Printed newspapers are with us for a while yet, and even the predictions of News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch are looking a little dated.

That's the view of The Newspaper Works media researcher Brian Rock, a speaker in one of the forum sessions which accompanied Australia's PrintEx2015 in Sydney this week.

The spirited defence of print media was welcome, notwithstanding that it came at a printing trade show from an organisation which tends these days to aggregate print and digital statistics into "audience".

Rock - who has a background in the advertising industry - says what we've been hearing about the death of newspapers has been overstated. And that there is "dire ignorance" and an underappreciation of how many people read newspapers.

There will be change, but change doesn't mean newspapers will vanish.

In a brief presentation, Rock criticised popular forecasts such as the now elderly Newspaper Extinction Timeline - which says newspapers will cease to exist in Australia in 2022 - dismissing it as built on "trends and guesswork"... and the prediction of News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch as out of date. Disaster is unlikely and a catastrophe is "extremely unlikely," he says.

Rock compares the scenario with that when disks replaced tape - CDs and DVDs introduced in the mid 1990s sounding the death knell for cassettes and VHS, although the latter were not overtaken until 2006. And here, replacement by the newer technology was a "no brainer" in that disks did what tapes had done, but better and with additional features.

"The printed newspaper is a different kind of experience, with digital newspapers complementing print," says Rock. "The relationship with technology is different."

Resisting the temptation for "chart-attack", he cites current statistics which show four out of five people have read a newspaper in the last four weeks. That's a newspaper of some sort, and Rock says that while his wife reads a local newspaper, he can't be bothred with it.

There's the recent Australian finding that people who advertise property for sale through a combination of print and digital achieve a better outcome.

And the suggestion that readership of newspapers on digital platforms will plateau, and may already have done so on desktops. Readership on tablets grew nine per cent year on year, and 16 per cent on mobiles, "but there will be limits to that," he says.

"We forecast that digital and print will intersect in five years."

Penetration of digital technology into households was "virtually unchanged" in five years, growing from 1.5 to 1.9 devices per household in the period, a stat which somewhat curiously - Rock told me it was because of the difficulty of tracking them - excludes smartphones.

And while different means of internet access may come - he jokes that he might at some time have as many as 17 - few would be able to use them all at the same time.

Back to the statistics: Of the people who "don't read newspapers", ten per cent are over 65, 18 per cent in the 45-64 bracket, 31 per cent in the 40-44 age group, and 45 per cent aged 14-29, "but I still think there will be a shift back as they get older and become more invested in the world," Rock says.

Of the future, he anticipates a continuing decline in the number of copies sold and size of newspapers; there will be a sharing of resources (such as that already happening with TV) and there will be closures and consolidation "for some time".

"Specialist newspapers including local newspapers - which are a freely distributed, intrusive media - will continue for some time, and the decline of big print newspapers will taper off. "Date from the US suggests that this happened there two years ago," he says.

World news is a different story, but "the more local you go, the harder (print newspapers) are to replace.

Most of those in the audience at Sydney's Olympic Park wanted Rock's optimism to be justified. And he said of the future of "big newspapers", we'll have a better idea in five years.

Peter Coleman