NewWest.net‘s founder, Jonathan Weber, makes a compelling argument about the longevity of print.
At first, this seems odd, coming from one of the people behind the Rocky Mountain community news site. But like he says, revenues from print still outweigh those from online, and this is one of the reasons why NewWest.net is launching a print magazine.
Yes, we can all agree that print is in a slow decline. But, as Weber explains, the key issue is not that newspapers are not profitable, but that they are much less profitable than they were before. Similarly, newspapers are still influential, just not as influential as in the past.
Media consumption is extraordinarily habit-driven, and old habits die hard. Maybe, once the people who grew up on Facebook are running all the local businesses in town, those businesses will lose their affection for the slick, well-produced color print advertising that still dominates many markets. But that time is quite a ways off still.
This all makes sense. The one unknown is the speed of this transition. The pace of change in technology is astounding and I suspect it will make its impact felt on society and the media much more rapidly than we can predict.
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