The Leveson inquiry aside, are we going to have any newspapers left to regulate?

Guardian reporting: f November seemed a wicked month on the newsstands, December was a wake to make even Tesco feel good. Mr Desmond's Daily Star is down 13.6% in a year (to 616,000). His Daily Express has slipped 4.37% to below 600,000. Does it console him that the Sun has plunged 3.56% in a month and 6.65% year on year, and at 2,531,000 copies a day has kissed 3 million goodbye for ever? Or that his big chum Paul Dacre has watched his beloved Mail dip below 2 million a day? Possibly. But only in the most macabre of fashions.
Dailies generally are selling over 6% less than they did at the end of 2010. Redtop dailies, averaged over six months, are now down more than 8.7% in a year. The middle market has seen 4.8% disappear, and though the quality end – only 1.3% gone – is holding firmer, the fact is that the national newspaper business is, in Desmond terms, an effing and blinding nightmare. The grisly question for the day after tomorrow may not be what kind of press regulation we want, but whether there's any press to regulate.
But wait a while, and ask a few hard questions. Ask whether sweeping generalisations about industry rises and falls make total sense – and whether there is anything around you could still call a British newspaper "industry"?
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Do we ever bother to find out why? Well, you won't see many Leveson witnesses at overseas newspaper conferences. Talk to them about the success (since its founding in 2009) of Il Fatto Quotidiano in Italy (straight facts, no spin) and you'll get a blank look. How has Christian van Thillo set about reviving Belgian circulations since he took over De Persgroep? What can we learn from the rise of Fakt in Warsaw? Why is Norway the fountainhead of newspaper reading and its Schibsted group one of UK analysts' best-buy stocks?
The America that British media automatically looks to has little to impart. Its newspaper industry isn't national and is often perilously short on precise market comparisons. Why are British papers slipping so fast? Some of the answers are American, to be sure. Because they keep banging up cover prices (to $2.50 now at the New York Times; to £2.50 at an FT down 14.4% year on year). Because, under economic whips, they're stopping selling at all outside their immediate areas: artificially ordained decline. Because, in a way the LA Times or Chicago Tribune would instantly embrace, they think offering less at a higher price is a great strategy – see the Sunday Herald in Glasgow, crunched of its sections by Gannett and down 28% in a trice...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/15/abc-circulations-leveson