I cannot understand why journalists continue to call me a doom-monger whenever I point to the undeniable decline of newsprint newspaper circulations. It's a fact. It's reality. It's what is happening.
Even more farcical are those commenters who urge me to become more positive, to act as a cheerleader for papers. This is plainly absurd. Surely no-one believes that by my denying reality the situation will somehow change for the better.
For the record (once again) I love newspapers, ink-on-paper newspapers. They have been my life since I was 17, some 44 years ago. Doubtless the drivers of horse-drawn coaches loved them. My father loved steam trains. But love is beside the point where technological advance is concerned.
All I am doing is trying to record reality and, on the basis of that reality, attempting to both understand it and predict what is likely to happen in future. This has persuaded me to become a digital revolutionary, because I sincerely believe that the future of news-gathering and news transmission will be online. It does not make me a hater of newspapers.
I raise this because of comments on the holdthefrontpage site about my latest analysis in the London Evening Standard about the decline of regional morning and evening papers.
This was, in fact, an attempt to explain that the decline predates the internet. There are social and cultural factors that have turned people away from buying regionals. Indeed, I was only scraping the surface. Surely journalists should want to understand why people are not reading what they write?
They can blame owners and the City if they wish. They can also blame the flight of classified advertising to the net (and the consequent erosion of the business model that has sustained papers for 150 years). But I would also like them to consider other reasons for reader apathy because, unless they are understood, they cannot be addressed.
And unless they are addressed the content that will eventually appear online will fail to win a new audience. That is not doom-mongering. It is me, in my own small way, trying to stimulate a debate that may well help the coming generation of journalists (and owners and managers) construct a positive and successful editorial agenda.
