In his opening speech of the WAN-IFRA World Congress here in Vienna yesterday, President Jacob Mathew said something that really stuck with me. He said: “The reader trusts print more than any other media and our credibility is by far the best.”

What I love about that statement is that it still gives credibility to traditional media. All too often, I hear people talk about the demise of “traditional” media and speculate how in so many years newspapers as we now know them will be dead. Of course, when television arrived, that’s what they said about radio! Instead of dying, radio has to adapt to the changes and reinvent itself.

Mathew, executive editor of the Malayala Manorama Group of Publications in India who was in April unanimously named WAN-IFRA president, went on to say: “Globally our industry connects with 1.8 billion people and that accounts for 25% of the global population. 5 billion are yet to be tapped.

The global online market in 2013 is expected to be 95 billion dollars which is 18% of the global ad revenue pie. And two thirds of it is commanded by a single player. Despite revenue migration to online the total print industry would generate 136 billion dollars in 2013 which would be 27% of the global ad revenue pie.

So we need to be positive while assessing our future and our objective should be to emerge as credible brands in the media arena.”

Kudos to Mr. Mathew for standing squarely in the corner of traditional newspapers. Of course, it should be noted that in his home country – India – newspapers are thriving, which is not necessarily the case in many industrialized nations.

In a recent post on the INMA website, writer Rahul Kansal points out that “the newspaper business in India seems almost embarrassingly in the pink of health. Over the past decade, aggregate circulations have grown at over 5% per annum and advertising revenues at upwards of 15% (despite the recent slowdown, from which the industry has bounced back with a spirited growth of more than 18%).” In fact, he points out that the print media industry in India is growing faster than other media, including television and “has actually increased its overall revenue share within media!” That’s amazing by all accounts. The question is why?

Some might argue that with 1.17 billion people and only 100 million (or 8.5 percent, according to Internet World Stats), the penetration is not big, so people will have to rely on newspapers.

Kansal’s opinion is that there are three factors to explain the robustness of India’s newspapers: “An extremely low cover price that ranges from a mere Rs 1.50 to Rs 5 (US$0.03 to US$0.10) per copy; a system of direct distribution that enables some 50 million copies to be home-delivered on time, morning after morning, and a clear and palpable focus towards young readers, even at the risk of occasionally annoying the old.”