It’s a saw that has seen plenty of action recently as pundits and press wallahs engaged in a millennial bout of navel-gazing about whether newspapers can survive in the age of the internet. “For more than two centuries, newspapers have proved themselves to be brilliantly adaptable in the face of competition from whizz-bang inventions,” wrote Sunday Business editor Jeff Randall in a fairly representative broadside. “I’d wager all the tea in China to win a brass Zak that come January 2100, newspapers will still be bright stars in a greatly enlarged media firmament.”

By now the other arguments are familiar. The “nothing to worry about” brigade invariably point to the many powerful advantages of dead trees. They are portable, far easier to read than a screen and much cheaper than a computer. As Tim Jackson, the journalist turned multimillionaire founder of QXL (the net auction site) puts it: “The technology of something that weighs very little, doesn't require a battery and can be read in all lights is pretty terrific. If a newspaper was new technology we’d say ‘wow!”’ The “sinking ship” contingent counter that the net has some very compelling structural advantages over its 500 year old rival: its immediacy, its searchability, its interactivity, its ability to deliver sound and video as well as text, its relatively low production costs. And now that the long heralded generation of mobile phones offering internet access has arrived, even the old riposte that “you can’t read a net newspaper on the bus” rings hollow. Why, they ask, would anyone choose to wait 12, still less 36 hours after a football match to read a printed report when they could access the same report, along with video clips of the goals, on the net within minutes of the final whistle? Why would anyone in a fast moving area like finance be willing to wait 12 or more hours to read a market sensitive story when they could get it on the net almost instantaneously?

If you were in any doubt about the direction the wind is blowing, argue the sinking shippers, you only have to look at the dismal statistics on newspaper reading by a generation that has grown up in front of the computer screen. Roger Green, managing director of EMAP New Media, the magazine group’s online subsidiary, has little doubt what impact this digital generation will have on the newspaper industry: “In 10 years’ time... the only people reading broadsheets will be old folks,” he predicts. So will the presses continue to roll? “Well there will always be the annual, won’t there. The World in 2030, that sort of thing.” A brief survey of who’s lining up on each side of this argument reveals an unsurprising but instructive fact: the “nothing to worry about” brigade is made up largely of journalists; the “sinking shippers” are more likely to be business or technology types. This division reflects the fact that the fate of newspapers almost certainly has more to do with their very particular (and frequently precarious) economics than the pros and cons of a new medium.

As The Economist put it recently: “Newspapers feel like a natural feature of the landscape, but they are no more so than canal boats or smokestack factories. Like them, they are the product of a particular stage of technology. A newspaper is a bundle of goods and revenue streams brought together to amortise the cost of a printing press, and to pay for newsprint and a distribution network.” Put simply there may continue to be a sizeable portion of the population who still want to read newspapers, but in five or 10 or 20 years the sums for this particular bundle of goods and revenues might well not add up any more. The biggest impact on the economic viability of newspapers is certain to be a widely predicted migration of classified advertising to the internet. Pretty well everyone agrees that a sizeable proportion of this market will go online quite simply because classifieds work much better on the net and can be produced significantly cheaper than in print. Even those most sceptical about the journalistic potential of the net accept it does classified advertising better than dead trees. Newspaper executives who have cheerfully toughed out the vicissitudes of bloody price wars blanche at the sight of projections of the scale and pace of this cash-drain.

So it’s worth considering what might happen when the first port of call for a job-hunter or a house buyer is a website rather than their newspaper. Plainly, the first effect will be to blow a multi-million pound hole in the budgets of most UK nationals, the precise size of which will depend on the proportion of each paper’s revenue generated by classifieds. (According to the Advertising Association, classifieds account for 12 per cent of national newspaper revenues and 51 per cent of regional newspaper revenues.) The migration looks particularly threatening for newspapers like The Guardian which have an unusually high proportion of classified revenue thanks to their success in dominating recruitment niches. But one of the many dark secrets of journalism is that a sizeable proportion of readers buy their paper as much for the job, or flat or holiday ads as for the news, or crossword or favourite columnist. So we can reasonably expect a slump in circulation too. And suddenly the picture is beginning to look rather grim: with falling revenue and circulation, our only way of squaring the circle is to increase cover price, but that pushes the circulation down further, reducing even our display revenue, and so on. It’s easy to see how this vicious circle could lead either to a future as a very high price niche publication (_3 is not unimaginable) or a decision to stop the presses for good.

Leisure

Papers that hope to keep their presses running will have to think very hard about what kind of product might persuade readers to part in reasonable numbers with a sum four or five times the amount they grudgingly spend on their newspapers today. Smart newspapers will recognise that spending huge amounts of resources supplying coverage of events and stories that everyone has access to simply doesn’t make sense in a world where this kind of news has become a commodity rather like stock prices or racing results. Sure The Daily Telegraph’s account of a particular court case may be turned a little more elegantly than the BBC or wire version of the same story, but when a good proportion of the paper’s readers have read the story online more than 12 hours before the Telegraph hits the newstand, will this marginal difference count for anything? John Katz, the strident US media critic (and no relation) is bemused by the way in which American papers have failed to respond to the dramatic changes in the news landscape. “When you put a story on the front page that’s been on the net 24 hours before, you might as well take out a full page ad and say ‘We’re useless.’ In an age where the Starr report is distributed to 55 million people within hours you still have hundreds of people sitting around waiting for press briefings. Newspapers have completely failed to understand that we are all reporters now.”

