Changing the printer

by Jason Preston on June 13, 2008

Another succulent item from Romenesko today (incidentally, if you open Firefox and type “romenesko” into the browser bar—and nothing else—it loads the right page): The Bing Blog from Fortune calls out the newspaper-haters:

So let’s take a breath and just agree: newspapers aren’t any deader right now than any other coughing, wheezing business in this lousy environment. Lehman (LEH) is losing nearly $3 billion dollars this quarter. Nobody talks about investment banking being dead. Broadcast television just racked up more than $9.2 billion in its upfront sales season, in spite of analysts’ predictions that this year would be its last. And not one social network is really making a go of it yet.

For now he’s right. The premiums that newspapers get from selling ads in the physical format still outweigh the costs of printing and delivering it.

But that won’t last forever. I alluded to my solution in my last post, I think it will be some eventual form of electronic paper that can eliminate all those pesky costs from the print + delivery equation.

It’s an amusing and probably good-for-your-perspective read. There’s a lot of “all old media is dead!” ringing around the industry right now, but I think it’s both a bit premature and a bit shortsighted.

Over the years, newspapers have changed what kind of printing press they use. That’s just happening more publicly this time.

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