SALEM, N.J.

JOURNALISTS have a hard lesson to learn about the Internet. If they refuse to restructure their minds to accommodate it, they will become obsolete curiosities within a few years, no matter how superior they feel.

If you do a Google search, you might find this (you will after this is published!):

Wow!!! You have reached the very last page of the Internet.

We hope you have enjoyed your browsing.

Now turn off your computer, and go have fun.

It’s a joke with a pair of punch lines, depending on who you are. The obvious one is about the value of doing something other than surf the Internet. This is funny to all the people who believe the Internet is, with a few exceptions, a colossal sea of mediocrity. It makes them think of dopes lurching from MySpace to YouTube to eBay without accomplishing anything.

The second punch line is funny to those who have seriously explored the Internet. They probably laugh harder than the first group because the joke is so much bigger. That one could ever see everything on the Internet or that it could embody the kind of sequential order that has a “last page” is so ludicrous that it instantly evokes an image of the clueless antiquarian snob who was able to think this joke up in the first place only because his mind is far too linear to conceive of, well, an infinite electronic mind.

Print journalists are prone to putting themselves in the first group. Hardly a week goes by without some condescending excoriation of the “blogosphere” by a columnist or editorial writer. There are two reasons for this. The first they know about and take pride in. The Internet is full of amateur writing, much of it lame. It’s easy for professionals to look down on pretenders, even when they attack in overwhelming numbers. The pros know, correctly, that a billion bloggers couldn’t supplant the need for active, accurate reporting.

The second reason they don’t know about, and it represents a far greater danger to them. It is that they are prisoners of their own page orientation. While it’s true that the Internet also has pages, the print pages of newspapers and magazines are obviously of a different sort. They’re physical pages.

In the early days of the microprocessor revolution, when the typing of business documents was migrating from typewriters to word processors, a company named CPT realized that typists missed their typewriters. They designed a word processor that acted like a typewriter. The screen mimicked an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper, and the software required operators to format documents one page at a time. CPT was very successful until typists got comfortable with computers and discovered how much easier it was to let the software format whole documents automatically.

Like those early word-processor operators, print journalists are still so fixated on paper that they have missed a sea change. All the tricks they learned to defeat the physical limitations of paper by artful choices of layout, font size, order and content omissions now serve only to provide an illusion of control, which might be summarized as, “News is defined as what we put on our pages, and its relative importance is determined by the order and inches we assign it.”

This is baloney. The blogosphere may constitute only an unruly ocean of letters to the editor, but they have an inevitable transforming effect. Differences in scale, when large enough, become differences in kind. All those letters represent an ongoing referendum on what news is and whether or not it has been reported sufficiently, accurately and objectively. Column inches are scarce only on paper; the Internet never runs out of space. Posting print product online doesn’t solve anything. It simply obscures an obsolete mindset.

Truthfully, it no longer matters what The New York Times chooses to run on Page 1 above the fold. Every page, every story, every headline, every paragraph is equally subject to blog scrutiny. Ironically, the mechanisms that once ensured control are often used to punish the would-be controllers. The lead story deemed overhyped, the buried item that should have been Page 1 instead, the news that wasn’t “fit to print” but really is because a yammering multitude of voices says so.

Resisting the rolling vote of the Internet as if it were some negligible troublemaker rather than a tsunami is suicidal. Its armies of fact-checkers and near eternal memory mean that print journalists must change. Their business has stopped being a private club. They must read their critics, do more follow-ups, cite more and better identified sources, admit mistakes fully and prominently, and undertake to criticize themselves as conscientiously as if they understood there was more than one legitimate perspective on their work.

Above all, they have to accept that there will never be a last page.

Robert Laird is the author of The Boomer Bible and the Web site Instapunk.com.