Gathered by the uplifting ambience of Sydney’s Darling Harbour for its annual Future Forum and Newspaper of the Year celebrations, it’s hard to think of Australia’s newspapers as an industry under stress (writes Peter Coleman).

It’s relative, of course: “Things here are bad,” consultant Jim Chisholm told delegates. “Everywhere else, they’re terrible. You’re having a holiday.”

Like the exaggerated rumours of Mark Twain’s death however – and perhaps the result of the amount of dirty washing the local industry has done in public – perceptions may be worse than the reality. Remarking to a fellow hotel guest that I was heading out to the Newspaper of the Year awards, I was asked, “You think there will be newspapers in a year, then?”

Chisholm does, but he says newspapers “have ceased to exist in our own heads”… a concept sadly reinforced by other speakers during the Future Forum event.

The Scottish advisor to newspapers and WAN-Ifra’s Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project is dismayed by the obsession with digital at the expense of print. And he says publishers should spend on marketing to dispel gloomy perceptions of print. Half of our decline is self-inflicted,” he says, comparing Coca Cola’s 17 per cent spend with the newspaper industry’s tiny marketing budget. Digital is still only a small part of what we do.”

Chisholm perches on the edge of the stage to thumb through a copy of the ‘Sydney Morning Herald’. “The challenge is that the ultimate serendipity of print is not being translated to digital,” he says.

Others at the plenary event either disagreed, or chose to ignore the view. PricewaterhouseCoopers executive director Megan Brownlow dismissed Australia’s small-scale newspaper and magazine losses as “not surprising”.

Monetising digital content remains a challenge: Former Foxtel head and now chief executive of News Limited Kim Williams espouses bundling on the lines followed by pay TV operators, “with which I have some experience”.

Author and media analyst Ken Doctor points to the mismatch between time spend with various media, and the advertising revenue generated: Currently a factor of four times for print, and ten times for mobile, but “the ad spend tends to catch up," he says. And on the conversion of free digital views to paid, “three per cent and you’ve got a business”.

He and Ipsos research director Rebecca Huntley agreed that the Sunday newspaper, with its related ritual, might be the print industry’s longest survivor.

For the most part, however, speakers had moved on from print, in much the same way – and perhaps influenced by – the far position of the North American industry. It had taken 15 years for one speaker to declare, “the end of the digital beginning has arrived”.

Two things most were agreed upon were the need to listen, and to still produce great journalism: Kim Williams told of News Limited’s commitment to putting the customer “front and centre”. The Poynter Institute’s Butch Ward asserted that “cost reductions alone will not save this business”, and says an audience which “was talking” wanted promises that publishers would listen, respond, and “provide journalism that matters”.

From Poland, Gregor Piechota had inspiring tales to tell of how his ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ had gained a following as a result of the causes – among them education and feminism – it had championed.

Ward returned to the theme with case histories from South Africa and North America in which investigative reporters’ work had made a difference and frequently saved lives.

As the awards dinner approached, he urged, “Tonight, share a story, or tell someone why you do journalism,” he said. “It’s not about whether print survives, but whether the newsgathering forces survive… and they must.”

• The Forum events continue to morrow (Friday) with master classes in journalism, photography, print and production, and sales and marketing.