If you're looking for fresh evidence that print journalism is alive and kicking, check out Rick Edmonds' recent column on how newspaper company stocks did in 2013.

The short answer: Surprisingly well. Stock prices at many of the the biggest newspaper publishers rose more than 60 percent from 2012, when share prices rose by a quarter to a third. That's two straight years of solid, even impressive growth.

For example, Gannett was up more than 64 percent over 2012; E.W. Scripps 100 percent; The New York Times 86 percent; and Lee Enterprises a whopping 205 percent.

Edmonds points out several reasons why investors looking at newspapers like what they see. First, and most obviously, is the fact that newspapers make money. That's not something you hear very often, but it's nonetheless true. In fact, the majority of papers are profitable.

Granted, newspapers generally are much smaller businesses than they once were, and no longer enjoy the 30 percent-plus profit margins of a decade or so ago. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway investing firm has bought several dozen papers in recent years, and he's said he expects profit margins of about 10 percent. That's a huge drop from the glory days, but compare that to the oil industry, which often draws fire for its enormous profits, which are typically well below 10 percent.

Moreover, with digital advertising proving to be less lucrative than once hoped, most newspapers still reap the lion's share of their revenue from printed display ads.

Edmonds says investors also like the fact that publishers are exploring new revenue streams, including something I've written about a lot - paywalls. Most papers, Edmonds points out, "have shown solid circulation revenue gains of 5 to 10 percent as they have introduced paid digital subscriptions and increased the price for print + digital combinations."

Indeed, in 2013 The New York Times started getting more money from its paywall than from digital advertising. This represented something of a paradigm shift from the traditional business model employed by newspapers, in which most revenue came from ads, as opposed to newsstand sales or subscriptions.

But the idea of subscribers paying one price for both the paper and access to the paper's website, as done at the Times, seems to be working, and working well. It's a formula they've been using for years at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Interestingly, Edmonds notes that print's online competitors, including sites like Huffington Post, have not proven to be the financial powerhouses some predicted a few years ago. HuffPo has yet to turn a profit for parent company AOL, which in 2013 was also beleaguered by the failure of Patch.com.

As stock analyst Ben Schachter told Reuters, "Going forward, things like The Huffington Post ... will have to show they are real businesses and profitable. I've been a broken record about it: Can they make content profitably? Up until recently the answer has been 'no.'"

Of course, for years the digital zealots have been telling us that newspapers were doomed, and that journalism's future was online and only online. Freed of the enormous expenses associated with printing presses and distribution networks, digital news outlets were more efficient and would naturally be more profitable, they argued.

How ironic that, two decades into the Internet age, most newspapers aren't just profitable, they are in some cases more profitable than their digital counterparts.

As for those predictions of print's demise, Edmonds has this to say: "It seems likely that the papers and their parent companies, perhaps shrinking still more, will survive for at least the next five years."

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