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Internet Journalism is so far advanced of the capabilities of "print journalism" that for now the idea of a regularly copy-hardened periodical being sold to men and women and children seems like a lesser thing than being able to point your computer, phone or handbag to "bbc.co.uk" and watch the news update itself live.

However, just like the crazy new gadget called a "digital picture frame" (allowing you to have a nice picture frame with a picture showing - presumably you can choose from a number you could fill it with) so the world of "hard copy" will change more and more as technology gets even faster, even wilier, even cheaper.

In the end the basic idea of hard copy will live on as the victor - because a document on a machine, to anyone with a mind, is much more often than not, "unfinished" or merely "in progress".

A psychological layer of "completion" surrounds the hardcopy, and even when some of the laws of completion (like "irreversibility") start to get totally bypassed, even then the basic notion of "finished product" is always going to ensure the "soul" of printed journalism is preserved in our global communications media.

Businesses eventually settled on "pdfs" as the model output for documents in transport. They could have had .doc files or any number of other types of files - in development files. But in the end things are always better off sent to pdf than left in some less-generic format. Similarly, writing only is "fully explained" to a third party if it is handed over in some form of hard copy. Forum posts will never replace reuters in briefs, at the end of the day.

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