ABSTRACT
The 1990s brought ‘super competition’ to Fleet Street.2 The evaporation of the promise of the Wapping revolution was followed by the sustained decline of the British press. Most newspapers have in recent times experienced a fall in sales, a drop in readership and a cut in staff. Titles have closed, especially in the local and provincial newspaper market. This state of affairs has led some to speculate about the imminent end of the newspaper. They believe the newspaper might soon outlive its usefulness as a vehicle for the communication of news, information and entertainment: the Economist magazine in 2006 asked the question ‘who killed the newspaper?’3 Newspapers are facing more competition than ever before – from the twenty-four-hour TV news networks and new forms of mass communication such as the internet. A large proportion of younger people have ceased to read a newspaper and if they do it is on the screens of their VDUs or the pocket computers they carry around or their mobile phones. According to Rupert Murdoch,
[a] new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it. This new media audience – and we are talking here of tens of millions of young people around the world – is already using technology, especially the web, to inform, entertain and above all to educate itself.4
