Alan Mutter finds "paywalls" scary. I don't. Here's why:

Meters are not walls. As I've said before: It's not a paywall. Meters selectively target users with a demonstrated high affinity for the content and leave everyone else alone. The (disturbing) demand curve that I discovered over a decade ago has proved to be a fundamental truth: A small segment of the local market with high civic engagement will use a local news site heavily. That segment values the content and can be induced to pay for it. The revenue, as post-newspaper local media companies are discovering, is real and significant, and can be used to fund much-needed improvements in content and services.

There is no typical consumer, and we shouldn't be targeting him or her. We have to stop thinking with 20th century mass-media models. The era of the single mass product is over. The "newspaper-y" journalism product has a selective appeal to a specific audience. It's not for everybody. Making a site totally free doesn't change that. To connect with the marginally engaged and disengaged potential audience, you need separate products designed to accomplish that goal. Those products generally will not satisfy the core engaged audience.

We can not persist with the notion that some way, somehow, we're going to create a digital version of 1965 where everybody sat down to read the evening newspaper. It's not going to happen. This is why we have a portfolio. This is why we have a mix of free and paid products, digital and print, mobile and tablet and desktop-targeted. This is why we have content designed for light readers and other content designed for committed insiders, some general, some niche.

It's not easy. But those of us on the audience side can look at the revenue side of the business and see that we are not alone. Our sales force doesn't just sell space. And they don't just sell multiple products or even multiple media. They also sell behaviorally, geographically and demographically targeted marketing, messages delivered across vast digital networks, search engine optimization, search marketing, and a lot more. Every sales conversation has to be built on a foundation of a needs assessment process that just didn't exist in the old world.

This is complicated. And I suppose it can frighten. But I'm not.

Continuing the "free AND paid" theme: Do Savannah, our weekly arts and entertainment section, just had a do-over. Effective today it's redesigned and expanded to 40 pages of expert coverage of arts, music, community, movies and food.

Print distribution continues to include all of the Savannah Morning News circulation, but we're adding more than 80 locations where you can pick up a free copy. We're also reworking the website and preparing a Do-specific mobile app, with more to come.

This "free AND paid" blended strategy targets Savannah's vibrant "creative coast" segment.

Most outsiders think of Savannah in terms of history and tourism, but it's much more than that. In about 35 years, Savannah College of Art and Design has helped transform Savannah's downtown area from a collection of vacant homes and dilapidated office buildings into a vibrant creative community centered around the world's largest arts school. It's not just art studios, it's film production, architecture, industrial design and other services.

There's a lot going on. In this month alone we'll have two huge music festivals (one the largest in Georgia) with hundreds of performances and the second-largest St. Patrick's Day parade in the world. And in case it all seems like too much booze and music, I should point out that last month's Savannah Book Festival featured more than 40 authors from James Patterson and Robert K. Massie to Al Gore. Savannah is a smart place to be.

Everybody's talking about paid and digital. But Sunday before last, we launched a product that's free, and in print.

Prototype page

Why? Because print still has an important role to play. Because it makes economic sense. And (there's a lesson in this for digital advocates) because one size does not fit all.

A key to understanding consumer media marketing is that different people have different interests, levels of civic engagement, and price sensitivity. A healthy product portfolio has multiple packages and prices of content and services -- including free.

Sunday FYI is a "selective market coverage" product that's delivered by carrier to non-subscriber households in key neighborhoods as a "reach extender" for the Sunday Savannah Morning News.

But it's not just an ad wrapper. We need readership, not just distribution, so some thinking has gone into the content. We're actually contacting residents and "selling" them the free product, so it has to be worth their time. They're paying, after all -- their attention.

And there's a digital connection. Page 2 of the Sunday FYI has a boiled-down version of the previous Sunday's big-hit enterprise story, with about half a page of select Web and Facebook comments.

It's a reminder that we do journalism that matters, and an open door to reengage in the civic conversation. The greatest enemy of journalism isn't change or economics. It's apathy.

In my new job in Savannah, I'm responsible for print as well as digital audience. It's been awhile since I last dealt with print -- I've been working on the digital side since 1994. A lot has changed since then. Today Sean Ruth, our production chief, gave me a look at this:

This is one of the three (yes, really) presses in the News building on Chatham Parkway. It's a manroland Uniset with a configuration that was new to me. In the old days, when "broadsheet" newspapers were actually broad, presses came in two basic configurations: single-wide (two pages wide) and double-wide (four pages). This one is three modern pages wide. With some magic involving slitters and angle bars, one of the pages gets routed away and slipped between the others at the folder.

This is a really nice machine that can print full color on every page at speeds of up to 80,000 copies per hour. But the part that impressed me was the computer technology that makes it economical to run.

Press operators wearing funny paper hats used to crawl around twisting knobs and dials adjusting ink and fountain solution and manually adjusting the registration -- the synchronization of the cyan, magenta, yellow and black printing units -- so color photos come out looking like photos instead of a Grateful Dead poster from the '60s.

It was an art. Now it's a science.

This press has a control computer that analyzes a PDF of page, knows the type of paper that's being used, figures out how much ink of each color should be available in advance, sets the flow controls digitally and starts up with usable copies after a few revolutions.

This is especially important for short runs, where waste used to be a big problem in offset lithography.

Color registration is automatically and continuously tuned by a system involving a video camera, a strobe light, and computer recognition of the image. The system reads tiny colored dots in areas of the page where you wouldn't notice them.

The results are beautiful.

The other two presses aren't used much these days. One is a Goss Urbanite, a single-wide press of the type that was used to print the first weekly newpaper I edited when I was 17. The other is the double-width Goss Metro, the type used for long-run newspaper printing at places like the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. They were once the kings of their respective hills, but seem clunky compared to the Uniset.

A lot of newspapers are getting rid of their presses -- including Morris papers in St. Augustine FL, Athens GA, Conway AR, and Topeka KS. But print still has roles to play in a digital world. High-tech printing centers like this one are picking up the work, providing higher quality, and operating as commercial printing profit centers.