Deciding whether it makes business sense putting online publications behind paywalls is increasingly like finding scientific evidence for the existence of God.  Your conclusion appears to be determined more by pre-existing prejudice than from any meaning actually extracted from data.

In the past week, Wolverhampton’s Express and Star has abandoned the paywall that it had erected around its content in April 2011, which gave access to the entire paper’s content for £2.81 a week.  The paper’s publisher did not elaborate on the reasons for the lifting of the paywall, but did announce new iPhone and iPad apps for its content.

The New York Times announced that it has seen no change in traffic to its sites, since it put up a soft paywall and Mecom, which publishes a range of European newspapers on the web, has switched from providing free content to 1.2m subscribers to requiring that customers will have to pay.

The Scotsman, too, has just launched a very attractive iPad app, which is free for 30 days but will cost £7.99 a month thereafter.

This price point is illustrative of another area in which the fog over paywalls is so thick as to make cool analysis difficult – pricing.  At the top of the tree is the Financial Times.  Full access to its content via an iPad costs £353 a year.  The Times/Sunday Times’ digital package (which is for seven papers a week compared to the FT’s six) is just £104 a year.  That makes The Scotsman’s app, at £96 a year (also for just six papers a week) looks pricey.

Check out the costs of a Kindle subscription to any of these papers, and the picture becomes more confused.  A Kindle sub to the FT will cost you just £216 a year, The Times, on the other hand, costs £120 a year.  The Guardian and Observer, usually so opposed to charges for digital content, also ask £120 a year to read their content on your Kindle.

Magazines are no less unpredictable.  The Spectator’s cover price is £3.50, but an annual, posted subscription to the actual magazine can be had for £104 a year.  A Kindle sub, on the other hand, costs just £36. A paper subscription to The Economist can be had for £102 a year, but the Kindle subscription cost £120 annually.

Does any of this matter? This is, after all, an emerging market in which established commercial practices and price norms have clearly not settled down. There is a compelling argument that the way to profit from digital subscriptions is to make the process of paying so seamless that consumers hardly notice that they have signed up at all.

However, there is surely also a risk of leaving consumers feeling cheated. Even those who have committed to paying for content at the moment face a bewildering search for the best deal.  At least most publishers allow a reasonably generous ‘cooling off’ period, in case you plump for a Kindle version, say, and then decide that you would prefer the enhancements of reading on an iPad.  Nevertheless, it would be hard to blame anyone for deciding to keep their credit cards in their pockets in the face of such apparently Chinese-menu marketing and mixed messages about the sustainability of any charging model.

Public Lending Right – the scheme that pays authors when their books are borrowed from public libraries – has long been a life-saver for impecunious scribblers. Little wonder then that when, earlier this month, the government announced its intention cut the benefit paid per book issue from 6.25 pence to 6.05 pence that authors howled in dismay.

Regrettable as this move is, could there be other ways by which the library model might benefit creators of books? Amazon certainly thinks so.  It is the major shareholder in Lovefilm.com, which claims to have 1.5m members who pay a monthly subscription to hire dvds by mail to watch screened films.  Of far more interest to authors, however, is the Kindle Owners Lending Library, launched in the USA in November and expected to come to the UK in the near future.

Membership is based on Amazon’s ‘prime member’ scheme, which costs $79 a year in the US and £49 in the UK.  For UK subscribers, the benefits from membership are limited to free-at-the-point-of-sale express delivery. On the other side of the Atlantic, members can ‘borrow’ up to one title a month on their Kindles. Over 75,000 titles are available to borrow, a large number of which have been ‘self-published’ via Kindle Direct Publishing.

A monthly royalty is paid to authors based on the number of times that the book has been ‘borrowed’. Those authors who grant Amazon the exclusive right to publish their works, also benefit from an additional ‘KDP Select’ bonus, which could see a book that was borrowed 1,500 times netting $7,500 in lending royalties alone. In creating this bonus, Amazon is clearly trying to establish itself as the first choice for self-publishers.

