The newspaper on the desk beside me still has me thinking about weblogs and the future of print news. I posed the question by e-mail this week: Will there be a New York Times on paper in 15 years?

Andrew Sullivan of andrewsullivan.com:

of course there will. it's just that readers will also want to compare its coverage with lively criticism and rival coverage from the internet. the times won't disappear, thank god. but its monopoly power will be greatly diminished.

The Times sent me this speech by publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., brimming with confidence:

http://www.nytco.com/investors-presentations-20020220.html

and told me there's a bet going over whether weblogs will outrank the Times in "a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007." Martin Nisenholtz, the CEO of New York Times Digital, has bet 1,000 dollars that the Times will win:

Readers need a source of information that is unbiased, accurate, and coherent. New organizations like the Times can provide that far more consistently than private parties can. Besides, the weblog phenomenon does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media: The New York Times has been publishing individual points of view on the OP ED page for 100 years. In any case, nytimes.com and weblogs are not mutually exclusive. ...

Well, it's not that simple. But take a look:

http://www.longbets.org/bet/2