One of the best presentations today came during lunch. Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future and a research professor at USC, discussed his long-term, worldwide research that describes the ever-changing nature of the (new) media user.

For several years, Cole has been studying the way the Internet and new media technology has changed media usage patterns.

As he has worked through his research, one conclusion echoes what most of us have concluded anecdotally.

Cole says that media development and evolution never leads to the demise of a medium. Radio survived TV, changed, became a smaller business, but remains healthy.

In the same way, newspapers will survive the current media revolution, but they will be smaller businesses.

That's a reality journalists have difficulty accepting, particularly as smaller newspaper businesses will lead to smaller newspaper newsrooms.

But he argues the ongoing revolution also presents newspapers with their greatest opportunities in generations.

Here is a crude summary of some of the conclusions growing out of Cole's research:

The Internet is not a threat to TV. In the old dialup days, it was because people concentrated their online time in big chunks, and that did take away TV time. Now, with broadband, online time is spent in countless little chunks and is even integrated with the time spent on TV. As TV and video merge, and TV viewing increasingly goes mobile, TV will explode. For the first time, TV viewing will be freed from the home. Research shows people are willing to watch 30-minute and 60-minute programs on small, mobile screens.

TV advertising has been threatened for 30 years, long before the Internet. Biggest threats to TV advertising came from the remote control and then the VCR and its successors, TIVO and DVRs. But advertisers are coming up with tricks to fool the DVR generation.

Newspapers and other print products have the biggest opportunities growing out of the media revolution.

But there are some real challenges. For example, the current generation of teenagers is more interested in news than any previous teen generation ever. But they do not now and won't ever go to an offline publication (print newspaper) for that information.

The second biggest challenge is growing concern for global warming. Newspapers are not really a significant "green" problem. But the political perception may be the opposite. And digital isn't at all green, but the perception is otherwise. Increasingly, the children in a home are asking their parents to save a tree by not reading a newspaper.

But even with these challenges, there is opportunity.

For the first time in 88 years, newspaper journalists are in the breaking news business. TV may grow in importance in the new era, but local TV news will be the loser in this new competition.

While attitudes have changed rapidly, online users today accept online advertising as a necessary reality to pay for the product. Specific subscriber fees never really worked and will not work in the future. The average household may pay for cable or satellite TV, maybe broadband, maybe one other thing. They will not pay subscriber or content fees for news and information content.

Cole's research can be viewed online at digitalcenter.org. I haven't had time to look at the site. But some of you may well want to give it a look.