If you wanted to branch out and start your own publication, how would you do it?

Unless you’ve been living in a ditch for the past ten years, your first step would be to start a website, right? Even I’ve championed the idea that new magazines and journals should start online.

But print isn’t dead just yet. And for a niche market, print’s a good marketing strategy.

In the name of full disclosure, I have contributed sporadically to Region’s Business, a political and business journal based in Philadelphia since its launch. When my first piece ran, I was ready at the keyboard to tweet the link to the launch edition. But there wasn’t one. The magazine, launched in August 2012, started off the old fashioned way — with a little start-up capital, ad buys, and paid subscriptions.

Editorial director Karl Smith always seemed one step ahead of the market. He moved seamlessly from various editorial roles in print to interactive media director at Calkins Media papers in Pennsylvania. When AOL’s Patch.com came calling, he hopped aboard to launch the hyper-local news sites as a Regional Editor outside of Philadelphia.

And now, among tablet saturation and folding weeklies, he was taking a business and politics journal to the presses. It was time to figure out how, and why, that was possible.

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In the latest Mediabistro interview, MSNBC host and New Orleans native Melissa Harris-Perry talks about the state of journalism and the decline of print. For her, the loss of The Times-Picayune is not just bad for the Crescent City, but bad for democracy, because “there have to be some spaces where we can say, ‘I believe that because it’s reported by that person.’” Below, an excerpt:

“I not only sometimes hear viewers’ angst about wanting journalistic reporting, I feel it myself as somebody consuming the news. I report and analyze what’s going on in the news, but I also want to know what’s happening in the world. For me, that angst is primarily about newspapers. I live in New Orleans, where we’ve lost our daily newspaper and don’t have reporters on the beat in our neighborhoods… When I think about [the decline in unbiased news], I tend to not think about it in terms of television news, which I never particularly watched, but print journalism.”

Read more in So What Do You Do, Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC Host and Tulane University Professor?

I’m not going to open up the whole “print is dead” can of worms, but I will point to a statistic I learned from Ken Doctor’s latest piece on Nieman Lab: Print ad revenue has faced 21 consecutive quarters of decline (year over year) in the U.S. That’s saying something. So, on a lighthearted and slightly tangential note, this is a list of five projects worth buying a newspaper for — and you can do them all while you read news on your iPad.

Newspaper gift bags

Everyone knows you can wrap a gift box with newspaper, but for those of you who want to go the extra mile, newspaper gift bags are an adorable and fun  little treat, especially when the gift is coming from a journalist. Said bags would be ideal for newsroom gift exchanges, the birthday of a journalist, or even as a desk decoration. Jessica Jones, a designer who blogs at How About Orange, has the step-by-step guide. Read more