Demise of the dailies

Arecent trip to London and Rome brought home how precarious the future of newspapers is in Europe, particularly in the capitals where commuters are inundated with free tabloids. Glancing around at fellow passengers on the London underground, few were reading ‘normal’ newspapers, but every other person was flicking through freebie Metro — found in most European capitals — or sister-paper London Lite. Light these newspapers (if you can call them that) certainly are, all celebrity gossip with a splash here and there of local news; it was as if Britain were in no way involved on the international stage, or in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rise of these dailies has hit the national newspapers doubly hard, struggling as they are for advertising in the midst of an economic slowdown while trying to retain a readership in an era of immediate news. This has had a direct impact on the news