As noted by Weber, print is far from dead but there has been much talk about its decline, “in the U.S. especially, the newspaper business appears to be in a free-fall, with many big papers reporting year-over-year revenue and circulation declines of ten per cent or more.”

However, the printed press still has strength up its sleeve. In the US, the print paper is still often the best medium for local advertising.

NewWest.net will actually be launching a print magazine soon, and even though Weber sees the company as “online first,” “we still expect the print magazine to generate substantially more ad revenues in its first year than our three-year-old online publication,” he said.

And this is still the case almost everywhere. Although nobody can deny the decline of newspapers’ circulation and print ad revenues, the real problem resides in the extraordinary profit margins publishers have come to expect from newspapers.

“The issue for most newspapers today is not that they are not profitable, but that they are much less profitable than they were before,” said Weber.

Same goes for papers’ influence, which might be lesser than it was half a century ago, but they still strongly shape public opinion.

So as Weber concludes, there might be a day when the Facebook and digital generation loses affection for the printed word, but that time is still a long way off.

Source: Times