We gathered, a small group of us, on the other side of the traffic lights. I wished I had worn warmer clothing - the bright sunshine that morning had misled me. This was a bracing Coventry day, and there was not much of a welcome on other fronts either.

Across the road was the office where I had started my career. More than an office: the words "COVENTRY EVENING TELEGRAPH" were bolted to the front and side of a four-storey building which, my dusty memories told me, dominated the entire city centre.

I squinted at the place. The memories must have played me wrong. Sure, the building was still four storeys. But a reconditioned theatre and modernised shopping mall took the eye away, and the pedestrians passing did not shoot the newspaper office even a glance.

We looked, of course. The building was the reason we were back for our reunion. Organised by BBC environment correspondent Roger Harrabin, who normally covers the destruction of the planet, these former journalists with the CET had returned to reflect on the distress of a somewhat smaller world: newspaper journalism.

I have much to be grateful to the Telegraph for. It took me on as a trainee in 1986 and taught me that the first sackable offence in regional reporting is to spell someone's name wrong. Even worse was for the first name of the principal character in a news story to change mysteriously during the copy (yep, I did that once). The paper impressed on me law for journalists, shorthand and the importance of detail.

I once came back from reporting on a compulsory purchase order to make way for a new road and, despite having spoken to all the people who were losing their homes, I was bawled out for not asking what the new road would be called. The Evening Telegraph gave its trainees the fundamental journalistic insight: what is a story and what is not. "A man comes up to a woman and shouts 'I want sex' is not a story," the deputy news editor lectured me sternly, "because everyone wants sex. The story is that she fought him off with a shoe."

When the Telegraph was a powerhouse in Coventry

The editor, Geoffrey Elliott, was a stickler who sent us a weekly briefing containing gems I have never forgotten: "Do not use the words 'incident' or 'situation' in the paper," he once wrote imperiously, "for they have no meaning." In those days the Telegraph had 85 editorial staff, numerous sub-offices in places such as Nuneaton, and was a powerhouse in the city. What you typed in the morning could fly off the presses and be sold on street corners that same afternoon. I had never felt so excited in my life as I did when I saw my first front page lead hit the desk beside my typewriter. And it really was a typewriter, with a ribbon: there were no computers back then. We used carbon paper to create second and third copies of what we typed.

Which is why the sight of the paper now was a sobering one for our group. More than 20 years on, the editorial staff was down from 85 to less than 20 (the ghost of the news editor appeared before me as I wrote that: '"Less than 20?" How many exactly? Haven't you checked? Why not fewer?') The paper no longer occupied all four storeys - in fact, it apparently had trouble filling one. When I worked there, aged 21, I would walk out past the deafening presses to collect my bicycle. Now the printing was done in Birmingham to save money, and 'paper' was almost the wrong word. The Coventry Evening Telegraph had become a website.

So if ever there was a day that demonstrated the pulverising power of technological change, that visit to Coventry was it. I think we all felt sad, standing across the road in the chill wind and looking at the bedraggled giant we had abandoned two decades before. But a sense of the inevitable takes the edge off any sadness: it had to happen, didn't it?

All around us we see the effects of technological change. Born in 1965, I had my childhood in black and white. Not just the small TV in the corner of the living room that took two minutes to warm up, but all the holiday photographs too. We now live in a world in technicolour. I do the BBC election graphics - VR, they call them, virtual reality: because they are that close. Augmented reality, 3D, 3G, use whatever term you like. The change has sucked the air out of our lungs.

The great irony is that newspapers were supposed to use all this innovation to coast into a new and greater age. During my brief time in Coventry I had seen the city squad win the FA Cup and the first delivery of enormous desktop computers (in fact, I tripped over the boxes in reception: just like the newspaper, I was not looking where I was going). Soon after I left, the CET printed the odd picture in colour. But somehow the technology started as slave and ended as master. In the US, many towns are without any printed newspaper now, and there have been predictions that before 2050, on an unspecified street corner in the USA, the very last newspaper will be folded and thrown into a bin.

What the case of Phil Laing tells us about the power of Google

I was struck by the case of Phil Laing, a first-year sports technology student at Sheffield Hallam University who urinated on a war memorial while drunk. Someone took his picture. Twenty years ago it would have gone into his local newspaper, and, if he was especially unlucky, a national tabloid might have printed it and lived off the reaction for a couple of days. Now the image went global. People abused him on YouTube from places as far afield as Sydney. If you 'Google' Phil Laing you see pages and pages of photographs and rabid commentary. He was tried and convicted by Google before he ever saw the inside of a courtroom. The image is permanent - it will outlive Phil - and will be instantly searchable forever. Phil has become the image. That is the change.

