To be clear my mom was on the right side. The publisher was on the "threat" side.
The only news organizations that both have had a print product and meet your latter description stopped printing because they'd squeezed all of the profit out of it that was there to have, and their "smaller but rising revenue" from their online operations are all that remain. Until you can point to an online business model that is more profitable than print, preserving print and its attendant profits was clearly the right strategy.
The point was: THEY WERE on the forefront of new technologies. OCR was the 5th newspaper online (after Mercury News, SF Chronicle, NY Times, Detroit Free Press).
And I don't think you understand the cost of print journalism. Print journalism might be more profitable if you have an economy of scale to support is infrastructure, but even in 1999 the display ad and classified business was waning to the point where it didn't break even on a single property. Only in aggregate for OCR's parent (Freedom Communications).
And lets not even talk daily subscription numbers, which were on the decline starting around the same time.
Newspapers followed a similar, albeit slower arc that the music business has, especially the recorded music business. A lot of the same hubris included.
The print newspaper I worked for is still limping along on its print revenues. If the OCR wasn't making money on print ads, how did it stay in business?