I attended the iMedia Brand Summit this week in Colorado Springs, Colorado and had the opportunity to present on social media to a select group of marketers. The theme of this summit was “All Roads Lead to Digital: But is Digital Ready to Lead Marketing?” One of the summit’s speakers was Jeff Cole of USC’s Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.

Jeff talked about many topic, trends, and developments in the digital world. One of the trends that has been of particular interest to me is the decline of traditional media in general and of print and newspapers in particular. He pointed out that 50 years ago, dozens of cities had two daily publications. Today, that number has dwindled to a half dozen or so and some cities have already lost their newspaper completely due to financial pressures and loss of subscribers.

Cole recounted a story meeting with the publishers of some of the nation’s largest newspapers in 2002. He warned them that they had, in his opinion, a twenty year window to change their business model or risk collapse. They scoffed at him and called him an alarmist and a pessimist. Low and behold seven years later, Jeff now realizes he wasn’t a pessimist, he was an optimist. As of January 2008, over 120 US newspapers have folded including the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Currently, our own Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News are on the ropes as well as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Detroit News, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Daily News, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and others.

Through this experience and his research, Cole believes he has the formula when traditional print media in its current business model becomes financially untenable. He asserts that when broadband penetration exceeds 30% in a particular country, print media suffers. In an “always connected” world, news delivered by print media is immediately out of date. At best, it can be no fresher than six hours old.

All roads do indeed lead to digital and the future is grim for most newspapers and other print publications. Just think, TV Guide was once the world’s most popular print publication. It was bought by Macrovision for $2.8 billion in 1998 and was sold for $1 in 2008. That would seem to be the icing on the cake illustrating the decline and demise of print media and the cherry is the continued decline of ROI for advertisers and their steady defection to digital and interactive.

While the proverbial writing is on the wall for print, the digital age is also an opportunity for those publications that survive to get back to be being in the breaking news business, adapt to the new environment, and find a successful business model. I agree with Cole that in ten years at the most only a half dozen newspapers that exist today will adapt and survive leveraging their brands as credibility to become trusted news sources and authorities rising above the hundreds of thousands of blogs and other less credible online news sources. The survivors will probably consist of, in my opinion, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today, and maybe the Los Angeles Times.

What are your thoughts?