Roger Fidler has an idea. Whether or not it's a good idea, it certainly aims right at the heart of the issue all of us in or about journalism should be pondering. Why will anybody need us, anyway?

With the coming of the Internet and the World Wide Web (and what will certainly succeed them sooner or later), ordinary folks now have the exciting capability of tracking down original sources via their own computers. They don't have to depend on us and our hoary institutions to decide what's appropriate for them to read, hear, and see.

Fidler, who discusses all that in a book entitled Mediamorphosis, which will be published in the spring, argues that consumers of news are habituated to:

a) Reading or viewing news and advertising in the vertical format of the standard newspaper, and

b) Relying on a mediator, someone to fill the role that journalists have always filled: gathering, sifting, filtering, verifying, evaluating, prioritizing. Indeed, Fidler points out that as people are inundated by increasingly more information, the more they need such mediators.

Fidler dreamed up a device that would combine both the look of a newspaper's packaging as well as that perceived need for a mediator. In 1981, his mind's eye divined a letter-sized, slender (inch-thick), two-pound portable electronic "tablet" that, he expected, would eventually supplant our favorite newspaper, radio station, television newscast, magazine, even our Rolodex. Users of news would in effect be constantly downloading new stuff, much in the same formats with which they are currently familiar.

You would see a headline on the screen of this tablet, for instance, touch a light pencil to it, and a full story -- or a video and audio clip -- would pop into view. You could touch again and get more and more detail, all stored in ample but tiny memory cards inserted in the machine. One idea Fidler was exploring was using those ubiquitous automated teller machines as docking stations to receive data and refuel tablets with the newest news. Later on, when and if "bandwidth" became virtually unlimited, data could be fed directly to the tablet from an orbiting satellite.

Fidler started out to be an astrophysicist before getting hooked on newspapering. His background in science enabled him to think through the electronics of this thing. Knight-Ridder is believed to have spent a couple of million dollars over five years or so figuring out how all these news and information sources could be packaged into such an apparatus, and Apple Computer has been working on the electronics to make it.

The problem is, "The Tablet" hasn't happened yet. Fidler maintains that the real thing was about two years away. But P. Anthony Ridder, the chairman of Knight-Ridder, figures that it's still at least ten years away and, although he says he loves Fidler's idea and would be delighted to be the device's first user, he also says his company couldn't "sit and wait" any longer. (The company poured $50 million or so -- in partnership with AT&T, which spent millions more -- into a black futuristic hole called "Viewtron" before scuttling it in 1986. Viewtron's design director was one Roger Fidler. Fidler has enjoyed some notable entrepreneurial successes, too, such as PressLink and the first computer graphics network, now called Knight-Ridder Tribune Graphics.)

A few months ago, Ridder shuttered Fidler's Information Design Lab. Ridder says he begged Fidler to stick with the company, to move to San Jose, site of its New Media Center. But Fidler decided to use his two years of Knight-Ridder consulting fees to keep on keeping on, hunting new investors. He has taken a visiting professorship at the University of Colorado and will help the university develop a media lab, part of which will include continued work on "The Tablet."

Ridder for now is betting on more immediate steps into the future and on the Internet. "I think what the New Media Center is doing is here and now," he says, "and there is lots to be done, including not only the news part of this but electronic classified. That stuff is exploding."

Fidler spent a year at Columbia several years ago, and he and I talked endlessly about the tablet notion, which I maintained would be great for about ten seconds until something else came along to supplant it. Fidler insisted that history would prove him right. He still thinks so.

"I firmly believe tablets will emerge as a consumer appliance before the end of this decade," he says. "What I'm trying to do is package the newspaper to preserve an easy way to browse information, but with greater depth."

Gadgets aside, Fidler's central idea -- that journalists are absolutely necessary in this new world -- remains central to many of us, notably including Knight-Ridder.

Kathy Yates, director of business development of Knight-Ridder's New Media Center, says consumers may find surfing the "Net" fun now, but that will soon wear off.

"At first, it's a whole lot of fun," she says. "In a way, it's extremely seductive -- getting data right from the source, unfiltered. But that takes time, and the Internet doesn't give people more time. In fact, it consumes time. And all it takes is one or two episodes of picking up and relying on information that you thought was credible and isn't. We believe there will be a revitalization or reappreciation of what it is that journalists do."

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