Let's get to the point, I'm talking about the making and selling of newspapers. Two things must be said, I think.
(1) Nobody, but nobody, no meaningful actor on the British left has put out a serious document/thesis/whatever arguing that newspapers are all and the internet is nothing and it shall be that way forever, amen. For one thing, if you could find such a document, right now, it would be, yup, on the internet.
No one hypes newspapers. People do hype the internet. At the basic mainstream level people hype the internet as a way of denying agency. The Arab people did not make the revolution, Facebook did. It's cobblers.
No one should pretend there's some absolutist orthodoxy about paper sales they're bravely railing against. There isn't.
(2) The distributing printed word is time consuming, energy consuming and expensive. When people suggest "you're just interested in selling papers" I tend to reply, "of course I'm not. I'd rather someone else did this for me, but that's not going to happen". What can having a printed paper do for you? I am in a London branch of the SWP, there are two branches in my borough. In our branch we have one street sale, usually on a Saturday, two regular workplace sales and a few more irregular ones. In the course of organising these sales the branch brings a dozen to two dozen people into activity. The basic propagandism of a street sale is not everything, but it should not be underestimated. Amongst other things, the day-to-day opportunities for making Bolshevism, even in unionised workplaces, are slim. The sale is a chance to put your ideas to some kind of a test.
In the course of regular, hum-drum activity, like meetings and sales, the branch can accurately estimate who can be counted on, who can do what and to what likely effect. I'd say there are 20-30 people regularly active in this branch during an average month, modest compared to our ultimate ambition but hey-ho... We can only know this because we ask people to complete regular, horrible, abstract drudgery, actual physical tasks.
The internet can't do this.
