Print journalism continues its decline and no one seems to have found a magic way to keep it viable.

Eye on Jacksonville attended a luncheon this week and heard a veteran reporter for a small local daily newspaper talk about the challenges.

He said he thought it was important for local news to be covered but he acknowledged that the huge capital cost of printing news and delivering it to people’s door is a major problem.

The paper currently is owned by Gannett, the largest newspaper organization in America, which he said is $1 billion in debt.

The local paper’s news crew is down to 22 people and now has unionized, like the Teamsters and teachers.

Currently, the union is demanding more employees and higher wages. Recently, it went on strike for a day to demonstrate its solidarity.

It was not clear exactly how increasing labor costs would help pay for what the union is asking but perhaps it has a strategy yet to be divulged.

Local papers such as the Daily Record and The Resident seem to be surviving without great difficulty, but they are specialized and don’t try to report everything that happens in the area.

The advantage print journalism once had over television is gone. The text of an entire 30-minute TV news show could be printed on one page of a paper that might contain 30 pages of information in all.

That advantage is reversed with digital information.

Since the advent of the internet, people seem to have found new ways to find out what they want to know. It generally is possible for them to transform it into print on paper but they rarely do in this digital world.

Print journalism quickly added the Web to its delivery, but never has found a way to make it produce the same revenue.

Purveyors of news and views must find a way to offer a product people will pay for, one way or another, or they will join the ranks of the unemployed.