Launched in December, the additional fund is already causing at least some authors to celebrate.  Carolyn McCray, for example, writes ‘paranormal romance novels’ and earned $8,250 from the KPD Select Fund in the last month of 2011. Rachel Yu, a 16-year-old author of childrens’ books, earned $6,200.  And they were by no means the only success stories – more than 295,000 KDP select titles were borrowed from Kindle’s library in December, its first full month of operation.

‘Lending’ royalties have averaged around 30% of these authors’ total royalties from Kindle. And those authors who have consented to their works being available for loan as well as for sale appear to have boosted the number of copies sold by an average of 26% compared to those who did not participate in the library scheme.

Hopeful though it is to identify a fresh source of income that should benefit authors, of course, the success of virtual libraries can only be another nail in the coffin of actual libraries. As more and more regular book readers find other means of satisfying their habits and thereby abandon municipal facilities, the case for the latter will inevitably be weakened. Whether Amazon’s royalties prove to be any more dependable than Pubic Lending Right, which the government appear able to vary on a whim, remains to be seen.

Report by Alex Klaushofer.

Its bleak industrial landscape was the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, with its population of diverse life-forms evolving new ways of being in the struggle for survival. And now, Port Talbot’s bleak media landscape is … You get the idea. While on the one hand, Port Talbot is the perfect illustration of the crisis in local journalism, on the other, it’s the scene of an experiment which combines the cooperative model with crowd-funding.

The origins of Port Talbot MagNet go back to January 2010 when a group of local journalists, having lost their jobs to the crisis hitting the industry, decided to do something about the news vacuum in the area. The local paper, the Port Talbot Guardian, had closed down, leaving the town without any local news provider, and has since been followed by the council newspaper and the community radio station.

The group of local journalists formed a coop and were initially optimistic about the prospects of funding it through both grants and commercial activity. But a year of funding-seeking generated nothing, while plans to set up a news agency ran aground as the recession bit into budgets for local stories. The team decided to go ahead anyway and launched last June, having entered into a partnership with the National Theatre Wales to cover the Passion, an interactive theatre production set in the streets of Port Talbot.

In the event, the project did secure a form of funding when founding member Rachel Howells won an award to do a PhD examining the effects of the lack of news on the area run by the Media Standards Trust and Cardiff University’s School of Journalism. The award, which provides £50K for a three-year case study of the ‘democratic deficit’ in Port Talbot, effectively means that Howells is paid to work on the site.

‘It works very well, because the project feeds into the PhD, and the PhD research feeds into the project,’ she says.

The research, which will result in one of the first in-depth studies of the effects of the disappearance of traditional local news providers, will compare an historical analysis of the town’s local news sources with the ways in which the local population now get their information about what is going on.

‘My suspicion is that a lot of people are finding out about news by rumour and word-of-mouth,’ says Howells. ‘Really, what are the people of Port Talbot getting? National news, a bit of regional news, and not much else.’

Taking weekly turns as editors, the eight-strong team also draws on help from volunteers to write and source stories, and recently launched a crowd-funding initiave based on Spot.us adapted for the local community. The Pitch-in! scheme has so far brought them a free office in Port Talbot, plus some cash donations to to revive the traditional reporting of magistrates’ courts and council meetings. ‘You can’t have volunteers doing that; you must have a professional journalist,’ says Howells.

Driven primarily by a desire to provide the local area with news, the Port Talbot MagNet approach is certainly not a well-worked out, sharply-defined commercial model. Pragmatic and experimental, the model is likely to end up hybrid, involving a mixture of advertising, grant funding and commercially-generated revenue. But Howells is clear about one thing: ‘We would love it to be profitable. We think of ourselves as a social enterprise,’ she says. ‘People talk about not-for-profit, but you’ve still got to make an operating profit to pay the journalists and the running costs.’

