As Nelson on The Simpsons once pointed out: “Ha ha. Your medium is dying.”

But as news gathering shifts to a more affordable, more equitable and more easily distributed medium, a part of me worries people don’t realize the value of newspapers – that is, the value of physical newspapers that have already been printed.

I recognize that a huge part of master data management is about knowing what not to keep. I also recognize the “Big Brother” fears that come with the Internet’s relentless cataloging of information.

But, anecdotally, this country is losing its history. Like I said, I’ve worked in newspapers. I can personally assure you that community papers – arguably the most important newspapers, historically speaking – are not properly cataloging and safeguarding their physical archives.

Once something is gone – it’s gone. Which says a lot about being sure your IT department has a comprehensive and clear data storage scheme.

So thank-freaking-God for Google on this one. In its quest to index all of the world’s information, the decade-old behemoth has started to scan and catalog newspaper archives.

Admittedly, newspapers, especially those written by 21-year-olds in small Vermont towns with little editor oversight (here’s looking at me) are often wrong or not completely informed. And much of the information becomes seemingly irrelevant by the next morning.

But you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, and you often don’t know what you need until you need it.

Imagine, for a moment, that your governor or potential vice president came up in a small town that largely escaped blog watchers and the city pages of the major metro papers. Wouldn’t it be great to have universal, uninterrupted access to the pages of the local weekly, allowing anyone in the world to dig into this person’s public history?

And, as The New York Times article points out, obituaries, birth announcements, wedding announcements and the like are invaluable when tracking family lineage – a tedious task under any circumstances.

Certainly, piecemeal cataloging is occurring. An otherwise dismissible trend story I once wrote about vandalism to city property has been sourced on the Wikipedia entry for “street sign theft,” for example.

But that’s just one story. I would be thrilled if I could use Google to access images of everything I’ve ever written. (Not everyone would be so excited — I covered crime and criminal courts and printed the names of alleged criminal offenders daily.)

Again, I know for a fact that some small newspapers in this country are one building fire away from losing their entire archive. Sure, most small papers have an extra set of microfilm stored away in a second location. Still … things go neglected and missing. That would be a travesty.

Google stands to make money here, of course, but our nation will benefit by having the folks in Mountain View contract to preserve our history free of charge.

The next number is almost unbelievable: A 468% increase in “threats” (not really defined in the story) from 2006 to 2007.

Apparently, sellers need to keep a good rep. A Symantec vice president says that people selling stolen data need to be honest about how much cash accounts contain, otherwise they’ll lose credibility.

“It’s a sort of honor among thieves, and it’s very strictly enforced,” the VP says. This appears to be the digital equivalent of a drug dealer cutting a bag of cocaine with baking powder.

Here’s my favorite part: Apparently the identity of a European Union citizen goes for almost twice as much as an American citizen. I’ll let you make the self-deprecating joke here.

All in all, a good read. I found this on a strange, broad sheet of paper filled with lines of black type. The header tells me that this curiosity comes from the past – April 8 of this year, to be precise. The upper left-hand corner is coded “B6” and suggests the theme of this page is “Business.”

About 80 percent of this sheet is dedicated to advertisements. But a small hole of information still exists at the top. This “paper of record” is good stuff. I just can’t help but feel there is a better, cheaper way to distribute it.