This weekend at the Forbes Online Brand Leadership Forum I had the opportunity to once again hear the entertaining Jeffrey Cole speak. Cole, who heads the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, offered his view of where media is heading.

He believes that all media will survive, however, their businesses will all shrink in the wake of digital platforms. Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer, backed this up with his own data showing that radio, b-to-b media and newspapers all saw flat to almost no ad revenue growth over the past several years.

Cole cited the rising eco-friendly movement as a critical factor in the decline of print as a viable medium. He predicts that as people become more aware of newsprint's environmental impact - everything from the energy required to run presses to the gasoline the trucks consume and, of course, the paper itself - they will rapidly ditch print in favor of going online. As he puts it, a newspaper reader dies everyday and is replaced by an online user.

This resonated with me. Although I am in the minority, I have recently transitioned nearly 100% to a "media green" state.

This decline of print, however, might be gradual. USC asked (PDF) Americans who read the print editions of newspapers if they would miss it if it ceased to publish. While more than half of respondents (52 percent) expressed some level of agreement with this question, 27 percent disagreed.

Regardless of the pace of change, I do believe that physical newspapers will be hard to come by in the next five to ten years. Ask anyone with an iPhone how it has changed their online news experience and you will get an earful. However, the web is a different animal than print and it has required newsrooms to change.

Cole was optimistic about the future of newspapers. For the first time, he posits, they have a real shot at competing with TV on breaking news, sports and financial news.

For example, USC found that users expect online sports scores to be no more than 30 seconds behind the actual score. This dynamic is allowing SI.com to compete with ESPN, something it could never do when both were solely terrestrial brands.

As Cole says, no media ever dies - it just changes with the times. Newspapers seem to be on the right track, even as the web and the eco-friendly movement erode their mainstay, the almighty print edition.