One day many decades hence, when your grandchildren ask you, “Grandma, what was a newspaper?” you can direct them back to Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016. Because it may well go down as the day the American newspaper as we’ve known it moved out of intensive care and into the palliative wing on its way to the Great Beyond.

The Newspaper Association of America, the trade group that has represented the interests of major newspaper publishers in one form or another since 1887, is going to drop from its name the very word that defined it: “Newspaper.”

The group will be known as the News Media Alliance.

There is one obvious reason behind the change: The number of newspapers continues to drop, which has a way of depressing the association’s membership. (It has fallen to about 2,000 from roughly 2,700 in 2008, executives there say.)

But the bigger issue, the group’s chief executive, David Chavern, told me last week, was that the word “newspaper” has become meaningless in reference to many of the group’s members, including The Washington Post, The New York Times and Dow Jones. They may have newspapers, but they get large percentages of their readers online. Actually, you can’t even refer exclusively to “readers” these days when so many millions are “viewers” of online news video.