Recently, around the time I received a volume of poetry through the post, I also read two unrelated stories on separate websites. In isolation, none had any connection to mobile telephony. But in combination they were the catalyst for the hypothesis I am about to offer.

I predict that well within the next ten years Vodafone, or one of the other mobile networks, will be responsible for delivering your daily newspaper. Newsagents as we know them will have ceased to exist.

And it will be possible for digital media owners, or some of them at least, to command advertising rates that compare favourably with their atomic predecessors.

As a consequence journalism and journalists will once again have a value that is in the process of being destroyed by the internet. Today we tend not pay for news or information online. So publishers fail to enjoy the cushion of a cover price, often remaining entirely dependent on advertising for their income. To make matters worse, banner advertisers pay comparatively small sums for the privilege of being able to reach us. Inevitably this leaves less money to invest in originating original content.

But I digress.

Back at the turn of the century a well-known British magazine publisher attended a meeting in a New York hotel room.

There he saw a demonstration of an early digital paper device called The Book. Not long after, delivering the Bernard Simons Memorial Lecture, he offered a percipient prediction. He foretold the convergence of technologies that he foresaw just over the horizon was nothing less than terrifying.

For those in the dead tree business, so it has proven.

At the time, I recalled, I wrote to him to say: "There is nothing terrifying in any technology, but only the uses to which it can be put. Precisely the same sentiments could, of course, have been expressed about the printed word, and probably were."

I went on to express my thoughts as to how The Book or a similar device might best be exploited.

The volume of poetry I received, entitled Homeless in My Heart, was written by that publisher, one Felix Dennis. I can thoroughly recommend it. Go to his website to discover why.

Almost simultaneously I read a story on the Telegraph website that described how researchers from Sony and the Max Planck Institute in Germany had demonstrated a flexible television screen that required no backlight and offered response times up to ten times faster than any LCD. "The displays", the researchers claimed, "have excellent brightness.... There are practically no display size limitations and they could be produced relatively easily and cheaply." Significantly you could, if you so wished, fold up the screen and put it in your pocket.

My hypothesis begins with the belief that, to date, nobody has devised a better means of presenting news stories to a reader while, at the same time, providing an environment in which advertising can work effectively, than the publishers of our newspapers.

Readers scan the pages of newspapers looking for items of interest, critically allowing advertisements a similar opportunity to editorial to compete for attention. Conversely, when someone clicks on a link to go to a webpage, they do so having already decided what it is they wish to read. Inevitably, and by definition, that is the editorial and not the advertising. The result is a phenomenon known as "banner blindness". It effectively means that although websites can attract audiences, they do not deliver those eyeballs to advertisers in anything like the same numbers.

This is but one reason why a newspaper can charge more for a reader of its printed content than it can for the same content online. Another is the lack of relevant research. Although a website can tell any advertiser precisely how many people have viewed a page, for how long and at what time, very few can say with any great accuracy who those people actually are.

By comparison, many major purveyors of the printed word can provide exhaustive demographic data, using such industry standard research as TGI (Target Group Index) and NRS (National Readership Survey). Utilising this data, the publisher of a magazine like Vogue can conclusively demonstrate the value of his or her readership to prospective advertisers, and can consequently charge a considerable premium for each thousand readers compared to, say, the publisher of love it!.

Of course, if they so wished, website owners could band together to offer joint industry research, although a lack of such data is not really a problem where direct response advertising is concerned. But, even were such research to exist, it would do nothing to overcome the problem of banner blindness.

The arrival of Homeless in My Heart also coincided with my reading a rewarding analysis by Frédérick Filloux, entitled The economics of moving from print to online: lose one hundred, get back eight.

Filloux, whose CV suggests no little knowledge of such matters, made a number of crucial observations. He noted that in producing a daily newspaper, typically around 25% to 35% of the total cost would be spent on print and paper. A further 30% to 40% would be incurred transporting the printed paper from press to reader. 10% to 15% would be consumed by marketing and administration, leaving only 18% to 25% to be invested in editorial.

In other words, as Filloux pointed out, at least 60% of all costs would be eliminated were the newspaper to be exclusively available online. As The Times is widely reputed to lose money, even with a cover price of £0.80, it is probably not unreasonable to assume that the cost to Murdoch of printing and distributing each copy sold will be closer to £0.50 than £0.40. Multiply that by the average of 0.6 million plus copies the paper sells Monday through Saturday almost every week of the year and you arrive at a figure that could be as high as £120 million annually, but which is unlikely to be less than £75 million.

So it is no wonder then that so many newspapers are desperate to develop their websites. But in this they face a difficulty that we have already noted. Online readers are simply worth less. Filloux compares an annual revenue per reader of more than €18 for the leading free daily newspapers in France and Spain - the equivalents of Metro in the UK, with the annual revenue per unique user generated by the websites of such acclaimed newspapers as Figaro and Le Monde of no more than €3.

