Our View: Print media still doing well

The Internet is not the latest, “greatest” thing to come along and threaten to upend the newspaper industry.

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean was covered by Fox Movietone News. It sparked rumors and fears of the end of the newspaper industry.

The advent of radio news and later, television broadcasts, led to the more rumors that newspapers were done as an industry.

But ink and pulp have persevered.

Not every newspaper from 100 years ago is still around, but many of the ones that are left are stalwarts of what good journalism should be.

Journalism should be about researching deeply, presenting information accurately, and holding our elected officials accountable. It should not focus on getting views or clicks or traffic to a website.

The Internet is an awesome and powerful tool, but online journalism is not working as a business model. And newspapers present more than simple rumor and arguments, as have become commonplace on the Internet.

A recent study of 51 major newspapers showed their average online readership to be about a third of their print readership.

Though circulation of print newspapers may be dropping, print still reaches more than twice as many readers as its digital counterpart.

Readers of digital content are forced to be more weary of online articles that those appearing in print. One of Facebook’s biggest problems continues to be the proliferation of “fake” news stories getting promotion through its news generation algorithm -- a set of rules and calculations dictating what gets presented.

For more than a year, and after decades of growth, that number has remained steady, causing the industry experts to wonder if their digital audience has peaked.

Print revenues still account for 82 percent of total newspaper revenue.

Online readers flock to aggregator or non-newspaper sites instead of spending time with giants such as the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.

But 66 percent of online users prefer the print version of their newspaper.

From a business standpoint, it was a mistake for newspapers to run headlong towards the web — a mistake that cost the industry millions of dollars and worse, inferior journalism.

The tangible, accountable journalism that readers expect from their news sources still comes from print.

This paper has been a fixture in Green River for more than a century.

And we plan to stick around for another century.