Roy Greensland writes a good headline:

Would Murdoch have spent £650m on a print plant if the iPad had been around?

Well, his response will be YES.

But as Burda or Rusbidger, I am sure that they know that these are tha last huge printing presses that the buy.

Printing is not our business.

Vertical integration is not the right strategy.

Universities need buildings but they don’t own construction companies.

And the cars of Ford needed tires and many years ago owned big rubber plantations in Brazil.

Yes, the 10,000 km² of land of Fordlandia!

So are the new mobile digital tablets going to be the next BIG IDEA?

Yes.

But no media company needs to become an Apple, Microsoft, Samsung or Nokia…

We are not in the bottling business.

We are in the wine business.

Content matters.

Platforms, no.

Newsprint will survive.

Printing presses will survive…

But journalism will not need them like in the past.

More cheap, green and efficient digital platforms will be available in less than three years.

So cheap that media publishers will be more than happy to give these devices free to their subscribers.

When you see than in less than 10 days the photo application of The Guardian has generated 50,000 downloads, you know that the iPad and the digital tablet are here to stay.

Jonathan Stray checks for the Nieman Journalism Lab the real sources of the recent breaking-news story about the China/Google hacking case and finds that”

– Out of 121 unique stories, 13 (11 percent) contained some amount of original reporting. I counted a story as containing original reporting if it included at least an original quote. From there, things get fuzzy. Several reports, especially the more technical ones, also brought in information from obscure blogs. In some sense they didn’t publish anything new, but I can’t help feeling that these outlets were doing something worthwhile even so. Meanwhile, many newsrooms diligently called up the Chinese schools to hear exactly the same denial, which may not be adding much value.

- Only seven stories (six percent) were primarily based on original reporting. These were produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Tech News World, Bloomberg, Xinhua (China), and the Global Times (China).

- Of the 13 stories with original reporting, eight were produced by outlets that primarily publish on paper,  four were produced by wire services, and one was produced by a primarily online outlet. For this story, the news really does come from newspapers.

So how are we going co cover real news without original reporting?

And who is going to pay for real reporters?

And real journalism?

Let’s get real.

Quotes and ideas from the first 226 comments published about the new Observer:

• The MAGAZINE is boring, and new font size is crazy (“please increase the font size in the Magazine to something that is readable without changing my reading glasses prescription”).

• The TV LISTINGS don’t make any sense (“The TV guide is a waste of paper. The information is easily available elsewhere”).

• THE NEW YORK TIMES section is a Guantanamo (“Why persist with the New York Times pullout?”).

• Where is TRAVEL?

• Too much POLITICAL GOSSIP.

• Go for THE SUNDAY GUARDIAN (“What my family wants is a SUNDAY GUARDIAN but with more depth!”).

• HOROSCOPE is gone!

• TRIVIAL content (“I wish you would invest in journalism rather than iPhone Apps and gimmicky redesigns”)

• The SPORTS is just a FOOTBALL section.

• We want more SECTIONS (“Sunday paper is for sharing: if you reduce the sections, we cant share anymore”). Are you sure? UK is becoming a single home occupant country!

• The CASH section is a joke (“The Cash section is so thin on content that it is laughable”).

My final take:

If The Observer wants to deliver more with less, must have BETTER CONTENT, FANTASTIC DESIGN, UNIQUE BREAKING-NEWS, COMPELLING STORIES, DRAMATIC INFOGRAPHICS, PROVOCATIVE  COLUMNISTS and more CAVIAR JOURNALISM.

Now there is too much spin and no substance.

Readers want strong double espresso, but not watered American coffee grande.

So, the new format is fine, the new content is bad.

As simple as that.

Poor value for £2.

Greg Hadfield, Telegraph Media Group’s head of digital development, is leaving the company.

He explains here the reasons in The Guardian.

A good reading for any “Monolithic Media” gang.

He ends with a great message: the time for innovation and change is running out.

A serious call.

