Predictions for Printers: 2003-2040+

Here are the conclusions that Adobe Systems Inc.’s Principal Scientist Dov Issacs, and Rochester Institute of Technology Professor of Digital Printing Frank Romano, who more often than now have differing or opposing viewpoints, gave in the concluding session yesterday at the Seybold-Romano Future of Print Conference during the larger Seybold San Francisco 2003 Conference:

Romano thinks that weekly newspapers will survive better than dailies. He believes that weeklies feature more local content than do dailies, real local content that consumers can’t get from radio or TV and that most daily newspapers no longer report. Romano believes that daily newspapers can no longer compete with broadcast as the consumers’ first source of news and so will become more like magazines, featuring mostly news analysis and entertainment content.

Isaac is even more sanguine and that that daily newspapers will largely cease to exist as a major medium. He believes that the behavior of reading a newspapers has been declining during each human generation and will end within a generation, particularly since young people already no longer read them.

Romano noted that three quarters of the 62,000 new book titles published each year in the U.S. don’t sell and become remaindered and pulped. He believes that on-demand book printing technologies will revolutionize the book industry eliminate those costs.

Romano also believes that the post office will become primarily a delivery mechanism for promotional material. As traditional interpersonal or regular business mail continues to migrate to e-mail, the post office will by process of elimination be delivering mostly promotional mail. Because the U.S. Postal Service is a commercial organization, that will make it favor direct mail companies more and more.

Both Romano and Isaac predicted that printing packaging and labeling materials and printing brochures and promotional material will be the only certain growth areas for the print industry.

They predicted that the printing industry will see only 1% to 2% annual growth through 2040 and then begin to decline. That small growth isn’t sufficient to maintain the printing industry. This will cause mergers and consolidations and layoffs throughout that industry.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.