Not so long ago a well-regarded business magazine reported that newspapers (what some bloggers now mockingly refer to as ‘fibre media’) are on their deathbed. Various stories in newspapers seem to support this rather gloomy view too. But hold the front page. Like most predictions I think this is way off the mark. Some newspapers that didn’t look after themselves are ill but they aren’t dead yet. Why do I think this? Four reasons.

Reason #1: The news and information explosion.

There is no doubt that the world is changing. We now live in an interconnected world where people snack on news and information and where the common language is visual. Indeed, it might not be too long before we enter a post-literate society, a world where people can read but mostly choose not to. This is a world of graphic novels, online video and data visualisation.

Consider, for example, the death of long copy advertisements, the appearance of short versions of classic novels, one minute news summaries from the BBC, Google Fast Flip and, my own particular favourite, executive summary versions of bedtime stories for time starved toddlers. Seriously.

Time is in short supply. Life is accelerating and many people no longer have time for breakfast at home, let alone a leisurely breakfast with a newspaper. Breakfast is increasingly eaten on the run and likewise lunch is often a quick sandwich in the office. Not surprising that first radio and then television have become faster and more convenient ways to consume information, especially breaking news.

And, of course, there’s the internet. The internet, we are told, is responsible for the steep decline in classified job ads, property ads and car ads in newspapers. These “rivers of gold” are running dry to the point where some newspapers, such as the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor, have moved entirely online in a rather desperate attempt to cut costs and go where the eye balls are.

The writing certainly seems to be on the wall. According to Deloitte, in the UK insolvencies in print and publishing industries were up 72% in QTR1 of 2009 and it’s much the same elsewhere. As a result media analysts have downgraded the newspaper sector and over-caffeinated young journalists have written their own obituaries. In the beginning was the word and the word was good. But in the end we will have sound bites and short video clips.

Why is the news so bad for newspapers? A key culprit is digitalisation. The internet, together with affordable access devices, such as computers and mobile phones, have made it easy to access news content from around the world, most of which is free. Why newspaper companies ever decided to give a product that costs money to create away for nothing is beyond me but they are paying the price for it now.

Moreover, these computers, mobile phones and digital cameras also mean that it is very easy for everyone to create their own news content and distribute it at the click of a mouse to anyone that’s interested. And therein lies a problem.

Anyone with access to a computer (or just a phone) can now create their own blog, magazine, newspaper or book. So people with too much time and computing power on their hands (teens for instance) are providing far too much information about their lives for the rest of the world to see. This means that the internet is becoming an echo chamber in which ideas are endlessly repeated and recycled.

Don’t get me wrong. Obviously there are some gems amongst the rubble. Some material can be fascinating too. Some can even be useful or commercially valuable. But I believe that most of it is digital drivel that’s generally only read by an audience of one – the person writing it.*

To be fair, teens have always been fascinated by themselves. In this context digital news and gossip is nothing new. It’s just pop culture and schoolyard gossip taken to a whole new level of connectivity and interactivity. These outpourings also represent an antidote to the claustrophobia of adolescence so we shouldn’t be too nasty. But this shouldn’t mean that teens should shape the future of media for the rest of us.

And they won’t. Because of the explosion of content people are starting to grow tired of having to wade through endless dross to find the nuggets that they are interested in. Information that’s written by people they feel they can trust. Hence, the rise of terms like “news curation” and “information trust” in the last few months.

Some of this sifting will, of course, be done by technology. Google alerts, RSS feeds, Twitter and so on. But I suspect that most of the filtering will eventually (once again) be done by brands and by people. It is interesting to speculate that algorithms will eventually replace newspaper editors but personally I think this is very unlikely.

A far more likely scenario is that people suffering from information overload will put their trust in a mixture of global and local brands with which they will establish conversations. In fact this is already happening.

Statistics can tell you many things but it’s rarely the whole picture. Clearly there are lots of statistics that point to a very gloomy future for newspapers but there are others that paint a very different picture.

First of all, not all newspapers are doing a death roll. Sales of the FT are up from 426,000 in 2005 to 450,000 today and FT.com now has 6.6 million users (up from 4.4m in 2006). Meanwhile, the Economist has seen its circulation rise by 6% globally to 1.41 million copies per week. The Wall Street Journal is also up, as is The Australian to name but a few. All these rises could be explained by a thirst for serious news and analysis during the financial crisis but I think that’s only part of it.

