You may or may not have noticed, but the Post-Gazette has launched a newscast in video form on our Web site. Now if KDKA will print out its stories and throw them in your flower beds, we'll have complete media convergence.

The mantra in the newspaper business right now is that we're not in the newspaper business, we're in the news business, and by golly if you readers out there aren't going to buy the dead-tree editions and would rather read free online, you're going to be forced to look at us.

Newspaper circulation in the United States has been declining for years, and if you ask people why, they say they simply don't have time to sit down every day with a huge pile of papers and read. Unless the name of the huge pile of papers is "The DaVinci Code."

We've known for a long time that people like to get their news from TV, which conveniently reduces complicated, nuanced and evolving stories to 30-second sound bites with lots of video and an evocative musical stinger designed to suggest how frightened or angry you need to be. This is multimedia, but for the longest time, we couldn't get our presses to spit out anything more than printed words and still pictures. We tried illustrations, locator maps and even charticles, but we couldn't capture sound or motion.

Well, we can now. We knocked out some walls between some disused offices and built a little studio. (We had to clear out a lot of old clutter, including a semi-fossilized local news editor who had been hiding in there since 1992 and thought the paper was still on strike.)

We filled a control suite with lots of mysterious blinking electronic equipment and painted the studio walls green. We got cameras and fancy microphones and a TelePrompTer.

And then we remembered -- wait a minute, we're newspaper people. Who's going to run all this techie machinery? Who's going to have the charticles to be on camera?

Um, we are. This is for you, you folks who claim you have no time to read whole news stories. A weekdaily 5-minute roundup of what's happening and what we're working on, written and read to you by PG staffers standing between lights that are emitting slightly less heat than an active volcano.

I am one-third of our current anchor roster -- I share those duties with my colleagues Peter King and Ginny Kopas Joe -- and I'll tell you, PG NewsNOW has been a real learning experience. It's a little like news, it's a little like community theater, and it's a little like a firing squad.

For the first time in over a decade of working at newspapers, I have to really, really care what I look like when I go to work. No more skidding out of the shower, grabbing something out of the closet and letting my hair dry on the trolley. Now it takes minutes and minutes of careful grooming to achieve that effect.

Hey: This is not "The CBS Evening News." We do our own hair and makeup, because we're that honest. Besides, have you ever tried to powder a shiny city editor? It's a good way to lose a finger.

And I'll tell you something about TV news: Reading into a camera is much harder than it looks. We're not even doing it live -- if we call the Steelers' mascot "Steamy McBeans," we can swear vigorously, take a deep breath, start over, and, through the magic of digital editing, we will seamlessly call him "Henry Clay Frick."

When you leave the safety of your desk and start doing a Webcast, you worry about things you never used to worry about. For example, hair. I have a lot of it, and it has a mind of its own. Not only do I need to arrange it in a way that looks more or less intentional, but I have to act as a hair wrangler in the studio to keep it from misbehaving. One day, early on, I had to come in and shoot my whole segment over because, about 30 seconds in, a rogue lock of hair snaked down and swallowed my lapel microphone, turning me into Charlie Brown's teacher.

Also, I haven't had to work so hard to spackle over an I-absolutely-can't-have-a-pimple-today blemish since prom night. I live in terror of the day we go hi-def.

I also dread summer, because light colors show wrinkles, and it's sobering to think that, after all these years, I'm going to have to find my iron.

Still, even standing under scorching lights wondering if my hair is making bunny ears behind my head is better than sitting at my desk deleting spam or going to another meeting about the future of the news biz.

NewsNOW is fast. It's fun. And it's worth at least twice what you pay for it.