Many years ago, early in my press commentating career, I wrote a piece in The Guardian in which I scolded the public for failing to appreciate the effort, skills and thought that went into the publishing of newspapers. People appeared to take them, and us who produced them, for granted. It was a fairly typical (and admittedly arrogant) journalistic response to declining sales. It cannot be our fault that fewer people buy papers, I was saying, so it must be theirs.
It is always sobering to watch people as they read papers, and especially upsetting if they are issues you have been responsible for producing. They flick over the pages that designers have spent ages carefully drawing and redrawing with the specific aim of catching the reader's attention. They barely scan stories that reporters have taken infinite trouble to compile, having agonised over the use of this phrase and that quote. They barely glance at headlines that sub-editors have puzzled over, having chosen the one from a host of rejects that is felt to be the best possible five-word summation of a story or feature. They hardly glance at pictures that photographers have carefully composed at the moment the light was just right.
That's the print world in which we've grown up, of course. It is altogether less clear whether these professional skills are as relevant as they used to be. I have no doubt that reporting skills - the delving, ducking and diving - will always be essential. And I guess that reporters will also employ audio and video skills as a matter of course in future. As for those oh-so-valued arts of newspaper production, they appear much less useful as we adapt to papers on screen.
Though website designs are important, they are formats which require many fewer layout tricks to capture audiences. What counts is the content itself. And even that doesn't have to be as polished as the finalised version prepared for a newspaper that cannot be changed once it leaves the print plant. Web content can be amended continuously. Video material, no matter the quality, is often more informative than a dozen perfectly posed pictures.
All this came to mind as I mulled over the latest set of ABC circulation statistics that show, yet again, the continuing decline of interest in newsprint. As people get more used to reading news on the web it dawns on them that newsprint, whatever its virtues, is inferior to the internet.
This is clearly the case with former readers of popular papers. The masses are deserting them in their masses. Look, for example, at The Sun's sales. Despite the benefits of a price cut throughout the Granada region, its overall circulation is rapidly slipping towards 3m. And the Daily Mirror is likely to fall below 1.5m by the end of the year. The Sunday red-tops are losing readers even faster, with the News of the World and the Sunday Mirror down more than 4% in the course of a year, while The People goes on plumbing new depths, having plunged by almost 14% in 12 months.
The more serious papers are finding it tough too. No-one is safe from the move from print to screen, not the Daily Mail, The Times or The Guardian. All have recorded year-on-year losses.
I'm not denying that people are also switching to freesheets as well. It's obvious that the morning and evening giveaways are having a negative effect on paid-for readerships. But that should not blind us to newsprint's real enemy: the net.
Mind you, it's an enemy that newspaper owners have embraced with increasing enthusiasm. The race is on to find ways of raising screen revenue before the newsprint revenue runs out altogether. Guessing exactly when that will happen is probably an art rather than a science.
