Many of you will be aware of the kind of challenges that are besetting the newspaper and broadcasting industries at the moment.
The digital revolution has seen a large scale migration of a lot of the advertising revenue that would once have found its way into newspapers into new online platforms. Meanwhile reading patterns have changed, with less people, particularly among the young, finding the time or inclination to buy and read a paper.
Add to that the economic crisis the world tumbled into last year, leading to drastic cut-backs in advertising revenues, and you had what was more or less a perfect storm.

The result has been job losses and cut backs across the newspaper industry, a process from which our own business has sadly been far from immune.
At the beginning of this week I spent a couple of days at the Society of Editors annual conference at Stansted Airport, at which some of the luminaries of the media world led a series of lively debates on the way forward, under the general heading "The fight back".
The discussions were fascinating, but the only really consensus was that we need to do something to protect the future of journalism. As to what, there was little agreement, and much concern that time might be running out for the profession.
The last session on Tuesday morning summed up beautifully the lack of cohesion within the industry about the best way forward.
Geordie Greig, Editor of the Evening Standard, shared a platform with James Harding, Editor of The Times, and Matt Brittin, UK MD of Google.
Geordie was speaking with great enthusiasm about the new, free distribution Evening Standard, which had tripled its circulation creating what he described as an incredibly powerful tool for advertising.
James explained how The Times was withdrawing all free distribution from Spring 2010, and preparing to launch Rupert Murdoch's plan to put its website on a subscription footing, ending the practice of making its stories free online.
Meanwhile Matt had to fend off general hostility from many in the room about how the beast that is Google rips off journalists' expensively crafted work and throws it open to the world at large. He pointed out that anyone can choose to "turn off" Google access to their websites, but most choose not to given the massive audiences it helps to deliver.
Totally free newspaper distribution, or no free copies at all? Put all your stories online for free, or make readers pay for every sentence? Bewildering, isn't it?
And then there was that other pantomime villain of the conference, the BBC. A concerted campaign by the newspaper industry last year halted the BBC in its tracks with its plans for a massive development of local video, using license-payers' money to directly compete with a key development area for commercial news businesses, the regional press amongst them.
Now the debate has moved on to the question of "top slicing" the BBC's annual licence fee, with the objective of helping to support commercial TV news in the regions, something that is being all but choked out of existence at present by very similar economic pressures to those besetting newspapers. Pilot models are being developed, with local newspapers working alongside TV businesses to provide regional and local broadcast news, helping to maintain plurality.
It's a complex picture, and a time of unprecedented turmoil and change. There are far more questions than answers.
Add to the mix the controversy over local authorities who put out propaganda sheets disguised as newspapers to the communities they serve, and use them to fulfill their statutory duty of publishing their public notices. Apart from being pure spin disguised as honest journalism, the local councils who perpetrate these products are further denying revenue to legitimate commercial news organisations by not going to them with their public notice budgets.
Industries change and evolve, and the media industry has gone through many changes in the past, but the pace of the current revolution is unprecedented, and the uncertainty about the best way forward deeply unsettling.
I don't pretend to know the answers any more than any of the distinguished and very worried gathering of colleagues whose company I enjoyed at Stansted.
You may wonder why you should care. So what if the old models like newspapers and commercial TV and radio that supported journalism go to the wall, and nothing is found to replace them? There's always the internet.
Unfortunately, most of the reliable news and independent information available on the internet can be traced back to the skills of professional journalists. Citizen journalism has its place to play, as do official sources like council websites. But would you rather believe what the man next to you on the bus told you about the situation in Afghanistan, light on first hand knowledge and heavily salted with his own view of the world, the latest official statement served up by the MOD, or the report of a skilled and courageous war correspondent on the front line?
Journalism, by observing and informing on the world we live in, has a vital role in preserving a free society. Those who sneer at the profession and decry its value would miss it as much as anyone if, God forbid, it should ever go.
That's why this debate is important to all of us, and why I thought I would share a taste of it with you.

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