The Pope is onto something in his message for World Communi­cations Day when he says: “The crisis of the publishing industry risks leading to a reportage created in newsrooms, in front of personal or company computers and on social networks, without ever ‘hitting the streets’, meeting people face-to-face to research stories, or to verify certain situations first hand.”

He’s right, of course; there are an awful lot of younger journalists for whom news-gathering means scouring the Twitter feeds and social media profiles of well-known people. The old-fashioned reporter, the investigative journalist, is a rare bird; still rarer are the foreign correspondents and stringers that even popular newspapers used to employ. Bloggers and citizen journalists are all very well but they don’t come with quality control. Even in the happy hunting ground of celebrity interviews and parties (there are far fewer private events; lots of corporate ones), the newspaper diarist is kept at a distance by a battery of public relations people, who filter awkward questions and ensure that whole areas of interest are kept off limits. Papers paid wholly by advertising are not as free as they look. The old newspaper libraries have been replaced by Google – material that is redacted and time-limited; it’s not the same.