Steve Crescenzo and Allan Jenkins are both my friends. Not online friends, but real-world, in-the-flesh friends. I’ve spent time with Allan in Copenhagen. I went to Steve’s wedding. I probably shouldn’t get in the middle of a dust-up between them. My life is filled with things I shouldn’t have done.

Steve takes Allan to task for his contention that print is pretty much useless. In his post, Allan comes down pretty hard on IABC’s “Communication World” magazine, nothing that “Any day of the week, any IABC member can go into the blogosphere and find 50 better articles than CW publishes in a quarter.” Crescenzo counters, “I use the Internet, and I like getting my print copy of Communication World. I think it’s a great benefit. So don???t try to speak for me on this issue, okay?”

Underlying the debate, though, is whether print really does have a future. About 12 or 13 years ago, one of the leading business publications (I think it was BusinessWeek, but I wouldn’t swear to it) predicted we were only 10 years away from the paperless office. Three years ago—the point at which offices should have been purely digital—a paper products association reported that the average office consumed 30% more paper than it did a decade ago. If you work online, you know why: You’re constantly printing emails and web pages because holding that piece of paper in your hand makes the content more readable than it is on the screen.

Of course, there are some who prefer reading on the screen. Allan is one; my podcasting co-host Neville Hobson is another. Neville has cancelled all his print magazine subscriptions, opting to read everything online. And, of course, there are those who argue that the generation of digital natives ultimately will sound the death knell for print, since they’ve grown up reading computer screens unlike us digital immigrants, who had to get accustomed to it. (And there’s a lot to get accustomed to: glowing light, reading across instead of down, reading a document the dimensions of which are wider than they are tall…the list goes on.) I don’t buy it for a minute. There are few digital natives more in tune with the online world than my 16-year-old daughter, Rachel, who manages a dozen or more instant messages while listening to online music, engaging in a three-way phone call, watching TV, and doing her homework. Several years ago, when “The Wizard of Oz” was re-released in a digitally remastered print, I took her to see the classic at a gorgeous, refurbished one-screen movie theater in San Francisco’s Castro district. She was knocked out and wanted to read one of the books. Being the dedicated nerd that I am, I refused to buy a copy of a public-domain book, so I visited the Gutenberg Archive (a volunteer effort that long preceded Google Print in its effort to make books and other literature available online) and downloaded one of L. Frank Baum’s novels. I loaded it onto Rachel’s computer. The next day, I came home to find her reading the book in hard copy; she had printed out all 500 or so pages.

“Why in the world did you do that?” I asked.

She looked at me as though I was a clueless moron (the older she gets, the more I get that look): “You didn’t expect me to read a novel on the screen, did you?” she said.

Exactly. The problems with extended reading on the screen have nothing to do with generational differences. It’s physiological. Besides, there are plenty of characteristics unique to print you just don’t get online:

• Portability—I still don’t see people taking their laptops to the beach or the bathroom. Cell phones, yes, but not laptops. Nor have I had any luck reading my laptop in bed. I heard one speaker compalin that whenever he tried to lay back in bed and read his laptop, the lid would close on his nose. I still see more people reading newspapers on BART than laptops.
• Permanence—I can delete this post tomorrow and it’ll be gone. If you print it and file it in a manlia file folder, you’ll be able to retrieve it in 50 years and read it.
• You can write on it. The only way you can make notes in the margin of an online document is to print it out.
• Substance—There’s something nice about the tactile feel of something solid in your hands.
• Quality—The best designed online annual report still looks like other online annual reports. In print, you can use high-end paper stock and class-A printing with foil stamps and blind embossing and other design elements to reflect the organization’s substance.
• It works when the power’s out.

Think about it; you’ll probably come up with other characteristics of print that appeal to you. There’s a reason so many websites offer a printable version of the material they offer.

So no, I don’t think print’s going anywhere anytime soon. The plummeting subscription rates newspapers are experiencing have nothing to do with the fact that they’re produced in print; it’s a consequence of content that hasn’t transitioned to take advantage of print’s strengths. Most newspapers will make that adjustment; some won’t. But in the end, remember that new media never kill old media. Old media adapt and, in some cases, shrink. But they continue to offer value as long as they play to their strengths.