OPEN

In a leader and a special report the Economist considers the death (or at least the decline) of print newspapers. Needless to say, its essential reading for anyone with an interest in the media.

Newspapers and online is a story and ongoing debate that has had plenty of airing on blogs, including this one, so I won’t give a point-by-point precis. One paragraph that did stand out in the report for me was this one, asking why there had been so much complacency in the publishing industry up until now:

Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices. Most have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry—“remarkably, unaccountably complacent,” as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year—but now they are making a big push to catch up. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and is beginning to offset some of the decline in print.

Newspapers’ complacency is perhaps not as remarkable as Mr Murdoch suggested. In many developed countries their owners have for decades enjoyed near monopolies, fat profit margins, and returns on capital above those of other industries. In the past, newspaper companies saw little need to experiment or to change and spent little or nothing on research and development.

Even as this report is published, a year on from the remarks by Mr Murdoch, you can still have conversations with publishers that are shot through with (sometimes angry) denial about the fast-changing world they are living in. While many newspapers are investing to try and build up their online offer and business, many consumer and specialist trade titles lag a long way behind the times.