I Heart Print

Print is dead, says former NBC “Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw.

“I was at The Washington Post earlier today,” Brokaw said, according to a report by the Business & Media Institute. “And in the lobby they’ve got a wonderful graphic describing how the printing press works and where it is … 75,000 copies an hour it can turn out. Its last run is at 2:15 in the morning and [has] an automatic paper roll that comes when they run out of paper and the ink is recharge and I looked at all that and I thought – ‘Ten years from now, will it be here?’ I don’t know. Probably … if you would do a hardcore analysis – probably not. It’ll be probably digital 10 years from now.”

My close friend Daniel M. Harrison will concur. Often, we would have lengthy and heated arguments about this topic.

Harrison: When was the last time you saw an 18-year-old pick up a newspaper?
Me: I don’t know any 18-year-olds.

For the purpose of this blog, though, I have taken the time to formulate a more eloquent and cogent argument. At the risk of sounding so-last-century and a hopeless romantic, (whatever, bring it on), I begin my day by reading the Wall Street Journal and sometimes, the Economist and Fortune. What do you do?

You will, naturally, ask: why does the survival of newspapers matter? In an era when the Web subverts the newspaper’s role as a monopoly over information, what remains distinctive about newspapers? Still, there are reasons why I think print will persist.

The economics of the business require newspapers to continue in the print form. Some people (me, included) still want to pick up a daily paper rather than scroll through chunks of text on a screen. In addition, the average monetary value of a visitor to a newspaper’s Web site is only 20 to 30 percent of a newspaper’s print reader because of fierce competition among online sites. So even if a newspaper shut down its print operation, published only on the Internet, and somehow managed to keep its entire circulation, the revenue loss would exceed the cost savings.

Also, there’s the problem of ad retention on the Web. How many of us remember an ad we see online, as opposed to an ad we see in the papers?

Thirdly, the print form encourages “incidental learning.” You pick up the paper for the latest entertainment gossip and you find yourself reading about subprime mess. Don’t newspapers do that better?

And, computers break down, but paper will endure.

As my friend Ana Patricia Ferrey points out in a recent blog post on Amazon’s electronic book, “Kindle,”: “The death of books is nowhere in the foreseeable future,” and “books won’t disappear because the majority of the world can’t afford to have them dissapear.”

I can't imagine a world without a print newspaper, anymore than I can imagine a world without books. The Web is not going to kill off print media, any more than television killed off radio. But a caveat: newspapers have to stay alive as hybrids. In fact, they have to use the Web to enrich traditional journalistic forms. My question is: why can’t you have both?