What will become of print, Monterey County included, is anyone’s guess.

It’s difficult, as a member of the media, to write about the media, especially when you write about the problems one outlet may be having while you belong to another. You run the risk of coming off, at best, snotty. You run the risk of coming off like a jerk with a superiority complex. Maybe that’s especially true at an alt-weekly – there’s almost nothing we can’t find humor in.

But when it comes to the future of print, there’s nothing terribly funny in what’s happening to our local dailies. I have my superior-jerk moments, but gentle reader, this isn’t one of them. I work at a print publication that has an online presence, and I’m genuinely worried about what the future portends for how people consume information.

So superior jerk wasn’t my intent when I set out to write about the real issues facing The Salinas Californian, my adopted-hometown newspaper and the daily of record for the largest city in Monterey County, nor will it be my intent in next week’s issue when I take a look at the Monterey Herald. As detailed in this week’s cover story, the Gannett-owned newspaper (The Californian) is slashing its print schedule and focusing its efforts on reaching millennial readers – those born between roughly 1982-2004 – online. Some of what it intends, multiple sources have told me, includes adding a variety of up-and-coming apps like Snapchat and Periscope to its roster. For an individual user, there’s an immediacy to Snapchat: You take a picture or a fast video, write your caption and send it to someone on the other end; the viewer has seconds to view the message before it disappears. My millennial-age kids, who live roughly 20 feet away from each other, use it to communicate. There’s the same immediacy to Periscope, a Twitter app that turns a smartphone into a live broadcast device in which viewers can chime in with their comments for everyone to see. And of course there’s the immediacy of Twitter and Facebook. We receiving constant information.

But it seems in our quest for immediacy, we are losing our desire for depth. I can report anecdotes and information from any government meeting I attend on Twitter, and simultaneously update a Facebook audience. But the real work starts back at the office, where those tweets or posts are given context and turned into a full-fledged story.

I didn’t expect The Californian to open its doors and present me with its secret archives on how it intends to reach a younger audience, but I also didn’t anticipate they wouldn’t answer questions at all. I wanted to know how the paper intends to track those highly desirable younger readers. How does giving them the ability to Periscope a school meeting, for example, or a soccer match, inform them about how their school board is spending tax dollars? How does Snapchat get them involved in local politics, or help them understand what a censure is and why the Salinas City Council just censured one of its own members?

How will they learn about the immediate world around them, and maybe more importantly, how will they get involved in it, if they’re not given the information they need to make decisions?

News industry analyst Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, writes on his Newsonomics blog that he’s not sure if any reader will go directly to a news or media site, or even an app, by 2020, instead getting their news from gigantic platforms like Facebook. It’s a phenomenon described as “platishing,” a combination of platform and publishing, in which platforms rule all of our consumption. He wonders if the platforms will be all that will matter.

He also wonders if local news has become the taxi of the modern age, outpaced by services like Uber. As he describes it, Uber reduces the “friction” of human movement – “the frictions of anxiety, waiting, payment and safety.

“We digital humans love friction reduction,” he writes, “in everything from voicemail retrieval to bill pay to buying tickets online.”

And too many local newspaper companies are the taxi in this metaphor, Doctor writes. No local news sites are emerging as the Uber of media consumption.

If that’s true, what will be left for any of us to read?

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com, follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan or Snapchat her at maryrduan