The fear factor

Just catching up with the Sunday's and after reading Peter Preston's piece in the Observer,the media's future is written not in gloom and doom, but shades of grey you might be tempted to think of change of career.

These are some of the things that the industry has to battle with

1.Straight on to the net. An unstoppable force of growth and profitability? Perhaps, if you're Amazon or Google – if, that is, you've got something to sell punters want to buy. But the latest list of America's top 30 newspaper websites shows that, year on year, as many have shed readers, and reading time, as have gained it.

2.There's no such thing as scarcity value: the net is infinitely available. It's just a cheaper medium, thus far unsuited to many kinds of display advert campaigns.

3.Welcome to Sky+, hurrah for the BBC's video-on-demand Project Canvas, three cheers for the wealth of the internet on your TV screen! But where does advertising stand in all this, a victim of deferred time travel and infinite choice

and finally

The fear factor. A decade ago I wouldn't have mentioned Facebook, Twitter or iPhones, because they didn't exist. On to 2015, 2020… and so many other things, barely dreamed of, that could unhinge everything. Are you sitting uncomfortably?