Power has shifted to the hands - and keyboards - of a new army of internet warriors, variously described as bloggers, citizen journalists, trolls, tweeters and many other things. They do not have a boss and their name appears on no-one's payroll. Their activities can suddenly coalesce like a swarm of hornets and then just as quickly they are gone in their different directions. It makes the solid four walls of the Coventry Evening Telegraph look like a positive disadvantage, and the same goes for many other old media outposts, even though some have bent over backwards to embrace the change. I regret not seeing how big this was going to become in the early 1990s; or, come to think of it, the early 1980s, when my dad bought one of the first retail computers and I used the entire memory by typing in song titles from my record collection.

So if you are reading this because you are about to 'go into journalism', good luck. You have chosen the worst time and the best. They used to say you needed an eye for detail and a nose for a story. Now it would be best to have an ear for what is coming around the corner. The only reassurance I can offer is this: the values I was taught on that newsroom floor in Coventry have not died. A journalist must fight to gain attention and trust. That has become harder to do, but more important than ever.

After his stint reporting on the Coventry Evening Telegraph, Jeremy Vine joined the BBC in 1987. He currently hosts the BBC Radio 2 programme Jeremy Vine, which presents news, views and interviews with live guests.

This piece is the foreword to a forthcoming book, Face the Future: Tools for the Modern Media Age, edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble, to be published by Abramis in April.

Do we need publicly funded broadcasting? Is it a luxury rather than a necessity, given the explosion of information on the internet? Is it a cash drain we can't afford in this age of austerity? Is it an idea whose time has gone?

Put these questions to a Republican member of the United States Congress and the answers might well sound shocking to BBC ears. Last month, members of the Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted to eliminate all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS) from 2013.

On 9 March, the Senate threw back the House's budget bill. But House Majority leader Eric Cantor is still vowing to press on with the plan to cut public broadcast funding. It might not be an imminent threat but the 'defunding' is a popular conservative cause in the United States.

You could say it's a cause that's more symbolic than substantial. It doesn't mean pulling the plug on the PBS network of television stations - many of which carry BBC World News bulletins across the United States. It doesn't mean the closure of the NPR radio stations which have for years rebroadcast BBC World Service radio programmes to millions of appreciative US citizens.

In fact, 'public broadcasting' in the States has long had only a fraction of its budget met directly by central government funds. It's more a question of 'seed money' than taxpayers covering costs.

Take my breakfast listening to Boston broadcasters WBUR and WGBH. Federal dollars account for just 6% and 8% of funding for these stations. Which is why listeners like me learn to live with 'the subscription drive' - endless appeals to phone in and pay up to keep your station on the air. I was driven mad over Valentine's Day weekend as WBUR's newscasters repeatedly broke into World Service radio accounts of turmoil in North Africa to urge us to buy roses.

And to get my fix of Downton Abbey, rebroadcast on PBS last month, I had to wait for the long opening credits to thank the programme's sponsors and "viewers like you" for making the necessary donations. The humiliating appeals for cash have even become a YouTube comedy staple, thanks to this season's inspired advertisement starring Alec Baldwin.

In communities like mine, in prosperous New England, there is private cash for 'public' stations. As the Boston Globe newspaper columnist Alex Beam put it recently:

"Boston is a honeymoon hotel of public broadcasting love, with loyal and well-heeled audiences; it would be a stretch to say the stations here are desperate for congressional megabucks."

The US simply has a different way of sustaining the arts; one that relies heavily on the philanthropy of wealthy individuals and the generosity of the foundations they endow. The tax system is framed to facilitate such generosity. The assumption is that if you're rich you make donations - to museums, to the ballet, to galleries, and even to journalists like us.

So, federal funding or not, some of the stations defined as 'public broadcasters' will continue to exist.

But some could go to the wall. That's been the message from the campaign '170 million Americans for Public Broadcasting' (above). Here are the statistics laid out on the campaign website: 170 million Americans connect through 368 public television stations, 934 public radio stations and hundreds of online services.

The comparison with the funding of the BBC is stark, as the campaign shows:

'170 million Americans' says that the people who most need these programmes will be hardest hit if the federal funding crumbles. It's the smallest stations - many in remote rural areas; many offering the single local source of international news - which need the highest proportion of government subsidy to stay on the air.

Is there a case for continuing taxpayer funding to serve audiences like these? If so, then the fight over federal dollars for US public broadcasters is worthwhile. The campaign has lived to fight another day. But the battle isn't over.

