Greatly exaggerated reports of the death of newspapers.

AFTER THE NEW YORK newspaper strike of 1962 had been running for a month of so, James Reston of the New York Times wrote a famous column for his syndication service that took the form of an appeal to Santa Claus:

   Please do what you can to get the papers back. I've
   been fielding the Times first bounce on my front
   stoop for 25 years and it's cold and lonely
   out there now. Besides, how do I know
   what I think if I can't read what I write?

This echo from long ago makes me envious of the pinpoint accuracy with which Reston's paper was delivered. Picked up first bounce on the front stoop. Gosh. To intercept the Australian so early in its delivery trajectory I might have to climb a tree, dive through the front hedge or slide under the car, remaining there, probably, until somebody responded to my cries and backed--very carefully--out into the street.

It also raises the question of what would be the reaction to and outcome of, say, Sydney's daily newspapers vanishing for a month. Who would miss them? How many readers would return once the papers were back? Evidence of steadily declining circulations and statistics about the number of people, including--if not consisting predominantly of--the educated and sophisticated, who do not read a daily newspaper, lead to the easy conclusion that such a prolonged blackout would see the end of the newspapers. This would be so damaging to civilisation as Sydney knows it that I can scarcely bring myself to contemplate such a catastrophe. But there's no serious reason to do so.

Examining my own changing habits at the excessive end of news consumption--fifty years as a journalist have, indeed, made me a junkie--provides pointers to the state and likely fate of the various means of news dissemination. A relatively early riser, I go before breakfast to the World Wide Web and graze on (usually) the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Drudge Report, the last an excellent tabloidish compendium of clickable-on headlines from all over. Plus a quick look at papers I've edited in order to toughen my moral fibre by seeing how well they are doing without me. Sometimes, especially if I am going out to lunch that day, I check the Hollywood Reporter to see how Mel Gibson's movie is faring in order to deride those who expressed little faith in it. If Rupert is up to something special, I check what the Wall Street Journal has to say about the likely fate of my savings. I also go there when Drudge draws my attention to a big Journal story. I used to call up the Times of London daily but it took to denying me access, unless I gave it money, to its best bits--well-written, intelligent commentary--so I am now only an occasional visitor.

The cricket scores, and so to breakfast.

At breakfast, three newspapers are there for communal enjoyment, two of them being broadsheets and therefore readily divided into sections for passing around. After the solitary half-hour at the computer screen the papers provide convivial relief, with a special liveliness characterising discourse when my wife and I breakfast alone, her views on politics and the arts often being strangely divergent from mine.

Every now and again during the day, if major events are happening, I switch on Fox, CNN of the BBC to taste a few minutes of their round-the-clock news broadcasts. I'm not certain if we have a radio in the house and I never turn on the car radio for fear of connecting with the baboon babble of talkback. Most evenings, if at home, I sample Channel Nine and the ABC's television news, plus Kerry O'Brien. Five minutes tells you whether it's a newsy day or not. Television is not a serious news source. It's good mainly for set-piece performances like sports and press conference spinning, stage-managed demos and cameos like Saddam Hussein coming out of his hole in the ground.

This conspicuous news consumption occupies me for one to two hours on an average day and costs me about $200 a month. Despite the skinflint nature of my patrons I am able to defray the expense with a modest amount of journalism, whose practice also provides me with a relatively respectable explanation for my news wallowing.

It is a far cry, as they say, from the days of my childhood, spent in a news-aware household that availed itself of all extant mass media. Reverent silence held during the seven o'clock radio news. My father read the sixteen pages of the local daily broadsheet from, it seemed, the top left comer of the front page to the bottom right of the back. We felt adequately informed and up to date. Close to tears, my father woke me from vibrant adolescent dreams to tell me Franklin Roosevelt had died. Who? When I went to work for the local paper, I brought home a free copy but my father ignored it. He was blessed with that character-forming combination of romanticism and paranoia that comes from long involvement in Labor politics and I think he considered the paper that was flung over the fence by a boy on a bike to be the only guaranteed authentic copy of the Marlborough Express. Who knew what tampering with the content of the specially-delivered paper might have been carried out by fascist forces, not necessarily excluding me?

It's the necessity of authentication that promises continuing long life for newspapers, I think. Despite my idiosyncratically discarding radio, my access to news is now so vast--and I haven't even mentioned Google, or blogs, or the gossip networks e-mailers develop--that no sparrow can break wind without my having the opportunity of learning about it. But did the bird actually fart or was that just the snap of a twig as it brushed past? On whose authority is the fart proclaimed?

My first inkling through personal experience that we were entering a disinformation and misinformation age came with the appearance in cinemas in 1999 of the most jaw-droppingly boring and god-awful movie of all time, The Blair Witch Project. It had been made for $US60,000--its production values suggested this might be an exaggeration--and eventually took $US248 million worldwide, including about $A50 of mine, since several hangers-on attached themselves after lobbying me to see this worthless glub. The marketing budget for the $60,000 movie was around $US25 million, spent on stirring up excitement on the internet through spurious word-of-mouth recommendation. It was a scam to make a bank of poker machines look like agents of St Vincent de Paul.

Recently one of my personal gossip networks circulated a letter said to have been written by a former private contractor to the occupation force in Iraq. It was packed with good news about oil flowing, schools and hospitals opening, comer stores flourishing. But then a member of the network clicked in to warn that last time he had seen this letter it had been from an army lieutenant colonel and that there was no telephone listing for the private contractor in the town in Nebraska he was claimed to have written from. Blair Witch pervades the net.

In the great communications revolution, news cannot be relied on as news unless it has an identifiable imprimatur. Floating loose, it is lies and propaganda until proven otherwise. That's why online versions of established newspapers carry virtually all the authority there is in news on the net.

