The messengers of doom have spoken: Print journalism in the English-speaking world, particularly in the United States, is at death’s door. Or is it? These doomsayers have been telling us how since the 1990’s newspapers — those little Gutenberg miracles we pick up daily at a newsstand or are left outside our door before breakfast — have experienced layoffs, cutbacks, downsizing, bankruptcies and closings.

The fate of others has been migration, in virtual form, to that Netherland we call the Internet. All that is sad, but true. In a study conducted recently at the USC Annenberg’s Center for the Digital Future, media researchers concluded that newspapers, as we have traditionally known them, will be dead in five years. Jeffry Cole, the Center’s director, says that with circulation dropping and advertising revenue diminishing so precipitously, “We believe that the only newspapers that will survive will be at the extremes of the medium — the largest and the smallest.” He predicts that only four major dailies, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, will continue in print form, along with local weeklies. These are provocative, not to mention bold and disturbing, predictions. But there you have it.

The first challenge to newspapers came, of course, with the advent of radio and later television, particularly 24-hour cable news networks, that delivered news reports at a clip. But newspapers were up to that challenge. They simply retooled their approach by providing the kind of in-depth news coverage that radio and TV could not provide.

But the dye was cast after the Internet entered the picture. The Internet, which put vast amounts of information out there free for the taking, effectively was a body blow, given below the belt, to newspapers. Circulation began to decline, and with it revenue.

If newspapers disappear, not only will there be nothing to take their place, but their decline and fall may herald the death of the printed word, to be exact, the death of what Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher of communications media, called our “Gutenberg galaxy,” that world where the invention by Johanne Gutenberg of the printing press, or movable type, in 1439 introduced Europe to mass communication, which in turn permanently altered the structure of society.

Print at the time helped to initiate and formalize the economic ambitions of Renaissance Europe and gave spur to the new forces of popular culture. McLuhan conjectures in his iconic book, Understanding Media, that movable type enabled people to “see” their vernacular for the first time and to visualize national unity. How is one to consider the leap from the Gutenberg galaxy to virtual reality other than one compounded by vulgarity of mind? We hold newspapers in our hands and as we do so we enter a world codified by typography, and we move through that world calling on the manifold, subtle functions of all, literally all, our senses — the tactile and the olfactory, as we hold our newspaper in our hand and smell its ink, the visual and the auditory, as we peak at the headlines and hear the rustle of its pages.

And, yes, our sense of taste is engaged as well, for do we not swallow hard, tasting ash in our mouths, as it were, when we read about an injustice inflicted on innocents, say the wanton killing of four kids playing on their beach in Gaza by Israeli fighter jets? No computer screen can replicate this miracle, certainly not for this old geezer who prides himself on being a technophobe.

The history of print journalism in the US is inextricably tied with the history, indeed the very ethos, of the country itself, when the first newspaper in the American colonies, Public Occurrences Foreign and Domestic, was published in 1690. Like the other journals that followed it, Public threw objectivity in its news reporting to the wind, opting instead for a fiercely partisan stance as it editorialized about the tyranny of the British Government. (The British government returned the favor by cracking down on the press in general.) From that time to well into the 20th century, print journalism survived and thrived. Now finding itself on the ropes, print journalism is being pummeled, and finally supplanted, by an upstart called online journalism. In short, it is about to go under.

But technology is a beast of prey. It can pounce on you when you least expect it. Here’s a case in point: In 1860, the Pony Express was introduced in the US with much fanfare as a speedy mail delivery service. It was speedy and it was effective. Its experienced riders knew how to ride their mounts and whip them into lather in order to insure that the mail was delivered on time.

Their wok was seen as an innovative leap in the transport of communication. These folks were not aware, however, that the men they saw on the roadside all along their route, ramming in wooden poles into the ground and connecting them with wires, were introducing a new-fangled technology that would soon render the Pony Express obsolete — the telegraph.

We bemoan the death of newspapers. But one wonders what next is doomed to a similar fate. Books? Oh, the horror, the horror!