It isn’t a loud or noisy war. You have to look carefully. And you probably won’t read about it in the local dailies. But the armies are out there, shifting positions, firing salvos, spying and plotting. Local newspapers are in a desperate struggle to win – and you are the prize.

Portsmouth readers especially can smell the gunfire. The Portsmouth Herald has a new more youthful design. It now looks like a web site, with bold colorful banners, splashy fonts, a boxy layout and more pictures. The Sunday Herald has "rebranded" itself as SeacoastSunday, with no space between the words.

The Internet look makes sense. Web sites are killing newspapers all across the country. Younger readers are going both wireless and treeless, gathering their news from satellite radio, cable TV, podcasts, cellphones and an expanding array of specialty web sites.

Fosters Daily Democrat, the Herald’s primary competition, announced this week that it will make an "historic change" from afternoon to morning publication on November 26. If morning is really "the most opportune time of the day," as the announcement reads, one has to wonder, why it took Fosters 135 years to figure that out. Either way, it means the Herald will now get a real run for its money, competing head-to-head with one of the last independently owned papers, and a paper well known for its reporting skill. Whatever shakes out, the consumer wins.

Portsmouth residents who get neither paper daily, still get both papers weekly. Fosters prints a weekly community newspaper called The Portsmouth Times that arrives free in local mailboxes every Thursday. The Herald bulk mails its own Friday weekly recently renamed It’s Portsmouth. Both are free and thin, filled mostly with classifieds and stuffed with direct mail flyers, but both offer a nice recycled summary of mostly low-stress news and features. Both papers already distribute their Thursday entertainment supplements – Showcase and Spotlight – that locals can pick up free.

The battle of the free weeklies got even hotter last week with the arrival, on Saturdays, of the new community freebie, the Portsmouth Atlantic News. This color tabloid avoids hard news almost entirely in favor of people-oriented articles, advertorials, reader-generated content and press releases. The content is all soft-serve, but don’t underestimate the power of fluff, especially in the 21^st century when readers can get the meaty stuff uploaded to their desktop from CNN or MSNBC 24/7. Community newspapers tend to have few if any staff writers, but an aggressive army of ad salespeople who can cut the advertisers out from under their daily competitors. Portsmouth Atlantic News gets mailed weekly to over 11,000 single family homes in Portsmouth, New Castle and Newington. If people don’t immediately toss it into the recycling bin, if they actually sit and read it on Saturdays, the battleground could shift in what is already a very fragile terrain.

Just as more and more Americans are turning in their traditional telephones for cell and Internet phones, we are reading fewer newspapers. Both local dailies publish high quality web sites that now provide almost all the news found in the paper versions. The Seacoast has The Wire, a high quality feature newspaper distributed weekly, plus the biweekly NH Gazette with its unique brand of activist politics and local commentary. Portsmouth-based web sites like SeacoastNH.com and PortsmouthNH.com plug along with little overhead, growing readership, and high "searchability" on Google. More and more community bloggers fill in the blanks. WSCA FM, Portsmouth’s low-power radio station, has truly become the voice of the community within its tightly focused range. Portsmouth Magazine, now bimonthly, seems to have finally found its voice, adding a new layer to the media map. Every dollar that goes into these alternative publications is a dollar not spent on a local newspaper or radio station.

The battle of the newspapers has rumbled on here for centuries, but every now and then, there are critical moments. This feels like one of them. How many free newspapers and free web sites will it take for readers to decide they simply don’t need to buy their beloved daily? Or will today’s newspaper morph into something we have yet to imagine? Either way, the armies are marching vigorously and we can see the whole battlefield clearly from here.

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