Print critics have been predicting the burial of print newspapers for many years now; in fact, the chairman of Tribune Company, Sam Zell, said this week that home delivery of newspapers will soon become a thing of the past, with papers being replaced by "PDFs."
One could be forgiven for questioning whether he knows what a PDF is, but it is true that the print news business has undergone traumatic downsizings, bankruptcies, layoffs, rising prices, audience losses, and hemorrhaging advertising revenue, and that it's been a tough haul for many if not most newspaper companies. They might be showing some success at reinventing themselves; a number of these large papers, including San Francisco's own Chronicle, are surprising people by reporting that they're back in the black, even as the larger economy continues to struggle. Still, it's probably a safe bet that papers will continue innovating and experimenting, until they come up with a stable new business model.
