Mr. Harry Browne:

Hugely, there is good international scholarship on this that suggests that those kinds of pressures were being brought to bear while newspapers were still quite profitable and before there was an online presence to compete with. If one looks at the book I referred to earlier or Flat Earth Newsby Nick Davies, which is based on research from scholars from Cardiff University, there is a clear sense in which journalism has become more like what Nick Davies calls "churnalism" in recent years. I am always surprised by how much the public does not realise the extent of the crisis print journalism in particular finds itself in. The fall in circulation is only outstripped by the fall in advertising revenue. The Irish Timeshas wound down the pension plan so I will get something like 40% of the pension I was promised when I left the newspaper in 2002. The Irish Timeshas done this because of the trading situation in which it finds itself. We talk about newspapers being large companies. The Irish Timesis now quite a small company. The advertising revenue in all national newspapers in 2014 is less than half of what it was eight years ago and this is from digital as well from print. Digital advertising is still a relatively small proportion of that.