At the end of the day, Britain's newspaper executives discover that maybe the future is not so bleak, at the Newspaper Society's CEP 2006 in Manchester. Although the man from Tesco tells the newspaper industry some bad news.
10am: From the north and the south, the east and west, the great and the good of the regional newspaper industry have gathered for the Newspaper Society's CEP 2006 in Manchester's Midland hotel.
Organised by the Newspaper Society, The Circulation, Editorial and Promotions conference is an annual get together for the industry to swap ideas, present case studies etc etc about an industry many believe in crisis due to falling circulations and the threat of the internet - oh, and there's a knees up at the end in the form of a black tie awards dinner.
All the big names are here - Trinty Mirror, Johnston Press, Northcliffe Newspapers, and quite a few of the smaller players as well, including the North West Enquirer, the new paid for weekly launching in Manchester at the end of April.
Topics to be tackled include "using FMCG tactics to stimulate newspaper purchase" - which means can you flog your local paper to the masses as you would sell a fast moving consumer good - eg, a packet of Daz.
There will also be a session entitled "RIP editions" - which looks at why some papers are letting go of regional editions with little or no impact.
An exhibition with stands from companies such as Advanced Logistical Racking and Dawson News, the newspaper wholesalers, runs along side the main conference.
About 200 delegates are here and its proving more popular than anticipated - extra tables and chairs are hurriedly being erected.
12.15pm: Matt Harrison is talking about how easyJet and Primark have affected local papers. Matt, who is newspaper sales director, regional newspapers at Trinity Mirror, is giving a gutsy speech.
"I don't accept the decline in circulation is inevitable," but I do accept pressures we have to face," says Matt.
Fine sentiments Matt. Make sure you tell your boss, Trinity Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey, who made famous comments about managing a declining market a few years back.
Anyway, Matt's well made point is that companies such as easyJet and Primark have revolutionised retailing, and completely changed the way people shop, but newspapers are failing to take advantage of this.
He boldly argues what many regard as a dirty little sentiment - "treat newspapers as brands". It echoes an early talk by journalism professor Roy Greenslade about newspapers as brands, but takes it further.
Matt compares newspapers to FMCGs - marketing speak for fast moving consumer goods, which itself is marketing speak for packaged goods sold in supermarkets, such as washing powder.
Should local newspaper be sold in the same way?
Matt, who used to work for drinks maker Diageo, told of how that company turned around declining sales of Guinness and Baileys by getting into consumer's heads and finding out what they thought of the brands and how they used them.
While Matt was right to pose the questions he himself admitted that he didn't have the answers. But he got the audience thinking about what goes through the mind of a shopper when they went into a local shop or supermaket, and posed the question - could newspapers "interrupt" shoppers and get them to buy them?
Chris Pennock, the newspaper sales and marketing director for Johnston Press, takes this one step further. He thinks front pages should be made up of part journalism and part marketing.
"Maybe the day comes when editors don't have the final say when it comes to what the front page looks like."
This is greeting by silence, then a low rumble, some boos and a tinkle of nervous laughter.
"There you go, I have just lost half the audience," says Chris, who clearly enjoys a bit of a stir.
You have lost more than half the audience Chris, I estimate. And not just lost. Scared.
12.45pm: The man from Tesco is introduced and as one the room picks up its pens and notepaper. This guy is clearly important.
Newspaper sales in supermarkets are increasing and David Cooke, Tesco senior buying manager, news and magazines, is explaining what the giant retailer thinks about regional newspapers.
"We had £25m worth of regional newspaper sales last year and I am sure that we can do better," David says. So far so good. In fact this was an 8.58% rise in like for like sales from the previous year.
He reveals that 20.9% of Tesco customers buy a local or regional newspaper. "Looking at it another way, that means that 80% of our customers didn't buy a local paper," says David.
From the atmosphere in the room it appears that Tesco is a bit of an unknown quantity in newspaper retailing, but one that is becoming more and more vital.
Which is why there is a sinking feeling in the room when it becomes apparent that Tesco doesn't really care about newspapers, at least judged by the anonymous comments about newspapers that David relays from Tesco staff.
"Prime position in the front of the store but a really low margin" says a commercial director.
"Very complicated and too much paperwork" says a general assistant manager.
"Not part of any Tesco process or way of working" says a category director.
At least Tesco believes that the customer is always right, and that the Tesco customer seems to be demanding more and more local newspapers - even if to the annoyance of more staff.
3pm: This afternoon has been given over to the editor's forum and first up is Martin Lindsay, newish editor of Belfast Telegraph, and a successful one at that, as his is the only daily evening paper to put on sales in the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures.
This was partly because, last April, his broadsheet evening paper "crashed" as he put it, into the morning market with a Saturday compact paper.
Now the compact morning edition of the Belfast Telegraph appears Monday to Friday, followed by four broadsheet editions. The paper is compact only on Saturday. "It is quite complex but it is working for us," says Martin.
The editor is frank about editorial and the other departments working together to sell a newspaper - a controversial topic today considering Chris Pennock's earlier comments about editorial and marketing sharing the decisions about what goes on the front page.
"We haven't got that far but it's started," says Martin, who says he wouldn't have it any other way and that all divisions in the company are needed to sell papers.
He is blunt about the place of editorial. "It's no longer the island it used to be - it's not cut off from the rest of the business."
Nick Turner, the deputy editor of Cumbrian Newspapers, spoke out about how the internet had boosted the Carlisle News and Star.
In February last year, the News & Star website had 108,708 unique users. One year later, February 2006, and unique users had leapt up to 253,063.
