WalletPop, part of AOL, just published a list of “Top 25 Things Vanishing From America.”

Some of the items are disappearing because of the Internet — like the yellow pages, classified ads, hand-written letters, personal checks, and dial-up access (my mother is a holdout) — or advancing on telco technology — like landlines and answering machines.

Those, plus VCRs, analog TV and incandescent light bulbs, all make sense. But the list isn’t comprehensive; there are more things that will disappear, such as the cassette tape (see Funeral for a Friend: The End of the Line for Cassette Tapes).

“News Magazines and TV News” came in at No. 3, noting: “While the TV evening newscasts haven’t gone anywhere over the last several decades, their audiences have. In 1984, in a story about the diminishing returns of the evening news, the New York Times reported that all three network evening-news programs combined had only 40.9 million viewers. Fast forward to 2008, and what they have today is half that.” Read the full posting here.

The Future of News is an important (but not the sole) topic for this blog, so check TheFutureofNews by Steve Boriss, who eaches the class “The Future of News” at Washington University in St. Louis.