If you’re reading this, you’re involved in a grand experiment, and you probably don’t even know it.

The experiment has to do with what you know.

That’s one of the most basic parts of life.

Friends commonly greet each other by saying, “What’s new?”

It was the first thing the nation’s founders thought of when they started adding amendments to the Constitution.

And now one of the latest versions of that question is playing itself out here, in Kirkland.

I’ve thought about that a lot lately, largely because of this job, filling in for a reporter who’s on medical leave at the Kirkland Reporter.

It’s been fun, and interesting, much different from the place where I spent most of my life, as a reporter at the Seattle Times, and also very thought-provoking.

A major difference is the size of the papers, of course. The Times had hundreds of people in its news department and was printed every day. The Kirkland Reporter has fewer people and is printed once a week.

But the differences go far beyond such comparisons.

They partly involve history.

For decades, in the information business, people in places like Kirkland learned what they needed to know about their communities from a weekly paper; here, it was the East Side Journal. There usually would be a metropolitan daily not far away — and here there were three for awhile, the Times, the Post-Intelligencer and the King County Journal.

But as always happens, things change.

For many years, it was part of my life to read those three dailies every morning. The Times even had an extensive array of “zoned editions,” employing dozens of reporters, in effect publishing different newspapers for the north, east and south parts of the Seattle area, as well as an edition for Seattle itself.

That didn’t last. Both the Journal and the PI stopped publishing, although vestiges of their existence remain.

The Kirkland Reporter can trace its heritage to the East Side and King County journals and PI remains as an electronic newspaper, available onli ne but skipping all the messiness of trying to deliver a piece of paper to your doorstep for less than the price of a slice of pizza. The Times ended its zoned editions in 2008.

The Internet was a big part of the changes, of course. People sell their cars for free on Craigslist, decimating newspaper classified advertising. Google means everyone can carry the equivalent of an encyclopedia, or the entire Kirkland Library, in their pocket, diluting the need to read those three newspapers every day.

Interestingly, at least to me, however, is how neither Craigslist nor Google have any reporters. Look up something on Google and what you’ll find is a product generated by people who work somewhere else — often people like me and other reporters.

All of this serves as something of a prelude for understanding where we are now— which seems very unclear.

A physical glimpse of the info business here can be seen all over town, at places like the Kirkland Post Office, where a line-up of newspaper boxes offers a choice of publications.

But that ignores today’s invisible news sources, many of which didn’t exist just five years or so ago.

As far as I can calculate, Kirklanders have a choice of four metro TV stations, one daily newspaper, at least four blogs, and one weekly paper — this one, which is the only local publication delivering a physical product, as well as also publishing online — as sources of information about their community.

Oh yeah, the city even has its own Internet site, so what is that — 11 places to look for Kirkland news?

Beyond that, of course, there’s the central question of what kind of information should be provided.

The applicable word now is “hyperlocal,” which also didn’t exist a decade ago, but has come to be seen as the root of emerging news coverage.

The theory is that you can get news about something like a hurricane in Vermont from dozens of places but there’s only one place —or maybe two? Or three? — where you can learn about street paving on Central Way.

Of course, that goes back to the question of what kind of information should be provided.

Looking at the city’s demographics — available on Google, of course — shows Kirkland has some 81,000 residents now, since an annexation last summer, and the most common income category is of people making from $50,000-$75,000 a year.

What kind of information do such people want? Street pavings? Housing trends? Crime? Schools?

If the answer is everything, that raises still another question of how to provide it, and the truth is that news operations or blogs with one or two people can’t cover all the news occurring in cities of 80,000 people.

But wait! What about a place like Ellensburg, home of the state’s smallest daily newspaper, where a city with just 17,000 people supports a six-day-a-week newspaper; why can’t Kirkland, nearly five times as big, do the same thing?

An obvious answer is that Ellensburg isn’t a commuter city; people live, work and play there, not routinely driving out of town to work or shop.

Of course, that “live, work and play” concept is precisely what Kirkland is seeking; the slogan is emblazoned right on apartments at Sixth and Central.

So, as I think about what might appear in next week’s paper, it’s all these kinds of thoughts that run through my mind.

I certainly don’t know the answers to most of my questions, and lately I’ve come to think how probably what’s ahead is that soon we’ll all have barcode transmitters embedded in our ears, and the information I’m so laboriously typing now will just be injected into our brains.

That hasn’t happened yet, fortunately, and until it does, there’s just one place where you can rest your cereal bowl on top of your Kirkland information while you read it, and that’s right here.

And if you’ve read this far, all the way to this last paragraph, at least maybe you’re thinking of the implications of being able to do that, and that was my intention. Thank you.