People who know that I have something or other to do with newspapers occasionally ask for my forecast about the future of my profession. But I've never known what to tell them. Trying to figure out where my next column is coming from is about as far into the future as I ever have lookecd since I started in this business.

Now the answer, it appears, is: The Capital Times.

A few weeks ago, the increasingly-shrinking 90-year-old newspaper in Madison, Wisc., shut down its printing presses for the final time, although not because it was going out of business. The Cap Times still lives.

If only online.

Virtually every newspaper in the country already uses the Internet to some extent, of course. The historic goal in newsrooms to get it in print has been superseded by the urgency of getting it online.

Picture pages have been replaced by slide shows. Offer a story idea to today's newspaper editor and the first thing he or she probably will ask is, "can we get video with that?" Most newspapers now are a hybrid of print and Web.

But the Cap Times has taken it all the way.

Instead of delivering its product to readers at their front door --- or somewhere in that vicinity --- it has gone 100 percent to the Internet. And, while it is one of the first newspapers to totally immerse itself in electronic journalism, it's only the beginning.

Eventually, it has been predicted, just about every newspaper will take the same plunge. A decade or so from now we may live in a world in which there are no piles of old newspapers stacked up in the garage and nothing in which to wrap our fish. The very word "newspaper" could fall into obsolescence, joining gaiter, buskin, corset and modesty.

When I started in this business, the thought of a world without newspapers was incomprehensible. But then, my grandparents probably couldn't imagine a time in which there weren't kids on downtown street corners shouting, "Extra, extra, read all about it."

While newspaper executives have been preparing for the change for quite some time, not every reader is looking forward to it.

"I like to take the newspaper with me to the bathroom in the morning," some of my friends protest when I mention the possibility of paperless journalism. Which makes me feel proud about the importance of my profession.

Not only is the change inevitable, it probably is desirable. The financial savings for newspaper corporations are obvious and enormous. No more paper to buy on which to print it. No more truck drivers and newspaper carriers needed to deliver it. We won't have to shout "stop the presses," because we won't have started them in the first place.

Besides, in a morning newspaper, "today's news" never really was today's news, anyway. It always has been yesterday's news. Now we can get stories on our Web site while the television news anchors still are looking for their hair spray.

But if you're one of those readers who still prefers your news on a page instead of on a screen and you're reading this in a newspaper, feel free to take it to the bathroom with you.