She adds sagely: ‘Although we know that the traditional print model is showing signs of wear and tear, we have to be careful we don’t throw away all the things that have made businesses, particularly media businesses, work in the past.’

And although she doesn’t say so, it also seems likely that the success of the project will depend as much on the hard work and tenacity of one individual as the collective efforts of the cooperative.

Photo by Joe Athialy (Flickr)

Comment by Alex Klaushofer.

With the first week of the New Year bringing only warnings from politicians and economists, it seems that wise men have realised it would be foolish to feign optimism for 2012. But while things remain bleak on the economic front, there is at last a glimmer of hope for those rooting for quality journalism.

As Ian Burrell documents in this Independent article, philanthropically-funded journalism has been burgeoning in the States for some time. Over the last decade, the US not-for-profit sector has invested over a billion dollars in quality journalism, while its leading light, the non-profit news body ProPublica, which was only founded in 2008, is thriving, and now has some 1,300 donors.

Meanwhile, Down Under, a major new initiative is to launch next month. Funded by Australian entrepreneur Graeme Wood to the tune of almost £10 million, The Global Mail aims to provide independent international journalism in the public interest.

A similar trend finally seems to be taking root in Britain. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been very productive since launching some twenty months ago, while The Journalism Foundation, a new charitable foundation funding journalism which serves the public good, was born in December.

Meanwhile, in regional journalism, York-based news website One&Other is to launch a print edition funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. There are also plans for the social enterprise, which started with backing from the charity UnLimited, to launch seven similar projects in cities around the UK over the next three years.

The significance of these developments lies not in their pioneering of the new, longed-for business model that will save quality journalism; as one editor points out, the ProPublica model is hardly a commercial one that can be replicated by media businesses.

The tide that is turning is more about socio-economic attitude; the rise of grant-funded journalism indicates a growing recognition that journalism is a good-in-itself rather than just another means to profitability, and profits are seen as the means to this end. In other words, what matters is people – or in this case, readers – an attitude that can comfortably be shared by both grant-funded models and commercial bodies with realistic profit aspirations.

Historically, it was this more reasonable attitude towards profit that was held by the proprietors of local papers back in the day – yes, they wanted their organ to wash its own face, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor. But their expectations of the revenues that could be generated by a inherently labour-intensive craft were modest, attenuated by the recognition that the point of the paper was to serve the local community.

Contrast this, then, with the profit margins expected by some regional publishers a century or so later, with news groups such as Johnston Press achieving profits of up to 29%.

Yet, with journalism hitting exceptionally hard times, it seems that a kick-back has begun as people cast around not just for different ways of achieving the same financial outcomes, but for different attitudes to those outcomes.

The pioneers of this not-for-excessive-profit attitude include Nigel Lowther, founder-editor of the Cleethorpes Chronicle, who says he would be content with profits of around five per cent, and David Ainsworth, who has argued on this site that the charitable model could save local papers.

Meanwhile, founder-editor of the New Camden Journal Eric Gordon has called for a government-backed ‘media bank’ to ensure the survival of the local press, while others are promoting the cooperative model.

Of course, it’s doubtful that all these ideas will translate into concrete reality. But what’s valuable here is the way they change the terms in which the debate about the media economy is framed, just as in the wider economy the failings of unchecked capitalism have led to a questioning of the desirability of endless growth.

So here’s, in 2012, to the spread of a more realistic, nuanced approach to media profitability which remembers that journalism is – and arguably always has been – about serving the public interest.

Wishing you all a very sustainable 2012.

To feed this hoped-for demand, a welter of applications, websites and feeds have sprung up, all hoping in various ways to provide the wrap-around format within which distinguished acts of reporting will be consumed.  Indeed, today the selection of formats is sufficiently bewildering to cause some would-be self-publishers to retreat to the known world of income-free blogging for fear of committing to the wrong thing.

