Tribute was actually joking about flat-panel displays. Traditional print publishers have been hearing for the past 30 years that the public would someday forgo ink-based media for pixels.
Consumers read print.
But digital technology became more refined during the late 1990s. And traditional publishers attending Seybold SF 2000 found themselves at the dawn of an uncomfortable age. The faithful learned that a convergence of GPS, cellular, PDA and Internet technologies would create new advertising opportunities for publishers. They learned that the Web's powerful ability to monitor consumer tastes would allow publishers to hone tailored pitches down to a hair's-breadth, and then charge more fortargeted ads. And they learned that in the future, publishers might be able to charge subscribers a pittance for content - sort of like the old days, when each reader accounted for a miniscule portion of a magazine's overall advertising revenue.