I still read the print edition of the Washington Post every day, just like my dad did.  I rarely read the online version because I don’t want spoil tomorrow’s print copy (I check cnn.com now and then for “current” news, and generally assume that if something really interesting is going on I’ll hear about it quickly.)  When it comes to press consumption, I’m pretty old-school.

I have an underused Facebook account and I’m fairly active on Twitter.  I’m a heavy email user, light SMSer, and probably average phone caller.  I IM a fair amount, mostly with co-workers, and blog occasionally here and on viget.com.  When it comes to communications, I consider myself fairly savvy, but not exactly cutting-edge.

I opened the Post today to see, to my surprise, the Viget logo front-and-center on the cover of the business section. 

Not only is our logo clearly visible, but the caption reads “… at Viget Labs in Falls Church …”  For anyone who knows Viget, it’s immediately visible.  As a friend said to me today “you can’t buy that kind of exposure.”  True.  But with whom?  And to what end?

In addition to the print version, the article is available online.  In this version, though, Viget is much less of a focus.

The photo is cropped such that our logo is gone, and the caption has no reference to Viget either.  Anyone who read the article online wouldn’t even see a Viget reference until 1/2 way through page 2. That’s fine, by the way — the article is about Startup Weekend, not Viget.

Right after I read the article, I blogged about it on Viget’s Four Labs.  More than a dozen contacts who saw the article – some I hadn’t heard from in years — emailed me to say “congrats on the coverage.” 

One contact called and left a voicemail.  One contact wrote a “congrats” on my Facebook wall — a savvy web user, no doubt. 

No one contacted me via IM, SMS, or Twitter.  No one took the opportunity to comment publicly on the Viget blog (alas, comment-less posts are still somewhat common.) 

This activity is interesting to me because in parallel I’ve recently had several communications with people via direct messages in Twitter or private messages within Facebook that have caused me to say “why don’t they just email me?”  Presumably because they are not heavy email users.  Or maybe my email address is hard to guess.

From all this I developed this brilliant hypothesis: older people still read the paper in print, and they react to it by making phone calls and sending email.  Younger people read news online, and increasingly communicate on social networking sites and other non-email means. 

Also: print news is dying, but that’s nothing new.  Email is in trouble too, and for good reason. 

Online communication is a mess, exacerbated by things like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but it doesn’t have to be.  There is a solution that will allow us to break free from the chains of old email habits without fragmenting into dozens of disconnected platforms.  It will let us consume, collaborate, broadcast, and chat all in one, and will include fantastic history and search.  It will ignore traditional technical limitations and be modeled after real-world communications but still be intuitive enough for old email vets to transition effortlessly.  I predict, in fact, that it will learn from us automatically and be available before we even knew it existed without changing a single habit.  And I can’t wait.