MEDIA PERSPECTIVE: Newspapers must change their ways to head off decline.

Innovation and newspapers sit together in the same sentence about as comfortably as David Beckham and Sir Alex Ferguson sharing a dressing room. And if you suggest to a newspaper boss that his or her product is poor, needs investment and must do more for advertisers, you are likely to get a boot in the face too.

It's that sort of a business. It can be conservative, undynamic and brutish.

Yet at its heart, the sheer, awe-inspiring scale of the print operations, combined with some top-class journalism and brilliant exclusives, makes it the most exciting business in the world.

But it's a shame that this excitement so rarely comes across as you plod through page after page of earnest reporting of the Hutton Inquiry. In this turgid landscape, it's no wonder that even bitter rivals of Times Newspapers were cracking open the bubbly at the launch of The Sunday Times' CD-Rom product The Month.

You could hear the collective sighs of relief as the industry said: 'At last somebody has had an original idea that we can copy.'

Whether it is an idea worth stealing I'll leave for others to judge (I tried it but it crashed my iMac and it took half an hour to extract the disc with a paper clip from my computer). But at least it's an idea that, providing you have a decent computer, plays with the traditional form of newspapers and offers some concessions to younger readers.

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