The countries where online newspaper website consumption is highest – Korea, Norway, Iceland, Japan – outscore Britain almost two to one and fare much better at protecting print circulation as well.
Austria, pretty close to the UK in news site usage, lost a mere 2% of publishing turnover in the two years where we saw 21% go.
Here’s a hint in these statistics – the sort of people who get their news online are also the sort of people who buy print newspapers. It’s not one or the other; it’s often both.
And nothing they find prompts the OECD researchers to conclude that print papers have a doomed, finite future.
Well, of course, international forecasters can be wrong. But a few nagging conclusions about our Fleet Street and regional press won’t go away.
In the broad, we’re a long way behind the US, and other nations as well, in increasing digital advertising.
And in the main, intense, introverted competition stops industry-wide thinking and co-operation. Compare places such as Norway and Sweden, which do better on every count.
Worse, we’re particularly poor at connecting with new, young readers – who may prefer news on the net, but often choose no news at all.
We fulminate about immigration, but don’t provide a service to meet their different needs.

We tell ourselves that Fleet Street knows best, but change painfully little in style or range as the crisis bites.