NEWSPAPERS find themselves less popular than ever, at a time when the newspaper industry is losing readers while struggling to cut costs and meet demands for ever-larger profits. Circulation is declining, advertising is shrinking and reporters and editors are being “let go”.

That gloomy assessment of the newspaper industry appears in the latest New York Review of Books and applies to America, but it could as easily have been written about Britain where the latest editor to be “let go” was Andrew Gowers, of the Financial Times, whose sales last month were down year on year by almost 20,000 to 419,000 — their lowest for seven years. At the full cover price, sales in Britain were below 100,000.

Whatever he does next, Gowers wrote in a valedictory article in London’s Evening Standard, it will not involve ink printed on dead trees. “Working in print . . . is the early 21st century equivalent of running a record company specialising in vinyl,” he said. “The future lies with the internet.”

Newspaper editors, and in particular those in the chairs of the traditional tabloids, are some of the brightest and sharpest men and women around. But none of them any longer seems able to stop the month-by-month slide in sales. DVDs work for all papers. Saturday sales of The Times have hit one million twice this autumn with the help of DVDs. The Daily Telegraph put on 179,000 with Whistle Down the Wind and the Daily Mail put on about 350,000 last Saturday with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

But DVDs are an expensive marketing trick — they can cost up to £1 million — and they work only for one day. There seems to be no editorial tricks that work the same magic on weekdays. So, in spite of the millions that were spent on DVDs by the popular tabloids last month, the depressing result was that weekday sales of The Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and the Mail were down by up to 500,000 a day compared with last year — the Express by more than 100,000 a day (11.4 per cent) — and sales of their equivalent Sunday titles were down by 630,000. Look back five years and the dailies are down by more than 900,000.

There are two editorial “tricks” that are working. One is the internet. In September The New York Times website had more than 21 million different users. Savour that statistic — it is staggering. In Britain, Guardian Unlimited had 2.5 million unique users, Times Online 1.45 million and Telegraph.co.uk 1.28 million. The papers are being read by more readers than ever — but not as ink on dead trees.

As another way of getting newspaper comment, The Daily Telegraph this week launched Britain’s first daily podcast.

The other successful trick has been the switch from broadsheet to compact. Among the dailies the worst performers in October were the two broadsheets — the FT and The Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph has been redesigned into three sections (one of them tabloid), but sales last month were lower than in September and down year on year, while its great rival The Times was up on the month and the year. Although the Telegraph remains ahead of The Times on overall sales, it recorded its lowest-ever October sales. At full cover price it was outsold, by more than 40,000, by The Times which had the highest year-on-year sales rise of any national daily.

The Independent, meanwhile, recorded its highest sale since becoming the broadsheet-to- compact pioneer two years ago and its highest for eight years despite of the launch of The Guardian in its Berliner format. However, The Guardian also had something to shout about, with a sale of 403,000 — up by almost 25,000 year on year and up by 45,000 on July.

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