The newspaper, first launched as the "Standard" in 1827, said the number of circulated copies would rise to over 600,000 a day from 250,000, which would in turn pull in more advertisers.

"I am confident that more than doubling the London Evening Standard's circulation and maintaining its quality journalism is what London deserves," Lebedev said in a statement.

"The London Evening Standard is the first leading quality newspaper to go free and I am sure others will follow."

We can certainly see this product gaining favor in hospitals and offices run by germophobes, and the like. It's antimicrobial paper, and it's being brought to market by a company called Domtar.

A special silver compound coats the paper, preventing it from growing bacteria, fungus, mold, mildew, and even odors. Moreover, it keeps the dreaded staphylococcus aureus away, that diabolical MRSA that we've heard about so much lately.

You don't need any special equipment to store or use this paper, which can sit on the shelf without festering for much, much longer than normal paper. It's white, of course, and has a high amount of brightness, which should give you a good feeling about using it for presentations as well.

Bill Gates says that in technology, things that are supposed to happen in less than five years usually take longer than expected, while things that are supposed to happen in more than 10 years usually come sooner than expected. Ten years ago, when I went to work for Microsoft, the newspaper industry was in a panic over something called Sidewalk -- a now-forgotten Microsoft project to create Web site entertainment guides for a couple dozen big cities. Newspapers were convinced that Microsoft could and would put them out of business by stealing their ad base. It didn't happen. The collapse of the Internet bubble did happen. And, until very recently, the newspapers got complacent. Some developed good Web sites and some didn't, but most stopped thinking of the Web as an imminent danger.

Ten years later, newspapers are starting to panic again. But merely slobbering after bloggers may not be enough. In 1996 the oldest Americans who grew up with computers and don't even understand my tiresome anecdotes about how people used to resist them ("What's a typewriter, Mike?") were just entering adulthood. Now they are most of the working population, or close to it.

The trouble even an established customer will take to obtain a newspaper continues to shrink, as well. Once, I would drive across town if necessary. Today, I open the front door and if the paper isn't within about 10 feet I retreat to my computer and read it online. Only six months ago, that figure was 20 feet. Extrapolating, they will have to bring it to me in bed by the end of the year and read it to me out loud by the second quarter of 2007.

No one knows how all this will play out. But it is hard to believe that there will be room in the economy for delivering news by the Rube Goldberg process described above. That doesn't mean newspapers are toast. After all, they've got the brand names. You gotta trust something called the "Post-Intelligencer" more than something called "Yahoo" or "Google," don't you? No, seriously, don't you? Okay, how old did you say you are?

Many papers have been losing circulation at alarming rates across all age groups. Newspaper profits and the stock prices of the companies that own them were also down during the first half of 2005. The biggest newspapers are cutting staffs, closing foreign bureaus and taking other steps to meet their owners' profit goals.

Most of these dire trends are nothing new. Deep thinkers have prophesied for years that newspapers are on a glide path to irrelevance or extinction. Since the advent of the Internet, a common version of the doom forecasts has the ink-on-paper news being supplanted by something not-quite-yet-describable on the Web.