Here’s a hopeful article: 6 Things Digital Natives Should Know About Print

It’s hopeful because I’m seeing more and more articles like this — by people who are realizing that all the “digital revolution” kids were just trying to sell us something, and that print is neither dead nor dying.

2013 was the year print forgot to die. It was the year our industry seemed to reach consensus that, for many years to come, we will derive much of our profit from putting ink on paper.

This post title says “5 wasted years.” I just made that up. I don’t know if it’s five or six or what. But that we’ve been wasting time is indisputable.

The “print is dead” mantra has so permeated our brains that in our meetings, conferences, and publications, we’ve stopped talking about how to be successful with dead-tree editions or the implications of the latest print-related developments.

Right. We’ve been wasting far too much of our time and resources on the 3 percent.

Consider this. Imagine how different publishing would be today if all the time and effort and meetings and talks and agonizing about “digital” for the past five years had been spent on improving renewal rates. Does anyone doubt that the time would have been better spent?

Don’t get me wrong. The world is changing and digital is a big part of the mix. (Generally speaking that means print + web — not tablet editions or apps or any of that “feed the consultants” stuff.)

But we have to keep things in proportion, and it’s my feeling that the hard times the publishing industry has been through the last several years have been exacerbated by losing track of the core business.