Can we please stop killing trees now?

Print media is dead - let's give it a decent burial and move on. It's confounding to me that daily newspapers still exist in this day of instant information. How can a daily printed newspaper possibly hope to deliver any relevant information when the news is already old by the time the presses are fired up to START their run?

I have a live blog feed from Al Jazeera updating about every 5 minutes on my iPhone with truly current events happening in the Arab world (which is kind of important right now), and another feed from CBC for local and world events that updates about every hour. I have read, understood, Tweeted, Facebooked, blogged, and shared it with 50 friends by the time my local daily newspaper sets the type in the press for *tomorrow's* print run. How can they possibly feign relevance?

I'm not saying newspapers need to stop existing, just that they need to stop wasting paper and wake up to the fact that the entire world - yes, even your 80 year old grandmother - is plugged in, hooked up, connected, fully wired… and they don't want to wait for the morning paper to get the news.

A new world order is about to emerge, fuelled by the youth of this planet who see the news as it happens. They communicate across borders and have formed communities that transcend politics. If Facebook were a country it's population would be larger than Brazil and would deserve a seat at the UN. That community is filled will people who live globally, not within the confines of physical borders and they certainly don't contain them selves to the politically controlled, day-late, printed word. In a day when you can Tweet a revolution, there is no room for the time-wasting, tree-eating antique that is the daily newspaper.

The news organizations that have embraced instant information (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Flash news feeds, etc) will survive and thrive if they do it right. The ones that truly understand the concept of "social networking" will become dominant. Those who continue to provide me with fire-starter will ultimately fail. Even the large news organizations that "get it" will need to watch their backs because this new generation that feeds on instant news is turning to non traditional sources like blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and special interest webs to gather their information - and they are definitely not killing trees to do it.