If you’ve ever taken a look at the GalleyCat sidebar, you might notice, in the “favorite posts” section, last year’s interview with Michael Rogers, in which we discussed his role as the staff futurist for the New York Times. Yesterday, Portfolio blogger Jeff Bercovici reported that Rogers would resume his freelance consulting work, ending his two-year tenure at the Times.
Last year, Rogers had proposed that print was far from dead: “The millennial generation will grow into reading the news, and paper will be a piece of that,” he said. The last ten months haven’t weakened his resolve on that front. “I think probably the most interesting thing that emerged from a lot of the research I helped with was just how hard it’s going to be to replace paper,” he told Bercovici. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, and the longer I do it the more it seems like a really good medium that’s going to be around for quite a while longer.” He was, of course, talking about the newspaper business, but perhaps the book publishing industry can take some comfort in that assessment as well…?