Kindle Direct Publishing is the Amazon’s inhouse self-publishing program.  Documents in common formats such at Microsoft Word can be converted into books at a mouse click, with authors able to set their own price.  They then receive either a 35% royalty, or a 70% royalty, less a ‘delivery charge’ based on the size of the book.  There is, for example, a 10 pence charge for the download of a 1mb book.

The number of eBook sales in the UK rose by 623% between January and June last year (according to research by the Publishers’ Association). Its research suggests that more than 12 million eBook units sold last year, with a combined value significantly in excess of £100m – so clearly there are readers out there who are willing to lay down serious money to fill up their devices.

One journalist who has experienced this, via the Kindle model, is Joseph Bottum, whose ‘Dakota Christmas’ hit the top three of Amazon’s non-fiction eBook charts in the run up to Christmas.  After losing his job on a Manhattan-based Christian magazine, he returned to his native North Dakota and wrote freelance magazine articles.  An editor at Amazon, who was looking to promote their ‘singles’ market remembered a piece that Bottum wrote about family Christmases some years earlier and persuaded Bottum to expand the piece to 7,500 words.  Priced at £2 per download, it became an unexpected hit this festive season.

According to Enders Analysis, Amazon accounts for around 80% of all UK eBook sales – in Spring 2011 it was offering 720,000 digital titles – but there is split available between conventional eBooks and shorter pieces.   How much luck any of its rivals are having is hard to say – but there are plenty of them.

Byliner.com, for example, commissions pieces of between 10,000 and 35,000 words and launched towards the end of 2011.  Its stated policy is that it does not publish fiction, but it launched with Amy Tan’s first piece of fiction for six years, priced at $2.99.  It appears alongside a selection of longer magazine-style articles by established US authors and by using Facebook as a log on, combines viral recommendations with a sales channel.

Atavist.net ploughs a similar furrow – commissioning work in the same way that a conventional publisher would, and even paying modest advances.  The revenue cut is then 50:50 after their sales channel (generally either Amazon or Apple, each of whom takes 30% of sale price).  According to David Wolman, whose 10,500 piece The Instigators, about those involved in the overthrow of Egypt’s President Moubarak, Atavist published, sales have been good.  Unlike Byliner, which prides itself on publishing words only, Atavist features combine pictures, information graphics and illustrations.  All can be switched off for those who prefer text only, but, as Wolman tells it, the format affords a richer, more original kind of storytelling.

In addition to actual publishers, there are numerous services which allow tablet users to save longer pieces onto their devices for later consumption, Longform.org, Instapaper and Longreads among them.

It remains to be seen whether a new golden age for longer journalism is truly dawning.  Given the number of people who, at the same time, appear to be willing this to be so, however, at the very least it is set to enjoy a few more moments in the sun.

Writing his Bike To Work book, Carlton Reid’s intention was to produce a conventional printed tome.  A trade publisher of 25 years experience, his business model was simple – sell sufficient advertisements to pay for the book and then give away the product.   Creating an eBook was an afterthought.   Nevertheless, in the two years since it was published, it has been downloaded more than 350,000 times and generated around £25,000 worth of advertising revenue.

Reid wrote, edited, designed and laid-up the book and took all but ten of the photographs.  “I am self-taught in publishing in the round”, he explains.  He also identified the advertisers, but the deals were all closed by his long-time business associate – his father.  “Being one-person removed from the selling keeps me (editorially) clean”.

When the book took longer to complete than he expected, he put the finished product online first – it went viral, and print was abandoned (save for a print-on-demand edition).

The book has appeared in many versions – some being distributed by third parties like the London Cycle Campaign.  But digital distribution is all though Issuu, the Danish self-publishing platform.  Reid generates a final pdf and then loads in on to Issuu’s server.  Conversion into a format that can be read on computers and tablets such at the iPad and the Kindle happens automatically.

“I was one of the first UK publishers on Issuu and they did publicise the book at first, which was a great help.  It is still the best platform, as far as I am concerned, and everything they do is free”, he says.  One of the many appeals of their service is the diagnostics.  Of course they show how many times the book has been downloaded, but they also track how far into the book people read.

