Futurologists now predict with increasing confidence the end of the paper as we know it. In their world of information technology there is no place for the newspaper, printed on paper, arriving once a day.
Why would anyone want such a product, when there will be news updated, hourly, nay, by the minute? Why would anyone want to open a newspaper, when at the click of a mouse they can have a river - more, an ocean - of information on the Internet?
The newspaper industry, the market analysts say, is a "mature" one. Generally circulations are falling, and every innovation that comes along has to be implemented, whatever the cost, in order for a newspaper merely to stand still.
To save lovers of newspapers from total depression, there is Jeremy Tunstall, the professor of sociology at London City University and a long time, writer on the press. Newspaper Power is not an ironic title. The newspaper, Professor Tunstall tells us, remains powerful. With the television "neutered in line with consensual public interest", it is the newspaper which has retained its prerogative to bias the news and slant the comment.
"It is the newspapers, not television, which go for the politician's jugular. Typically it is a newspaper which first spills the politician's blood; only then does television swoop in for the action replay."
If newspaper executives worry about the recent pattern of semi regular newspaper reading, the same is true of television. But those who are reading newspapers are reading much fatter ones.
Leaders in society read newspapers. In most democracies newspapers set the agenda. Those who have to take major decisions affecting all our lives start the day with the newspaper, not CNN or breakfast television. It is the words of top columnists and specialist journalists that politicians will ponder over. Politicians might feel that television is the only way to get to the voters, but the newspaper is the way to get to the politicians.
Jeremy Tunstall has been writing about the media and in particular newspapers since the late 1960s. His seminal work, The Westminster Lobby Correspondents, published in 1970, still stands as one of the most important studies.
For this book he has relied on interviews conducted with editors and journalists in the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1990s. He gives a unique picture of the changes in British newspapers, rather than the over simplistic story offered as a pre and post Wapping analysis.
There are some problems with the material, possibly due to its being gathered over the years for different purposes. At times comparisons are hard to make. However, in other areas there is genuinely important information. Women are still under represented among the newspaper elites on 20 per cent. Professor Tunstall shows how the popular press has cut back on foreign news, with the reduction - in foreign correspondents from 41 in 1965 to six in 1990. In contrast, the broadsheet press has increased its numbers from 70 to 100.
He describes the rise of the journalist stars, as well as what calls the "reserve army of unemployed or underemployed journalists. "Clearly the recruitment of journalists to national newspapers was becoming more like the recruitment of actors. Also increasing the total body of resting or aspiring journalists were the products of a hugely increased number of, university courses in journalism, media studies and communications."
Tunstall has also identified a new type of editor, which he calls the entrepreneurial editor, one who is closely involved in the business of running a newspaper as well as the editorial content. This new editor contrasts with his predecessors, the editor manager, who edited for a powerful owner, and the "sovereign" editor, a man of letters, who was distant from the news and the staff in favour of the leader page.
However, while Tunstall holds that leading newspapers will continue to be extremely powerful, in Britain and in comparable countries, there are some worrying trends. The British press is partisan and right wing. At one level, it is argued, they are subsequently more interesting and more engaged than radio or television. However, negative coverage of those out of favour with the media elites has contributed to the negative views which the British public holds about the reliability and honesty of both its newspapers and its journalists.
However, as yet, there is no sign that this has hindered the power of the press to define events, to remake the Royal Family as a soap opera, to push the power of the opinion column, and possibly most importantly of all, in terms of its own existence, to use its political muscle to define the debate about the future of the media itself.