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“Print is dead.”
I heard that line in a movie I was watching last night, and it resonated more than ever.
That’s because the movie was “Ghostbusters,” released in 1984, just a few years after I had embarked on my career as a journalist.
The line is delivered by Harold Ramis’s character, Egon Spengler, as he emerges 
from underneath the desk of the Ghostbuster receptionist where he has been installing a computer connection.
It was a funny, ironic and forward-looking joke when it was written 32-some years ago. That every digital futurist since then has repeated some version of it is, well, little more than redundant. Its origins probably lie with Marshall McLuhan, whose theories in the 1960s, although provocative, were not particularly useful.
Nevertheless, there’s no denying the long decline of print circulation among newspapers. There’s also no denying that print is not, in fact, dead. Nor do I believe it will ever disappear, for many good reasons.
Some of those are outlined in this recent Editor & Publisher piece by Nu Yang, echoed by a column in The Guardian by Stephen Curry (not the basketball player) and somewhat embellished by my own piece on Upworthy last week.
The thread that links these observations is the value of quality over quantity — the value of the reader’s time, the credibility of the author and publication, and the sheer volume of media being thrust at people.
It’s what Rob Orchard calls the “white noise” of the internet. National Public Radio’s recent promotions for its upgraded news coverage promise to help listeners comprehend the firehose of information aimed at their heads.
For newspapers, this strength — news judgment, context, background, editing, analysis — sometimes has been overlooked because it takes time, along with experience and expertise. As I said just this morning to a reporter at a Nevada Supreme Court hearing, “Readers pay you 50 cents to sit through this so they don’t have to.”
Scarcity helps create value, and readers will place a premium on quality information. It takes an awful lot of time to sort through the noise of the internet. It takes real effort to distinguish the clutter from the clarity.
Will readers pay somebody they trust to guide them? I think so.
