What about the death of print newspapers at the hands of the net, the obsessive fear incessantly invoked by journalists themselves?

Assumption piled on assumption anoints internet news the dominant medium of the future, leaving forests to die in peace. Thus - at root - a news website is seen as the old paper chase turned digital, a newspaper in another form. It has 24-hour news alerts, sport, features, an editor, all the usual stuff. It seems intrinsically familiar.

Of course, it's more open and inter-reactive than print news will ever be. Reporters and readers can pursue mutual interests whenever they like. The most lauded sites - say, the Telegraph and the Guardian - have grown blogging, special interest and video operations far beyond print capability. But still, from its home (or front) page on, the basic model evokes the memory of a newspaper, the model that journalists grew up with - and still measure themselves by.

The people who write the sites (and also, with integration, write for print editions, too) see themselves as pursuing their ancestral trade by new means. They think of transitions from one technical level to the next - from puffing Billy to TGV. But suppose - just suppose - that this is all a little off-centre. And suppose that, if we look hard enough, the facts of the matter (as opposed to salesman spin) are awkwardly complex.

Facts, to be sure, come inherently confusing in this area. Most of those worth building on here are American-based, from Nielsen, because Nielsen collects them with continuous, detailed authority. So take a few of the crucial figures - some familiar, some surprising - from the summer.

Around 70.3 million unique users visited a US newspaper website in June, only one-third of the actual (210 million or so) American universe of users. The average visitor spent 38 minutes and 24 seconds a month on one, or more likely, a variety of many sites. That means that around 140 million US web users didn't go near any newspaper-originated news. It also means that, on one calculation, just 1.2% of all surfing-cum-browsing time was spent on newspaper websites.

Six of the top 10 US news websites - boasting around 180 million users a month in all, numbers boosted by obvious duplications - belong to internet providers like Yahoo or TV companies like MSNBC. The four newspaper groups on the list rate well under of third of that total between them, with no newspaper presence at all in the top five. For all the breast-beating, newspapers cannot, in any true sense, quote big numbers. They don't make a truly big net noise.

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