In January 2010 Guido gave a presentation at Microsoft’s HQ to the Online Journalism Association, the thesis was that newspapers as we know them will die and journalism would thrive. Guido’s pitch was that the old deadline based “news cycle” is being replaced by “news streams” and that newspapers as we know them will be replaced by “news brands”.

Today the industry trade body for the dead tree press, the Newspaper Marketing Association, accepted the thesis and announced it is renaming itself “Newsworks”, dropping dead entirely the word “newspaper”. CEO Rufus Olins says “We need to start thinking differently… It’s all about newsbrands, about delivering content through a range of platforms.” Guido thinks we can only measure the strength of news brands in terms of their mindshare. The broadsheets – Guardian, Times, Indy – all lose money and are more akin to vanity publishing than profit motivated businesses. It is about who they reach and how much they influence their consumers.

As the news industry and more importantly – from a financial perspective – the advertising industry comes to realise that online and print consumers are fungible, reality starts to hit home. In under a decade this blog has become as strong a news brand in our field in terms of readership and mindshare as the New Statesman, hell we’re part way through a reverse-takeover of The Spectator. The great thing for consumers is that because of low barriers to entry, we have an ever more competitive, pluralist, thriving free market in news. Without slaughtering trees…