“There is a huge spike in the first ten pages, as you would expect”, says Reid.  “But you can also see how many people have actually opened up every page.  You can show advertisers that, say 15,000 people have viewed your advert.  That is something that no newspaper can do, and I think that it has actually converted a lot of our advertisers to eBooks as an advertising vehicle.”

So successful has the Bike To Work been, that Reid has turned down conventional publishers who offered to take on his next venture.  To be published in the early Spring, Roads Were Not Built For Cars will be a history of roads and road improvements in the decades before the motor car.  As with his previous book, Reid’s intentions are more polemical than commercial.  Nevertheless, the early signs are that he has found another successful niche.  An eight-page sampler has been downloaded 11,000 times – in part generated by an energetic Twitter campaign.

Although he has been in business his entire working life – he set up and subsequently sold the trade magazine Bike Biz – Reid’s philosophy is decidedly non commercial.  “I don’t factor in my own time at all, because I enjoy what I do and I would be doing it even if it did not make a bean”, he says.  He is by no means the first inadvertent capitalist – but unlike many he seems quite content to pursue his own projects while his commercial interests thrive in an apparently parallel universe.

Report by Alex Klaushofer.

My last blog reported on the curious absence of women among the pioneers of digital journalism – a regressive trend seen by some as symptomatic as an emerging form of e-patriarchy.

But hang on, isn’t the beauty of the digital age the new opportunities it opens up, the way it affords everyone, including those historically with the least access to the means of (print) production, to have a voice? In theory, the digital revolution should bring us a new era of protest and debate, in which old hierarchies can be challenged and more powerful, inclusive forms of campaigning created. At the very least, you get a few good feminist websites.

Let’s head over, virtually speaking, to one such. Run by a team of volunteers, The f-word started as a forum for reviews in 2001, becoming a collective blog several years later. Yet ten years on, the team is only just starting to think about a business model, and are finally putting together a funding committee to look at ways of bringing in revenue.

With the only revenue raised so far having come via an appeal on a blog for donations to cover the costs of a re-design, attempts at income generation have been ‘slow-going’, admits music review editor Holly Combe.

But looking back, she goes on, it would have been almost inimical to the spirit of the project to think in cold commercial terms.

‘A lot of women have come together to do something that’s almost anti-organisation, and anti-business model,’ she says. ‘Gradually they do more and more, and then they start to wonder how they’re going continue to do it, and earn a living.’

At the opposite end of the spectrum is a stellar example of a website run by and for women. With revenue of £3 million this year, Mumsnet can hardly be accused of not being business-like. And, with 1.7 million unique users a month, it uses its considerable influence to campaign on behalf of women, raising everything from the over-sexualisation of girls to the impact of night car parking charges on women.

Yet the path to success was hardly a clear, or even a thought-out one. For the first few years, according to co-founder Justine Roberts, the aim was simply to provide a forum for parents to exchange ideas and support each other. The site’s campaigning voice first emerged when an advert about Madeleine McCann advert caused an outcry among Mumsnet members. As time went on, politicans started to take notice of this vocal constituency, but it wasn’t until the ‘Mumsnet election’ of 2009 that the company finally decided to invest in some dedicated campaigning staff.

‘We didn’t start off with the intention that we would be a campaigning website,’ says Roberts. ‘We became large enough and attracted the interest of politicians. We thought it would be remiss of us not to use that access.’

Even more compellingly, she admits that the first business model she drew up in 1999, based on e-commerce, ‘wasn’t worth the paper it was written on’. But while its contemporaries over-invested in costly infrastructure, Mumsnet survived, thanks to a low-cost, slow-grow approach which enabled it to gradually build large numbers of engaged visitors. Running the site was effectively a voluntary job for years, with its founders relying on the family income earned by their partners. (Roberts is married to Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz.)

