[The future] is still very, very robust. On the media investment side, there's so much activity now. The challenge is the costs - Paper, oil, ink are going up. On top of that you're going to have another postal increase next year. A lot of people are complaining about tough economies, and we've all seen this before back in the mid-90s where it got real tough and real ugly and the ones that survived are the ones who are creative and think out of the box and say 'what about this'. Everyone knows it's quite a challenge.

"First off, you have tremendous consolidation within all of these industries, particularly in film and television, and there are fewer opportunities in some of these areas but others have opened up, for example, in the online area. One of the most remarkable trends is that many companies are refusing to give employment contracts for a specific term to anyone but their very senior executives. The business has been so volatile. The average life span of a television or movie executive is 18 months. What that does, it increases the likelihood of executives that can give greenlight to projects are more …

History is full of tales of disruptive technologies, material shortages and the innovations they inspired. Most of these stories had happy endings, with technological change yielding remarkable benefits to humanity. But the current trajectory of print media, which seems to be hurtling toward a catastrophic ending, has dire implications for Western democracies. To set the stage for examining the sorry state of print media today, let's look at the consequences of shortages and technological revolutions over the centuries.

What will it take to be a media executive of the future? What are the critical skills in your DNA that will contribute to your ability to lead and win?

"We don't have anywhere near the backbone bandwidth we need in this country," says veteran analyst Stuart Zipper, senior editor of Broadband Business Report. "In two to three years, we will see some kind of crunch."

Roland DeSilva has spent 25 years working where media and money intersect. And so he has reason to feel confident about where they're headed. "The perfect platform for the foreseeable future will combine print, online and face-to-face," says the cofounder of New York investment bank DeSilva+Phillips LLC. "Over time, though, these will all morph into the media brand. By then it won't matter if the technical medium for any one aspect of the brand's representation is print, online or a hologram."

In February 2008, The New York Times ran a piece called "Pushing Paper Out the Door" with a graphic depicting a contemporary pulp-free living space that would liberate residents from clutter: "The Paperless Home." It looked pretty slick, boasting digital picture frames, e-books, flatscreen televisions and smartreaders on kitchen appliances. Though maybe, if you'll pardon the expression, good on paper, the image felt reminiscent of a wireless future promised in technology rags 10 years ago that has and hasn't come to pass.

All of us are fascinated by the future. After all, we'll spend the rest of our careers and lives there. Allowing for the uncertainty imagining tomorrow brings, there are some key factors that will help us thrive as marketing and media practioners in the future. Success will be aligned with how well we create products and services that resonate with what people need and desire at a fundamental human level. Our research at Denuo indicates that media and marketing companies need to provide three things to remain relevant and successful: access, participation and empowerment.

1. The first continuously published American newspaper was the Boston News-Letter, first published April 24, 1704. It reported such groundbreaking stories as the death of the famed pirate Blackbeard in a sensational on-deck fight. In 1761, the paper advertised a "Scheme for a Lottery" to sell 6,000 tickets at $2 each to raise funds for a new highway.

It should come as no surprise that media developed for the Web and mobile devices are dominant in China, which claims the world's largest Internet market, at 220 million users, and the largest number of mobile phone users: 500 million plus. Two of China's Web sites are regularly ranked by Alexa within the Top 20 sites globally - search engine Baidu and Tencent's instant messaging site QQ.com.