Changing the printer

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.