Begin with some big numbers. Maybe 9 million people around the globe will browse the MailOnline today (make that 122 million or more over this month).
The Guardian is reaching for 5 million a day - and 90 million a month - whilst the Telegraph pursues 3 million and 60 million. And big growth rates of 40% or 30% over a year fit quite snugly into this picture. Newspapers online look like a booming, ABC-sanctified business - especially when you can start calculating overall exposure and offer advertisers a print product outing as well, thus more than doubling UK morning readership before you even think of addressing the wider world. Reckon 20 million Mail readers of one kind or another in Britain alone.
Are statistics like this instantly meaningful to advertisers in search of an audience, though? Perhaps not quite. They'll need to jump through the various comScore-style hoops to find out who's "engaged" or not, what precisely a click on a keyboard, with or without cookies, portends. But still, the success story itself looks basically clear.
Why, then, all the doom and gloom when progress - from Singapore to Seattle as well as from Bristol to Bolton - can be so marked? At which point it's time for all "newsmen" (aka journalists) who've cut their teeth on the dailies or weeklies we call newspapers, to grow a little more thoughtful.
Of course news isn't the only thing that matters to newspaper editors, or their readers. Where would the Telegraph be without Fantasy Football or the Guardian without its Soulmates dating service? People buy newspapers for quick crosswords, cartoons, TV programmes and the rest - basic information or familiar diversion. That's part of the whole engagement process - just as much as video-watching on online versions.
The primacy of news
Yet a certain bleak logic operates nonetheless. A newspaper without news is nothing in particular, a thin magazine there to fill in idle hours without any immediate relevance. News itself is the core of every key sales argument. It defines purpose; it's where any future assessments begin. You can't keep those big numbers if you're not big in news.
But any sentient editor, whether considering print or digital, also knows something immediately crucial about how readers react to the news they want most, the coverage that makes them feel most "engaged". A halfway credible "reading and noting" panel survey gives the essential facts in an instant. The news most avidly read is the news that directly affects a reader's own life. It's news with an instant reaction: the gas leak in your street, the rise in your pension age, the fear of something disastrous happening to you and your family (say a nuclear meltdown near your part of town).
Conversely, therefore, the news that has least allure is distant, random and of no identifiable relevance. I once remember a distinguished political correspondent complaining to me that nobody, nobody at all, appeared to have read and noted a story he'd written: but it proved, on examination, to be a tale that reflected only the worthy endeavours of a very junior minister who was also a good source of the correspondent. It had been written to keep the source happy, not engage any passing trade. It had not even paused to think about finding an audience.
But where are the eager, concerned audiences that underpin digital growth?
Who are the millions who bulwark Mail or Guardian global reach, and drive ever wider expansion to satellite news centres from Greenwich Village to Sydney?
Here's the question that matters increasingly.
Distant relatives?
The MailOnline, an incontrovertible success, is barely a second cousin of Paul Dacre's Mail in print. Its discrete staff collects and processes - almost aggregates - basic stories through the day. What the print Mail said that morning doesn't much matter as the hours pass. The fundamental job that first prompted staff hirings in Los Angeles is buying pictures, those miles of stars in bikinis or leggings that swoop down the right hand of the site, a cornucopia of celebrity culture. The "directness" of what's offered here is direct access to candid coverage of the exalted people less exalted people see on TV or when they go to a movie. Gosh! She's put on a bit of weight!
In a sense, it's the mirror image of the appeal of social media like Facebook and Twitter where ordinary readers are invited to think I'm "important" because I have my own site - and my own line in tweets so I can follow Justin Bieber or Harry Styles. I'm a sort of surrogate celebrity too.
And since celebrity culture, orchestrated from LA via a host of paparazzi and related websites, is a culture without borders, as ubiquitous as the nearest laptop or television set, so this Mail world is essentially one without borders, too. It may carry "news" in a limited sense. But it's not news as most newsmen - even on the Daily Dacre - would understand it. And though other competing sites, from the New York Times to the Guardian, have a rather wider definition of what's news today, the fundamental sums that underpin the strategy are still full of problems.
I'm an obviously devoted Guardian reader: but sometimes, appearing for the paper's defence at conferences and seminars, there are problems I can't quite deal with. The balance between home and away, for instance. I'm aware that hundreds of thousands of settled or transient Australians live in the UK, especially London. I know that potential or actual readers in such numbers need stories that interest them - and that, back in Australia, the Guardian has started a flourishing website service designed to increase engagement and numbers on the other side of the world. But does that mean, say, that this autumn's Australian general election is worth more examination and analysis than a German election that impacts directly on the course of the British economy and British politics? You can't begin to make that case. There is a lot of Australian copy in the copy of the print Guardian that drops on my mat in London because there are a lot of Guardian journalists in Australia generating copy that's available for use anywhere.
Who’s covering home?
And you can make exactly the same point about American coverage around Fleet Street. How - on the Mail, Telegraph, Times and Guardian for starters - do you differentiate between American coverage (and columns) for America, and what's appropriate for coverage in this country? The net and the printed page are bound to show seepage back and forth; the perspective of news, centred somewhere in mid-Atlantic, grows elusive, not firm and grounded. Meanwhile the core audience for British newspapers - ie the readers of Britain - tends to fade from view. You may staff up for purpose in LA, but you won't have a correspondent left in Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle - or even Liverpool. The non-metropolitan hinterland of Britain is abandoned to struggling regional dailies - or weeklies with a far narrower focus.
Wales, after devolution, has become a virtual no-go area. Scotland, after devolution, reports its own affairs, but sees those stories drop out of circulation the moment they pass Berwick on Tweed heading south.
I have read far more about Australian politics these past few months than I've glimpsed about politics north of Watford.
The directness of the old news-reading experience, in short, grows curiously diffused. The news on offer is news about second or third phase events that may not truly touch your readers' lives. The news on newspaper websites is targeted to individual interests, hobbies, passions, occupations; but it always has to spread farther and wider in search of the unique users who can give it big browser numbers - and ad credibility. Global icons are good for business. See Michael Jackson die and look out for a tsunami of tweets and clicks. Celebrate a royal baby by surfing the web. But somewhere close to ground level, somewhere in the street where you live, a certain mistiness of purpose begins to emerge. The advertisements that circle your laptop page are utterly specific: they echo the last few inquiries you made, the hotels you stayed at, the books you thought of buying. The news that fills the hole in the middle, though, lacks such consistency. It is gathered and written for a vast variety of reasons, and readers. It is too often there because that's what the commercial logic of digital survival demands.
Bloggers can fill some of the gaps. Small operations can try to think small themselves in news terms. But as for covering, say, city council affairs the length of Britain, that's much more problematic - a problem that regional TV news shares with print. The expense is large, but the audience - relatively - isn't. Here, perversely, is where innovation and effort may directly lead us. Have I got news for you?
No, sorry, nothing doing in Bradford. But how about Beverly Hills?
