This piece is going to sound a little like preaching to the choir. No. It is going to sound a lot like preaching to the choir, but I really don't care because what I am about to say needs to be said.

Stop the presses. The print media is dead! At least, it soon will be.

Many of you who have been on the Worldwide Web for more than a little while have probably been thinking this, if not saying so, for some time. Others are probably not yet convinced of the totality of this claim, but are beginning to see some merit in it. And, finally, those who are newcomers might not believe this at all; but wait, you will be holding this sentiment shortly. Indeed, so strongly am I convinced that newspapers and magazines are about to die that I am giving serious consideration to not renewing my subscriptions to several publications, including those devoted to motor racing (gasp), when I receive renewal notices.

What, you may ask, has triggered my (not so) radical thinking? The Italian Grand Prix. That's what. But it was only the coup de grace.

For nearly a year now, I have been increasingly envisioning the day when virtually everyone will be on the web. With more than 40 % of American households now having computers, that day can't be very far away. If we can go from zero to 100 % households with telephones in less than seven decades, it is not improbable to hit the computer saturation level sometime early in the 21st century. With everyone having computers and being on the web, there simply won't be the need for paper anywhere other than on the roll in the bathroom...which reminds me of a joke, but that's a different matter.

Nay sayers, of course, maintain that there will always be a place for books because people have a need to hold in their hands something between covers when they read. Well, had they lived in ancient Egypt, these people probably would have said something similar about clay tablets when papyrus was beginning to be used. And, for those who say that computers are too large and there are no modems at the beach, where some people like to read when they are relaxing, I say consider technological advancements that have been made in solar power cells, microwave transmission (envison, if you will, a 2 cm diameter antenna), and the reduction in the size of computers with each new generation. Probably everyone of us over 40 years old has a solar-powered, credit card sized pocket calculator, and remembers the day in the late 1960s when four function calculators were larger than a bread box and plugged into the wall. Can the day be far off when lap tops give way to palm tops? Those of you who know anything about global positioning systems or GPS know exactly what I mean.

But what does this have to do with the Italian Grand Prix? Well, it was something that happened immediately after the race and which I read about, as "news" only a few days ago--or a full 37 days after the event!--that cemented my opinion. It was only a few hours after the race that I had the opportunity to edit the contribution to Atlas Team F1 by Simone Musco (vol. 1, no. 13). I, like everyone else who watched the race, saw Gerhard Berger come to an unexpectedly abrupt halt with an unexplained dangling left front suspension. Italian viewers, of which Musco was one, had the priviledge of seeing precisely what happened in a taped replay after the race. By now, we all know what happened, the on-board television camera broke loose from Jean Alesi's car and crashed into the wishbone of Berger's car.

I learned of this detail in reading Musco's piece, and that fact alone inspired me to rush that article through the editorial process. I knew that Musco, and by extension Atlas Team F1, had a scoop. You read about it here first. So, too, apparently, did Tony Dodgins of OnTrack and Maurice Hamilton of Racer. If you haven't done so, and now there really is no reason to, go read pages 30-31 and 83 of the 5 October and November issues, respectively, of these magazines. What you will see is something very much like what Musco wrote, complete with a nearly identical sobering comment on the implications of the camera hitting Berger himself instead of the car.

Now, I'm not accusing either of these fine journalists of anything other than being trapped in a media that is rapidly becoming a dinosaur. I hold both writers in high esteem and think they possess great integrity. The only problem is the paper on which their words appear. It is, like some yellow cars that start from the last row at every grands prix, slow.

Can the end be very far away? Will the day come when the tree-hugging environmentalists have their forests totally intact because there will be a greatly reduced need for paper? Without a doubt. And, not a minute too soon! The print media is on the verge of joining the ranks of Vanwall, Cooper, Matra, BRM, Brabham, and Lotus, F1 teams that both won the world champship and died.