London Briefing: One of the striking changes experienced by the financial district - the City - over the past few years is the way in which we receive our information. When I first started working for an investment bank back in the 1980s, every employee of the firm was given an allowance for purchasing the Financial Times.

Back in the days of gentlemanly capitalism, it was considered essential to read the FT.

Nowadays, it is only those of us of a certain age who still bother. Few fund managers, traders or analysts would appear to consider the FT, or any other newspaper for that matter, a useful source of news.

If the furled umbrella has disappeared as part of the City uniform, so has the sight of the FT tucked under one arm.

Technology is mostly to blame, of course. If we find the time to read all the primary news and data feeds to our desks - mostly coming via Bloomberg - we can probably realistically reckon to be the most informed people on the planet. And certainly more informed than any 1980s stockbroker relying on the FT.

The internet has also played its part. To the extent that many City types rely on newspapers, they tend to look at websites rather than printed versions. That way you stand a chance of getting timely facts and opinions rather than ones that moved markets yesterday.

Consensus views about the relative merits of different newspaper sites have determined that the FT's is hopeless - cluttered, slow and hard to find anything - while the Wall St Journal's web pages are much more popular. Google has set the trend: anything along clean and simple lines tends to get favourable reviews.

London's Evening Standard faces similar problems to the FT: many of its potential readers don't want to buy a paper on their way home from work that simply reflects everything they have been looking at on their computer screens all day.

Anyone in London who wants recycled news simply has to wait until they begin their morning journey to work when they can pick up a free copy of Metro which, as far as I can see, simply rehashes things that appeared in the previous day's Evening Standard.

The Standard is fighting back with its own free paper, which might meet the competitive threat posed by Metro, but fails to address the primary problem presented by the fact that paper is now a very slow way of delivering news.

The web pages that I see everybody using at some time during the day are the ones on the BBC's news site. Another part of that media consensus is the BBC's site ticks all the boxes: it looks good and contains must-read content.

Which, of course, is paradoxical since the BBC, it might be thought, should be far less successful when competing with more commercially oriented websites.

I reckon that if the BBC simply charged the same price as the FT for its web edition, it would come close to matching a significant chunk of its licence fee.

Only UK citizens currently pay that fee. By contrast, the web, of course, reaches a global audience of potentially paying customers.

Commercial exploitation of the internet has reached a kind of tipping point.

Online retailers are suggesting that sales are booming while high street stores are struggling - once again, it looks like the January sales are coming early.

It has become routine for many people to buy electrical goods, DVDs, CDs and much else besides from Amazon and a host of imitators.

And it has become just as routine for people to get their news from the web.

Even the business of providing views is being transformed with the advent of the blogger.

When the internet first came along, we were often told how it would transform everything.

All that subsequently happened was a dotcom bubble: few businesses could make money out of the web, despite all the hype.

In a much quieter way, the real revolution is now under way and the trials and tribulations of parts of the UK newspaper industry are symptomatic of this.

The business of supplying pure news has been utterly transformed by the internet.

All newspapers are suffering, hence the rush by the tabloids to desert the reporting of news.

The number of features and opinion pieces will increase; competing to print the latest news on paper is a war that has already been lost.