But while Nick found the News & Star's website was booming, he did a bit of online research and found that local papers were completely missing a trick regarding the internet, particularly when it came to Saturday football matches.
Only 12 out of 80 local newspaper sites which had a local football team playing that weekend had any sort of online match report on Saturday, he found, while on budget day on Wednesday, only 12 out of 50 sites had budget news for their readers that day.
"This shows how conservative we are being," Nick told the crowd, "holding onto our content until the last possible moment until we put the paper out".
Only two out of 70 papers had any sort of blogs. The News & Star put a front page appeal on its website and now has nearly 30 bloggers, including one exiled Cumbrian blogger who left the region to escape the region's floods and got hit by hurricane Rita in New Orleans.
Three of the News & Star's bloggers now write for the paper.
"Get stuck in and use blogs to liven up your website and newspaper," Nick urged. "You need to be in it to win it - or are you going to leave it up to the BBC."
4pm: THE CAR PARK RACKETEERS is the page one splash on the Manchester Evening News (2ND Monday edition). It is a great story, about how crime gangs are raking in thousands of pounds by setting up fake car parks in the city centre and fooling visitors into paying for fake car spots - sometimes right in the middle of a pedestrian square.
MEN editor Peter Horrocks says his company now has 30 different media products for local readers, including an MEN Lite edition and a morning edition.
For him, the future is all about getting credible and trusted media products to readers when and where they want to receive them.
Thus Channel M, city TV for greater Manchester, which Horrocks says is a lab for the past four years, is about to launch on Sky digital on April 10. Channel M has worked alongside MEN for many big stories - one of its most popular clips was filmed by an MEN reporter at the funeral of George Best in Belfast.
The piece was certainly emotional, if crudely put together, and is still running on the MEN site and has attracted one of the biggest number of hits. But isn't this just a cheap way of getting content and doing a film crew out of a job? And at this point we should acknowledge that MEN is part of Guardian Media Group, which publishes this website. MEN is currently the focus of union anger over job cuts at the newspaper.
Meanwhile, veteran newspaper editor Bob Waterhouse is going the otherway and launching the most traditional of products, a weekly paper, next month.
The North West Enquirer will publish on a Thursday, cost £1 and aim to serve to serve an older AB readership in the region that extends through Cheshire, down into Wales and as far west as the Isle of Man, which as Bob says, is not part of the United Kingdom but is part of the north west. Does his plan have any chance of success in an era of falling newspaper sales and internet growth?
5pm: For a man who has recently seen the number of his editions cut in half, Ian Murray, the editor of the Southern Daily Echo, is a jovial man. We shall see why later.
Several years ago the paper, which serves Southampton and associated regions including the New Forest and the Isle of Wight, cut its six editions to four editions a day because stop and start print runs for each edition meant the paper was constantly and annoyingly late.
Circulation, which had been declining 1% or 2%, plunged 8% and the paper hurriedly went back to its old edition structure as readers made known their dislike of heavily localised news from outside their area.
But recently the Southern Daily Echo had to cut down to just two editions while presses were replaced -- for a whole three months. Each local edition was replaced by just two - a Town and County edition and a City edition.
"We held our breadth and waiting for what would happen," Ian said. "Ladies and gentlemen, nothing happened."
After three months circulation was so stable that the paper continued permanently with just two editions.
But what the paper did was put its best story on page one - no matter from what part of the region it came from. "Local may be local but at the end of the day it's your best story that sells your newspapers," says Ian.
You can imagine the cost cutters at Northcliffe Newspapers, with its big news today, and its rivals will be rubbing their hands in glee at this approach. It's interesting that the huge news that hit the sector today was so roundly ignored by most speakers today. Almost all the delegates had not absorbed the detail of restructure but it is sure to be a hot topic for discussion at the awards ceremony tonight.
The Wolverhampton Express and Star has taken the opposite approach to the Southern Daily Echo. It publishes 11 editorial editions in the west Midlands, changing 300 stories a day and many advertisers.
"Not only readers but local advertisers' needs are fully catered for," said Arthur Couchman, circulation director of Express & Star, based in west Midlands.
The approach has made the Express & Star the number one provincial evening newspaper but Couchman warns that no half measures will do. "The only jewel on our crown compared to all other media is our ability to gather and present local content."
5.30pm: Mark Challinor, the European president of Independent Newspaper Marketing Association is not only a former marketing executive with the Liverpool Echo, the Daily Mirror and Associated, but the guy is a qualified stage hypnotist as well.
Now managing director of Buzz Mobile Marketing, he was by far the most upbeat guy at the conference - and the one that knew the most about what is happening to newspapers around the world - from Melbourne freesheet MX going national around Australia to how Danish newspapers used 35,000 Danes in Thailand during the Asian tsunami to provide pages and pages of photos and news stories via mobile phones.
Mark said that the newspapers doing the best around the world were launching new products, making radical changes to their presentation.
"The winners are those that are combining print with the net and mobile," Mark said.
He pointed out that while the public expects everything on the net for free, they paid for mobile content and services. TV had learned this fact, witness text voting on programmes such as the X Factor.
His final appeal was for local papers to use their strengths: "You just have such a powerful, fantastic heritage, more than 40m readers and you are more trusted than any other brand and together you are just so powerful."
Mark left delegates and closed the conference with an image from the film Gladiator, when the fighters are in the amphitheatre surrounded by a pride of hungry lions.
"We can all die individually or we can all survive together."
Today's speeches will be available from www.newspapersoc.org.uk
