Let’s face facts: if newspapers didn’t exist we’d have to invent them

The trouble with the web — apart from it being home to all sorts of bigotry, hatred and aggression — is that you have to pan through a lot of tedious material to find the interesting nuggets. Anyone can blog, true enough, but the flipside of being free is being free to be boring. Who cares what anyone else had for breakfast?

WE are an endangered species. There is an ‘r’ in the month, so it must be time to roll out that old chestnut about the writing being on the wall for newspapers. You know the routine: readers are dying, young people will only read for free, the financial model doesn’t work anymore. We have heard it all before.

Newspapers’ impending doom has been predicted since the first desktop computer was invented. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the last printed page will roll of the presses some time in 2043. When the office went paperless, the world was supposed to go newspaperless too. Neither has happened. Recent events, though, suggest the “old media” might need to take the techies’ argument a bit more seriously.