And let’s not forget about Metro either. Metro is the world’s largest newspaper. It is read by over 17 million people every day. Admittedly, these people don’t pay a cent for the paper but I hardly think that matters. It’s just a different business model. It’s just a modern re-framing of where newspapers came from in the first place.

I think it’s also worth mentioning The Week in this context too. I know this is a magazine but it’s not really. It’s more of a newszine, a weekly digest of the best bits of newspapers from around the world. Again, this publication is thriving so perhaps what people need to do is re-frame their idea of what a newspaper is or could be.

Globally, newspapers are actually doing rather well. In 2008, a bad year for most industries, newspaper circulations rose by 1.3% worldwide to 540 million copies per day with 1.9 billion people reading a paid daily paper.

To put this into perspective this represents an increase of almost 9% over the past 5 years and newspapers now reach 40% more people worldwide than the internet. Equally, whilst ad revenues are down globally, newspapers still take 37% of worldwide advertising expenditure. Hardly an industry with no revenue model. Admittedly quite a few newspapers are really struggling, especially in developed markets, but I wonder how much of this is really down to a permanent rejection of newspapers on the part of consumers.

In many cases I suspect the reason for the demise of certain newspapers is simply that they are saddled with too much debt, have a poorly differentiated product and fail to deliver any real value proposition to their readers. Apparently the London Evening Standard is now a free paper. Really? Well I certainly wouldn’t pay for it. But I do pay for the New York Times, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Nikkei Weekly and The Week.

Looking at Metro it is clear to me that people will still read a paper if its placed in their hands and they don’t have to pay for it. The FT and the Economist also suggest that people will pay money — quite a lot of money in some cases — if they believe that what’s inside is valuable.

This last point is quite important. It is no surprise to me that if you ask people whether they’d like to pay for something they already get for nothing then most people will say no. Furthermore, if you just print press releases, create endless lifestyle sections or fail to break or investigate real news then you are very unlikely to attract a paying readership either.

Reason #2: Anything digital is trending towards the disposable

As I’ve said, one of the consequences of digitalisation is that we are creating too much information. This is an issue from a sifting (finding what you want) point of view, but it’s an issue from a perceived value and attention point of view too.

If something is sent to people in digital form (e.g. email, text, web link, tweet) this can create an immediate response but it can also result in the content being ignored. I don’t know about you but this happens to me all the time.

If someone sends me an email or a link to an interesting newspaper article, I will often ignore it because of the sheer volume of information that I receive. Either that or I will put it to one side to look at later. Only I don’t. If something is squirreled away digitally I generally forget about it. In contrast, if information lands on my desk in physical form I will (eventually) look at it. It’s always in my line of sight so to speak.

Moreover, if I’ve actually paid for information I somehow assume that it has a value and will make an effort to extract that value. Digital I equate with free (and to some extent rushed or poorly thought out) so I have no such compulsion to get value from it. It’s a bit like digital friends. Easy to acquire and even easier to ignore or delete.

Some bloggers rave about the fact that the newspaper model has evolved. The new model is to write something, publish it and then let your audience edit it for you. Yes, that’s true. And doesn’t it show.

Another point that links to this thought is that reading something on screen is very different to reading something on paper. The mindset is very different and so too is the experience. This is not to say that one is better than the other. Only different.

Online we are in a rush. We want to extract information as fast as possible and move on. On paper things are different. We have more time. We are more relaxed. We tend to see the broader context and reflect on things.

What are the implications of this? Firstly I’d say that business or everyday information (breaking news, weather forecasts, stock prices, classified ads etc) will continue to move online and will stay there. But analysis and commentary (together with display ads) with stay on paper.

This could also mean that Mondays to Fridays online is dominant but at weekends (when people have more time and are in a different frame of mind) newspapers will stay on paper. At least I hope that’s what happens.

Reason #3: If enough people predict something it won’t happen

Most mega-trends create counter trends and for people that are old enough to remember they often follow cycles too. For example, many people were predicting the death of the bicycle not so long ago. The ‘hard evidence’ was there for all to see. Sales were running downhill fast and the culprits ranged from increasing levels of traffic to a plethora of new competition, ranging from daytime television to video games.

But someone that didn’t follow trends invented the Mountain Bike and things started to change. Then there was a boom in health and fitness and, hey presto, things started to move in the opposite direction. Before you knew it talk of industry doom disappeared faster than a bad video clip on You Tube.

