As publishers lose control, are newspaper web sites a dead parrot?

A truth is dawning on media owners (or in many cases it has dawned, but they don’t like to talk about it). Publishing is over. Obviously this isn’t true in its purest sense; publishing is actually flourishing, just not for publishers. As Facebook extended the reach of its instant articles to anyone, as Google invests in making news articles load lightning fast, as virtual reality can be produced by a £200 kit, it is fair to say we have more opportunity today to put out remarkable works of fact and fiction to the world than ever before.

As the pipes of distribution have merged with the advertising sales functions, the publishing tools and even the customer relations and data, the best a traditional publisher can hope for is that they will be favoured by the distributors or that they can build value separately. This is most likely to be through relationships with either advertisers or their own customers, hence the most closely watched models are those based on becoming a new type of advertising agency (BuzzFeed and Vice) or subscriptions based on brand loyalty (the New York Times). Given the disorienting speed of change and a dozen announcements a week that potentially upend your business model, maybe publishing is not in fact dead, but like the proverbial Monty Python parrot, lying on the floor of its cage, eyes screwed tightly shut.