Interesting story on silicon.com about the death of newspapers as prophesied by Piers Morgan. Of course this is old news, made interesting by the fact Morgan - a former newspaper man himself - has finally latched on.
The stats silicon.com cites to illustrate the respective demise and rise of paper and the web are US figures which is a shame. Shame because that doesn't really show the full scale of this shift. The US audience is a strange one with a focus on local and broadcast news and a shortage of national newspapers (one if you count US Today... two if you count the New York Times... which I don't). So the web was always likely to throw a spanner in those unusual works.
The situation in the UK is far more interesting, not least of all because of the role the UK plays as the heart of the global media industry, both currently and historically.
Check out the latest ABC figures for the 'dead man walking' of the UK newspaper industry. September figures for The Independent show a 12 per cent fall year-on-year, taking circulation to a barrel scraping 220, 097 - just 5,000 off its all time low of 215,676, The Guardian reports.
The Guardian itself was down 5 per cent year-on-year to 348,878. Of the quality press the Telegraph (-1%) and Times (-2%) saw lesser declines, perhaps reflecting to a degree the prevailing political mood in the UK, but undoubtedly still in a downwards trend.
However, fear not for your favourite media brands because they are all doing great guns online. Figures from ABCe for example show The Guardian online has increased page impressions by around 36 per cent year-on-year, to an August total of 211 million.
The Telegraph meanwhile - hold onto your hats - has increased its online readership by a staggering 60 per cent year-on-year, closing the gap on the Guardian to hit an impressive monthly impressions audit of 158 million.
So of course the web is the future and paper the past, though I'm not convinced the latter will die-off in any our lifetimes - barring there being some very young readers of this site.
A more interesting question - and conclusion - perhaps is around how these titles are acquiring readers.
Are they overseas readers who value the world view of the UK press above their own? Absolutely. But they are also undoubtedly people looking for niche or particular subject matter from multiple sources. So an example might be somebody digesting a raft of stories, irrespective of source, about a specific sports club, movie or technology. And an overseas reader devouring the latest news on the English Premiership or the Apple iPhone may not even notice - nor care - whether they are reading the news from the Guardian or the Telegraph - a brand agnosticism those papers' core constituencies would once have thought unthinkable.
I have certainly spoken to a number of online journalists from the nationals who admit they are writing as much for Digg, Google News and RSS feeds as they are their papers' traditional audience. And it's clearly working as these major brands adapt to the online world.
But I wonder therefore if it isn't the value of the masthead that is more at risk as online replaces paper in this changing media world?
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