I have long avoided making predictions about the future because the one thing I have learned is that they ae invariably wrong.

Reading David Leigh, an assistant editor of th Guardian, yesterday on the question of whether reporters are doomed, I hoped my theory stands up this time.

The media and journalism is certainly changing and a commercial model that will work online is elusive. As a result, say the doomsters, reporting as we know it is dead, because the people who do the job will not be able to afford a crust for their babies.

All I can really say in response is that something will turn up, things happen. We will find a new business model.

The future for reporting, according to some, is in networks of amateur citizen journalists working with paid journalists. Actually, I see that as a development of what has happened for a long time. Yes, it may be important but unlikely to be more than a part of the answer.

Leigh writes about the impact of stories coming from the influence of the places they are published. He continues:

That is perhaps one of the biggest dangers of the media revolution. When th media fragment — as they will — and splinter into a thousand websites, a thousand digital channels, all weak financially, then we will see a severe reduction in the power of each individual media outlet. The reporter will struggle to be heards over the cacophony of a thousand other voices.

Is that really what is going to happen? More likely there will be consolidation resulting in a smaller number of media organisations. That is a concern, but a different one.

The web is already bringing us global news brands. The BBC’s website has been called Brtain’s biggest newspaper, and it is being increasing read around the world. The Guardian of which David Leigh is an assistant editor, is also read around the world and draws advertising revenue from these distant places.

Rupert Murdoch having recognised the reality of the internet is embarking on the development of the Wall Street Journal global brand.

The trade press, some of whose titles have a fine record in investigative reporting, remains strong as it adapts to the web which is enabling publications to overcome some of the restraints of weekly, or less frequent, publication.

Overall, my belief is that good reporting will survive. Whether it will of not is a very different question to one of whether newspapers will survive which Leigh’s colleague Roy Greenslade has also discussed recently.

Archant, the regional newspaper group based in Norwich, may have arrived at a better approach to managing change in the industry than its rivals. It has been steadily developing and buying magazines which in general circulate in the same areas as their newspapers.

The half-year figures show modest increases in both turnover and operating profit. John Fry, the chief executive believes that while “negative sentiment” and high profile disposals have given the impression the sector is in decline this “couldn’t be further from the truth”.

That is the view you might expect from the boss of a regional group but there are signs that Archant’s rather different approach is working. It now has four dailies, 75 weeklies and 75 magazines as well as 120 websites.

The half-yearly announcement describes the approach as the “development of a layered strategy” which recognises that while newspapers continued to be an important part of the local mix many advertisers and consumers also want a range of comlpementary products.

This has, they say, been particularly noticeable with web classified advertising where the closely tied online and print brands offered more than online only competitors were able to provide.

One of the results is that Archant says its recruitment advertising has been showing “solid growth” helped by the online revenues.

Fry says: “We have demonstrated that tight cost control, on the low growth areas of the business, allows you to invest in higher growth activities. Our web audiences are growing in excess of 50% a year. The advertising revenue we generate from those audiences is also growing. Our local magazine business is showing audience growth, revenue growth, and an increasing number of the titles delivering profits as they become established.”

You can learn a lot from he state of anyone’s desk. Sophie Morris, at the Independent, has been finding out about the offices of editors.

Roger Alton of the Observer reveals a survival strategy: "One of my bosses once told me he didn’t like people putting pictures of their family on their desk because he found it much harder to sack them, so I have put a heap of pictures and personal things on my desk."

At the Express Peter Hill, we learn, makes his own tea and keeps a kettle in the office. Mark Hedges of Country Life has brought a grandfather clock and furniture editors have used for 110 years to the modern new offices near Tate Modern. He also has a scarecrow.

The Oldie has an open plan office but Richard Ingram admits to "a very untidy environment… it looks chaotic but I like to think I know my way around it." That I understand.

Can separate regulation of the media (statutory Ofcom for for broadcast and the voluntary Press Complaints Commission for print) last in an age of converged media?

Peter Preston, in the Observer, today has no doubt which he prefers. He points out that while the PCC turns round judgments in five weeks, Ofcom has taken five months to produce a 66 page report on Big Brother and racism.

I haven’t been able to find a copy of the new-look Press Gazette yet, so no comment on that. The website has been spruced up too and looks good with clear navigation, but still lacking full content online.

Of course, with an audience that universally has access to the web they need to protect revenue. I have no objection to paying for the content behind a subscription wall, but the replica digital edition I do not want.

Some glitches are to be expected — and forgiven — but hopes that the blurb below the new top navigation bar, would deliver what it promised ("Editors explain the relaunch of Press Gazette") were dashed. It linked to Martin Stabe, the online editor, writing about the website relaunch. Stabe is always worth reading but it was not what was promised.

Ian Reeves’s video report on the state of video in British newspapers and magazines gets a strong plug at the top of the web front page. The video was a fairly superficial gallop through how video is being adopted which left the impression that most of it is pretty boring, which it is.

I am not sure that the talking head with relatively short clips was the right approach. And why no links to the mentioned blogs to allow further examination? That is one of the things web video can do which broadcast TV cannot.

Actually, you would do better to look at the vlogs on Reeves blog to get a view of newspaper and magazine use of video. He does provide links to the sites mentioned. Good stuff, but I wish he would keep his head a little stiller and not let his eyes dart around as though he was looking for an escape route. But he is a whole lot better than the reincarnation of Ananova at the Eastern Daily Press shown in his Press Gazette video.

Later: Thanks to Martin Stabe (comment below) I have the link to the article about the redesign (I clearly did not scroll down the home page far enough to find it). 

