The Daily Telegraph published a story last week noting how all five of the top-selling British daily newspapers are enjoying their lowest sales figures for 50 years.

Likewise, the Press Gazette, British Journalism’s weekly in-house publication, published a front page story last month with an accompanying photograph of two dusty bottles of formaldehyde containing a ring note-pad and pencil: a future museum exhibit preserving of the tools of the news trade circa 1995.

Oh how they’ll laugh as they peer through the glass. ‘How quaint’ they’ll snigger to each other from behind their 2020 iTablets.

Yes, I know this could and probably will be the least interesting piece I’ve put up on Chewing Pixels if I’m not careful: slating the internet for changing the face and method of journalism is something that should be the sole preserve of fat, terrified Telegraph freelancers who write pieces about how newspapers are selling less copies than 50 years ago. But still, I can’t help feeling a little threatened: one of my colleagues on a paper I write for was made redundant this week for no reason other than they don’t have enough subscribers anymore. We all know the Internet is taking ground against print fast but she was the first casualty in my immediate proximity.

Local daily newspaper The Argus (which covers the South East of England around Brighton and has been where many future broadsheet writers have cut, spilt and split their infinitives) came knocking last week. They need new subscriptions. In the eighties they sold 250, 000 copies of the paper a day. That’s quarter of a million copies daily: for a local paper. Sheesh. Today the Argus struggles to sell 30,000 papers a day.

Eight weeks for a pound, sir? Free newspaper with that DVD, ma’am?

So we get our news from RSS feeds and websites and television these days. So what? Big deal? The Times they are a-changing. But let’s look at blogs for a moment: now everyone’s a writer, a critic, a journalist, a commentator.

Ok. Stop.

Let’s rush through the carriages of the above thought train; try to get off before it’s inevitable, messy crash:

“Blogs are cheapening the art of criticism” *BLAH* “Not all words are equal: some are better than others” *BLAH* “The problem with ubiquitous blog comment is that it makes the whole world a critic” *BLAH* Most blogs devalue ‘real’ writers’ skills, creating a sea of impenetrable observation that says nothing, goes no-where and helps no-one” *BLAH* “I miss the good old days where people had websites” *BLAH* “I’m scared” *BLAH* “Am I redundant?”

So trots the current argument of so many print journalists (except usually without the explicit honesty of the last two statements) as they – we – hurtle towards a paper-less oblivion.

Let’s change tack a moment.

I think I’m frustrated because I want to create beautiful things but most of my job is just playing judge at a beauty pageant of other people’s children: most of the time you cause more damage than good. I operate in a strange occupational limbo where I’m not really a journalist at all; just some kind of insignificant arbiter of subjective taste. *sniff* A critic */sniff*

One editor I work with was telling me the other week how on her first day working on a newspaper she was sent out by her editor and told: ‘Don’t come back until you have a story.” Frankly, this terrifies me. Going out, rummaging through a family’s chest of drawers looking for a picture of a murdered daughter while the mother’s not looking (as one reporter/ photographer tag team from The Sun allegedly did round these parts recently: ‘you keep them talking – I’ll find a picture’) couldn’t be further from what I want to do with my life. So in one sense I’m glad I’m not that kind of journalist.

However, sometimes being a critical journalist feels equally useless. I was chatting to one third of the Triforce, Ste Curran (Last-gen Edge writer/ editor and Redeye) on MSN last week. He now works for Sony as a producer making videogames and something he said kind of haunted me: “I now feel like I’m contributing rather than just criticising- which was kind of always the point for me.”

That resounds.

I’ll level with you: I like critique, and criticism- it’s what I’m probably best at writing, but at the same time it can be such a negative discipline. It can stifle fun, bring other people down and be counter-productive.

I was at the press preview of The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe a couple of weeks ago (my thoughts on it are apparently embargoed *sign here please * until the 4th December, so don’t ask). It was like the red-carpet Premiere for the geeks: all tight jeans, puffer jackets, horn-rimmed spectacles and practised sneers. In this place, I hate critics.

But then, at it’s best, most inventive, most creative and most honest, critical writing can inspire, throw a sheet of perspicacious light onto something otherwise confusing and difficult to understand. It can point people towards wonderful art and life-enriching things, while pulling others up where they have been lazy and substandard and, in a tiny way, it contributes. In this place, I love critics.

My favourite critics I read simply because I love the way they write, even if I have no interest in the subject. I think this is where Kieron Gillen’s New Games Journalism phenomething works: It’s a way for critical writing to be creative rather than just distant, cold and removed. It’s exciting because the writers have to make themselves vulnerable rather than just superior: using their creative skills to critically examine someone else’s creative output and in doing so making, sometimes delightful, cross-media mash-ups.

So these thoughts, in a way, ease my frustrations. NGJ, however small the influences in more traditional videogame reviews, is helping critics be creative and entertaining, contribute in more interesting ways and hopefully become better writers.

So how does this relate to declining newspaper/ magazine sales? Well, I guess that the move to self-published websites is allowing writers to more freely go where traditional non-fanzine published media doesn’t. This in turn is changing the way people write about things (at least in the area of videogames): It’s transforming the language and face of critique, which, as someone trying to straddle the growing divide and not fall down the middle into oblivion, is at once frightening and exhilarating.