Digital content director for the Mirror Group Matt Kelly is well-known for his provocative speeches – see his talk to the World Association of Newspapers’ annual congress in December in which he said online newspapers had prostituted themselves online and treated SEO as “the be-all and end-all of online publishing”, devaluing readers in the process.

We’ll be reporting his remarks in full shortly from today’s Westminster Media Forum event ‘The Future of News Media’ (as well as Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow’s optimistic note for journalists), including what he told Journalism.co.uk about Mirror.co.uk’s plans for more niches building on its Mirror Football and 3am.

But for starters:

• “The general news business is dead. If all you have to peddle is general news, then rest in peace.”
• “Newspapers aren’t in the sharp news game; we haven’t been for some time. We are in the audience business.”
• “Thirty million customers [online] and no profit isn’t what I’d call a business.”
• “Publishers need to re-establish in our online businesses that sense of value, brand and uniqueness that we have taken so much trouble to do in print.”
• “The newspaper industry is far from blameless in this situation [free content online]”

More to follow…