Which is not to say that the changes of the next 20 years will not be dramatic and wrenching.
Here in the present, newspapers are getting hammered by the decay of the business model that sustained them for 200 years, even as their overall readership grows.
Like other big-city newspapers, The Inquirer's paid, print-edition circulation has fallen over time and continues to fall - to 288,298 on weekdays and 550,400 on Sundays, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.
More and more, newspaper owners have argued that readership, not copies, should be the calculation. The Inquirer's readership of its print edition averages 833,669 people on weekdays and 1,504,941 on Sundays, according to Scarborough Research, which measures consumers' media preferences and habits.
The readership of the Philly.com Web site, which offers news from The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, is big and growing. Figures compiled by Omniture, a Web analytics firm, show the site draws 4.5 million unique visitors a month. Some of those people read the print edition as well.
The number of pages viewed by those Web site readers has been growing about 40 percent a year. In March, when The Inquirer dominated coverage of the corruption trial of former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo, Philly.com recorded more than 60 million page views.
It is that "robust, muscular demand for our work" that assures Inquirer editor William K. Marimow that whatever changes come, the newspaper - the news organization - will continue to provide information of primary importance to people in the Philadelphia region.
"I don't think the demand is going to dissipate," Marimow said. "The change is the means of delivery."
And the structure of payment.
