated 15 years ago, in 2060.

Even now, with his memory card inserted securely in his neck, he has a hard time believing how newspapers used to be.

When the Internet came along, in the mid-1990s, it had scared everybody in the publishing industry. There were burning questions: Would newspaper sections survive? If newspapers disappeared, what would hold communities together? Would kids of the MTV era replace older, loyal readers? What would give expression to the common culture? Would everyone be his or her own journalist, self-publishing on the Net?

100,000 words per day

How odd those late-20th-century obsessions had been. Now, for example, thanks to cell regeneration, animal-to-human transplants, and artificial organs and body parts, aging is no big deal. If you want to keep your brain from atrophy (and who doesn't?), you must stimulate it with thought. If you don't take in a minimum of 100,000 words per day, you simply go into a gradual mental shutdown.

By 2005, indeed, paper (a.k.a. sliced trees) had disappeared; all the content was digital. No more sections either -- editorial, lifestyle, entertainment, national, local, international. Today the only boundaries that remain are between fact and opinion, and of course between the "brand" personalities of each pundit.

It doesn't matter where the columnists sit, geographically, or where the readers are either. By now, the planet's inhabitants have crossed so many boundaries -- gender into gender, race into ethnic group, mind into body, flesh into machine, nation into nation -- that if any hierarchy remains it is one of intelligence; the only community is one of shared values, interests, and culture.

Utley used to argue that the mere existence of an editorial page implied an institutional framework for communication. Back then, he truly believed it was a privilege to write opinions vs. merely report the facts.

After all, before the year 2000, people couldn't even choose their own content; they got the articles the gatekeepers let through. Community standards, clean language, providing the information people ought to know vs. what they wished to know -- that was what the leaders of pre-interactive publishing considered important.

Utley chuckles. He'd always had a sense of how the chips might fall, but only a sense.

Now, on weekdays he prefers to read the wire dispatches first, often in bullet format -- just the facts of the news, no interpretation, no analysis. On weekends, though, he likes to cut to the chase: the pundits.

The three big global syndicates - Time-Warner-Yahoo!-Microsoft; Find SVP-Facts on File-Oxford Analytica; and Bertelsmann-Sony-Berezovsky -- all are based on NASA's orbiting Global News Lab satellite, with its central facilities for data collection and transmission. No centralized newspaper offices remain. All content is transmitted to News Lab from home bases and beamed back, in daily orders, to the subscribers around the world.

The most flexible, adaptable, and savvy late-2Oth-century publishing enterprises had been the ones to prosper in the new millennium. They shifted from old media to new media by gradually merging departmental territories and intensifying the dialogue between editorial and business minds.

Commentary a cash cow 

Now the facts are free, unless you want to pay a premium fee per word for storage longer than three months -- by then facts are considered history. Commentary is the real cash cow.

There's plenty of pressure on the pundits -- it's no easy ride. If a mere 1,000 subscribers press control-delete in response to two columns in a row, the writer is automatically terminated from syndication for three years. What allows columnists to survive in the Darwinian jungle of 21st-century cyberspace is a mixture of talent, knowledge, and creativity.

Utley utters a few commands to get into the free subscriber network for Owd's column. Instant digital translation allows him to read anybody's comments there -- in Urdu or Spanish or Yoruban, whatever. His best pal today lives -- where does he live? -- oh yes, in Singapore. They met on the Owd reader circuit and now enjoy a direct brain-to-brain link.

And for sure, nobody confuses the chatterers with the journalists. Writing is an art, an Olympic sport.

Ah, finally time to relax. Utley swallows a tunafish salad sandwich tablet -- but abruptly his screens go blank! Oh, no -- he forgot to wire the digicash for his monthly subscription download fee. And now those blasted News Lab robots have cut him off.

NCEW member Carolee B. Morrison is international editor at The New York Times Syndicate. Her e-mail address is [e-mail]