Our View: Newsprint's death is exagerated

We’re all still a little shell-shocked from the fallout of the Great Recession.

As for newspapers, in 2007 when our world economy was at its peak, so was newspaper pulp production.

But by mid-2008 people had stopped spending money and you probably noticed a dearth of 18-wheelers on the highways.

But despite the chorus of “print is dead” (led by our own industry) some strange facts have come to light.

Pulp sales in the U.S. in 2014 finally surpassed that high water mark of 2007 and 2015 is expected to surpass that.

Spending on direct mail also is growing once again.

So if print is dead, why then is there more of it being sold and/or shipped today than ever before?

There is a simple answer, but it is an over-simplification.

Marketers, who pay to have print delivered to you, saw the internet as a cheap and more effective route to their customers.

They were half right. It is cheap.

But the internet, with all its promise, has still failed to deliver a workable business model for our industry and the carnage of trying to make it work has yet to stop.

And when we say “carnage” we mean the elimination of jobs. Big newspapers have ravaged their newsrooms, in many cases by firing half of their news staff.

But print is still the most effective medium to deliver a message and none more so than paid circulation media.

To paraphrase a social media giant, we had 10,240 likes last week (paid readership) which means this newspaper will have close to a quarter million page views.

Which is why this print media survives. Every week we deliver to you reliable information on the cheap.

This paper costs more than four bucks to get to you so we make up the difference by selling advertising we think will benefit you.

Our advertisers have faith or know from experience that if they put their message in front of people who are paying for the message, they’ll get more customers.

If you’re a global company with vast resources, you can probably compete pretty well using digital.

But if you’re a small town shop using the internet, you are competing globally and that’s a hard row to hoe.

As a culture we should also recognize that the more we make our purchases on the internet, the less chance our retail stores and local businesses will be able to survive.