Print Is Not Dead, Darwin Says So

The market can only take so much and there will always be specific niches to fill. That being said, let's also remember that geeks have been declaring the death of print since at least 1984.

But really, we might call it natural selection for the media industry. More on that later.

If you were just a baby when the movie "Ghostbusters" came out, you'd be about 23 today and most likely immersed in a digital reality. And there's a chance, a small one, you remember life before the computer mouse.

I wasn't much older than you, just seven, and the joke made in that movie was lost on me then. It's a short joke, very quick and subtle and intended for a tiny audience:

Janine Melnitz: You're very handy, I can tell. I bet you like to read a lot, too.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Print is dead.

Twenty-three years and countless new print publications ago.

I've made no secret about
He might also note the saturation that is currently seeping through the seams of the Internet – everybody's a reporter these days.

But one thing online reporters and publications will have trouble taking from the mainstream print media (believe me, I know – who do you think Larry Page and Sergey Brin are more willing to grant interviews to?) is the mainstream print media's (i.e., the papers of record) authority in the journalism world.

When anybody can be a reporter, nobody takes reporters seriously, which leaves the sensible portion of the population to look towards the established truth-revealers. (This is a different topic, of course, than the value of printed books, which, as long as there are farts as old as I am, always will be preferred over a lighted, electricity-powered screen that's hard on the eyes and less reliable and metamorphic – you know, birdcage liners and such.)

So what I'm trying to say in the above paragraph, in my long-winded way, is that newspapers carry a certain gravitas beyond even broadcast anchors that people see as credible and more valuable than just about any online source. (Just watch your professor's face, young-uns, when you choose a Wikipedia or even Huffington Post source over the Washington Post.)

"What prospects then for the handful of high-quality producers of journalism who survive to ring in this future? Far greater pricing power. More money," says strategic analyst Seamus McCauley on his