There have been a couple of interesting blog posts from Roy Greenslade, one of the UK's most respected media commentators recently.  Roy was the recent keynote speaker at the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications' annual awards dinner.  (AMEC is the industry trade body that represents Metrica and the other leading firms that specialise in PR measurement and media evaluation.)  His speech that night was fantastic; the content was reported on Measurement Matters at the time by my colleague Paul Kennedy.

Writing in his Guardian blog, Roy began the year by predicting that 'online is the future and the future is now.' 

He made a series of predictions for the year that included:

• at least one major regional owner will go under
• many local publications will close or merge
• more freely distributed papers will cease to publish
• and many more journalists will lose their jobs

He believes that the traditional newspaper industry faces a 'perfect storm' which is resulting in there being limited money available for much needed innovation in new forms of journalism and online delivery platforms.  And owing to commercial pressures, too many of the national paper websites are seeking ratings at the expense of innovation & credibility.  This in turn is going to make it more difficult for them to generate the online audiences that they so desperately need.

This week he has posted again commenting on the business folly being exhibited by many papers as they have set about increasing their cover price.  The Mirror, Guardian, Observer, and News of the World have all done this recently and he concludes that all this will achieve is the acceleration of the decline in their audiences. 

We may well now be in January and memories of the holiday season starting to fade, but does anyone else think that the newspaper publishers' actions are somewhat reminiscent of a turkey voting for Christmas?