I was in a Starbucks the other day, and saw a half-dozen folks reading their laptops.

It got me thinking.

First, it’s amazing that news can now be beamed wirelessly to your LCD screen as you sit in a coffee shop.

Second, I sure am going to miss newspapers. At least the kind you can hold. I’m not sure how much longer they’re going to be around.

I saw an article the other day that said some big newspapers are planning to be almost exclusively online in seven or eight years. Even a decade ago, people in my business felt that paper on doorsteps would indefinitely remain the most popular source of news. But the last few years have proven you can’t fight the Web any more than, say, radio people in the 1950s could have fought the coming dominance of television.

In some ways, newspapers have never faced a tougher challenge. Once, our main competition was the evening news on television, but most readers understood you could fit the transcript of an entire half-hour newscast onto a third of the front page of a newspaper. They saw TV as a supplement, not an alternative, and into the 1960s, just about every household in America got a newspaper.

Then came CNN, and today, there are a half-dozen 24-hour news channels.

Then came the Web. Suddenly, there was an alternative source of news with enough stories to fill thousands of newspaper pages each day.

The result?

Now, only half the households in America get a newspaper. Only a quarter of Americans under 30 read papers.

Changing over to the Web won’t be easy for papers, because, with so much free news there, few folks are willing to pay for online subscriptions.

But in one form or another, that’s where newspapers will end up.

In many ways, it’s a good thing. It will save a lot of trees and delivery-truck gasoline.

Still, I’m going to miss holding a paper.

There are some great newspaper Web sites out there, but I still like to just look at a front page, with its half-dozen stories and photos, and feel an immediate handle on the day’s most interesting events. To me, turning each page is a logical way to peruse and discover what else is going on in the world, and neighborhood.

I understand that the Web has thousands of stories, but to me, one of the downsides of the age of information is that there’s too much of it. It’s hard to sift through it all. A newspaper does that for you.

In a time of distractibility, a paper also keeps you focused. When we go online, we may start with a news story, but then go chaotically from e-mail to stocks to Google to shopping, and then back to news. But sit with a newspaper, and you no longer are sidetracked. You’re focused on just the day’s events. There’s no “you have mail” chime to interrupt you. It’s a rare sane moment in the day.

I even like to see the paper lying there at dawn when I come downstairs each morning. You bring it inside, you open it up, and there’s a portrait of the day to give you your bearings. Call me sentimental, but it’s almost like a friend. Yes, one that can make you furious, or frustrated, but unlike the great, vast Web, most longtime readers feel their newspaper belongs to them.

Now the world is filled with bloggers — citizen journalists and commentators who can write at home and post their work for anyone with a computer to see. Online, their potential distribution is as wide as that of the mighty New York Times.

Bloggers, of course, have as much a right as newspaper people to be “published.” But I still remember when my own company’s presses were next to the newsroom here, and when they rolled, the whole building shook, and it reminded you that newspapers were a momentous operation.

Today, bloggers just push the send key.

Maybe that’s a good thing for the diversity of media.

And maybe I’ll adapt like others and in time be reading bloggers on my laptop at Starbucks.

But even as I do, I promise you I’m going to miss holding a newspaper in my hands.