In his final Stop the Presses column (for Editor & Publisher), Steve Outing revises history with a look at how things might have gone for the newspaper industry. And –since they didn’t– what to expect next. From the HTMHG list:

1. In 1994-95, newspaper executives recognize that the Web is something with the potential to rock their world, and increase R&D budgets significantly in order to plan for and begin building new businesses based on fast-developing new technology.

2. Learning from media history (e.g., TV started out as radio with a video image of the announcer speaking into a microphone), newspaper leaders decide not to repeat it this time around. They direct new-media R&D staff to design new online services that create original content and new utilities — things that are not possible in print but are online.

3. Fat and happy with enviable profit margins, newspaper companies’ leaders take note of the wave of Internet start-up companies in the late 1990s. Business development executives with technology experience are brought in from outside the newspaper industry to identify the most promising trends and start-up companies, and begin making acquisitions and/or significant investments, in a big way.

You get the idea. I do dread the day I read a similar “what might have been” about the broadcasting industry.

My friend Keith tweeted his surprise that I still write cheques (He’s British) and balance my checkbook. I write less than half a dozen checks a month and it would be easy to pay all my bills electronically.

I confess there’s something comforting (?) about the routine of opening the bank statement and reconciling it with my checkbook. Maybe it’s an age thing. I’m old enough to remember Diner’s Club cards and the introduction of ATM machines.

And while there’s precious little math involved in balancing a checkbook, it’s the only math I have/do these days.

But I think the real reason I cling to this anachronism has something to do with my perception of the “reality” of money.  The same reason I have never used a debit card and always keep a little cash in my pocket. I love PayPal and used it every few days. But a bank statement and my little money clip with a few bucks in it are the threads that keep money real, at least in my head.

Bonus reference: Who remembers counter checks?

NYT’s David Carr on The Fall and Rise of Media:

“Those of us who covered media were told for years that the sky was falling, and nothing happened. And then it did. Great big chunks of the sky gave way and magazines tumbled — Gourmet!? — that seemed as if they were as solid as the skyline itself. But to those of us who were here back in September of 2001, we learned that even the edifice of Manhattan itself is subject to perforation and endless loss.”

“Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.”

Hard (for me) to read this not feel a little … wistful… on behalf of the old guard. But Mr. Carr clearly sees the glass as half full.