Print is dead. I read that somewhere. Text is antique, at least according to the prophets of multiple media who can still string a word or two together. To hear it endlessly told, fragile paper and smelly ink are the last, stubborn obstacles to the shiny digital revolution.

There may be something in it. In a world in which its goofy founders can flog off YouTube as an online home movie exchange for £880 million after barely 20 months in business, and without once stooping to turn a profit, words on paper might strike many as beside the point.

Think of all the educated people you meet who are “too busy” to read. Think of Gore Vidal alleging that a majority of Americans are now functionally illiterate: how, practically speaking, can you argue with that? Print is dead and the dominant global literary form is blog-standard: millions upon growing millions talking to themselves. (See ianbell@notathometoanysod.com).

My laptop, because it always knows better than I, just took that last little joke to be an actual web address, and highlighted the thing in fetching blue while offering to make the necessary connection, without once asking if I minded. It, too, knows that print is dead. It will still turn keystrokes into words, if I really insist, but you can sense the meaning of its feeble little beeps. Wouldn’t I rather click to YouTube?

Not as such. Websites and search engines never seem to grant the complexity of information, meaning and intellectual experience I need. Perhaps the fault is mine. But computers are a pest, most of the time, and screens are bad for the eyes. The pretty pictures seem to lack texture and the reporting of the world – when not derived from one of those antediluvian printed things – is mostly facile, superficial, untrustworthy, or some permutation of the three.

Print is dead, but I cannot function, as a grown-up, without a newspaper or a book. Print is dead, but the useful content of the web-world still depends, mysteriously, on those who place words on paper. Print is dead, but not half as dead as some of its dedicated servants.

Anna Politkovskaya did not have much time to worry about the contemporary relevance of ink and pulped trees as a suitable medium in the new information age. The reporter for Novaya Gazeta’s task was to file and to stay alive. Her problem was that the former duty can make the latter impossible in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The 48-year-old Polit kovskaya persisted in writing about our valued ally’s slide towards autocracy, particularly in the brutalisation of Chechnya, and last weekend another nameless thug did the regime another favour.

Politkovskaya was the 13th Russian journalist to have been assassinated since the fall of the USSR. Her profile, not to mention her bravery, was more conspicuous than most, but her crime was familiar, her death almost predictable. She failed to keep silence, despite many threats and previous attempts on her life. Her reward – three shots to the chest, one to the head, in a lift in her own apartment block while a CCTV camera recorded the scene – was a murder of professional quality.

Those who plotted her death paid Politkovskaya the greatest compliment imaginable, though the fact is unlikely to console two bereaved children. Her words on paper were not “irrelevant to modern needs”. Her journalism mattered more to those who run Russia than any rebellious billionaire, opposition politician, foreign government, or patient democracy activist.

Thanks to an abundance of oil and gas, Putin’s regime can silence squeamish Western powers while Russia’s democracy becomes a joke. Thanks to a flexing of Kremlin muscle, the country’s broadcast media are tamed. But Anna Politkovskaya, refusing to shut up, was a real threat. People read and people believed: imagine that. She was a careful reporter: nothing more, and never less. Just words on paper.

In this trade, we expect to lose five or six dozen colleagues in what passes for an average year. War reporting, as ever, claims more than its share. These days, equally, naive young freelancers in search of a byline have been adding their blood, copiously, to the harvest. Iraq and the madcap war on terror have meanwhile inflated the general body-count: truth as collateral damage. But the killing of Politkovskaya is a reminder of a new twist to the old game. Journalists are being killed or intimidated while pursuing a lawful trade in their own countries, and for the sake of their own people.

The list is too long, and never likely to be exhaustive. Fearless journalism is unwise in Zimbabwe or Burma or Iran. It is ill-advised in China or Saudi, in Tibet or Indonesia. It is suicidal in North Korea or Syria. These states, and many more, have no real fears of foreign propaganda. As in Russia, home truths are the authentic, emerging enemy. Happy optimists once alleged that the growth of the internet would cause the walls of tyranny to tumble everywhere. As it turns out, no government has yet fallen to a blogger.

Why not? Perhaps because print must focus in order to function while the web is diffuse. Perhaps because those words-on-paper are imprinted with a kind of cultural memory, a thing of embedded, layered associations and meanings. Perhaps we understand the language within the language in a way that has become almost instinctual. We read the signs even as we read the words. Perhaps. Or perhaps the truth is less pretentious: one clear voice is preferable to Babel.

By all accounts, Orhan Pamuk doesn’t get out much. They say he spends long hours in an Istanbul apartment, avoiding people, smoking steadily, and writing endlessly. He has given his primary allegiance to print in a 30-year career that saw him win literature’s Nobel last week at a “young” 54.

The gesture by the Swedish Academy was “political”, no doubt, as enraged right-wing Turkish nationalists have alleged. Those who award the prize indulge the taste, from time to time, and why not? Art’s relationship with society, like freedom of expression, is political. Pamuk is deeply interested in both. Last year he found himself on trial in his homeland for “insulting Turkishness” and breaching article 301 of Turkey’s legal code. His crime was merely to mention to a Swiss journalist that the continuing official denial of the Ottoman genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, and of the state killing of 30,000 Kurds in the 1980s and 1990s, was bad for the country.

Like the Nobel, his trial – won on “a technicality” – made news around the world. That was just as well. Pamuk’s distress drew attention to the 80-odd Turkish writers and journalists persecuted for mentioning the unmentionable. Forty-five cases brought by nationalist lawyers are waiting to be heard even now. All involve the simple right to debate the truth. All depend on the peculiar potency of words on paper.

In a curious piece of timing, the national assembly of France was passing a bill of its own last Thursday as the Swedish Academy’s decision was being announced. If enacted – though that is unlikely – the proposed legislation would render denial of the Armenian genocide a crime, punishable by a year in prison .

Turkey has detected a barely hidden agenda – a desire to prevent its accession to the EU – and threatened retaliation. Even some of the Turkish and Armenian writers fighting for a true accounting of the 1915 slaughter have objected. Which country has told the whole truth about its imperial past, after all? Not France. And how is freedom advanced if anyone is muzzled?

That, of course, is Pamuk’s point. That was Politkovskaya’s point. Journalism, so often despised, defends freedom by its very existence. Art, so often abused or misused, illuminates the nature of that freedom. You can end up giving comfort to the propagators of ideas you despise: that’s the price, and the reason why a Turkish novelist or a Russian journalist earn their honours the hard way.

If print dies, the lone, essential voices die with it. Two thousand years of accumulated culture sink, unnoticed, into the Google swamp. Every truth becomes relative. If print dies – and who will then write the obituaries? – all that can remain, beautifully rendered, technologically exquisite, open to one and all, is undifferentiated noise. Sometimes, after all, a web is just a snare.