Rosie DiManno, star columnist of the Toronto Star, got something a bit wrong today -- but also got something extremely right.

In a column on the declining fortunes of newspapers, she wrote:

It was shocking, at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, when the publisher of The New York Times told a Haaretz reporter: "I really don't know whether we'll be printing The Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either."

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. later tried to redact that comment, predicting the paper will be around for a long time, even as it transitions from print to Internet. "The point of view is not about nostalgia or a love of newsprint. Instead, it is rooted in fundamental business realities."

He got it wrong on two counts: Revenue streams for papers with online versions come overwhelming from the hard-copy product.

And it is, very much, about the love.

It might shock her to know that Sulzberger made the remark in 2007.*

* No correction appeared in the Star on Tuesday or any subsequent day.

She was right about this:

Last week, the Newspaper Audience Databank numbers were released, measuring readership results for 2007.

I have no idea what they mean. You, reader, will have no idea what they mean. You will especially have no idea what they mean if you were to read news stories about the NADbank statistics in any of Toronto's four major papers. Newspapers are never so selectively spinning as when reporting on their own state of the union.

Okay, I find the last sentence of the above graf completely unintelligible, but it is very true that reporting on NADbank numbers is the most shamelessly self-promotional exercise in newspaper journalism. It's amazing how every paper finds something triumphal in them -- and something with which to faintly damn the competition.

Maybe that's the truly useful thing about NADbank -- how it provides for win-win situations for everyone. :)*

* For a different view, check out what the media manager had to say.

   Here's the NADbank March 5 news release.

But while DiManno sticks up for newspapers -- a worthy cause, in my view -- she ignores a few salient trends.

1. The news cycle is now largely continuous; newspapers generally publish once per day.

2. DiManno said a newspaper is a different product every day. That's not true. One problem is newspapers read the same -- day after day after day after day after ... They are treated like an industrial product when they should be a creative one.

3. Yes, newspaper display ads generate proportionally more money right now, but that won't be forever. Newspaper classifieds, even online, don't compare to craigslist. There are lots of other forms of competition for the advertising dollar out there.

4. Young people today have grown up digital and expect free content. A newspaper is analog and expects money in return for the privilege of reading it. The end result is you don't see many young people reading traditional daily papers.

5. Newspapers are used to monopoly profit margins. They aren't monopolies any more. To cope, they are almost-continuously shedding staff and shrinking in an effort to maintain their high margins. This strategy won't succeed over the long run. They may be shrinking their way to irrelevance.

I like newspapers. At their best, they are provide an essential service to those who wish to be  informed citizens. The question is, can newspaper journalistic values survive the transition to the digital world, with its much-different advertising model? I hope so.