The journalist, author and teacher Hodding Carter III sums up your concerns this way: “This is the most creative time ever to be a journalist – if you are not in search of the past.”

Where’s it all heading? Nobody knows.

 Some of the best minds in journalism and future-think work night and day trying to figure it out. Whoever gets it right, first, will be rich.

 In the meantime, this is a cyclical period of shakedown.

 Happens all the time, without fail, in times of great change and uncertainty.

What is shaking down (and out) is the old:

 The traditional newspaper business model, newsroom structure, reporter and editor roles, the role of the reader/consumer/ citizen, to say nothing of the traditional mode of delivery – i.e., hulking Sunday papers, stuffed with ads, on a truck.  

   I, for one, agree with those who say that the paper part of newspaper will one day be a nostalgic memory. But the news part—and thus, the need for good journalism—is more important than ever, given the complex world we inhabit.

 News is as vital to a democracy as air is to a living being.

  What news looks like is changing as we speak. I urge you to look at Everyblock.com  as an example of how “news,” and how it’s delivered, is changing. As Adrian Holovatay, “computer-programming journalist” and Everyblock creator, says:

    “Isn’t news what appears on the front page of the New York Times? Isn’t news something produced by professional journalists? Well, it can be — and we include as much of that on EveryBlock as possible. But, in our minds, "news" at the neighborhood or block level means a lot more. On EveryBlock, ‘Somebody reviewed the new Italian restaurant down the street on Yelp’ is news. ‘Somebody took a photo of that cool house on your block and posted it to Flickr’ is news. "The NYPD posted its weekly crime report for your neighborhood" is news.”

 For other glimpses of what the future might hold, go to the Knight News Challenge winners Web site. Here you will find entrepreneurs solving problems in how to deliver news in innovative ways within communities using the latest technology.

  Finally, remember: Communication has gone through numerous upheavals and revolutions, from the printing press in the 1440s, to the telegraph in the 1830s, to the personal computer in the 1970s and ‘80s, to the digital revolution of the 1990s. Each shift caused great uncertainty. Each brought a shakedown. We have survived every time.

   Embrace it. This is, as the Old Bard put it so well so long ago, a Brave New World indeed.