For example, the BBC used to be cloaked in this Reithian idea that they should put out what was “good for people” and this lead to plays and other cool stuff. Nowadays, though free, the BBC chase eye-balls and the result is celebrity-obsessed nonsense and reality TV.

At what point does optimism become blind faith?

In fact, it’s killing off even non-resource-intensive articles like newspaper coverage of books and films whilst encouraging the production of easy to churn out editorials and celeb stories cut and pasted from press releases.

What’s worse is that the internet has really struggled to fill the gap left by those newspaper services. Are there websites out there doing investigative reporting and long-view analysis? there are blogs that self-publish the latter to a certain extent but without editorial oversight or fact-checking. Even pay review sites struggle to keep themselves afloat unless they’re willing to go down the GameSpot route of climbing into bed with advertisers.

I think the problem is that while I may not be willing to subscribe to a site devoted to investigative journalism or reviewing, I’ll happily pay 50p day and get a little bit of that and some other stuff that might peak my interest in a form I can carry around with me.

I’d be the first to say that old media’s reaction to the internet has been wrong-headed (only the Guardian are close to getting it right and they’re run at a loss and always have been) but that reaction has taken place. To deny that newspapers have cut back on investigative reporting etc because of the internet is to live in cloud cuckoo land.