If the publisher of The New York Times admits to being worried, I guess the rest of us should be, too:
Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?
"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," he says.
Sulzberger is focusing on how to best manage the transition from print to Internet.
"The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we're leading there," he points out.
The Times, in fact, has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.
Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It's a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn't see a black void ahead.
There will always be something resembling the newspaper, in function if not in form. People will always want to know, and there will always be a need for information gatekeepers. The Internet is likely not even the final form we will see. And there will still be people making money from news -- just different people in different ways.
But the end of the print era, if indeed it comes, will be a sad one, and we will be missing many things we take for granted today. You wouldn't want to swat flies with your laptop, and you can't wrap breakables in them. Might get it to fit in the bottom of some birdcages, though.