Yet – and here comes the paradox at the heart of the Mumsnet model – Roberts acknowledges that the site’s success depends on, well, its success. ‘Having a voice that people will listen to means that you have to have scale,’ she says. ‘The only way your voice will be effective is to have scale. You have to have a business model that works. It’s chicken and egg.’

The Mumsnet secret, it seems, boils down to a blend of hard graft, patience and something that its more idealistic counterparts lack – a canny willingness to identify and act on commercial opportunities. The site is now entirely sustained by advertising, to the point where even media folk wanting to access its membership are sent to a Worldpay page charging £30.

In July this year, the site launched the Bloggers Network, a scheme allowing contributers to take a share of revenue based on the number of page views their work generates. ‘It doesn’t feel right to take people’s work and publish it without sharing the potential revenue,’ says Roberts. ‘The Huffington Post model didn’t feel right for Mumsnet.’

But, the almost serendipitous success of Mumsnet aside, the problem of how to sustain campaigning websites remains. Courtney Martin, editor of
Feministing, a US blog started in 2004 and run entirely by women in other full time jobs, puts it starkly:

‘So I’m sitting here, mindful of my own legacy and very struck that what one might reasonable argue is the most robust, powerful medium for feminism today is being created in a truly unsustainable way,’ she writes in a post earlier this year. ‘I start to daydream about all of the amazing things we might be able to do if we actually had the funding, space, and time to do more than keep our heads above water.

‘I just can’t shake the feeling that one of the biggest mistakes my own generation is making is accepting the status quo of an unsupported blogosphere and losing the opportunity to make an even larger impact,’ she adds.

“When you pay nothing, you are the product” goes the saying.  As a truism it might pre-date the internet, but it is a sentiment whose perfect expression occurs in the relationship between content farms and their users. Cheaply-generated material on search-engine-optimized pages, surrounded by advertisements seemed, a year ago, as though their rolling progress would soon see them dominating the internet and reduce search engines to the status of satellite states.

In January, the biggest of these operations, Demand Media, was launched on the New York Stock Exchange with 8.9m shares successfully offered at $17 each.

On balance, that launch might represent the high-water mark of so-called content farms.  In February, Google announced that it was launching “a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking”.  It quickly became evident that the target of these changes was “the proliferation of low quality sites”.  Of course the search giant did not specify which sites it had in mind – but it has become known at ‘the farmer update’, it immediately made it more difficult for low-quality pages to achieve higher rankings.

As it turned out, the farmer update was simply the first part of a year-long roll out of algorithm changes that Google has introduced throughout 2011 (known collectively at Panda), all intended to keep the search engine ahead of sites such as Facebook and the Twitter.  The search algorithm itself is one of Google’s most closely guarded secrets, and is thought to contain over a1,000 tests that can be applied to sites that it ranks.  At least 200 are thought to be applied to every search.

And Google were by no means the only organization that was beginning to cast a critical eye on content farms.  The Internet Content Syndication Council has been around since 2007 and includes such bastions of journalism as The Associated Press (US) Thompson Reuters and the Tribune Co.  It issued a press release saying: “an issue that is causing concern among its members: the rising tide of poorly produced informational content, specifically designed to score high on search”.

There was disquiet at the other end of the industry too.  Demandstudiossucks.com, started by Patrick O’Doare, a Demand Studio freelancer provided both a critical focus on the company, and a forum where others who worked for them but felt ill-treated could make common cause.  It is precisely the sort of initiative that on one or two occasions has allowed freelances to take control back of a negotiating situation in which publishers assumed that they held all the power.

That is not to say, of course, that a case cannot be made for content farms.  There are serious and successful journalists such as Julian Marszalek who argues that the crumbs of cash that can be made from content farms are a useful to generate income while you might otherwise be idle.  And, for anyone who has ever tried to do something as esoteric as change the brake light on a 15 year old Volvo estate (to take just one example), there are few things more useful than the answers to be found on sites such as Demand’s eHow.

