Anyone who thinks the news business is dead should look at the wire services. Privately owned Bloomberg is adding 950 staff, 100 of them journalists, an almost 10 per cent expansion. News Corp is cutting jobs at the Wall Street Journal but adding them at Dow Jones newswires. Nor is this hiring spree mere bravura. While newspaper groups such as the New York Times and Independent News & Media are in survival mode, the wires are buzzing. London-listed shares of information group Thomson Reuters, for example, are at the same level as last May, when the merger of Reuters and Thomson closed. Since then, the FTSE has dropped by 35 per cent.

Bulls have seized on the idea that instead of just wholesaling news and data, the wire services can now also sell it direct to consumers via the internet or mobile applications, cutting out the middle man. Perhaps. But the risk that such retail ventures cannibalise more important wholesale revenues – the reason, after all, that many such attempts have foundered in the past – remains as high as ever.