At the World Newspaper Congress session on technology, Edwards says Kodak invented the digital camera and sat on the invention for 10 years. At the time, it had a $US10 billion consumer film division that had a 60-percent margin.
 
"If you look at that business today, it's gone from $10 billion to $100 million," says Edwards.
 
Kodak remains a $7 billion company, "but had to completely change our products and reinvent ourselves – digital cameras, digital scanners and printers, service business. We're a completely different company than what we were."
 
Will newsprint go the same way? "I would suggest it needs to completely reinvent itself to survive," Edwards says. But that doesn't mean print will disappear, just change.
 
"We live in a hybrid world; these technologies will co-exist," he says. "The key question is, I think, what will digital technologies allow us to do that we couldn't do before?"
 
For the newspaper industry, it's important not to view print and digital as entirely different worlds, Edwards says. In fact, print can be digital.
 
Digital printing technology allows publishes to target, segment and personalize content. It will allow them to move advertising from mass market to personal promotion. "And that’s what the advertisers are looking for. It pays the bills and it looks like newspapers are uniquely positioned to drive value to advertisers," Edwards says.
 
"The technology exists today," he says. "During the transition, you can vary a portion of your newsprint by applying inkjet heads to a web offset press; ultimately you can vary 100 percent of the content on every page, and the technology exists today to do that. I'm very surprised I haven't heard anyone talk about it during the last two days [of the conference]."