The imminent launch of the iPhone has got Steve Yelvington thinking about the threat to newspapers from cellphones and increasingly clever smartphones like it. As a Treo 650 owner I find the word smart and phone difficult to say in the same sentence without spitting, but Steve has a point. Will a whizz bang phone with access to everything on the net kill the last refuges of newspaper reading, beyond perhaps the bath? Is improved waterproofing or printing on rubber ducks the only innovation left open to us in the face of easy internet access on your phone?

Unlike Steve, I'm much less worried by it. In fact I'm pretty stoked. I have a dirty secret you see. I rather like the fact that cellphone services are controlled by major companies who make money selling stuff. I know, I know. That makes me a bad person, an e-traitor, an i-deserter. And, don't get me wrong,  I love what the anarchic freedom of the web has brought about, the information I can get, the people I can connect with, the things I can do.

But I also like newspapers, and the fixed internet has confused printed media, shattered their self-confidence, and set them off wandering aimlessly towards an online revenue cliff.  Maybe newspapers will do better in an environment where there can be lots of meetings and Powerpoint presentations instead of people just getting out there and doing things
and seeing if other people like them?

There will, I'm sure, be Powerpoints. I think big cellphone operators, who like to do business with big brands and who can tailor their products by geography, will seek out local newspapers as partners very quickly. Readers may tell researchers about how little they trust newspapers but big telecoms trust us a lot. They advertise with us already. Newspapers know them. Newspapers play golf with them. Newspapers used to carry their books to school for them when they were young.

This is why I think the mobile internet will be good for newspapers. Cellphone operators make money from the internet access on your phone now by selling data plans that let people download what pitifully small content there is out there designed specifically for phones.  But you'll go to a very narrow set of sites once you've had to wait five minutes while a "normal" page downloads in an unreadable undesigned way. Try a Myspace page and make a nice cup of tea while you're waiting. All that user-generated chaos is kind of fun on a PC - it's really irritating and timewasting on a phone.

Of course over time more and more sites will be able to adapt and offer cell ready versions, but one key building block of the fixed internet - that it is all out there,  in a semi-standard form ready to be found by Google and displayed effortlessly on your screen - is not there right now on cellphones. There are lots of kinds of phones and not enough standards. If you want your site to work across them all it's going to take a lot more than a couple of lines of HTML.

Maybe the internet will divide in two - fixed and mobile. Fixed for the chaos and fun of big MySpace and the big words of little Inksniffer, fixed for interaction and long reading, fixed for information searching. Mobile for well designed, platform specific, paid content with a use to someone who is out of the house or office. What will people want? What will they want to read? What can one mobile medium - the newspaper - offer to another - the phone. There are so many interesting unanswered questions.

At the moment an unlimited data plan costs about $40 a month. The cellphone operator, with a lot of bandwidth to shift,  doesn't mind how much time you spend online or with whom. But as the price comes down after competition, at the same time as supply is stretched by more subscribers using the services, the cellphone companies are going to look for partners who will provide useful paid content in exchange for prominence and a share of revenue.  I doubt it will look  exactly like i-Mode in Japan, but that bit of ancient history does at least offer an insight into the likely psychology of the operators.

People pay for content on phones, something that a built in payment mechanism, the cellphone bill, has helped firmly establish. They'll even pay for a sort of email (SMS messages) and minor personalizations (ringtones). So it's reasonable to think that they might, just might, pay a small amount for well-thought out local content and information presented in an attractive and cell-specific way. It's only a maybe, but it's a whole lot better than the wishenomics of newspapers on the internet.

I doubt that even the cellphone operators will be able to control their consumers and funnel them to preferred suppliers in the long term. But there's an opportunity now to get a head start, build relationships with an audience and learn how to publish on phones that could prove the lifeline for newspapers whose fixed internet product is increasingly commoditised and who have (foolishly) stopped innovating in print.

I'm not saying this is going to be easy for newspapers. There will still be competition and a constant pressure to develop new improved products - not the newspaper business's strong suit in recent years. But the early premium on brand credibility and having content to manipulate and the skills to manipulate it, could give newspapers a great start.