USA Today, Neanderthal Metaliteracy?

So, many of us have seen the video now of the toddler who rapidly loses interest in magazines, having become completely accustomed to the i Pad in her life.   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049117/readLater.html   Here we see the rookies, who will become the veteran meta literacy specialists, the mavericks, frontiersmen, and front-runners.   I think back on what it meant to find the USA Today issues filled with charts, graphs, photos and graphics, and an ever-diminishing content of words. What happened to that newspaper?  The intention was news that didn't cause too much anxiety, made the world easier to take, and digestion possible for even the dyspeptic among us. It was a capital sponge, soaking up great infusions of cash for over a decade before turning a profit, sixteen years after the first issue.   We were, as a reading people, slow to turn away from all the news that's fit to print.
No doubt about the fact that inter-disciplinary presentation of information allows for greater understanding, crosses all sorts of disability boundaries, and considers learning styles, a long abandoned approach to dismal public education statistics, in favor of the all children positioned  behind corporate-test-production.   Too, I think we are witnessing rapid adaptation of our sense organs towards multi-tasking at a level that would confuse a palm-pilot.  Yet, I cannot help but wonder what becomes of that word, all of those words, that left it up to the reader to see the color, hear the shouts, picture the lightening, feel the grief.