Rescuing print

Somehow I am getting a wiff of an underground lobby movement to revive the dying trade of print advertising :D
Can it be a coincidence that one our best and most respected bloggers is quoting one of our best and most respected creative directors - known for his love of [and exceptional talent in] the printed ad word - and posting a full article about why print is a great medium for advertising and only days later there's a second post about the same thing? :DDD

When I first read this I got sucked into the pathos of the writing and posted an enthusiastic tweet about it. Later on, I kept going back to it in my head and realized there was something amiss with the reasoning. It's an interesting train of thought to start discussing the virtues of print ADVERTISING when the very existence of PRINT is questioned. Mainly because advertising is not something that should be a reason to save print for. Somehow a move by, say, the IAA to preserve the existence print just for the sake of putting print ads sounds ludicrous. I mean we all loathe advertising right? Would it not be seriously silly to try to save print because we need to place print ads in it - especially since only 5-6 years ago everyone was complaining about the rape of print by advertisers when full pages of red or green ads covered the first pages of newspapers?
I fully agree with the need to have print but on the other hand I am finding it hard to understand why print needs to remain the ad volume driver that it used to be. Just to save jobs? Interesting train of though for a country where budget deficit is driven by the government's continued subsidization of industries that contribute with nothing. If ad people need print to continue to get a job maybe we should also continue paying miners to dig on in empty mines.

Okay, we need newspapers and magazines and we need them mainly because of two things: 1] the kind of reading experience they provide - more personal, more applied, quieter, more analytic and 2] the kind of editorial art they require - more diligent, more analytic, more in depth, more opinionated. But this kind of experience requires pairing with a certain kind of advertising, and the aforementioned article bemoans exactly the death of that kind of ads: comprehensive, introspective, smart, brand driven vs sales driven. And now, to be completely frank: we had stopped doing these a long time ago. Because Romania is a country of growing needs and growing bellies and these need to be fed fast and cheap and mindlessly. And that kind of advertising in those kind of newspapers and magazines would not do the trick.
So we really don't need print for print ads. What we really need is a customer base interested in both print AND that kind of print ads. Which we do not have. Yet. Or ever?
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PS: and the art of copywriting is real because that letter made me jump for joy with enthusiasm although later on I questioned almost every line :D