Some of the best stories these days are dug up by amateur bloggers and citizen journalists who work for free. Why? Because professional reporters are too busy duplicating each others' efforts.

Five years from now, a "newspaper" for nearly everyone will be a high-resolution tablet running apps that aggregate news from a variety of curated sources.

Something like this already exists. For example, I use a $3 app called gNews that gives me global, national and local news "curated" by Google News algorithms. I read it in the same way I used to read the paper newspaper, and not the way I skim news online when I'm at my desk.

Google does an incredibly good job of giving me one news source for every topic, and ignoring dozens, hundreds or thousands of duplicate stories. The overall breadth of coverage is much better than The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal combined. The quality of the text and pictures is many times higher than any paper newspaper. There are no ads. And it's free.

In my experience, getting electronic news on my desktop PC is inferior to reading a paper newspaper, but getting it on my tablet is superior.