Whatever one thinks of such operations, however, as the year end approaches, it is clear that they are no longer having it their own way.  Where once they appeared to be a column of tanks, inexorably pushing their way across cyberspace, they now look as though they will have to scrabble to hold their current position, just like everyone else.

As I write, Demand Media’s shares are trading at $7.90 each, having been as low as $5.24.  Not Stalingrad by a long chalk – but surely evidence that Google’s Marshall February is not to be dismissed lightly.

Report by Alex Klaushofer.

Over the two and a half years I’ve been researching emerging forms of media for New Model Journalism and the NUJ conference which preceded it, a question has been slowly pushing itself to the forefront of my mind. It feels a bit like that story about the emperor having no clothes, but no one being prepared to say so, and it’s certainly too early for any data on the subject. But finally, I’ve got to the point where I can no longer stop myself from asking …

Where are all the women?

This question crystalised in my head, I had a rummage around the New Model Journalism archives, which are replete with case studies of impressive start-ups and reports of exciting new digi-developments. And there, my hunch was confirmed. From the founders of pay-what-you-want sports mag the Blizzard to the inventor of innovative advertising system Addiply, the population of pioneers is overwhelmingly male.

The process of deciding on the speakers for the conference on new ways to make journalism pay, I recalled, told a similar tale. It wasn’t that the organising committee unwittingly invited panels almost entirely composed of men; we noticed quite quickly that the lack of female speakers and scratched our collective head, but failed to come up with anything approaching a gender balance. Finally, we settled for a single woman speaker, resolving to break up the monotony with a few female chairs.

That single speaker was Angie Sammons, editor of Liverpool Confidential, a news and reviews website that has thrived since it started five years ago. During that time, Sammons has earned what she describes as a ‘good living’ from the site, and is as passionate as ever about ensuring a future platform for news about the city she loves. But she admits that, as a woman, the networking side of the job has been challenging.

‘I know that if I was a bloke I’d be perceived very differently,’ she says. ‘Websites are very blokey by their very nature, and it’s quite difficult, on a social level, to be that blokey. I’ve certainly ‘”manned up” since I’ve been doing this.’

‘As to women in this game, it’s the same old rule with just a different kind of ball,’ she continues. ‘The rule being “best batted by men”, and the ball is just digital media, rather than traditional media.’

Her experience chimes with that of Natalie Fenton, Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, a longtime researcher into media and gender issues. ‘I don’t know of any data on this, but it’s classic stuff,’ she says. ‘Newsrooms are fiercely macho environments. They’re squeezing out an enormous amount of intelligence and communicative understanding that is critical to the digital age.’

Danuta Kean, books editor for the women’s writing magazine Mslexia, agrees. ‘In the creative writing industries, men do seem to get an easier time. The voices of men are taken more seriously, and it’s a question of women having to break into a boys’ club.’

‘People see the digital world as a shiny new world,’ she adds. ‘It isn’t. It’s the same old world. Why should we be surprised if we see the same sexism in the digital world?’

And, if current trends are examined further, it looks as if things will only get worse. According to Sammons, women in regional journalism are failing to acquire the skills necessary to participate in the digital revolution, and are getting left behind. ‘Most of the women I know in journalism don’t interact with the internet,’ she says. ‘And I don’t think it’s going to change.’

Meanwhile, says Fenton, the crisis afflicting the media industry is affecting women, who tend to work more on a freelance or part-time basis, particularly adversely. ‘When any crisis strikes, equality goes out of the door,’ she says. ‘The fragility of the business model is worse for women.’

At the same time, she adds, the 24/7 demands of the digital age mean that, for staffers on newspapers, it’s the women who are increasingly doing the online work. ‘They are very conscientious, and it’s communicative work,’ she says. ‘Women are better at that. I think they’re being exploited, because it’s so round-the-clock.’

