By Peter Preston

The paper that was once printed all over the world now makes 700,000 of its 900,000 sales digitally – and that may offer a little hope for others too.

The Financial Times used to be a discreet, pink wing of establishment Britain. Its editors went on to grace City boardrooms, become university chairs or lead the CBI. It was thoughtful and respectable. It did not make great waves or turn over stones, ambitions prudently constrained. But baby, look at it now.

The FT trumpeted the news last week that it’s now selling 900,000 copies – some 700,000 in digital, fewer and fewer in print – every day. One huge transition is working, then – and very beneficently, because the emphasis on cover and subscription cash ameliorates the threat of sudden City advertising downturns.

Here, cautiously, is real change and real success. Lionel Barber and his team – serving their news Nikkei masters in Japan – are taking strides, and not afraid to make the most of them.

Of course, though, one pink swallow doesn’t make a summer. Look around at other transition tales and the clouds soon gather. And see what the arch-optimist of print survival, Rupert Murdoch, has been saying. Digital advertising has been “tremendously damaging to print” and many of his papers are struggling, he told a company meeting. He won’t be buying any more. Plaudits for the Wall Street Journal, Times and Australian. But previous dearly beloveds – the Sun, the New York Post et al – are sources of toil and anxiety.

Now, it’s no great surprise that the Wall Street Journal is making money. It would be a disaster if it wasn’t, because (like the FT) it has a specialist audience prepared to pay for specialist information. But the rest of the empire faces harsher tests: in particular, the problem of finding a formula for survival, a transition thesis that works.

Rupert once embraced such a formula. His journalism was deemed precious: therefore every title had to have a price. But once applied to the Sun, that dictum faded. The Sun’s imposed paywalls came down; its website was free, and much refreshed. Yet the money doesn’t seem to be there yet. The Sun has a growing digital audience, but a diminishing digital cash pile.

It’s not alone in such problems of course. Kath Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, has said exactly where she thinks the blame lies in a recent lecture. Like so many others, her paper hoped to make advertising pay for vastly expanded digital reach. “But this business model is currently collapsing, as Facebook and Google swallow digital advertising; as a result, the digital journalism produced by many news organisations has become less and less meaningful.” Viner and Robert Thomson, chief executive of Murdoch’s News Corp, share an eloquent theme.

“Google’s commodification of content knowingly, wilfully, undermined provenance for profit,” Thomson says. “That was followed by the Facebook stream, with its journalistic jetsam and fake flotsam. Together, the two most powerful news publishers in human history have created an ecosystem that is dysfunctional and socially destructive.”

In some recent ways the situation is a little less bleak. Professor Charlie Beckett at the London School of Economics sees signs of recovery. “The legacy media has started to get its act together and it has the resource, profile and core audiences to sustain both scale and add value – perhaps helped by Trump and Brexit in the US and UK and generally by the public sense that they need more reliable sources during our informational crisis.”

The New York Times, with 2.3 million digital subscribers, finds that revenue climbing quarter by quarter. The Washington Post, floating on the cloud of Jeff Bezos’s fortune, is making giant strides. Murdoch specifically praises his London Times, with its 400,000-plus subscribers. Some 800,000 readers contribute to Guardian membership or subscriber schemes.

Yes, there will be many casualties. Look, on the latest ABC-sanctified print circulation figures, at the Sunday People, down to 206,593 in September, a 21.45% drop in a year, or its stablemate Sunday Mirror, down 24.06% to 516,786. Look, for that matter, at the Daily Mirror itself, down 20.17% to 603,629. No wonder Trinity Mirror seem restive over the interminable takeover negotiations for Richard Desmond’s stable. Salvation painfully delayed.

But it pays to examine the parcels of gloom one by one. Newspapers and news websites that have something special to sell – some coverage and expertise that set their own value – are beginning to see a little daylight. The words, the pictures, the facts still matter. It is the news organisations – websites as well as papers – that don’t add value which are having the direst time.

You could almost, for once, manage a little cheer – if Kath Viner didn’t wisely remind us that the whole history of news on the ever-changing, ever-elusive net might well be entitled “Cancel My Last Announcement”. And the FT, once physically printed around the globe, can echo that.