When it comes to the news business, the future is anyone's guess.

That's the admittedly prosaic conclusion I've reached after years of writing about the turmoil that's shaken the news biz - and more specifically newspapers - in recent times.

I'd like to be able to confidently predict where we'll be in 25, 10 or even just five years, but I can't. Will newspapers still exist? Will a sustainable business model for online news be found?

I don't know. No one does.

Even the people who spend all their time thinking about such things, the so-called digital literati, don't know. They may claim otherwise, but a cursory glance at their track record of prophesying reveals the truth.

The digilits, after all, told us back in the '90s that information wanted to be free, and that if newspapers simply built websites and gave away all their content, the online ad revenue would come. This gold rush of digital dollars, in turn, would render print and its attendant old-school inefficiencies - chopping down trees, running huge presses, operating far-flung distribution networks - obsolete. Newspapers, some said, would soon go the way of eight-track tapes.

Well, we all saw how that turned out. True, readers migrated to the web, but they mostly ignored the advertisements found there, which meant papers couldn't charge much for them. Online ad revenue didn't even come close to replacing the money newspapers got from printed display ads. As newspaper analyst Alan Mutter notes in his excellent blog:

"Fifteen years after the commercial debut of the Internet, publishers on average still depend on print advertising and circulation for 90 percent of their revenues. Stop the presses and newspaper companies are out of business. It's just that simple."

More than a decade into the new century, the presses are still rolling at some 1,300 papers across the country. But the long, slow slide in newspaper circulation continues, as does the decline in ad revenue. Some papers, having examined this grim calculus, have decided the path to survival involves charging for their online content by erecting so-called paywalls.

And, in a rare bit of good news for the news business, paywalls actually seem to be working, especially at The New York Times, where where revenue from the paper's paywall has now surpassed revenue from digital advertising. That success has led other large newspaper chains to implement paywalls as well, and the results so far seem encouraging.

But the big picture, business-wise, remains uncertain. Print wheezes along, a viable but flagging business. Paywalls are a work in progress. Experiments with non-profit and philanthropy-driven journalism are ongoing. No one knows which ideas will prevail and which will fail.

As Clay Shirky wrote a few years ago: "There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke... Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen."

I happen to think newspapers are going to be around a lot longer than many thought. Print continues to make money. And there's an elegant simplicity to newsprint that hasn't yet been matched, even by tablets and smartphones. Read it, fold it, tear it, toss it (and hopefully recycle it), there's beauty in the utility of the printed page. And yet I'm not a luddite; the iPad and Kindle are wonderful devices. I just don't think they'll ever totally replace newspapers and books.

But would I bet a sack of cash on that prediction? Probably not. I'm no seer but I know that in the end, predictions are more about wish-fulfillment than forecasting. And the future is almost always stranger, scarier and more wondrous than we could have ever imagined.

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