Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory spoke about the future of the newspaper business recently at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, and for the digital zealots it would be easy to point to the Globe's recent history as proof positive that print journalism is dead in the water.

After all, McGrory admitted in his talk that the Globe's circulation has plunged in recent years from 800,000 on Sunday and 500,000 daily to 350,000 Sunday and 220,000 daily.


The paper closed its eight foreign bureaus, as well as ones in New York, Chicago, Silicon Valley and New Orleans. The Washington office now has half as many staffers as it once did, and overall the newsroom has been slashed from 540 to 360. Just recently a hall-dozen local reporters were laid off.

Meanwhile, classified ad revenue continues to dwindle, McGrory said, adding: "The business model is definitely broken."

But one thing in particular stood out to me, and that was when McGrory mentioned that “more than three-quarters of our revenue still comes from print.”

And there's the rub, so to speak, for those who think journalism's future will be all-digital, all the time. Let me state this unequivocally: Digital advertising simply doesn't pay enough to sustain a news organization of any significant size. That's not a theory, it's a fact.

And the fact that most of the Globe's revenue comes from print advertising isn't the exception to the rule, it's the rule. Even in an age when ad sales are falling, most papers still get the vast majority of their revenue from printed display ads.

That's also a fact.

So when I hear the digital zealots preaching the gospel of shutting down the printing presses, my response is, who's going to pay the bills? How are you going to pay the reporters who write the stories and the editors who edit them? Because even if you eliminate the costs associated with printing, the numbers just don't add up.

The equation is simple: The money saved by going all-digital doesn't equal the money lost in ad revenue.

The problem is, no one's come up with a reliable business model for online-only news. No one. Website paywalls appear to be effective, but they seem to work best in conjunction with a print subscriber base. (In any case, the digital media know-it-alls have never liked paywalls and used to claim, before evidence showed otherwise, they they'd never work.)

And yet these same pundits continue to hammer away at the notion that print is a relic of the past that's best jettisoned. Lately they've been preaching this colossally wrongheaded message to college newspapers.

But as far as I can tell, most of these digital pundits have never run so much as a lemonade stand, much less a newspaper, so I don't put much stock in their advice to begin with. (They do seem to do a lot of blogging, but how many blogs are actual businesses?)

McGrory, on the other hand, is running a newspaper, and his ideas about the future of the news business, not surprisingly, seem much more sound. He warned against running “from one end of spectrum to other” between digital and print. "We need a balance,” he said.

Perhaps the wisest thing McGrory said was when he admitted he has “absolutely no idea" what the future holds for newspapers. "Anyone who tells you they know is either lying to themselves or lying to you,” he said.

Like, perhaps, the digital zealots?

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