At 6pm this evening, UK time, Apple will be announcing ... something.

The FT predicted on Sunday that it will be a second-generation iPad, but, according to the well-informed Engadget yesterday, "There's really no telling what could happen tomorrow at Apple's little event."

So, stand by and listen up. Whatever is said will be respectfully received.

That respect has been earned by a tech business that last year overtook Microsoft in market value to lead its sector, and in January rose further to become the world's second-most valuable company (after Exxon Mobil).

Market value depends on share price, and share price depends on reputation. Which is where the media comes in.

Apple is notoriously closed to media access, except when it has something to sell. The media takes what it is given, on Apple's terms. And the hard-line policy seems to work.

In the long rivalry between Microsoft and Apple, I think it would be fair to say the media hasn't been exactly even-handed. Bill Gates has rightfully earned plaudits for his philanthropic work. But in his Microsoft days the much smaller Apple got a disproportionate share of attention. Up in Seattle, away from the buzz of Silicon Valley, Microsoft was unbelievably profitable but, at least since Windows 95, just wasn't seen as cool, even though it had far more customers than Apple.

A recent Neilson survey found that Apple products were seen in more than a third of the number-one films at the US box office during the past ten years. As Brandchannel points out, that puts Apple ahead of McDonald's and Nike combined - which is "pretty impressive, considering that fewer than 15% of American computer-owning households have an Apple".

On British television, Apple products are often seen in dramas and factual programmes. How many presenters have been filmed 'doing some research' with a Macbook in a hotel room? I would guess that the presenter/producer class is more likely to own a Mac than most people, and that works to Apple's advantage.

When I was filming at Microsoft a few years before the word 'iPad' had meaning, the PR people were keen to show off new Microsoft-powered tablet PCs which they predicted would revolutionise the work of whole classes of workers, such as nurses. I don't know the numbers but the tablets didn't, I think, live up to expectations despite their many advantages.

But once Apple took on the idea everyone thought it was brilliant.

As a former Microsoftie, Robert Scoble, wittily put it in his blog last month:

"So, in this dream, er, nightmare I have, I walk into Steve Ballmer's Microsoft office back in 2006 and say:

'Hi Steve, I gotta talk to you about our tablet strategy.'

'Sure, Scoble, what you thinking about?'

'Well, it sucks. It just isn't working. Customers aren't delighted. The market isn't afire. Our employees are even bored with it.'

'So, what should we do?' he asks.

'We should ship a device that doesn't run Office. Indeed, doesn't run any Microsoft application. Doesn't do multitasking. Doesn't run Flash. Doesn't have a camera. Can't print. Can't use a Microsoft Mouse or Keyboard, either. Oh, and just to be really revolutionary, we can't put any of our normal packaging or stickers on the device or around it. Finally, we can't sell it at Best Buy, but we have to build a new series of stores to distribute it in.'

'What the f*** are you smoking, Scoble? Get the f*** out of here before I call security. That's the stupidest idea I've heard. Ever.'

Then I wake up and realise, no, I'm not Steve Jobs."

A Microsoft staffer I sent that to had the good grace to say Scoble's dream "did make me laugh".

I was going to add that Apple products aren't perfect and that my own Macbook broke yesterday (nothing serious, just that the internal speakers don't work, although the headphones still do). You don't often hear in the media about broken Apple products, do you?

But I have been disarmed: I was passing an Apple store in London yesterday and popped in to ask whether they had any suggestions. The first person I came to told me there is a process called Genius Bar (right) which lets you make an appointment at an Apple store with a 'genius' who, I was told, should be able to fix it on the spot.

OK, I was impressed.

And, yes, I am interested to hear what Apple has to say this evening, despite my best intentions to take a fair and balanced view.   

On 18 October, the magazine Russkiy Newsweek hit the news-stands for the last time. Over the six years or so that it had been published in Russia under licence from the owners of the US Newsweek magazine, it had built up a talented group of journalists and gained a reputation for feisty, independent reporting that was often critical of the government. Its young editor-in-chief, Mikhail Fishman, had even been the victim of an internet smear that some linked to pro-Kremlin youth groups and others to the security forces.

The reason for Russkiy Newsweek's demise, though, appears to have been purely economic. Despite its good standing among the journalistic community, it had never made a profit. So it was perhaps not surprising that its German publisher, Axel Springer, finally decided to pull the plug.