Similar things have happened over the years in markets as diverse as sports cars, cinema, musicals, butter, beer, camping, vinyl records and paper diaries. Movie-going in particular was predicted to be dead – or dying – following the invention of the VHS recorder in the early 1980s, much as it was predicted that television would kill off radio in the 1950s. Neither came true — or both are still alive for the time being.

As the writer Douglas Coupland has observed, the moment products or industries are declared dead, they emerge from the grave like at the end of the movie Carrie, only stronger, more powerful and bigger than ever.

Why didn’t the cinema industry die as foretold? The exact reason is difficult to pin down but contenders would include an increase in the making of movies worth watching and the desire to watch big films on big screens with large social groups.

I suspect that something similar will happen with newspapers. At the moment the industry is mid-way through a spiritual crisis. Journalists have convinced themselves that the shift away from paper is irreversible and that the current rate of job losses and resource cuts will continue until there is nothing left. Print newspapers will be dead in the future or will only survive as online editions with marginal influence or as luxury products for the fortunate few. I thought this once but I think I was wrong.

Any futurist that predicts the total extinction of newspapers is suffering from peripheral vision. The trends towards life speeding up and people snacking on bite-sized free media are true, but there are other trends too.

As life continues to accelerate some people will seek to slow it down. And as connectivity increases this will breed volatility and confusion, so people will seek out the people and the publications that can explain to them what’s going on.

Hence, the problem isn’t really the internet — it’s the content. But in an attempt to be ‘accessible’ most newspapers have dumbed down their content to the point where it’s just not worth anything. And taking costs out just makes matters worse.

When we invent a new technology we seem to assume that the new will kill off the old. Hence, digital newspapers will naturally kill of their analogue cousins. Perhaps part of the problem here is the word new. ‘New media’ just sounds so appealing. But don’t be fooled. Concentrate instead on the second word, ‘media’. That’s not going anywhere. It’s the same with e-books. I suspect that the reality will be that digital and analogue will live alongside each other for a very long time to come.

What I also expect is that newspapers will start getting smart about copyright. Currently the unauthorised use of content online is being largely ignored, but I suspect that eventually the industry will get heavy about it much in the same way that the music industry clamped down on illegal downloads and piracy.

Moreover, simply because something is old doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s inferior. Newspapers are a very clever form of technology. They have their problems but it seems to me that overall the pros far outweigh the cons.

OK, they cost a lot to create and distribute. But so does anything worth having. The pages can blow away in a strong wind and the ink sometimes comes off on your hands. So what? At least you can read them in full sun, you can get them wet, scribble all over them, rip bits out of them and they don’t need an external power source. You can even recycle them or wrap food in them.

Reason #4: The more we globalise the more important the local becomes

Globalization is a big trend. But if you look far enough forward it looks like the future will be largely local. You can already see this shift in the fact localization (or re-localization) is becoming a major force. Theoretically, globalization still has many years to run (and will run alongside an interest in all things local) but we are increasingly at the mercy of natural resources. Put simply, when natural resources such as oil really run out, we will have no choice but to stop moving around the world and adopt a more local way of life. Back to where it all started in other words.

I’d expect the same to apply to newspapers. Newspapers started out as hyper-local newssheets and I think that’s the direction we are heading in once again. I’d fully expect a handful of global newspaper and information brands to do very well, but I think that local newspapers with local (personalised) news and local (personalised) advertising will attract and retain loyal readers too.

The management consultancy firm McKinsey & Company once said that in the future most industries will be barbell shaped, meaning that there will be a handful of large global players and lots of small, usually local, players at the other – with not much in the middle. I think this is exactly what will happen with newspapers. We’ll have The Times and the New York Times at one end and the Stroud News & Journal and the King Island Courier at the other. But many metropolitan newspapers, such as the Detroit News or the Sydney Morning Herald won’t be so lucky because they are neither one thing nor the other.

Just being local won’t save local newspapers though. Local newspapers will need to find people with time on their hands too. That’s why newspapers situated in areas with a high percentage of retirees, or holidaymakers, will do well. So forget the young — they never did read newspapers anyway — and focus on the old and the seriously relaxed instead.

But you will still need to work at the content too. Good newspapers and good journalists have always done the same thing. They both wake up, as Bob Woodward once said, with the mindset of “what are the bastards hiding today?”

So here’s a prediction. There really isn’t any such this as a dead or dying industry. Only industries in which old people have run out of new ideas. Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Create a better newspaper and people will email you to find directions to a store.

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* I know. The irony of this being on a blog.