In general, it is better to use logging for any kind of debug output in a web app and never use print statements at all. Or use them in the form:
print >> environ['wsgi.errors'], "message to be printed"
It is best to get rid of sys.stdout by making it a copy of sys.stderr just in case.
If you do development on a UNIX server, you can have two terminal windows open, one to run Django and the second one to do
tail -f loggingfile
And you get pretty much the same effect as using print statements, but you can use the standard logging
module to generate the output, and in the production app, you just change the filter setting to not show DEBUG level messages.