Newspapers won’t die

Al Neuharth, the former chairman of Gannett, tells Forbes that he does not think newspapers will die for a long long time. I’ll note he used the phrase ‘around the world.’ Newspapers outside of the U.S. and western Europe are growing in circulation right now. But I don’t think he used it as a hedge — I think he figures that newspapers have survived media shifts before, and this one will be no different. Though in other media shifts, they weren’t giving their content away on TV or Radio, and their advertisers weren’t completely bewitched, or befuddled, by the new form of advertising.

It’s timely for me to see this, because I was talking to Craig Mathias yesterday, and he told me he thinks all print is doomed. I have yet to have someone tell me to ‘go read this Web site’ for any idea that was important to them – people want me to read books. So I doubt print is doomed. But then, most of the people that I know aren’t under 25, except my children, and at the moment they’re happy with the newspaper because it includes comics.