With regard to the former, talk of the expiration of newspapers, in fact the passing of print as a communication method in its entirety, has abounded for well over a decade. The truth is that while it might not be in rude health right now, it’s certainly not on its last legs.

The simple fact is that print is still the sugar-daddy of online and the bulk of all publishers’ revenues – whether that’s papers, magazines or books – are from print, and so it will remain for a long time to come.

Print and online are increasingly easy bedfellows. The trick is, as any forward-thinking publisher knows, getting the two mediums to work together effectively as information portals and, in the case of magazines and newspapers, commercial tools. They both have their strengths and compensate for each others’ weaknesses – in the same way that digital and offset print are complementary, not competing, technologies.

In fact, the same could be said of the tussle between the print rep and Google. I don’t think that there’s any doubt that the old-school print rep – he (or she) with the highly honed taste for boozy client lunches, fast cars, ‘creative’ CVs and a tongue almost as silver as their iridescent double-breasted suit – is rapidly becoming extinct.

The modern sales person is more of a customer services rep, whose job should be to develop, nurture, understand the client’s needs and be more likely to over deliver than to over promise.

And one of the tools of this new sales breed’s trade, when it comes to lead generation, should surely be the internet.

There’s no doubt that when it comes it to highly commoditised or consumer print, the internet is the perfect tool. But when push comes to shove, when was the last time you were upsold by a website?

Whenever a discussion raises the spectre of the internet ‘killing’ something, it’s worth remembering that the internet won’t kill anything, only end-user or client demand can. And right now, and for the foreseeable future, everyone seems to want the best of both worlds.