When the topic is news in the digital age, everyone is talking about Weblogs. But the reality is that the way we get news is changing so fast that no one can predict which of many trends will last.

Just 10 years ago, some thought we would all be reading electronic books, but they haven't taken off, and it's clear that traditional publishing -- putting print onto paper -- still has a long life ahead.

I defer to no one in my admiration for the e-book idea, but the notion that they would displace conventional books and newspapers was a nonstarter. More likely is a leveraging of the virtues of print vs. screen, each of which has pluses and minuses. I love the ability to search a news story on a computer, but paper is easier on the eyes.

Try to track a clear direction in digital journalism and you're likely to get a headache. Consider a small test case that recently occurred in the Netherlands. When a much-loved singer named Andre Hazes died there, mobile phone calls in the country rose 10 percent as people spread the news. But what's really intriguing is the 15 minutes after Hazes died, when the use of text messaging via SMS doubled.

SMS stands for Short Message Service, and chances are you already use it, given its recent popularity. It's a way of sending short text messages via cell phone. So widely used is SMS that I get the occasional "wrong number" message in text form. The other night my cell phone screen lit up with the message "What up 2nite," a call to adventure unfortunately directed elsewhere.

Now think about it: If text messaging doubles in Holland when a news story breaks, then we are seeing the cell network becoming a news distributor. I would have to guess that a huge number of Dutch fans learned of Hazes' death first by SMS, and only later by the mass media.

And in some ways, this form of distribution leaves even Web methods in the dust. After all, posting news on a Weblog requires the publisher to be at a computer and to compose the story for online use.

Text messaging is all but instant, requiring no more than a good workout for your thumbs as you manage those tiny keys.

And then along comes a study conducted by the Ericsson Consumer Lab in Spain, showing that SMS may be blowing past the Internet among young people in that country. Whereas 38 percent of the 15-to-24-year olds surveyed said they connected to the Net on a daily basis, a whopping 68 percent reported sending SMS messages.

The phenomenon means that reading the news is only half the story. The real action is in spreading the news, one screen at a time.

Talk about new media! Maybe there is a market somewhere in SMS whereby traditional publishers could reach this generation of text messagers. But it's hard to see how pushing serious content onto cell phone screens will help, even with the advent of powerful "smart phones" that have the computing capability of handheld computers.

The key to SMS is short and fast -- it's not a medium for reflection.

So what we expected would be a digital takeover of publishing is in fact taking many a strange fork in the road. It turns out that people will read in whichever way makes best sense for them; they don't read as a way of adapting new technologies.

Paper-based books and newspapers will survive even as alternative media proliferate, but with an online component that will distribute their content through devices whose popularity we can seldom predict.