Russkiy Newsweek joins a number of other national publications that have succumbed to harsh economic forces over the past couple of years. They include Business Week, which closed down in April 2008; Moskovskiy Korrespondent - a title owned by the proprietor of the London Evening Standard and the Independent, Aleksandr Lebedev - which folded in October 2008; and another business publication, Smart Money, which went under in May 2009. In addition, earlier this year the upmarket daily Gazeta ceased publication of its hard-copy version and reverted to being one of Russia's many internet-only news publications.

Other publications and outlets have been forced to take drastic cost-cutting measures. Some, such as the quality dailies Kommersant and Novyye Izvestiya, cut their page numbers. Kommersant also cut jobs, as did the investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta and business daily Vedomosti, which severely scaled back its regional operations. Pay cuts have also been rife. Staff at the editorially independent radio station Ekho Moskvy volunteered for this option in order to minimise redundancies.

State-owned media were partly insulated from the harsh economic climate, but they also had to tighten their belts. Two of those earmarked for the chop at the state-controlled Channel One TV were journalists Oleg Ptashkin and Elkhan Mirzoyev. Ptashkin and Mirzoyev, though, refused to take their fate lying down. When they were given notice in March 2009, they barricaded themselves in the Ostankino TV tower, declared a hunger strike and even threatened to set fire to themselves unless they were given their jobs back.

Two months later a court ruled Ptashkin's dismissal had been illegal and ordered his reinstatement. He has since left the channel.

Overall, though, Russian media have proved pretty resilient to the economic downturn. Many predicted the roll-call of major closures would be even longer.

The main reason for the gloom had been the sharp decline in advertising revenues. According to figures produced by the Association of Russian Communication Agencies (AKAR), the media advertising market in Russia fell by 27% in 2009 - from R277bn to R204bn (around £5.6bn to £4.1bn according to current exchange rates).

Print publications were worst hit, suffering a 43% fall in advertising revenues; closely followed by radio stations, which saw a 36% drop. TV channels fared only a little better, with an 18% dip. Only the internet bucked the trend, increasing its advertising revenue by 8%.

Now, however - notwithstanding the demise of Russkiy Newsweek - the picture is looking much rosier. The latest AKAR figures show market growth of 10% in the first half of 2010. The rate of growth in the three months from April to June was even faster, at 15%.

Again, it was internet advertising that blazed the trail, growing by a third to just over R11bn for the half-year. TV and radio advertising both grew by 7%, and press advertising lagged slightly, recording 6% growth.

Forecasts are now bullish. Russia's largest advertising sales house, Video International, is predicting the market will grow by 14% in 2010 and 16% in 2011, which will take it back to near pre-crisis levels. It also thinks the growth will continue at similar rates until 2015, by which time the internet will be generating more advertising revenue than the press.

A forecast by the ZenithOptimedia for the next couple of years comes up with similar figures.

This optimism opens the door for new media projects. One recent start-up is Dozhd TV (Rain TV), which was set up in March and, appropriately, calls itself the "optimistic channel". It broadcasts via the internet and mobile technology until its launch on the NTV+ satellite platform in September.

According to director-general Natalya Sindeyeva, Dozhd TV is an unashamedly aimed at an upmarket audience. "We are not building McDonald's - big, mass TV," she told the internet newspaper Chastnyy Korrespondent on 1 October.

She also said the channel, which broadcasts round the clock, will have a "large volume of news content" as well as "very difficult" documentaries and off-beat music.

Although it is a minor channel, Dozhd has already made an impact, and, as the Chastnyy Korrespondent reporter noted, some people are comparing it to the NTV of the 1990s, when this channel was owned by the tycoon Vladimir Gusinskiy and was a byword for independent reporting.

Dozhd TV has also come to the aid of one of the victims of the downturn: until a couple of weeks ago, the channel's new editor-in-chief, Mikhail Zygar, was deputy to the editor-in-chief of Russkiy Newsweek.

He's got an influential column in a glossy magazine, but he's also behind a cutting-edge online news aggregator. Michael Wolff admits to biting the hand that feeds him. 

He's not the most popular media commentator in New York City, but he's been one of the most prescient since the dawn of the internet age. 

He condensed his vainglorious early dotcom experiences into the bestseller Burn Rate and, although his flagship writing gig these days is a column in Vanity Fair, he is also the founder of the aggregation site Newser, where he bangs out a spiky 500-word column each day that's a kind of literary morning workout on any topic that grabs him. 

Some call aggregation an essentially parasitic form of journalism, but Wolff tells me that's how the news business has always worked. 

He's convinced that the old paid-for paper or magazine is dead, because readers have simply moved on. This puts him at loggerheads with the man who was the subject of his most recent book, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch.