GETTING A BROAD VIEW of declining newspaper readership is hard to do in Australia. The organisation that does the counting, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, is a service to clients--newspaper publishers and the advertising industry. Newspapers are reticent in their public admissions. The fact that all now engage in rather hollow boasting about their numbers in the latest audit having declined only 0.78 per cent against their rival's catastrophic 0.94 per cent indicates all is not well. I would deduce that the average daily circulation of Monday-to-Saturday metropolitan papers has dropped about 1000 a year for the past ten years--around 4 per cent for the decade. It's not a cascade but the drip is steady and not abating.

Patterns revealed by more exigent and widely promulgated research in other countries probably exist here. US newspaper circulations have dropped 2.5 per cent in the past tire years and only Italy and Ireland of the eleven nations of the (old) EU have had circulation gains in that period. Of the 11 million so-called AB citizens of Britain--that is, the well-educated, affluent top-drawer segment as classified by advertisers--nearly a third don't read a newspaper daily. In 1964 more than 80 per cent of American adults read a newspaper every day: now it's only 54 per cent. At a conference of the Newspaper Association of America in 2001, Philip Meyer, a journalism professor from the University of North Carolina, predicted that "by my calculations, the last daily reader will disappear in September 2043". Meyer was sort of joking. But John Bartolomeo, a media consultant, wasn't--which doesn't, of course, mean he is right--when he predicted that by 2010 only 9 per cent of men and women aged 20-29 would be reading weekday newspapers.

So, okay, people will continue to read newspapers, but only once a week, on Saturday or Sunday. Won't that do? I don't think so. That leaves six days for the torrents of counterfeit news, unsourceable disinformation and toxic rumour on the net, and the showbiz sampling of the news by television, to suffocate our synapses and pollute our store of knowledge. Accumulated experience of this will lead to widespread dissatisfaction. Maybe it already has. Audiences for broadcast television news are suffering a downward flutter. As well, those who consult the net for their news can stand only quick glimpses of what's happening because transmitted light from a screen is much harder on the eyes than reflected light on a printed page. Info Man cannot live by snippets alone.

With an imperative to make things happen fast for shareholders, newspaper publishers are turning to technology and marketing to stop circulation slide--neither, nor even both in conjunction, being the main part of the solution, in my opinion.

In the marketing sector, Fleet Street, mother of form over substance in journalism, has been pioneering tabloid versions of broadsheet newspapers. This is an idea from the island of Dr Moreau. Tabloids, seeking out the jagged and shiny in life and hitting hard with one dominant story on each page, backed (in the best papers) by crisply edited short bits, have powerful skills at getting words and images off the page into the reader's mind. They are politically influential at election time. The design of broadsheets makes them attractive to the roving eye and enables them to interest people in things they didn't know they were interested in. They convey a large quantity of information and shape opinion. The most likely outcome of the present marketing experiment is that the Brits will, before long, get only tabloids from Fleet Street. Just deserts? Arguably.

The most repellent technological proposal I have heard about is for the "personalised" newspaper (the print version of the take-your-pick promise of digital broadcasting). You let your paper of choice know the things you are most interested in and every morning there will thump on your doorstep a paper containing news tailored to your tastes. Your neighbour's copy will be significantly different. I have no doubt the technical capacity to do this is close. Every morning, Google, at my request because I see in it a constituency for my newspaper journalism, e-mails me all the substantial Western world headlines about "old people". It will do this for anybody nice. But the idea of a personalised newspaper negates the socialising benefits of mass media. It would sedate curiosity and make every man an island, if not have us recoiling from one another as if charged from opposite poles.

More acceptable is the notion of transmitting newspapers electronically and having the reader print them out at home. Some technical development is needed. With present standard equipment it has been estimated it would take two days to download the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Nor would anybody want a newspaper printed out a screen at a time, making it hall a metre thick on a quiet day. What's needed are facsimiles of pages laid out in traditional newspaper form, probably modified broadsheet, transmitted and then printed on a continuous roll on both sides of the paper, and finally cut and folded. Perhaps ironed and warmed for the upper classes. Digital compression makes this theoretically possible. A printed newspaper with online updates between editions would suit me fine.

But what's being rather overlooked in the present techno-marketing scurry is that people only pay to read newspapers for trustworthy and useful information. Newspapers that expect to attain eternal life as lighthouses amidst the roiling darkness of "data smog" (a fine coinage of onliners) will have to smarten up. Trust fades when papers pursue causes that aren't the readers' causes. The Australian's obsessive promotion of an unacceptable republic model comes to mind. So does the New York Times' year-long crusade against The Passion of the Christ, culminating in the almost demented assertion of its arts columnist Frank Rich that "orgasmic spurtings of blood and other bodily fluids" made it a "porn movie". Quite modest self-indulgences progressively erode the credibility of a newspaper--a commentator declaring: "The American government is dysfunctional," or a fashion writer speculating that the wardrobes of Australian Olympic athletes had been designed to make them look as if they came from countries that had not supported the USA in Iraq.

Newspapers also need to learn how to say what they mean. Journalistic writing can be taught, and is, as a basic course stream, in American postgraduate journalism schools. All sentences must be load-bearing. Empty chatter and pawing the ground are verboten. Cliche is to be shunned like HIV. Who will read on when they've already been there? At least fifty lashes for weasel words. Concern is "growing", alarm is "spreading"? What's the unit of measurement? Pixels? Ergs? Rems? "Observers believe ..." But who observes the observers?

Only the newspapers that get these things right will enjoy long life as authenticators in a possible combination format of online and print. Who knows? With help from information technology and entrepreneurial rather than salaried news gatherers, the Kalgoorlie Miner may, with the right frame of mind and set of values, eclipse the Sydney Morning Herald.