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There were PowerPoint presentations to staff by senior executives at which this sort of language was inadvertently hilarious.

In one memorable instance, journalism was represented as a content egg that could be sliced and diced and made into content suitable for different delivery platforms: curried egg for the internet, scrambled egg for mobile phones, soft-boiled egg for the newspaper. Or hard-boiled, if that's your preference.

Editors became middle managers or, if you like the content egg metaphor, short-order chefs, with the journalists as kitchen hands, or should that be battery hens?

Fairfax was not the only newspaper company - at which senior management and the company board, invariably, contained not a single person with newspaper experience - to junk the history and the traditions of newspapers and journalism, but it was one of the first to do so, certainly in Australia.

And all the while board members and senior managers publicly proclaimed their commitment to quality journalism. And obsessed over the share price and what the next lot of prophecy from media analysts might mean for their futures.

More quotes, on the distinctiveness of old press that is steadily threatened with cuts in headcounts in the newsroom trying to find relevance and survive in the Internet Age:

I am not saying that The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age cannot be great newspapers with fewer journalists. They can — and they have to change. But for real change, courage is needed as well as vision and risk-taking and, above all, a commitment to newspapers and journalism that, frankly, I do not see at the moment.

All the talk of newsroom integration is rendered meaningless if, as I understand it, the editors of these papers have no control over their papers' websites. With this structure, how will it ever be possible to come up with a model that integrates the newspaper with its online site so that both have a future?

Already the online newspaper sites of the main Fairfax mastheads are at odds with what those mastheads long stood for. They are much more populist, much more celebrity and entertainment focused. This is a recipe for disaster.

Despite all the doom and gloom about the future of newspapers, there are some grounds for optimism. There are some things newspapers can do that no other medium can match — not television, not radio, not the internet. One of the great mistakes newspapers have made in recent years is that they have tried to address their weaknesses rather than build on their strengths. So we have shorter stories, bigger headlines, more graphics, more bells and whistles, more tricked up, overblown pages, more and more pages that are meant to look visually rich, but in the main, look desperate and garish.

And this attempt to ape the internet in print is being driven by middle-aged people who, in truth, have no real feel for the net and therefore no real understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. The next generation of journalists, who have grown up in the digital age, are much more likely to understand what newspapers can offer that digitally delivered journalism cannot offer.

And Gawenda's famous last words of what newspapers should be in the Internet age:

Newspapers need to be in the business of news, but they need to report news that only a newspaper can do well.

The rest - reports of news conferences, PR-driven events, announcements - all of that can go online. Newspapers need to get smaller, clearer in their focus.

Most of the lifestyle sections should migrate to online.

Newspapers must not become what The Independent in Britain has become: in the phrase used by its present editor, a viewspaper. The internet is awash with commentary.

This is not to say that newspapers should abandon commentary and analysis. But commentary should really be just another form of reporting: tell me something I have not thought about. That can be done only by people who know more about a given subject than I know. Too many columnists actually know less than their readers.

Great photographs and illustrations and wonderful editorial cartoons: we can produce all that if we put our minds to it.

Aha... Viewpaper, anyone?