Will online newspapers be newspapers?

Will newspapers still be newspapers without the paper? We're about to find out. After years of anticipating an era when "dead tree" media (to use a rapidly proliferating pejorative) would yield to the digital world, the transition is upon us and happening fast. Faster than many expected or prepared for.

This week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (which often carries this column) delivered its last print edition to subscribers and newsstands. Like The

Christian Science Monitor , it will live on in daily form as an Internet-only edition.

With the same name and some — by no means all, but some — staff remaining in place, you may be wondering about that opening question. But there's more to asking if newspapers will still be newspapers without the paper than a reflexive traditionalism.

First, though, let's give tradition its due: Paper, whether folded into a tabloid or broadsheet, is a wonderful technology for delivering the news. It is portable and easy on the eyes. It provides a logical and easily understood ordering of stories, according to editorial judgment. Veteran readers of The New York Times , for example, know that even when all the front-page stories are headlined in the same-size type, the farthest-right column contains the lead story, the farthest left the second lead. The editors of any paper send an easily understood message about the importance they place on a given story according to where they put it.

Also, and I don't think this can be emphasized enough, paper editions allow for a great deal of serendipity that abets the civic goal of an educated public. Unlike online editions, where stories are accessed directly by clicking on headlines, the story you're looking for in a print edition sits alongside other stories that may well catch your eye.

But at the core of the question of whether online-only editions will still be "newspapers" is the essential function newspapers have and continue to serve, and how they've been able to do that. Anyone who, like your reporter, has spent substantial time in a network television newsroom can tell you that newspapers drive the news agenda. If a story merits a headline in the Times or The Washington Post or a handful of other influential dailies, you can bet that it will at least be discussed as a story for that evening's news — even if it hadn't previously been on the radar.

That newspapers play a similar role online is obvious to anyone who has spent much time there. Without discounting the importance of bloggers, it's worth noting how many news-oriented blogs are inspired by (and link to) news originally generated by the online identities of traditional newspapers.

Newspapers are, in short, our most vital wellspring for news — news as distinguished from stenography of official pronouncements, from infotainment and from the heat of partisan opinion masquerading as the light of information.

Which brings us to how they've been able to perform this public service while turning very healthy profits — which they did, to the tune of 20 percent to 30 percent, until the Internet, higher costs and the recession all took their bites. They managed it by having a near monopoly not only on local news but also — and more importantly from the revenue side — on ads for local businesses, for classifieds and real-estate listings.

It is, at best, a question whether newspapers can replicate or replace these sources of income when they become online-only. And if they can, can they do it fast enough?

What's at stake is more than a business and more than tradition. Until a new model proves viable, the heart of the information flow on which a democracy depends is at stake. So let us wish the

Post-Intelligencer well — for their sake and, more importantly, ours.