Day the newspapers died

Reporting on 9/11 saw collapse in trust of mainstream news

- NIALL McCRAE

THEY'RE still there, on supermarket shelves, in petrol stations and convenience shops. But the bundles are much smaller now.

Some retailers stock a limited selection, or take a single copy of The Guardian, with only the Daily Mail and Sun making the distribution worthwhile. For how much longer can the daily newspaper, that faded icon of British social life, survive?

The terminal decline began two decades ago, on September 11, 2001. The attack on the World Trade Center in New York surely surpassed other historical landmarks in our collective memory, such as the death of Princess Diana, the breach of the Berlin Wall, or even the seminal Sixties events of the moon landing and assassination of JFK.

At the turn of the millennium, our national newspapers were competing in a boisterous market. The Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph was so thick with supplements that you needed a wheelbarrow to carry it home. Back then, the Telegraph sold a million daily, the Mail two million and the Sun over three million.

My local railway station at Carshalton had a magazine stall, and the busy rush-hour platform was lined with commuters reading their chosen version of the news. Many of these same people also bought the Evening Standard for the journey home.

Newsagents were threatened by the free Metro paper, which was available at every railway and underground station. For a while, the stall owner moved the Metro stack out of sight, to protect his livelihood, but eventually his business succumbed.

Why was 9/11 so key to the demise of the newspaper? The wider context is that the internet transformed society, shifting us from the analogue to the digital world.