Stephen Glover on The Press

Experience has taught me not to get too worked up by a newspaper's redesign, as we soon grow accustomed to almost anything. I was not an immediate convert to The Guardian's Berliner shape, but if they brought back the old broadsheet I would probably howl in despair. I may even have had qualms about The Independent going tabloid, but now its appearance seems part of the natural order of things.

So we should approach last week's radical overhaul of The Times with caution. Conceivably we will grow to like it. Moreover, I am instinctively on the side of the paper's new editor, James Harding, partly because he is fresh to the job, and needs every encouragement, and partly because he has edged The Times upmarket, where it should be. The foreign pages, for example, are often quite impressive these days. Mr Harding is evidently a serious young man.

Whether he is so strong on design is another matter. I could go on about the overuse of colour, which is now available on every page, but these things are largely personal, so that what seems to me a fussy, or even slightly vulgar, dash of colour may strike someone else as the epitome of beauty. But, try as I might, it is impossible to imagine any sensible defence for the uprooting of The Times's leaders to the dead zone of page two. It is tantamount to having a sermon preached at one the second one enters a church.

Times leaders, admittedly, are not what they were, and it may be that rather few people read them, but tucked away in their new home they are likely to be even more ignored. It is the columns and letters, though, that have been left behind which really suffer. Somehow the editorials, whether read or not, gave them legitimacy in the old layout. Now we have pages described as "opinion" – a naff word, even worse than "comment" – which on their own seem inconsequential and lacking in gravitas. The idea that we need to read editorials before tackling the news, so that we know our coordinates as it were, is childish.

The redesign of the second section, Times2, is perhaps less seismic but no less bewildering. I wondered whether I had strayed into "advertorial". There are acres of white space, and, perhaps because the quality of colour produced by the paper's new presses is so good, some photographs are presented almost moronically large. On one day last week, a picture of two wrists with "Kabbalah strings" covered a page and a half, while another of five blackberries occupied almost as big a space.

As I say, we may get used to many of these changes, and no doubt there is scope for tinkering, but I am almost sure I will never grow accustomed to editorials on page two. It is difficult to think of another action that could have had so subversive an effect on the whole paper. Did James Murdoch, who was put in charge of News International six months ago, approve this unhappy revolution? One cannot easily imagine his newspaperman father, Rupert, doing so. Incidentally, one of the first things young James did was to call in Boston Consultancy to review the company's "brands" – its newspapers. When publishers turn to consultants, disaster normally follows.

The doom mongers are wrong – newspapers are booming

Certain pundits go on about the inevitable decline of newsprint and the inexorable rise of digital. My esteemed colleague Professor Roy Campbell-Greenslade is among them.

How do such people interpret the latest figures from the World Association of Newspapers, which suggests that worldwide newspaper circulation rose by 2.3 per cent last year? Though sales declined a little in North America and Western Europe, they soared in many parts of Asia and Africa. In India, for example, newspaper circulation rose 12.9 per cent in 2006, and by 53.6 per cent over the past five years.

Roy and other doom mongers explain these figures by saying that the World Association of Newspapers has included titles in its figures which it had previously not known about. Maybe it did. Besides, journalists should always be highly suspicious of statistics.

But Roy and his mates are missing the point, which is that newspaper sales are racing ahead in much of the Third World, and their success there dwarfs a still rather slight decline in developed economies.

This, of course, explains why the Mail group and the owners of this paper and others are buying into newspapers in India, Indonesia and other points East. When the pessimists go on about the death of newspapers in developed countries – and these figures suggest that they exaggerate their case – they tend to forget about their amazing success in Asia and parts of Africa, where rising literacy rates and increased spending power are driving higher circulation.

To proclaim that the newspaper industry is dying is to take a very insular view. It is not true even in the West, where still only a minority of readers prefer the internet. In the Third World, where internet access is restricted, and is likely to remain so for some time, newspapers are a roaring success.

* I yield to no one in my admiration for the Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins. Nonetheless, I was slightly taken aback to hear him last week, on the Today programme, blaming the press for running stories about knife crime. He declared that such crime has declined, and newspapers are whipping up fears.

It turns out that knifings among the young have risen a little, but set that aside. Does he have a point? Some people are undeniably eager to swallow scare stories in the press, and may alter their behaviour as a result. I always ignore articles that inform me that eating – or not eating – any food is dangerous. Yet it is reductionist to think that most people can be easily persuaded to believe something that they can see with their own eyes is false. Our view of the dangers of knife crime is more likely to be determined by our own local experience than what we read in papers.

Most of us cannot be persuaded by the press that something is true when it demonstrably isn't.

scmgox@aol.com