More newspapers will end their print editions and publish online, following the Christian Science Monitor. More will reduce the number of days they deliver printed papers to homes, similar to the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. More broadsheets will become tabloids, and the broadsheets that endure will have fewer separate sections.

Don't like the miniaturized Sunday comics tucked into The Inquirer's TV guide? Stay tuned. More and more, papers will save money by condensing the printed product, so they can continue to employ people to report the news that is their lifeblood.

More news in more papers will be sponsored - an affront to traditionalists, and a rational, natural move to those who hear or watch radio and TV shows dependent on corporate sponsors.

One more thing: The delivery method will evolve. It must.

Driving trucks full of printed newspapers to drop-off points, and having people drive around throwing those newspapers onto front lawns, is too expensive and inefficient in an age where news moves from Center City to Shanghai at the push of a button. When the cost of paper stock jumps 20 percent or gasoline spikes to $4 a gallon, it stabs a lance into companies that rely on rolls of newsprint and fleets of trucks.

Print prospered because it was such an efficient means for conveying the news. It was the best delivery device - cheap, reliable, portable. But it is the news that is important, that people want and have traditionally been willing to buy.

"Newsgathering is not tethered to newsprint," said Christopher Kent, who thinks about the future at Social Technologies, a Washington consultancy. "If the Internet has demonstrated anything, it's that consumers are hungry for content, and newspapers daily generate a huge amount of content. The challenge for newspapers is not one of distribution - the Internet has solved that problem. It's one of monetization."

In March, if online readers of The Inquirer had paid two cents - an amount they would not stoop to pick up off the sidewalk - to look at a page of the Web site, that would have generated $1.2 million in revenue - $14.4 million a year..

"I think people will be willing to pay for quality journalism," Tierney said. "This idea of free access to your content is fundamentally as silly as we all thought it was 10 years ago."

If the changes of the last two decades are a guide, then it is impossible to imagine the innovations that will emerge during the next 20 years and the effect they will have on newsgathering.

In 1989, almost nobody had heard of a little invention called the Internet. Few people had computers in their homes. Cell phones were big, bulky boxes, owned by about one million people. Today 263 million Americans keep a cell phone in their pocket or purse.

That does not mean people are not thinking about what The Inquirer might look like in 2029.

Marimow envisions a news organization operating on multiple platforms, evolving to meet the changing format and delivery demands of readers while staying true to its mission - excellent journalism.

"We've got to be the maestro of multimedia," he said.

Others envision a radically different offering, a mostly online publication that gathers all sorts of Philadelphia-area information.

"Think the template of Facebook, with a mingling of the public with the intensely personal, and an aggregation of news," said Rich Hanley, director of the graduate journalism program at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn. "We will always want to know who died, who is doing what with whom, and how the government is spending our money. Human nature doesn't change, but the way it is recorded and reported will."

Harper, of Temple, said he thought the future Inquirer would include news filed by amateur journalists from across the city, in places such as Logan, Olney, or West Philadelphia, all reporting on their particular corner of the world.

"You have people writing, you have people taking photographs, commenting, taking videos," said Harper, a former foreign correspondent for Newsweek and ABC News. "We have to reinvent ourselves. And I think that's a good thing."

Contact staff writer Jeff Gammage at 215-854-2415 or jgammage@phillynews.com.