It is the year of our Lord Baby Jesus the First Keyboarder and we are hearing shit I heard 10 and 20 years ago. The passage of time has not made it less condescending: 

Still, he insists that mobile devices are used more as search tools than anything else and ultimately won’t be a sufficient replacement for newspapers. “I use these all the time,” Griffin says, laying his hands on a smartphone and iPad. “But I use them to find stuff that I’m looking for, and I read the paper to find out things I don’t know.”

He said he expects young people, like his 20-something sons, will continue to gravitate to newspapers, even print editions. As they move into adulthood and begin to care more about settling into a community, they’ll turn to a newspaper, as generations of Americans before them have, he predicts.

“I don’t think they’re going to completely unplug and just go to Google News when they want to find out the answer to a question, and then know nothing else other than what they see on Facebook,” Griffin said.

HAHAHAHA you kids with the Facespace! You don’t know anything. When you grow up, you will settle down to an existence not unlike that of Betty Draper at the START of Mad Men, at which point you will want a newspaper to rub ink all over your fingers! Until then, enjoy your trivialities and nonsense, because that’s all the Internets are!

I HATE YOU BUY MY STUFF TO MAKE ME NOT HATE YOU. Best pitch ever.

Did I mention this is an entire article about how the Tribune Company has to “play catch-up” on “digital?”

IT IS.

“The old revenue models that supported reporting and journalism, they’re either gone or severely compromised, and that’s not news to anybody,” Griffin says.

When company execs can lay off hundreds, preside over staggering losses, and walk away with millions of dollars as if he’d done a good job, then something’s severely compromised. I’m not sure it’s the “revenue models,” though.

Print makes money. Buckets of money. Plenty of money to support reporting and journalism. Just not enough to provide a profit margin that gives Wall Street a woody.

I’m sure that’ll all change just as soon as we wake up and realize how much we need this product they’re cutting to ribbons, though.

A.