Thanks for the mention… I only just caught up with it.

On job losses among journalists . . . this is the elephant in the room that no-one wants to discuss.

I understand why. Servers = power looms, and Luddite machine breaking really wouldn’t be good for anyone’s image.

The revolution we’re living through is a wonderful, awesome, unstoppable thing — but there’s also a significant chance that job losses among the content classes are going to become a serious issue going forward.

In sectors that have already made the transition from print to web, I’ve seen all of the arguments about duplicated coverage and aggregation play out.

Experience tells me that this won’t be enough.

Once you start to visualise national newsrooms staffed by 25%-50% fewer journalists a decade hence. . . maybe a few closures, too. . . perhaps then we’re getting closer to the future reality.

I’m basing those numbers on the experience of media that have been through the digital mill during the past decade.

(My other assumption is that online advertising won’t suddenly become very much more expensive in the long term.)

I think there’s a real case for the industry to start making some informed forecasts about the economics of newsgathering in the future.

The question is not so much what we’ll be doing as journalists and UGC people. (There’s plenty of prognostication about that.)

But how will we be doing it — in financial terms? How much revenue shrinkage is inevitable, probable or possible?

And what does the resulting cost base of a broadsheet or ITN look like as a result?

Newsrooms of the future are springing up all over the place. (Wapping, Victoria. . .) I’m more interested in the P&L of the future, the business model of the future.

Perhaps McKinsey — after all of those Big Media engagements — possesses an industry-wide forecast and scenarios, or has the data to generate same.

But I doubt McKinsey would ever go public with that data.

Maybe, therefore, this is a job for John Lloyd at the Reuters Institute in Oxford, possibly in conjunction with Said Business School. . .

Peter