In the redesign we are seeing the strategy of the new owners, Wilmington Media, to extend the audience to all journalists, rather than the much narrower one of  newspaper people.  The editor, Dominic Ponsford, writes:

The new look, masterminded by designer Michael Crozier, sees a new logo in place which places greater emphasis on the word "press" and incorporates our new slogan: "For all journalists".

This underlines the fact that "press" in our case is meant in the broadest sense of the word, encompassing all journalists wherever they work.Beyond that they are aiming at, "all those interested in the fascinating machinations of the fourth estate".

Nitpick: As the British Journalism Review said in a centenary article on the Daily Mirror in 2003: "The use of the word ‘first’ is as dangerous in newspaper history as in any other." Press Gazette heads an article: "Fleet Street’s first female editor Lori Miles on her move to customer mags." The first female Fleet Street editor was Mary Howarth, the first editor of the Daily Mirror, who lasted just a year before being replaced by a man.

Behind the annual figures from Archant, the Norwich-based regional publisher which show a 6.8% drop in 2006 operating profit to £29.5m, lies an interesting shift in their business. Expansion of their 75-strong local magazine business is replacing some of the fall in profits of their four daily and 85 weekly papers.

The figure shows the decline in profits slowing from the 12.3% drop, from £36m to 31.6m, in 2005.

In both years the smaller magazine and contract publishing business, which has been acquiring additional titles, saw substantial profit growth, nearly doubling in two years. Last year it was up by 37.3% from £5m to £6.1m. The previous year it was up 49.9% from £3.3m for to £5m.

While the Archant announcements are not detailed they indicate that the performance of the newspaper business is flattered by the groups headline figures.

In the latest statement Richard Dewson, chairman of Archant, talks of a “robust performance in challenging conditions”. He says the rate of decline in advertising revenues has slowed.

He also says continued investment in their online presence is encouraging with unique visitors up by 66% last year. In January this year they had nearly 1.2m unique visitors.

I have had a couple of pleasant days talking to students who have returned from work placements. They have come back more confident, feeling like real journalist, after using the reporting skills we have been encouraging them to develop since the autumn.

They are happy and more convinced than ever that they want to be journalists, largely because they have been trusted to do real work both print and online. A big “thank you” to all the people at papers, magazines and agencies who have encouraged and helped them.

In one of the tutorials I was reminded of the story Richard Burton told recently about marking one lad’s work in which he circled “retail outlets and residential units” and wrote in the margin “shops? flats?”. Then he read the cutting of the page lead the story had become and it included retail outlets and residential units.

One student was showing me an impressive collection of cuttings from two weeks at a local paper when my eye lit on a caption story. Under a picture of two people it announced the were “sharing a joke”. It was, I suggested, a rather tired old cliche and she could have found something more informative.

I should have seen the smile that was forming on her face and understood before she said: “It was written in by the sub.” That’s journalism!

Cosmopolitan is 35 this month and Carol Sarler in the Daily Mail has taken a look at the latest edition and likens it to walking down the street and bumping into a friend you have not seen for years:

But as you look closer, your pleasure turns to horror - for she is not the gal you knew and loved; she is now a raddled old slapper with desperation in her eyes.

It was once an aspirational magazine for a whole generation of women she says but is now “as grotesque as she is tragic”.

Sarler continues:

The cover sets the tone, with a doggedly relentless string of provocative words and phrases. We have ’sex boosters’ and ‘being thin’ and ‘loving your bum’ and ‘Kylie’s boyfriend’, we have another boyfriend who ‘beats the beautiful’, we have ‘real men’, ‘guys who grab’, ‘turn-on tricks’ and who ‘demands’ what in bed.

It’s like a gynaecological conference without the brains to match…

I know exactly what she means. I have always looked at Cosmo from time to time and I bought a copy yesterday to discuss with students. It is not what it was, From its fun but serious approach it has gone to sex and celeb.

I have a feeling that somewhere along the way it lost its way and readers and reinvented itself for a different audience. I suspect that all the commenters who have added their supporting views to Sarler’s piece are of her generation.

A look at Cosmo website confirms it is not aimed at them. There is a chat room with a thread on spanking and all written in txt language. On the home page there are instructions on how to have sex in a hot tub: I suspect the original Cosmo girls would have worked that out for themselves.

Adam Tinworth looks at a shelf of magazines published by his employer and wonders if the “slow death of the published magazine at the hands of the internet might not be a good thing, at least in terms of the environment.”

His thought was prompted by a report that deforestation is responsible for more global warming than air travel. But then he wonders if all the energy needed to sustain online communication could be more damaging than print publishing.

Good question. What is the carbon footprint of the internet?

Later: Martin Stabe has also posted on this. He has some interesting information on the printing industry and gives the carbon emissions for one copy of the Daily Mirror as 174g of CO₂.

That IPC is prepared to invest £27 million in a new weekly celeb and fashion mag for women is a clear sign of their confidence in the market. This week 1.2 million free copies of the launch issue of Look are in the supermarkets and and newsagents.

With the publishers predicting weekly sales of 250,000 within a year, this is not a short term investment. They claim to have found a gap in the market, women in the 20s who are interested in celebrities and high street clothes rather than labels.

IPC Connect, the division with is publishing Look, sells 2.9 million magazines a week and says it is the clear market leader.

Look’s editor, Ali Hall, makes a good point to the Guardian. It is that the monthlies (they are losing sales) have lead times that make them unable to react to the high street where the hanger-life of new designs is short.

Top Shop, for example, puts 300 new products on sale every week. The shelf life issue is also one that affects sales in supermarkets which are responsible for an increasing proportion of print sales.

Supermarkets demand products which clear their shelves quickly and don’t hang around hogging their bit of space for a month. Marketing costs, including prime positions do not come cheap in supermarkets so it is only those with deep pockets that can hope to successfully launch a new mass-market title.