One of the aims of Correspondent.com is to imagine how the news industry will change in the next decade. Will newspapers fade to a minority audience as handheld web devices become the preferred means of delivering news? Will reporters find themselves sidelined by contributions from citizen journalists? And, as headline or 'raw' news increasingly becomes a commodity users are not willing to pay for, will news packaged with comment and analysis come to dominate the paid market?

Despite the millions publishers are spending on consultancies and think tanks, no-one really knows for sure how newspapers will look in 2016. Few could have imagined how the industry has changed in the past three years, as blogs and user-generated content have become the buzz words to include in business planning reports, never mind ten years ago, when many news websites were a mere twinkle in the tech department's eye.

Back to school

Future planning is a complex business, and that's part of the problem. Visionaries need to know something of the industry's history - how did the arrival of radio and television - "disruptive technologies" in their day - impact on newspapers? Sociology, too, has its uses here. One of the traditional places for an Englishman to read his morning paper was on the train to work: As public transport use in Britain has changed, how have reading habits been affected? How does reading a newspaper or watching a news bulletin compete for "media time" with broadband internet? How are office workers incorporating reading news on the internet into their working time? Reading a paper at your desk would get you fired, though workers in many offices have news windows open permanently.

And what of young readers, who already get most of their information from the internet?

One can't ignore economics. If a reader from the early 1990s travelled in a TARDIS to 2006, he'd doubtless find internet news a source of wonder: He would, however, recognise most of the major titles in the news field. Big media - Time Warner, the BBC, the New York Times and the Guardian - still dominate, both in terms of traffic and reliability. In Britain, the top news sites reflect the top newspapers and broadcasters (though the Guardian's online presence is much more popular, particularly overseas, than its influential, but relatively low-selling print edition).

Big media's success is doubtless down to the resources companies have been able to spend building their online presence - and perhaps explains why outside some big-hitting bloggers in the US and South Korea's wildly successful but never successfully emulated OhMyNews service, there have been few wholly web-based news services able to compete with traditional players. Google's foray into news aggregation and Yahoo's recent moves towards content production might change that, but neither organisation has claimed it has plans to become a news industry player.

However, no matter how big a company is, it can't give away its content for free indefinitely. Economic expertise is required, then, to analyse how quickly alternative revenue streams from online advertising and even subscription can grow in order to offset losses from sales and the declining advertising market for print newspapers.

Moreover, as newspapers attempt to slash costs by cutting staff, just how many reporters does a news organisation need in order to retain the standards required to ensure readers keep coming? Perhaps, as some commentators suggest, they should focus on their strengths, ditching content which is better covered online. So far, this advice has been confined mostly to timid reform such as dropping television pages, stock listings and arts critics from print editions: Perhaps a visionary with MBA skills might be able to predict which areas a newspaper should specialise in for the benefit of its readers and its staff?

What is news?

Prospective visionaries also need expertise in various branches of philosophy. Semiotics, for example, as "What is news anyway?" has unexpectedly become a central question in the debate on the future of news. Professional semiologists with experience of the wilder fringes of academic life in the 1980s might be up to speed with this one already, having doubtless argued that the text on the back of a cereal packet can sustain the same analysis as Hamlet, but the question is a serious one for the news industry.

A decade ago, what was "news" was fairly clear: "Events, dear boy, events." Even then, however, newspapers responded to their readers' demands by bundling lifestyle supplements and star profiles in with their traditional offering of news and comment. But the internet has stretched the definition further still: A wedding in Yorkshire might not be news to you, but to the 100 or so guests and family who swap photos, videos and diaries of the event online, it certainly is. The web allows users to create their own news - and this content competes with traditional news providers for media time.

A video of a fat boy bouncing around on his sofa obviously lacks the appeal of Christine Amanpour reporting from Baghdad - but CNN would love to find a way of tapping into the urge that gets millions of people to forward amusing clips to their friends and colleagues. Newscorps Rupert Murdoch has already made a start, buying personal website and community company MySpace for over 500 million dollars. MySpace, with its millions of mostly youngish members, is already one of the world's top ten websites. Members post photos, music, blogs, link to friends - and Murdoch's team is already looking at ways of incorporating this news into offerings from his traditional newspapers, like the UK's top seller The Sun.

Readers, particularly young readers, want input, more personal space and more sharing: How will newspapers respond to these new demands on newspapers?

Ethical thinking

Elsewhere, philosophers can apply their ethical skills to the problem of news from non-accredited sources. How reliable are blogs and citizen reporters - bearing in mind that the mainstream media has undergone ethical crises of its own in recent years. How can user-generated content be subjected to editorial review, and will that rob it of its appeal? Will newspapers circle their wagons and attempt to make a virtue of their credibility, charging a premium for reliable, professional services, or has the public's preference for on-demand free news and comment from blogs killed newspapers reputation as purveyors of truth for good?

Is there even a market to sustain such an exercise? And what about those readers who actually like a bit of bias with their news? Companies from the Guardian to Fox News via the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mirror (not to mention numerous weblogs) owe their success to a particular view of the world: Will newspapers bend to attract a certain reader profile - and will others emerge to cater for those readers whose views are left uncovered?

At this point, publishers could be forgiven for demanding that their futurologists study theology, too, as keeping on the right side of the Almightly is beginning to look like the best way to survive the next ten years.

However, if no-one knows for sure which way the news industry is headed - and some commentators already say that the blogging phenomenon has peaked - newspapers can help themselves by asking their readers what they'd like to see. Marketing think tanks don't always work - readers notoriously claim that they would pay for editorial services, only to desert to another free news source when gated content is introduced.

Think of your readers

Nevertheless, the habits of those who read your paper are worth knowing. Editors Weblog picks up on the Wall Street Journal's idea of brainstorming its readers to discover how they imagine the perfect news site, circa 2016.

So, ten years on from the first edition of WSJ Online, what would its readers like to see in the next decade?

"More context and background included in news reporting. They want new ways to receive their news, on next-generation handheld devices, for instance, rather than simply on a Web page. They want fewer ads – especially the kind that animate or show up in popup windows."

Others want stories filtered to their needs - they don't want the same headlines twice, perhaps suggesting that a news site that remembers what you read and displays only new stories when you visit again would be useful. Another reader said he didn't need 20 eyewitness reports for every shooting, preferring "highly edited coverage that makes the best use of his time."

Portability is a keyword, not just for the obvious move towards news on handheld devices and possibly digital paper, but the possibility of carrying an encyclopedia of related facts linked into the background of every story. One reader also requested that the WSJ's content be made "portable" in other sites, allowing him to view his accounts alongside news feeds on the same secure page.

More audio and video was predicted, perhaps extending the news site to a 24/7 news operation. How that newsroom will be staffed, however, might not make happy reading for journalists:

"Much has been made lately of citizen journalism and the perfect site of the future would build on that. 'Editors will be a thing of the past. Instead, users will vote content to the front page. Fact checkers will be the only staff left as they verify and comment on the information posted be the community of readers. In the next decade the broadcaster and the reader will merge into one.'

"Wrote another: 'Instead of traditional news bureaus, a sophisticated network of freelancers, some with no journalistic experience, will act as correspondents, filing stories from computers inside their homes from around the world. The news will be more in depth, and news will be covered much faster.'"

Many of us don't get the time to read all the news we'd like to, never mind write it too. Indeed, while the opportunities presented by the internet are exciting and immense, perhaps we need a visionary to come along and tell us how pleasant it will be to unplug from the media now and again: Offline time could become the new luxury time. As one of the WSJ's readers says,

"Some days I think we were all blessed when we had [just] an evening newspaper and the 6:30 network news."

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