‘As a result, they’re getting more kudos. But we know that, as time goes on, work is seen as less valuable because women are doing it. That’s a standard pattern that’s happened throughout the technical transformation of the working environment – think typewriters. Women end up doing the busy stuff, and men take the leadership roles and the kudos.’

‘That’s a pattern that’s difficult to break, because it’s patriarchy,’ she concludes, depressingly.

So is the digital revolution generating the need for a new e-feminism? If so, it’s too early to say what form it might take. No one I spoke to had any strong ideas about possible remedies; it seems that we’re still at the very early stages of diagnosing the problem.

(I am confident that two leading female players in the new media world – feminist blogger Laurie Penny and Michelle Stanistreet, the NUJ’s first woman general secretary, could shed further light on this regressive trend, but neither have responded to interview requests. Laurie and Michelle, I’ll be keeping a watching brief on this area, and would still love to hear from you.)

In the meantime, dear reader, I’ll leave you with a provocative hypothesis from Danuta Kean that there’s something about the digital world, with its new forms of communication via forums and social media, that fosters a New Sexism.

‘It’s not a two-way conversation. You’re inside your head, and not empathising with another person,’ she says. ‘It’s quite a narcissistic medium, and maybe that suits men better.’

It was not a carefully considered opinion, nor an official announcement – but I suspect that it tells you something of how adrift the management of Britain’s regional press has become.  Few seem to see any real future for their titles beyond getting out with their own nest suitably feathered.  Indeed, as I write dark rumours are abroad that one of the regional press ‘big three’ (Trinity Mirror, Johnson Press and Newsquest/Garnett) is about to announce the complete closure of some of its best known, and biggest selling daily titles.

Of course the nation’s attention is currently concentrated on the national media – although if you ask most MPs they will tell you that they are more concerned about the demise of their local papers than with the misdeeds of some of the nationals.   But in a few dark corners, some thought is being given to whether anything can save local media from their seemingly inevitable slide.

Neil Fowler, for example, the Guardian research fellow at Nuffield College, came up with a 10 point plan to save local newspapers – Jon Slattery republished it here.  It is not altogether without merit – although the idea of a debt write-off is a bit rich for companies that have treated their employees abominably while extracting returns on capital of as much at 30%.

More worrying, though, nothing that Fowler suggests would cure regional newspapers of the mixture of arrogance and flat footedness that they have made their trademark in recent years.  The most perfect example of this is in the success of thebusinesspages.com.  Johnston Press can’t really be blamed for allowing the The Yorkshire Post’s business editor to waltz out of the door and snatch a decent chunk of their market from under their noses – after all, it was a new and original idea that he had.

What is astonishing is that the publishers of the Manchester Evening News and the Birmingham Post sat back and let him do the same again, after his already well-publicised success in Leeds.

The ‘Confidential’ group of websites is another example of the kind of venture that newspapers themselves could be spearheading.   Regional newspapers used to have their commercial departments strangle at birth, any who had the audacity to try publishing under their noses.  Today they appear to adopt the attitude of a pensioner watching the local children steal all the apples from their garden with a shrug that says – ‘oh well, at least they are being eaten’.

There have been local news triumphs.  During the recent riots, Wolverhampton’s Express and Star saw daily visits to it website swell to 835,000 – which is pretty good for a town whose population is 240,000.  Archant’s Ipswich newspapers reporting of the Steve Wright/Ipswich murders trail saw teams of reporters covering the court case in short shifts so that the website could be updated hourly as the case proceeded.  But heartening as these examples are, they are both responses to a news challenge, rather than innovation in the business of journalism.

Declining sales and a tight advertising market make this a desperately difficult market in which to innovate.   But unless local papers do start thinking anew, they are on a certain course for catastrophe.  In 2009, Enders Analysis predicted that half of all local newspapers would shut within five years.  Sadly, not much has happened in the intervening period to contradict this view.  What a shame that in all the earnest attention that is being focused on the media as a result of the Leveson inquiry, almost none will consider local newspapers.