The view from 2029: No more presses.

IT'S DECEMBER 14, 2029, the last day before I reach the Social Security retirement age of 75. I remember thinking, back in 1999 when I was 45, that I might be able to retire at 65, or earlier; there were nothing but stock market gains and federal budget surpluses as far as the eye could see. But the politicians in Washington blew their last, best chance to save my generation's Social Security benefits while the economy was good.

Early in this, the 21st century, it lost steam. My 401(k) tanked, along with everyone else's, and the government kept pushing back the age at which full Social Security benefits are paid. Officials rationalized their failure to save Social Security by arguing that the average life span of 90 years gave people in the 2020s a longer retirement than they had in the 1990s, when the retirement age was 65, but people lived only until their late 70s.

Though I've done other things in the meantime -- my best job was Mars correspondent for The Associated Press, in that organization's final years -- I'm back to writing editorials for a small daily newspaper, which was part of my job 30 years ago. A lot has changed in the past three decades, though. I'll fill you in on some of the major developments.

We still call the institution I work for a newspaper, though the company tore out the presses more than a decade ago. By that time news in all forms had been integrated into the Internet. The walls between newspapers, radio, and television news began to crumble in the early part of the 21st century and were pretty much leveled by 2010.

By the early 2000s, many people were regularly getting much of their information, the stuff they used to get from newspapers and television news, from the Internet. In most communities in the 2000s and 2010s, newspapers and television stations began supplying content to common Web sites, which carried text, still photos, video, and audio. All-in-one devices replaced computers and televisions, allowing users to watch video content much as they always had. Text could be read on the screen as well, but most users preferred to print out what they wanted to read. For those caught without their portable printers, there were public printers, which resembled ATMs, on almost every block of most cities.

Reverse evolution

An interesting aspect of this development was a reversal of what had happened in many cities, which started the last half of the 20th century with several newspapers and no local television news, and ended it with one newspaper and several channels of local news. As people got used to accessing news - including audio and video - through the Internet, whenever they wanted it, television news began losing the audience that had been channeled to it by entertainment programming. In most cities, only the vestiges of one local television news operation remained, and it was folded into a Web site dominated by the city's newspaper.

The television networks maintained successful Web sites that featured world and national news. Predictably, they were heavy on audio/visual content, including "news magazine" stories, which viewers now could watch at their leisure. The position of network news anchor disappeared in 2020 with the (some say forced) retirement of Dan Rather.

Perhaps the biggest change in journalism brought about as a result of technology was the localization of smaller newspapers. The content of big-city papers such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Boston Globe became available electronically to most consumers early in the 21st century, and by 2010 all had discontinued their longstanding practice of providing content to other newspapers through their supplementary wire services and syndication.

This was a boon to readers, who no longer had to rely on the judgment of the editor of their local paper's editorial page as to the best syndicated columns, cartoons, and other content. If Molly Ivins was too liberal or George Will too conservative for the local editor, that no longer was a problem for those who wanted to read them.

Editorial and op-ed page editors, like many intermediaries, felt threatened by the new power the Internet gave consumers. Many editors were also genuinely concerned by what they saw as the increased opportunity for readers to reinforce their views and ignore all differing perspectives. It has always been possible, of course, for readers to avoid editorials and columns that might have made them uncomfortable. But most papers at least carried a variety of viewpoints on their editorial pages, and a reader might at least glance at those with which he or she disagreed.

Given the wealth of opinion on national, international, and even regional and state issues that was available directly to readers, many small and mid-sized papers reduced the number of editorials they ran on world and national affairs or eliminated such editorials entirely. But editorial editors and writers remained concerned that their readers get the best opinion -- of all stripes -- available on these issues. They also felt it was necessary to have experts on world and national affairs on their staffs to inform their writing on local issues.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, many small and mid-sized papers addressed these issues by establishing the position of "links editor." This was not solely an opinion position; papers established links editors for world and national news, business, sports, the arts, and other areas.

The opinion links editor's job is to steer readers to a balanced menu of the best commentary. Most do this by preparing daily columns containing brief summaries of columns and cartoons to which they provide links. With all the material out there, readers rely on links editors to steer them away from the unreliable and redundant and not to let them miss the important and original. It is not an easy job. Unlike op-ed page editors, their immediate ancestors, links editors are rarely anonymous, and some of the best in their fields have national and even international followings.

Amid all this change, the jobs of those of us who write editorials on local issues have remained pretty much the same. As long as people are physical beings living in a physical world, most everyone is part of a community based on geography. People who constitute such communities continue to face social, political, and moral decisions about their collective direction. Editorials have always played a role in shaping such decisions, and I see no reason that should end in the 21st century, or ever.

NCEW member Fred Cohen is city editor and editorial writer for the Palm Beach Daily News in Florida. His e-mail address is [e-mail]