Maybe you have these experiences at parties.

First: People complain about what the local news didn't cover, or why some personality at the newspaper got to write what he or she did. Pretty normal stuff.

Two: Now there's something new. People ask what happened to the newspaper. Why is it so small? Where did it all go?

They lament the obvious contraction and say, above all else, they still want newsprint on the doorstep every morning. Yes, they check the Web all day long for breaking news, but they want a newspaper to wap against the front door at 4 a.m. so they can open that door at 6 and find it. Call it ritual, some are still addicted.

Both conversations are a good thing. People care about information and getting it. They argue over where good information comes from and whom you can trust. That's engagement.

But the scary realization is that that old reliable local news organization is not some public utility company guaranteeing gas under your tea kettle whenever you turn on the heat.

Consider instead that many local news outlets are businesses that can only survive if they pay their way and make a profit for the owner. Working journalists love to point out that bloggers still don't make a living at their craft. Worrisome it is that many journalists no longer do, either.

The main point is only to note that the collapse we are witnessing locally goes way beyond Anchorage, Alaska. This is a fundamental re-ordering, a '64-style earthquake ready to bury Buicks in craters that didn't even exist before the shaking began.

Journalists, like airline and auto workers, and now financial service workers and maybe soon lawyers, surely have something to fret about.

But I worry about consumers. Our information ecology is in flux. Credible news and information sources are in crisis.

The upside? A crisis, by definition, is a moment of opportunity. Will Anchorage and Alaska do something with this rough "opportunity?"

The audience today is no longer passively receiving the news. Old models of one-to-many, top-down information sharing are over. Believing that the audience will decide the quality and extent of coverage we end up with in the future, here are two things to read that I hope make the audience demand a lot.

Readings

The State of the News Media, 2009

This is both grim and sweeping. A big document, it's broken into bite-size sections like Newspapers, Online, Network TV, Cable TV, Local TV, Magazines and more.

Too much homework? Then at least read two sections, A Year in the News and Special Reports with a spotlight on citizen journalism and new journalism ventures.

Lastly, don't miss Clay Shirky's Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. His perspective on this changing situation:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.