In the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie “Minority Report,” there’s a scene in which commuters are reading USA Today. Only as they’re reading, the photos and story mix are changing right on the page. It was not one of the most important scenes in the movie, but it has stuck with me these past few years and I have often brought it up when speaking to community groups about the future of newspapers.

You see, the ongoing conversation about newspapers vs. the Internet typically come down to the same conclusion: The Internet eventually will kill off newspapers once and for all. The only question supposedly remaining is: “How soon?” This debate and solution, however, presupposes a very iffy proposition: that technology essentially will remain frozen long enough for the scenario to play itself out, to the certain demise of news on dead trees. Progress doesn’t often work that way.

Quick: Anybody remember the first music video that ever played on MTV? If you said “Video Killed the Radio Star,” give yourself a gold star. It seemed like such a forgone conclusion at the time: If you could actually see rock stars perform a song, why would you settle for hearing them do it? But here we are more than two decades later, and radio — such as it is — is still going strong, and with satellite radio offering hours of listener-specified programming with little or no commercial interruption, the medium’s future appears to be secured. MTV, meanwhile, has become so overrun with reality and other programming that you could watch it for most of the day and never see a music video.

The point: What if the future holds a true melding of newspapers with Internet technology — and not just a capitulation by newspapers in which they go all Web with no print edition? That’s essentially what those commuters on Minority Report were holding in their hands, wasn’t it?

Every component needed to produce such a hybrid either already exists or is being developed in corporate research labs right here in Silicon Valley, even down to a product called “liquid paper.” OK, nitpickers, liquid paper isn’t actually paper at all, but a computer screen so thin and durable that it can actually be folded up and put in your pocket. Now add to that wireless Internet and a dash of not-so-pie-in-the-sky nanotechnology and insto-presto, you have the newspaper of the future: Buy one “paper” that lasts a lifetime, then subscribe to a 24-hour news service from USA Today or The New York Times.

Liquid paper seem too unwieldy? How about a pair of eyeglasses — or even contact lenses — that use wireless nanotechnology to project a copy of the latest edition of The Washington Post into thin air about a foot in front of your face?

If newspapers are to leverage technology to carve any future at all for themselves, however, the leadership will have to come from progressive, forward-thinking companies that are willing to spend money and even lose money for a few quarters with an eye toward a long-term payoff. In other words, while the necessary technology likely will be produced in Silicon Valley, the actually publishing leadership component of the partnership will almost certainly come from somewhere else.
Just one man’s “Minority Report.”