TechCrunch surfaced this YouTube video this morning, a 1981 KRON news report on the San Francisco Examiner efforts to deliver its news online, calling it “pure gold.” That it is.

There’s much to enjoy, especially the “Anchorman” production values, but my favorite part comes when online newspaper reader Richard Halloran (who “owns home computer,” the KRON Chiron helpfully tells us) says what he really likes about getting his news online is having “the option of not only of seeing the newspaper on the screen but also optionally we can copy it . . . onto paper.”

As new media evangelist Clay Shirky told the Guardian in an interview earlier this month:

The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press – high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication – is over. But will the New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.

For the record, David Cole, the Examiner staffer interviewed in report, now runs the Cole Group, which publishes a newsletter on the newspaper business and also offers consulting services for publishers, helping them in “acquiring new technologies and . . . running their businesses more effectively.”