From Manhattan to Malibu, newspaper publishers are likely battling ulcers from their inability to handle declining ad revenue, plummeting readership, record costs and the Interwebs.

Maybe, just maybe, some enterprising engineers from Cambridge, Mass., can show the industry the way.
With their recent announcement of a new flexible, plastic electronic reader, researchers at Plastic Logic have many in the media wondering if the news won’t turn out to be this device’s killer app. Richard Archuleta, company chief executive, will officially name the device here in January 2009 at the next International Consumer Electronics Show.

The size of a piece of copier paper, according to the above New York Times piece, “it can be continually updated via a wireless link, and can store and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books and documents.”

The notion that high-tech iconoclasts, outsiders, will play a large role in helping newspapers evolve must be embarrassing to newsrooms across America. Home to brigades of smug know-it-alls, you’d think newspapers would have navigated today’s challenges much better, much earlier.

Not so. Newspapers here and across most of America haven’t yet figured out that only better local reporting and learning to live online will save them. Some CEOs and publishers are getting the message; many others still aren’t (and here).

These are troubling times even for some media giants whose print operations drag them down (and here) or whose news costs too much.

This demoralizing news for the news business seems to have accelerated after a recent, dire prediction from Goldman Sachs, which was largely in line with what they said in early January 2008. (Perhaps some of you are wondering if it’s no coincidence that this slide has come after decades of newspaper consolidation. Wonder what will come from the inevitable next wave, which could soon begin to crest just one state over? It’ll probably be a lot worse than even this (transcript here) or this.)

No matter how god-awful the content of tomorrow’s newspapers, the only business models that make any sense for them involve high-tech.

If enough newspapers embrace this kind of technology, it’ll be an overdue smart move from an industry of smart asses.

The tech-centric website Dvice.com released an interactive map earlier this week rating the states on the security of their voting technology. As you can see here, Nevada skews to the most hackable end of the spectrum.

Why? Because of the Silver State’s reliance on electronic voting machines. According to the site, one third of the state uses Sequoia’s AVC Advantage (it doesn’t specify which counties/cities make up that third), and the rest use a mix of brands. The Sequoias have a better track record than machines produced by Premier and ES&S, but can still evidently be hacked by members of the tenure-track mafia. They’ve also been implicated in a 2004 case in New Mexico involving 2,000 phantom votes.

On the bright side, the Sequoias are easy to use. Easy enough, in fact, to put Nevada at the good end of a related spectrum reflecting the likelihood that voters will make errors at the polls. Click here for that map.

To recap: Las Vegas voters will probably pull the right levers on Election Day. Or at least hit the right touchscreen interface. What we’re not so sure about is the fate of all those virtual ballots after the fact.

Maybe we don’t need to be so worried about Mickey Mouse or Tony Romo stealing the election. Perhaps democracy’s greatest enemies are the ones who pledge Lambda Lambda Lambda.

Wait, so the John McCain campaign is saying that vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is going to donate to charity all those spiffy outfits paid for by $150,000 in Republican National Committee donations?

But won’t she need those clothes to be vice president after the election?

Oh, yeah. Right. Never mind.