George Brock, Saturday Editor, The Times, UK; President, World Editors Forum

The view of an editor of a magazine as successful as The Economist deserve respect, but let's not forget that The Economist is a weekly "newspaper" and is thus likely to lean towards the analytical. And the "space" into which The Economist has shrewdly grown is the expanding curiosity about global business. Serious daily newspapers have always mixed entertainment, news and analysis: the issue isn't the fact of the mixture but whether or not the proportions are right. Over the past 20 years, the quantity of commentary and analysis - both in opinion columns and in news analysis - in my own paper has risen steadily. Persuading a reader to form a long-term relationship with a daily may partly depend on analytic qualities. In the next few years, with news being transmitted more and more by digital platforms, papers may concentrate more on analysis not as easily read on the web. But readers can also be persuaded to buy papers - and, yes, papers seek to maximise their readership - by something they urgently want or need.

Bill Densmore, Director/Editor, MediaGiraffe Project, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

At the local level, newspaper publishers can still gather news, without analysis, and get along. But they have to offer it in more ways than on paper. Beyond their topical or geographic niche, however, Emmott is right. Entertainment, world and national news are now a commodity. So, actually, is commentary. But fact-based analysis remains rare and prized. I think newspapers have to learning to become the information home base -- or valet -- for their users -- able to find, reference analyze and recommend information from anywhere.

Bachi Karkaria, National Metro Editor, Times of India, India

Bill Emmott is both right and wrong. Yes, analysis is what print does best, for both  reasons of legacy and now perhaps default. I would not however agree with the statement that Net and TV have left this space  largely to us. In India, some channels draw much prestige  for the quality of their discussions, and it is not a domain they will relinquish. It is a select viewership, but an influential one, in the same way that  readers of the edit page  form a very small but coveted part of the general  readership.

As for the future composition of newspapers, they will stick, though not exclusively, to serious issues, but they will have to keep finding ways to present them in reader-friendly ways, different ones for different contexts. Conversely  they  will bring gravitas to areas conventionally deemed  frivolous. Lifestyle will be looked at less as a transient event, and more as a trend. Editorial page writers will deem (or be asked to consider) this a subject worthy of comment as society takes its due place along with politics and economics. The sociology and psychological fall-out of changing mores, relationships, leisure options will get more serious discussion. Technology too will move out of its niche, and assert itself in mainstream pages. In India, urbanisation is fast asserting itself on news and editorial pages; city rather than nation is an already apparent trend.

Emmott mentioned `authoritative analysis'. Yes, but participative media is here to stay. Net can stroke this beast most seductively, and TV and radio can accommodate the instant phone-in/sms/email public response. Print too will have to find creative ways of serving the need of today's audiences who are looking for news that's relevant to them,  - insist on a say in the forming of opinion. No newspaper can afford to position itself as the oracle, talking down from on high.

Philip Meyer, Knight Chair in Journalism, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA

The problem is more complicated than a choice between entertainment and analysis. The media that have flourished  in the past half century are those that attract specialized audiences. That's good news for small community newspapers, bad news for large metropolitan papers whose content is a broad mosaic that tries to contain some appeal for everyone. The Economist is a niche publication, albeit a very large and vital niche. But to say that newspapers should imitate it is no more logical than saying they should emulate People magazine because it has a large audience.

Philip Stone, followthemedia.com, Switzerland 

At followthemedia.com, where our number of readers goes up around 5% monthly, we are told time and again that we are read for our analysis. People want help in understanding information. As you may recall the Economist has had its biggest subscriber increases in the US and if you think of the way American journalism is taught -- that the journalist gives the facts and only the facts and keeps opinion out of stories, then it is natural that if people want analysis, and they do, that they look at the venues that provide that. And the Economist is as good an example as any you will find for that.
 
As to the content of local newspapers, we at followthemedia.com believe strongly that newspapers must increase their local coverage to a far greater degree than they do now, and should invite more reader participation. . People want to know what is happening to their neighbors, to the local  school -- and the further you travel from the front porch the less interest there is for those distant events on a day-to-day basis. But the key is the proper convergence with the Internet  -- in other words newspapers must become multi platform, and, indeed, there may be less reliance on "paper" in the world of newspapers.  So apart from the stories and boxscores etc. on the local sports team one should be able to go the newspaper's web site and see some video of that game, and listen to a podcast -- interviews with some of the players, the coaches, etc.. It does not have to be that professionally produced, indeed it can be audience participation -- video/audio taken by parents and others going to that game -- but no longer is news just text, or pictures, or video, or audio  it is all of these things put together and newspapers must adapt so that they are the multiplatform delivery system that people turn to.

Barry Sussman, Editor, Watchdog Project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, USA

One thing left out of Emmott's explanation is the continuous, expensive promotion The Economist undertakes. Without it, no amount of concise analysis would have brought such great success, in my view. I'm not sure more analysis would help newspapers succeed but it would be better than a glut of celebrity news. I'd focus on hard news and the kind of global report that Emmott describes, and I'd try to promote them heavily. Would that work? Maybe, since the world is getting smaller every day. But if it wouldn't, let's at least go down swinging. The other thing I'd do is study the Internet for best practices and how to apply them.

Jean-Pierre Tailleur, Journalism professor, Political Science Institute at Aix-en-Provence, France

Bill Emmott’s comments are very instructive for newspapers managers who tend to ignore the peculiarities of their media in their competitive environments. Some French regionals, for instance, excessively decide what is fit to print according to what television news put forward or to what they believe consumers like (entertainment namely). Dailies do not build strong confidence with readers, however, if they are seen as followers of commercial trends or broadcast media. Like The Economist, which has been investing on investigative stories in its specific area (world politics), they should cover more deeply their specific fields to ensure a solid readership base.