Australian newspapers cannot escape the trend to online, and the plethora of challengers that are arriving as part of it.

Key points: Newspaper advertising has fallen 40pc in five years to $2.4b

Newspaper advertising has fallen 40pc in five years to $2.4b Online advertising worth $6b and growing at 25pc a year

Online advertising worth $6b and growing at 25pc a year Fairfax redundancies have cost the company $70m over two years

"The trends are not just local, they're global. I suppose every publisher takes different approaches to how they address those trends through their own structures, their own go to market plans," said Michael Miller, the executive chairman of NewsCorp Australasia.

Earnings were down 11 per cent in News Corporation's global newspaper empire in the March Quarter - it does not break out the Australian result.

However, if Fairfax is any guide where a further 82 frontline staff are losing their jobs in yet another round of cuts, News Corporation's Australian newspapers are hurting.

"The CEOs of both News and Fairfax are describing the markets in Sydney and Melbourne as challenging in the print side, which is really code in business for saying they're probably making no money, if any," said Stuart Simson, the chairman of advertising agency, Switch Group.

The newspaper advertising market in Australia is now worth $2.4 billion, a fall of nearly 40 per cent in just five years.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is predicting it will drop another 22 per cent by 2020, which would mean that advertising revenue will have more than halved in a decade.

"Newspapers' problems are about losing paying readers, not readers. We stopped paying for content when content went digital and we're also losing advertisers. That's what's resulted in that drop," explained PWC executive director, Megan Brownlow.

Internet advertising now worth almost three times print

The web is what newspapers are up against.

In just 20 years, the online advertising market has grown from nothing to $6 billion and it is growing at 25 per cent a year.

Digital search engines, such as Google and Bing, are now pulling $2.8 billion a year, which is $400 million more than the entire newspaper market.

Digital display advertising, which includes Facebook, is at $2.1 billion.

Sorry, this video has expired News Corp and Fairfax are counting the cost of the digital revolution ( Andrew Robertson )

PwC predicts that by 2019 Australians will be spending $13 billion a year on entertainment and media, and half that money will be spent on internet access which, among other things, will be used to look at free news content online.

"Digital revenue for traditional publishers has not yet, and we're not forecasting it to, offset the decline in lost circulation and advertising revenues," added Ms Brownlow.

Which is why Ms Brownlow said newspapers need to diversify their revenue streams.

For example, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post in the US, and the Financial Review in Australia, now leverage their brands by regularly hosting prestige, lucrative corporate conferences.

"Whether it's through e-commerce or through selling, whatever it is that you're selling, somehow you need to have a number of different revenue streams that help you get back to where you once were in aggregate," explained Ms Brownlow.

Real estate keeping Fairfax afloat

Like News Corp, Fairfax also does not publicly reveal the havoc being wrought on its key mastheads.

It groups them together in its accounts with its highly profitable real estate classifieds website, Domain, calling it Metropolitan Media.

"We have a real estate component, a real estate listings component to our business, it's called classified advertising. We have always had classified advertising inside Fairfax, but the core of our business is our journalism," said Fairfax Media CEO, Greg Hywood, as he defended the model.

But the continued axing of staff, which has cost nearly $70 million in retrenchment payments in the last two years, points to the real story.

"If we don't respond with at times tough decisions we won't secure the sort of journalism that we all value down the track," Greg Hywood responded.

Whichever way you look at it, the situation for newspapers appears dire.

In a previous life Stuart Simson was the managing editor of the Melbourne Age.

He believes Fairfax is better placed than News Corp to deal with the web.

"Both of them have an almost identical [combined] print and digital audience in both markets. It's just that Fairfax has about two-thirds digital, one-third print and it's about the reverse for News, so at least Fairfax has an escape route," Mr Simson observed.

He predicts that within the next few years both Fairfax and News Corporation will only be publishing newspapers on weekends - Monday to Friday will be exclusively digital.