I COULDN'T not respond to a fine bit of local newspaper coffin-nailing carried out by an Ormskirk media academic the other day.

Although I've had the weekend to mull over comments made by Edge Hill lecturer Marc Stanton in which he says that the days of traditional paid-for newspapers are numbered and that the future of free newspapers - papers, don't forget, like The Champion - are "in the balance", I'm still struggling to understand them.

Let's get the things he and I both agree on out of the way first; crucially that the ye olde idea of there being print, broadcast and radio journalists is gradually dying out, because all these mediums now cross over, particularly via that newfangled Internet I'm always going on about. I trained as a print reporter but really I think of myself as working in Convergance Media, simply because I'll be expected to write for a newspaper one moment, coordinate our website the next, and then either record a Podcast or shoot some video footage.

It's also no secret that The Champion is launching a radio station in January, which will add another string to our bows. All these things working together, I have absolutely no doubt, is a good thing.

But then Marc - a man who, I should point out, I haven't had the privelige of meeting yet - start to head off in completely different directions. While I fully respect his years of experience in the media, I just can't agree from my own experiences with his assertion that our days are numbered.

Marc's views on the media would have been entirely appropriate had he been speaking in 2008, a torrid time when titles across the land were abandoned, scores of journalists found themselves shut out and - worst of all - communities suddenly found themselves without a voice. It was, however, in the middle of a particularly nasty recession and while I know that even today lots of journalists are having a tough time, the industry is slowly fighting back.

Consider this: in the past year more newspapers have been created than killed off, so much so that a now-infamous analyis by Clare Enders that half of the country's titles would be gone within five years has now been scaled back.

Why aren't we covering the parish councils? Apart from the none-too-small problem of there being so many of them, the industry as a whole has had to slice back its operations, often to the point where sending reporters out for the afternoon would compromise stronger stories. But the fact is the proper newspapers will, in most cases, still beat the so called 'citizen journalists' to the real stories.

Journalism lecturers are, naturally, lecturers and therefore clever enough to know exactly the problems being faced by local newspapers, but also about how bright ideas can be used to help tackle them. The idea that the Internet will kill newspapers is about stupid as watching MTV for the first time and deciding that radio has had it.

Local newspapers aren't dying. They're just changing for the better.

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