Today, for some reason, I’ve been reviewing how I consume news and commentary, both on- and offline. It must be the persistent wind and rain outside.

This is not going to make a long article, so I’ll get straight to the point.

I live in England where, contrary to Robert Scoble, we have a superb selection of national broadsheet newspapers, plus a dubious pot of red-top tabloids that entertain us from time to time with their wild excesses — though none quite as bad as some in the U.S.

I find I tend to consume hard news — like “Obama wins primary”, “Brown reneges on solemn promise” — on TV rolling news programs, principally the BBC’s News 24. Never for more than 20 minutes, though, because nothing is more life dehancing than watching the same clips over and over — unless they’re about you, of course.

Tech news is best read online. Techmeme, TechCrunch (and the other Crunches) and Robert Scoble put the print press in the shade. It’s very much a case of deja vu if I glance at the technology pages in The Times or the Guardian. In fact I think they source a lot of their material from the tech blogosphere too.

Here at Syntagma Towers we only buy the print version of The Daily Mail because it loses a lot of its visual value online. It’s more of a magazine these days, so you need to have it in your hands for maximum impact.

I read the American press online, which means The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. It’s so much simpler than buying late print versions flown over.

I also consume the British broadsheets in pixel form. Unmissable commentary in large blocks of text does not require a paper version in an age of big screen monitors.

The Telegraph is the first port of call, with its brilliant array of journalists : American Janet Daley (who, annoyingly, is rarely wrong about anything) ; International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, whose commentary on the credit crunch is required reading — oh, and I knew some of his relatives in Oxford. Charles Moore can be relied upon to throw fresh light on any subject, and Jeff Randall is a one-stop-shop for untangling what’s going on in the business and political firmaments. Add Matthew d’Ancona’s take on politics and the paper really is de rigueur for anyone interested in the world we think we live in. Not forgetting Simon Heffer, of course. That’s quite a galaxy of stars.

The Times (London) ditto. Anatole Kaletsky’s macroeconomic pieces are perfectly read online, as are Matthew Parris’s musings on politics and everything that moves.

So, a newspaper nut like me only reads one paper in its native print version. What does that say about the future of print?

Keep the aspidistra flying folks.