Watch our conversation for a damning verdict on the News International mogul's recent attempt to scare newspaper publishers into line behind his paywall strategy. Wolff is convinced, after more than 50 hours of conversation with Murdoch for the book, that he simply doesn't get the internet and the profound way it has changed the whole culture of news.

It's designed to help organisations - including broadcasters - solicit and select video material. 

YouTube handles the hosting of the videos and offers an interface to manage them on a website: "news organizations can ask for citizen reporting; nonprofits can call-out for support videos around social campaigns; businesses can ask users to submit promotional videos about your brand," YouTube explains. 

It is, in effect, another erosion of what once made broadcasters different from non-professionals - adding to the list of things anyone can do for minimal cost that were once the exclusive realm of large organisations, and, at the same time, offering a service to news professionals from an internet company their children are the experts on.  

YouTube's own video explains how it is moving its tanks onto news organisations' front lawns, suggesting how they can "create [their] own bureau of citizen stringers": 

How well have financial journalists acquitted themselves in the current crisis? Were they too passive - ignoring signs of an overheated, overcomplicated market which, in retrospect, any old fool could see was about to implode? Or too assertive - making too much of early signs of trouble and creating the panic that led from Northern Rock to Lehman Brothers and beyond? Or did they just avoid the harder financial analysis in favour of easy stories about 'fat cats'?  

These were the questions that Professor Steve Schifferes put to his panel at the City University/BBC College of Journalism debate Saints or Sinners: The Role of the Media in the Financial Crisis last night.

Whatever the finer points, financial journalists, as Larry Elliot of The Guardian admitted, have had "the time of our lives in the past two years ... an absolute ball. We've really, really enjoyed ourselves." Suddenly his opinions on arcane financial matters were being sought by people in the newsroom who once ignored him. Financial journalists were "no longer just the pointy heads in the corner".

And so it was last night, as Elliot and three other practitioners heard a critique of media output from three academics.

Damian Tambini of the London School of Economics had been studying financial journalists. and suggested that, as a class, they were less comfortable with holding their subjects to account than political journalists, who saw the watchdog role as a central part of their job. (His report, What Is Financial Journalism For? can be downloaded here.) 

Professor Charles Goodhart, also from the LSE, was more forgiving, excusing journalists for not foreseeing the crisis on the basis that, by definition, "Crises only occur when people don't foresee them."

Finally, Alistair Milne of the Cass Business School complained that the media had "lost the ability to think about the bigger issues" such as how our economic system, on the whole, performs remarkably well. Instead, he said, singling out the BBC, there are pointless reports of the daily movement of the stock market, meaningless to a non-specialist audience and already known to those who are interested.

Of the journalists, Faisal Islam of Channel 4 News was the most ready to admit the shortcomings of his profession. He said journalists had known about the bigger picture - international liquidity issues - and the small picture - such as over-extended mortgages for individuals - but had failed to make connections between the two.

He accepted that financial journalists often faced a dilemma, wondering, for instance, whether drawing attention to over-valued house prices was "doing our job" or just spreading panic. 

And he said that his own employer "pulled its punches" on the story of struggling Icelandic banks, knowing about it for months before broadcasting.

But his strongest rebuke was for personal finance journalists, who he accused of "implicit low-level corruption" in their "quite shocking" closeness to the companies they report on. He talked about journalists accepting free trips and taking press releases at face value.

For the BBC, Hugh Pym, Chief Economics Correspondent, said he did see financial journalists as having a watchdog role. But he pointed out that even the watchdogs - whether academics or journalists - didn't always know what was going on: when the Queen famously asked on a visit to the LSE why nobody had predicted the crisis, Pym said it took the LSE months to agree on an answer, which was eventually posted to the palace.

Michael Wilson, formerly of Sky News, took up the theme, saying that at the height of the crisis bamboozled government ministers simply demanded that the banks come up with a solution - and fast. He said that today we are in a new position of uncertainty, not knowing how far into the crisis we are, or what will happen next.

Charles Goodhart was prepared to predict that the crisis so far - in which policy-makers had put their foot on the accelerator as hard and fast as possible - would turn out to be much easier to manage than the task ahead, which was to steer between the dangers of inflation and deflation and its associated unemployment.

This wasn't a debate about the economy but, inevitably, discussion had strayed onto that. Alistair Milne sent a chill through the lecture theatre by raising the possibility that "the real storm is yet to come", saying that the problems so far would be as nothing compared to the consequences if government itself lost its credibility in financial matters.

Would that scenario produce even better times for Larry Elliot and his colleagues? For all the fun they've had, none of the journalists was brazen enough to say they looked forward to even worse financial news.

You can watch video of the event here.