I still call newspapers “newspapers.” I probably always will, even long after those that survive become almost fully digital operations with perhaps a token print newsletter for the elite and the elderly. Will this prevent me from ever attaining legitimate new media douche bag status? Should I try to kick the habit?

For example, I wrote this the other day in a Paper View Monday post, a feature which reveals my dirty paper habit in its very name:

Speaking of the Merc, Howard Kurtz has a story today on the paper’s effort to rethink itself. Of course, you don’t need to wait for ol’ Howie to tell you about the effort when you can follow it directly at the paper’s own Rethinking the Mercury News blog.

My problem, if indeed it is a problem, is that I find the more general and increasingly more accurate alternatives inelegant and awkward. “News organization” is unpleasant to say, as I’ve always found the word “organization” a bit rubbish. And “news” is far too narrow a word that fails to capture what the industry is trying to become, anyway. “Media organization” is just a complete shambles. It brings to mind nothing so much as my elementary school’s “media center,” also known as the library.

Ideas? What’s a newspaper when the paper one day stops rolling? Or will “newspaper” suffice even after that day? Do I clearly have too much idle time?