To survive, newspapers need to rethink radically not only their business models, but also how they manage their businesses; they need to overhaul outdated organisational structures; they need to consider how they relate to all their employees, to third-party providers of content and services, and to individuals with whom they may have no contractual arrangement whatsoever.

Most crucially, they need to rethink how they relate to their communities of readers, subscribers, and users, when they know next to nothing about members of their digital audience. They need to identify their most loyal users and then work harder to meet their individual needs.

No longer can newspapers survive by publishing at their readers, by talking down to them, by controlling what can and can’t be written or said. In future, they will have to provide – and share, not “own” – the online environment in which they can meet the needs of individual members of their community. They have to be part of social media, not monolithic media.

But for those newspapers that survive, it is going to be a long journey. Who knows how long? I suggested radical innovation may take five years … because the future always seems to be five years away.

At 53, however, I don’t have as much time as many to wait for the future. I want to help make it happen now.

(Picture by Graham Turner)

The Guardian is covering the Haiti tragedy with this live blog.

Matthew Weaver is doing a great job.

You don’t need to read too much abut the UN Conference in Copenhagen.

Just listen to Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace:

“Not fair, not ambitious and not legally binding.

The job of world leaders is not done.

Today they failed to avert catastrophic climate change.

The city of Copenhagen is a climate crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport in shame.

World leaders had a once in a generation chance to change the world for good, to avert catastrophic climate change.

In the end they produced a poor deal full of loopholes big enough to fly Air Force One through.

We have seen a year of crises, but today it is clear that the biggest one facing humanity is a leadership crisis.”

As The Guardian says today:

Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure.

So don’t be fooled by the propaganda machine and PR spin of the big polluters.

Copenhagen was not “Hopenhagen” but, as Pedro Monteiro says in his great poster, “Nopenhagen.”

Peter Preston, former editor of The Guardian, writes in The Observer about i, the new national quality paper of Portugal.

The headlines are:

(In the picture, Mário Crespo interviews Martim Avillez Figueiredo, editor of i)

What a blast!

All this week, first The Observer last Sunday and then The Guardian, are printing each day an original issue of Jackie, The Beano, Roy of the Rovers, Bunty, The Dandy, Tammy and Whizzer And Chips.

These are old comic magazines that now are free with the daily paper.

A smart promotion to get young ad old readers.

David Sullivan thinks that the old department stores fate is a good reminder  for newspapers.

And the same lessons can be learned by newspapers from the railway industry.

Today, The Guardian presents the ambitious plans of the British transport secretary Lord Andrew Adonis with this lead:

There was a time when all the world firsts in rail took place in the UK – the first modern locomotive, the first intercity line and the first train-travelling monarch. That time, however, was the second quarter of the 19th century, and for very many years now Britain’s railways have, as it were, been stuck on the slow train. No principally domestic mainline has been built in over a century, and the spread of high-speed services – from Japan in the 1960s through France in the 80s to Spain in the 90s – has all but failed to reach these shores.

Yes, there was a time… when railways ruled the transport world, like newspapers ruled the information business.

But cars and airplanes came as more fast and convenient options.

And the railway industry didn’t react,and died in many markets and in many countries.

Until the fast trains resurrected the old business.

It took time, money and courage… and the results are here.

Fantastic and very comfortable new trains rule again in many European countries.

Investing in fast trains is like investing in the new “online-centric” news organizations of the future.

And as The Guardian says:

The lesson is plain: build it – and they will come.

(Picture by Getty Images)

In 2007, I posted a long series about newspaper boys, but this time I am sharing with you images from my own collection, including the last one, a picture of our son Tam David, selling the London Evening Standard last May during the Chelsea Flower Show.

As you know, I collect cheap newspaper memorabilia, mainly via eBay.

Thing like newspaper boys in pictures, postcards, porcelain, iron or bronze.

Today, I got my latest find from a seller in Manchester, a huge rubber floor mat with this precious message:

…whatever you do, read THE GUARDIAN.

Any pictures or leads are welcomed!