Back from holiday and the first thing I hear on the BBC Today programme is a discussion as to whether Internet publishing will kill off paper publishing – traditional printed media. Scary stats were quoted on the circulation figures, especially of regional daily papers. There has been a lot of discontinuous change in the print industry.  I started my working life creating ads to appear in newspapers that were changing over from letterpress to litho: ‘It’s just a fad’, we were told. Like phototypsetting, all colour newspapers, desk top publishing, digital photography. Change goes with the medium.

Yes, a great deal of what paper publications once provided can now be delivered better digitally. But there will be a place for paper publications. Whether this will be in forms we recognize today or whether new forms of print media will emerge remains to be seen.  I think it is an exciting time for entrepreneurial publishers to be looking at how digital will present new opportunities for print media.

For those of us not directly involved in publishing the biggest impact wil be upon our promotional activity. Will all our advertising spend be directed on-line? How should digital communications be integrated with print as part of a communications strategy? Where do we place our PR emphasis?

Perhaps the most important decision is how we harness the power of social Internet. It’s easy to look at the world of publishing in terms of just the commercial media, but with an estimated 50 million plus blogs, we are all publishers now.