If newspapers do have the courage to change their print offerings radically even as they mount their tentative forays into cyberspace, the effects could be distinctly refreshing. How much better if a paper assigned its precious reporters to the valuable business of breaking stories, rather than rehashing ones that most of its readers had seen or heard elsewhere. The fundamentally dishonest practice of “top and tailing” wire copy to look as though it has been produced by a newspaper’s own correspondents would be the first, unlamented casualty of the pressure to look to our strengths. It is easy enough to envisage several other areas in which the surviving newspaper of the 2020s might be different from the one we are familiar with today. Andrew†Brown, the New Statesman’s internet columnist, has argued forcefully that it’s not likely to employ anything like the battalion of staff foreign correspondents it does now. With most of the foreign correspondents’ sources (i.e. local newspapers) directly available on the net, he says, “it will become harder and harder to justify the considerable expense of a foreign bureau when it could be replaced by a fast web connection and the occasional air ticket”

Instead, the successful newspaper will have concentrated its resources on the things it can still do that the net can’t offer: fine writing at length, for instance, or dramatic presentation. And there will be plenty of space for this “high value” content because we won’t need all those boring articles that the classified advertisers demanded or the football match reports that are hopelessly out of date long before the presses even begin to roll. Instead of running pages of raw information like TV listings, we will concentrate our efforts on the more useful business of guiding our readers through the forest of information to which they now have direct access. In a 100 channel world there’s no point trying to tell people what’s on, only what’s worth watching.

Dispirited

Two years ago, brimming with ideas for developing The Guardian’s presence on the net, I had a very depressing conversation with one of my opposite numbers on the New York Times. As I burbled on about the importance of providing a “Guardian take” on the world, he cut me short to tell me that the busiest part of the New York Times website was a “raw” feed from the Associated Press. Thankfully the direct feeds from both AP and PA that appear on The Guardian site, like many others, haven’t quite achieved the same status on The Guardian’s News Unlimited site, but The Guardian’s head of new media, Simon Waldman, regularly stuns gatherings of journalists by informing them that our interactive crossword attracts more visitors than all our columnists added together. We newspaper journalists shouldn’t be too gloomy about the apparently low regard in the online world for the things we do best. As screen and printing technology improve there will be ways of doing newspaperish things in more compelling ways, but for the moment we should be thinking about how to harness the clear strengths of the net to complement our print offering — and to keep upstarts from walking away with chunks of our business.

Over the next few years the success with which newspapers adapt to the new medium will depend to a large extent on how well they grasp two key facts. The first is that the competitive landscape in which they must fight for survival has changed forever. Not only does the net throw newspapers into direct competition with established players (like the BBC) whom we’ve never seen as straightforward rivals, but a host of upstart specialist publishers are now picking off the consumer niches we so successfully aggregated in print. Just look at the plethora of specialist sports sites which have largely crowded out the once formidable sports offerings of newspapers. A quick survey of the competition from news giants like the BBC, CNN and MSNBC, meanwhile, will quickly sober up the newspaper executive who dreams of building a rolling news site with global ambitions.

The second key fact, and one that newspaper types are likely to struggle with, is that the net is genuinely a two-way medium rather than the one way variety with which we are familiar. In short that means the success of any site may depend as much on the content you can get the users to produce as the content you, as publisher, bring to the party yourself. I learned this lesson in the early days of the development of The Guardian’s websites. When we launched a successful football site back in 1997, the busiest part of the site was the heaving bulletin board where users gossiped (to put it politely) about the latest transfer news. It may have been dispiriting as a journalist to discover that most users preferred their own wretched gags about Manchester†United to David Lacey’s elegant prose, but the idea of readers entertaining themselves is a finance director’s idea of heaven. For now all that is certain about the future of newspapers is that nothing is certain. It is possible, though, to identify a few of the imponderables that might help to decide their fate. How much classified advertising will move to the net and how quickly is the most obvious. (So far the only evidence of an actual falloff in print classified has been a widely reported drop of between eight and 15 per cent in recruitment revenue at the Los Angeles Times between the end of 1997 and the last quarter of 1998.) Can the techies and ad men make advertising work on the web or will its relative ineffectiveness preserve the value of the print display advertising that newspapers desperately need if they are to stay afloat? How easy will it be to access and read newspaper type material on the new generation of net-empowered mobile phones that look set to be commonplace within a couple of years And will scientists find the holy grail of publishing technology, an ultra-slim screen that mimics the characteristics of good old paper?

Meanwhile, it’s hardly surprising that everyone’s hedging their bets. As Peston puts it, describing the Financial Times strategy: “We are redefining ourselves as a company which invests in journalists who get stories. At the moment we are agnostic about whether that information is put out on paper or on the net.”