There has been no lack of evidence that newspapers are still unsure how best to make the transition to a digital age. Nor is there any shortage of casualties: many of Britain's regional titles have fallen victim to recession, declining readership and plummeting advertising revenues. Even the mighty national titles are reporting losses as they struggle to find the revenue to support paper and digital editions.
But if there has been one common strand, it has been the belief that only those newspapers with a popular and lively online edition will survive. Indeed, some mainstream American titles have taken the bold step of dumping their print editions - the Seattle Post-Intelligencer became a web-only publication in March. Just as controversially, the Washington Post recently published a two part, in depth story about a homicide - and kept it out of its paid-for print edition.
But if online news is the model for the future, newspaper moguls on the other side of he Atlantic must be tearing their hair out at the latest statistics regarding the amount of time visitors spend on their websites. In a nutshell, the time people have spent browsing the US's top 30 newspaper websites has declined or remained unchanged over the last 12 months.
Nielsen Online found that, last month, visitors to 17 of these sites spent less time browsing than they did in May 2008.
The Washington Post, with its clear strategy of wooing online readers, saw visit length drop from an average of over 16 minutes to less than 11 minutes.
Meanwhile, the fully-digital Seattle Post-Intelligencer saw its stats halve from 15 minutes 24 seconds to seven minutes 44 seconds.
The figures weren't all bad news, and a small number of titles saw major increases in visit length: the San Francisco Chronicle saw its figures double.
However, there's no getting away from the suggestion that the future will be home to far fewer traditional newspapers - online or not - and that people will mix and match their media to suit their needs and interests.
Whether this will be good for news reporting is doubtful, but advertisers will want to be where the audience is, developing increasingly targeted digital direct marketing campaigns.
