Asking whether journalism will exist a quarter of a century from now is like asking Americans at the depth of the Great Depression whether they can envision a life without Hoovervilles and apple sellers. Hope springs eternal, but present indicators aren't promising. With the Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, in bankruptcy, the Rocky Mountain News and Cincinnati Post extinct, and the stock of The New York Times Company hovering near $4 a share, the specter of out-of-work journalists sporting "Will Report for Food" signs seems chillingly real.

That's bad news for democracy. Our country needs a robust press to act as a check on public and private power. If there is a silver lining, it is that while the business of journalism is undergoing a painful transformation, journalism is at a thrilling juncture.

Never before have there been such sophisticated tools at the disposal of modern-day Woodwards and Bernsteins. Computers make it possible to analyze public records and distill telling insights from disparate bits of data. Social media such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter help reporters find sources, news tips, photos, and eyewitnesses to important events. Technology has extended the reach of even modest news operations. With the click of a mouse, an American working in New Delhi can instantly access his hometown daily in Des Moines and check out local blogs for the latest doings in his old neighborhood.

News consumers, too, have been transformed. The innate human desire to know what's going on, and to share it, has found infinite expression on the Web, through mainstream media news sites, blogs, "tweets," and video- and photo-sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube. There is a ravenous hunger for news, in every way that term can be defined. In an increasingly connected and globalized world, that craving is sure to grow between now and 2034.

Whether news outlets as we currently understand them will be around to satisfy that need remains to be seen. Newspapers, which generate most of the reliable, independently verified news in this country, are an endangered species, hobbled by the Internet's ability to atomize audiences and lure advertisers to free sites such as Craigslist. It's ironic, but even as the Internet has greatly expanded newspapers' readership, it has choked off their economic lifeline.

As a result, there will be fewer newspapers in twenty-five years. Indeed, we may not even use that word. (The American Society of Newspaper Editors recently proposed substituting "News" for "Newspaper" in its name.) The ones that survive will be wholly online (a move just made by The Christian Science Monitor). TV and radio will also migrate to the Web, with text and visual and audio reporting delivered to anything that has a screen (laptops, PCs, flat-screen TVs, iPhones). By 2020, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, most people in the world will connect to the Internet through a mobile device, so it stands to reason that future news junkies will read and view and hear the news through something the size of a human palm. Already, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times can be downloaded and read on the portable e-book device Kindle.

These are all innovations in news delivery. They don't address the more critical question of who or what will pay for the hard work of actually reporting credible news and analysis. Without news institutions or, at the very least, independent journalists steeped in the values of truth-seeking and verification, Google and Yahoo would have little trustworthy news to aggregate, radio talk-show hosts would have few facts to twist, and bloggers would be reduced to swapping rumor and gossip (something many specialize in anyway). Especially at risk is the expensive investigative journalism that is so critical to holding government and business to account.

Who will pay for high-quality news in the future? Perhaps press lords patterned after News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch and Mexican billionaire media investor Carlos Slim. Perhaps foundations, philanthropists, readers, and viewers, who have long supported public broadcasting and are now underwriting GlobalPost, ProPublica, and other intriguing experiments. Perhaps news consumers, who will pool donations to "hire" individual journalists to cover a particular story or a beat, a model now being tested at Spot.Us. Perhaps "serious news" will become a niche product like expensive industry newsletters, marketed by providers like The New York Times to an elite audience willing to pay top dollar. Perhaps news websites, currently free, will throw up tollbooths and collect fees for entry.

At the end of last semester, I asked my students what they saw in their crystal balls. A surprising number were horrified at the prospect of ink-on-paper journalism disappearing. Some worried that in a 24-7 media world, accuracy would give way to speed; others that news would become more partisan and opinionated. One predicted that news shows would merge with game shows: American Idol meets 60 Minutes. But, overall, there was confidence that, by the time they reached their forties, reliable news would still be available, and the ethics and values of good journalism would endure.

Tifft '73, who planned to retire as Patterson professor in May, conducts research on media ownership and ethics. The Sanford Institute has established the Susan Tifft Undergraduate Teaching/Mentoring Award in her honor.She is a member of Duke Magazine's Editorial Advisory Board.