The Bay Citizen reached another milestone in our very young life this morning with the publication of our first stories in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times. These pages appear as a supplement to the national edition on Friday and Sunday, and The Bay Citizen will produce the content, which will also appear on our website.

We are an online news organization, dedicated to innovation and exploring journalism’s future, but opening the nation’s leading newspaper and seeing articles that we completed only yesterday at our offices at 126 Post was nonetheless a slightly magical feeling.

In many ways, the Web is the best forum for delivering news and information today. Since our launch May 26, we have produced stories on topics ranging from the shockingly low property taxes paid by some residents of San Francisco’s Gold Coast thanks to Prop 13 to the problem of poop-related bacteria at Baker Beach. These articles have been rendered in text, photos, audio, video and interactive graphics.

But there is still something uniquely satisfying about picking up the newspaper and holding it in your hands. On the Internet, stories spray into an infinite universe, rarely reaching the printed page. In the newspaper, they hang around and become part of your life. For reasons that defy easy explanation, there is still more heft to stories that appear in The New York Times, as opposed to those that appear on the newspaper’s website.

In the end, this may be a matter of age and perspective. I am 48, and as I pondered the publication of our stories in the newspaper of record, I began to think back at the technological changes that have occurred during my 25 years as a reporter.

I began my career as a sportswriter, and some of my earliest memories are of travelling through the Midwest with a manual typewriter and something called a Telecopier – a fax-like machine that came in a black carrying case about the size of a banjo. Each typewritten page took about 5 minutes to transmit; I recall one writer who lost his entire story when someone spilled a beer on it.

After that I used a Teleram, a bulky digital typewriter with a tiny screen that was known for making 750-word articles disappear on deadline. I gave it up after a part fell out and disappeared beneath the bleachers while I was typing during the 1985 Super Bowl at Stanford Stadium.

After that I used one generation of laptop after another, until, in 2005, I found myself transmitting stories from the middle of a helipad in the Iraqi desert with a satellite unit connected to my Dell.

Magically, no matter how the stories were transmitted, they would show up on someone’s lawn early the next morning. There’s something intimate and communal about that process – and so very inefficient.

I still love newspapers, even as each of the four where I once worked continue their inexorable decline. But I doubt that my 11-year-old son will feel the same.

Through our relationship with The New York Times, The Bay Citizen is straddling both of these worlds – the one in which words never touch the ground, and the one in which they linger, sometimes longer than we’d like.

Look for us again Sunday – on your doorstep, and in the ether.