While everyone is mourning the demise of newspapers, it's surely not the paper itself that we will miss. Newspapers are an inherently disposable product, and it seems that our acceptance of their disposability has led us to reduce our standards and expectations to a remarkable low: Would we buy books if we knew that the ink would come off all over our fingers as we turned the pages? Or if they were so large and unwieldy that we couldn't read them in close quarters during our transit commute or tuck them into our shoulder bags? We accept our inky, awkward newspapers because we expect to throw them out hours after we get them. We don't want the product, we want the news it contains. Why should we keep pulping trees and producing ink and manufacturing literally tons of printed material each day in a subpar format if all we want is the service it provides?

Designing a digital-only newspaper is an opportunity to dematerialize, preserving and even improving the essential offering while eliminating the costs, logistics, and environmental impact of mass production.

Meanwhile, only a small number of Websites that don't have paper version (meaning excluding NYT, etc) have managed to establish themselves as credible, respectable information sources. Sites like Huffington Post, Slate, Salon (to name the liberal set) have loyal followers who group them alongside major newspapers. It's a slippery slope into the crowded sphere of the blogs, where accountability and accuracy vary dramatically. The design of this site has to distinguish itself because the content sets out to prove that journalistic integrity does not get buried with the paper. Journalists can and will uphold equally high ethical standards and quality in the move to online, and it's the design of the site is an indicator to readers of the type of content they can expect to find. We don't need gothic typefaces to create those associations, we need a new structure for a new experience.

Why not a front page that works like a combination of iGoogle and Huffington Post? A curated, customized news page that incorporates editor selections about what's important, the most popular articles of the day, and preestablished choices (like neighborhood feeds). Be acquisitive, link content from other sites if it's better than what you've got. Think from the perspective of the news consumer not producer.

Doesn't some designer with a love for news want to put something in this lonely little box? Your real work is nowhere near as fun as designing the news daily of the future! Just get it going and provide the InDesign file (or PSD or whatever). Once we've got something to look at, the community will take over.

Putting together a mockup is a lot of work, but how about just dreaming a little dream about your ideal news frontpage over at the What I Want page?