Sure, sure, I know. They didn’t make the transition to digital soon enough, and that’s a lesson for everybody in publishing!

I am so tired of hearing that kind of “analysis.”

There isn’t one transition facing publishers and publishing. There are several different transitions all going on at the same time, and different parts of the industry face them in very different ways. It’s a big mistake to take a lesson from one part of the industry and try to force it into all aspects of publishing.

For example, I just heard that New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said print will be dead in ten years. But of course he didn’t say that at all — because he’s probably a smart guy and knows better.

What he said was that the print edition of the NYT might only last ten years. Okay. That may be. He’d know better than I would.

But remember, the challenges facing newspapers are remarkably different from the challenges facing trade paperbacks, or B2B compliance publications, or magazines, or professional journals, or ….

You get the point.

Publishing is experiencing some very big changes these days, and all those changes can’t be stuffed under a single umbrella (even if it’s emblazoned with the magical word “digital”). Let’s be smart about this and apply the lessons where they belong, and not pay too much attention to people who have simplistic, mono-vision answers.

The issue publishers have to face is not print or digital, or print versus digital, or “the transition away from print,” or anything that simple.

First of all, “digital” is too broad of a term. Does that mean a PDF, a Kindle book, a digital edition of a magazine, a magazine website with articles, a blog, a video, a database, a voice interface like Google Home, a membership site, ….

Second, print is alive and well in some areas, and probably will remain so for a long time. Students (yes, even “digital natives”) prefer print textbooks. Some print magazines are doing fantastically well. And people still buy print books.

And I haven’t even mentioned Facebook, Kahn Academy, the general decline in reading, the hyper-partisanship and personalization (read “echo chamber”) of most of the information we receive, and a host of other things.

The key in the information business is to find the right niche (and, as Lev helpfully points out in his comment, the right product) and that requires transcending a simple “print vs. digital” question.

Oh, and about Time, Inc. I’ve heard a lot of speculation, but one thing should be quite clear. The demise of a weekly news publication after the advent of a 24×7 news cycle is not all that surprising.