There seems to be a faint aura of surprise in two stories today, one about Cablevision's purchase of the New York newspaper Newsday, and about the launch of a high-end quarterly newsmagazine called Dispatches. 

The first story seemed motivated to ask why a newspaper should command such a high sales price ($650-million) in an era when the obvious shift is to online news, and second story, about a new magazine called Dispatches, reports wonderingly that it's being founded on the notion that people want to read news analysis on paper and don't mind getting it just four times a year.

Perhaps there is something to be learned here: that contrary to popular  opinion, print media are not dead, dead, dead.

The story on the purchase of Long-Island-based Newsday concluded that newspapers will continue to be sold, although at lower prices. The sales will be driven by strategic needs, the story explained, with buyers offering lower and lower prices.

This is a logical conclusion considering the valuation of recent sales. About two years ago, newspapers were being sold at 10 to 12 times their cash flow; today, it's down to about 6.5 to 7 times their cash flow.

That conclusion supports the existence of rival bids made by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and tabloid rival Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News. Murdoch and Zuckerman wanted their advertisers to reach affluent Long Islanders, and they wanted to do that  by combining Newsday with their own New York properties, and the costs could be rationalized into profitability.

The founders of Dispatches, journalist and author Mort Rosenblum and photographer Gary Knight, say they're trying to slow down the breathless delivery of news that characterizes the Internet-based news providers. “We just thought we would go deeper and, when possible, closer, and deal with not so much the what and who, but the why and what can be done,” said Rosenblum, a former AP reporter.

There is something encouraging in both these situations. Conventional wisdom usually says the new ventures are mad, because the trend is against print.

But conventional wisdom is sometimes capable of a major error. Take a news-reporting trend over the past four years, say, and project it forward by another bunch of years and it will be relentelessly headed for the great newspaper graveyard. What the trend-watchers sometimes forget to ask is whether there will be a bottoming out in this trend; it's easy to predict a steadily progressing trend, but much more difficult to predict when the trend will run into a brick wall.

And it will. Just like all the other alleged victims of technology found out. Television didn't kill movies, the recording industry didn't kill live concerts, and streaming video won't kill TV.

This is not rocket science. The arrival of new technology on the scale we're seeing now is definitely going to change older technologies, and newspapers will change profoundly, but they're not likely to disappear entirely, despite what online evangelists say.

Obviously, Cablevision sees some sort of future in a Long Island newspaper that is not based on rationalizing its costs with existing properties, and the two journalists behind Dispatches are gambling people will want a less-frenzied diet of news and analysis.

They're both probably right. But whether they will make their particular ventures work will be specific to their separate approaches, how deep their pockets are and how patient their shareholders are. Not on what so many people insist is an inevitable trend.

They may or may not succeed. But their individual fates are not likely to provide us many answers. Ultimately, the publications that survive will be the ones that make the fewest mistakes.