A leading advertising figure issued a bleak warning to newspaper editors and publishers at the WAN conference - reach out to the modern consumer or your newspapers will become extinct.
Mr Hans-Peter Rohner, of the Swiss media giant, PubliGroupe, said the very existence of certain newspapers was at risk unless they learned how to make themselves more relevant. He said falling circulation figures and lower advertising revenue in 2002 were not just "blips" that would soon be corrected.
"Something more profound is happening than just a recession," he told the delegates gathered in the RDS. Mr Rohner's company specialises in print and Internet advertising and he said his contact with advertisers led him to believe that newspapers were in danger of falling behind other media.
He said while occasional downturns in advertising revenue were normal, the events of recent years were of a different order. He said many advertising agencies were experiencing their first major slump.
He said be believed 75 to 80 per cent of the lost revenue was recoverable, but the other 20 to 25 per cent was not going to come back because of structural problems with the newspaper industry and a shift among advertisers to the Internet.
"This is the first time since world war two we can observe a truly global downturn in our industry," he told delegates. He said this was the reality "whether we like it or not".
He said virtually all markets were experiencing circulation falls and readers were getting older. He said the way to tackle these problems was by adopting "integrated strategies", finding partners and outsourcing parts of newspaper operations which could be done by other companies at lower cost.
He asked delegates to consider the "new reader" who was evolving in the first decade of the new century. He said this reader was unpredictable, had multiple needs and accessed the media in multiple locations.
He said this reader wanted news on a laptop, on a mobile phone, on a computer screen, on the radio, on a television, all depending on the time of the day. He said while the new reader was mobile and unpredictable, that reader still wanted a "reliable source" for news and that was where newspapers could find their place.
He said there were three ways to deal with current market conditions. The first two involved hoping the downturn might go away, or adapting the existing product. However he said these were unlikely to work. "Addressing the market situation as it is," was the best approach, he said.