At 48 Andrew Gowers is remarkably young to be set loose from that august bastion of British business journalism, the Financial Times, over which he presided as editor for just four years. He is also remarkably certain that he won't be editing another newspaper, in an industry that he describes as declining.

"Working in print, pure and simple, is the early 21st century equivalent of running a record company specialising in vinyl," Gowers said in a recent column.  Such is the pace of change that he believes some established national newspapers might disappear in coming years.

He will not be drawn on the reported “strategic differences” with Pearson, his former employer that led to his unusually abrupt departure last November from what was one of the top jobs in British journalism.

One thing is clear. He presided over what can accurately be described as the most turbulent period of the newspaper's history, when the previously money-spinning FT plunged into three dark years of successive loss and continued speculation – despite Person's denials – that the paper, estimated to be  worth more than $1 billion, would be sold.

The FT's problems were also shared by other national newspapers, desperately trying to buck the trend with free giveaways and DVDs. But marketing gimmicks can't hide sliding circulations and advertising revenues. The Internet, which Gowers describes as “a disruptive technology,” has changed the whole nature of the newspaper industry and made nonsense of the old business model.

“I think they [newspaper owners] realise that the Internet has changed everything, but I'm not sure they fully appreciate the extent to which it is changing their industry,” he says.

Despite his Oxbridge roots, Gowers is different from his predecessors at the FT, Sir Geoffrey Owen and Richard Lambert, both of whom possessed the same donnish air that would have equipped them equally for a life among the dreaming spires.  Appropriately, Owen is now a director of the LSE and Lambert sits on the equally donnish Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee. Gowers seems more the street-fighter. Some of his former colleagues found him abrasive. He seems far from ready to retire to the more rarefied corridors normally reserved for ex-editors of the FT.  He is considering involvement in one or two media ventures overseas, details of which he is not yet ready to divulge. 

Yet Gowers, for the moment, is pursuing the same well-worn path as that of other ex-editors of what used to be known as Fleet Street.  He has acquired a column on a rival newspaper, in his case on the Sunday Times. Like Lambert he has also been offered a part-time job by Gordon Brown on leaving the FT. He is to preside over an independent Government review, led by the Treasury, of  Intellectual Property rights.

The aim is to see whether existing laws are sufficiently robust to protect innovation and existing patents in the new digital age. The review is partly inspired by growing concerns among the music industry that their copyright is being breached by online downloads. “We need to strike the right balance between rewarding innovation and giving people access to information and ideas,” says Gowers.

The newspaper industry is also struggling to protect its copyright in the Internet age. Readers are migrating wholesale to the new media where news can be collected from a variety of different online publications, often for free. The reader is in control; they select what they wish to read, not what the newpaper choses to deliver to them.  As Gowers says, it is possible to read 70 different versions of the same news story via the net.

As a result, newspapers have become less relevant, especially to younger consumers. Audited figures reveal a fall of three per cent in newspaper circulations last year, and two per cent the year before. The trend coincides with an advertising downturn, and a rise in the cost of newsprint of about eight per cent for the second year in a row.

“The newspaper industry is facing an unbelievable challenge,” says Gowers. “News has commoditised. People now get their news from multiple sources. ”

New Internet technology, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), has reinforced this trend by enabling publishers and bloggers to share quickly new content posted to their sites. News organisations such as the BBC and the Guardian also provide RSS feeds.

Newspapers, the FT included, have responded by setting up their own websites. FT.com attracts four million visitors to its site each month, of which it is believed some 80,000 are actually paying subscribers.

Gowers says the FT continues to offer what he describes as its “uniquely authoritative and distinctive coverage.”  But increasingly electronic news services such as Bloomberg and to a lesser extent Reuters continue to offer many of the same business stories as both the FT and the Wall Street Journal, except a day earlier in what they call “real-time.”

The response to such challenges has been to increase productivity. Gowers was instrumental in accelerating the integration between the newspaper and online operation on the FT. “Journalists just have to work harder,” he says. 

Newspaper publishers have responded to the Internet challenge by setting up their own operations. Some, including the Daily Mail & General Trust have gone out and acquired stand alone Internet operations in property, cars and jobs in an attempt to hedge against any migration of advertising sales.  Even ITV has bought Friends Reunited in an effort to link with new consumers.

But Gowers believes the key question of how you make money from your website remains unanswered. “What I think hasn't been cracked – and I'm not claiming to have a great answer – is how after putting your content online, do  you make money out of your subscriber base.”

While everyone in the newspaper industry is looking for new ways of connecting with people and advertising, there are no easy answers and a great deal of uncertainty over the future of the industry's core market, which is news.  You could, concedes Gowers, run newspapers as a mature, but declining business. “You might just strive to get as much cash out of the business as possible,” he says, “without investing in the future.” 

It's a tactic that Richard Desmond, owner of the Express, appears to be pursuing. The Express, was once the world's biggest selling newspaper with sales of over two million. Its circulation has fallen by 20 per cent in the past five years to just below 850,000 at the end of last year.

Regional newspapers are another profitable, but mature industry. The Daily Mail & General Trust's surprise decision to sell off its regional Northcliffe chain was no doubt motivated by fear that advertising was migrating to the new electronic media. Yet, Northcliffe has margins of 20 per cent, while the Johnson Group, another regional chain, has margins of 33 per percent.

All this seems to present a bleak future for journalism. In the past 30 years, with the breaking of the old print unions' stranglehold on the industry, journalism has become a fashionable career of choice among the educated Oxbridge elite.  It is now seen – perhaps erroneously – as a profession rather than the old trade it originally was.  But commoditisation of news and a less profitable industry implies wage deflation and a less certain future.