And this finally, you will be relieved to know, brings me back to my initial hypothesis, and why I think it of relevance to the future of mobile telephony.

First though, let us imagine a subsequent iteration of the iPhone. Doing everything the current model does and more, the body is hinged allowing, when opened, an A4 sized display to appear, utilising technology similar to that developed by Sony and the Max Planck Institute. This screen does not need to be any bigger in order to display a scaled-down tabloid page, on which all headlines and subheads would still be easily legible.

To read a story, or for thatmatter an advertisement, a user would either simply use their thumb andforefinger, as they already do with their existing iPhone, to zoom in andincrease the font size. Or, by turning the device through 90º, and changing theorientation of the page being displayed from portrait to landscape, the tophalf of the page would be redrawn to its actual size. Again, the user wouldsimply slide their finger from the top to the bottom of the screen to scrolldown to view the bottom half of the page.

By limiting the size of the display to A4, the device would be commuter friendly, even for those forced to stand on an overcrowded train. More pertinently, by employing newspaper rather than online page layout conventions, users would find themselves scanning the screen to identify which stories they wished to read. And in doing so, I believe, they would once again engage with the advertisements.

Now though we come to the interesting bit. As I said in my letter to Felix: "Were The Book to be mine, I could be tempted to give it away, or sell it at a heavily subsidised price. I would want to accelerate uptake, and ensure that worthwhile content was immediately available."

Eight years on I am now of the opinion our new iPhone should and would be offered without charge by the network operator to any user on a monthly contract. In return, and in addition to having to pay call but not data charges, the user would be required to complete a detailed questionnaire about themselves each year.

To distribute their newspapers media owners would pay the network operator, say, £0.10 per "copy" downloaded. The media owner would then have to decide whether readers should pay for their copy or to give it to them free. Were there to be a cost, the network operator would simply add the price to the reader's monthly statement.

Given that as in the example of The Times earlier, there could be an annual saving for the publisher of somewhere between £75 million and £120 million, and that the money that The Times would have to pay the network operator would not exceed £20 million, I suspect there would be no charge, at least to those readers the paper wanted to offer to its advertisers.

The newspaper would earn money from advertising, but hopefully at a cost per thousand far closer to that currently generated by its print version and not its online offering. But, even if the cost per thousand were lower, overall advertising revenues could still be higher. That's because very few advertisers need or even wish to reach every reader of any newspaper. Inevitably, most advertisers find themselves paying to be in copies that will be read by those whom they have little or no desire to reach.

To use a simplistic example, there is arguably little benefit to Ford in advertising cars to avowed non-drivers. However, those non-drivers might be of particular value to, say, a train operating company.

Time of day could also be a consideration, with an advertiser like Starbucks wishing to talk to people on their way to work, and Pizza Hut to those same people on their way home. Similarly, by utilising the phone's GPS capabilities, a retailer could advertise only to those who were actually reading the paper within a specified catchment area.

In these and other ways, and by utilising the information provided by the user, the network operator would be in a position to only serve advertisements to the relevant target audience for each advertiser. This would allow the media owner, on any given day, to sell a single advertising site to more than the one advertiser, and in doing so charge for that site several times over.

The network operator could then ask the publisher for a small additional charge whenever an advertisement was served using the information provided by their subscribers.

Once the advertisement had appeared, media owners could tell advertisers exactly how many members of their target audience had actually looked at the specific page on which their advertisement had appeared, for how long they had looked at that page, and whether they had deliberately enlarged the advertisement in order to read it.

For the first time brand advertisers would know precisely the audience they had reached, and so could pay the media owner for actual rather than presumed readership. Similarly, should users also decide to view video on the device, airtime could be traded on the same "by results" basis.

To encourage uptake of the device, optimise media owner revenues, and increase their own market share, the network operator would allow all newspapers to be distributed over their network. They would also allow any consumer or business magazine publisher to do likewise, and again for the same reasons.

In fact I would be surprised whether somebody in Cupertino, Bracknell, Wapping or Slough hasn't thought of all this and much more already.

Of course, the reason why such a development should prove so beneficial to journalists, and consequently to readers, is quite simply market forces. In order to maximise revenues from each advertiser, publishers would have to ensure that all pages of their papers were actually read. Currently advertising is sold on the basis that over a period of time an average number of copies of a paper have been purchased or picked up, and that research can demonstrate that at least some of the pages are read. However, unless an advertisement carries a specific call to action, an advertiser cannot tell whether or not anybody actually looked at the page on which their advertisement appeared, let alone in what numbers.

With such an increase in accountability, publishers will be forced to offer content capable of engaging and retaining, in sufficient numbers, those readers the advertiser on that page wishes to reach. This will not be achieved by the simple economic expedient of merely regurgitating press releases, only by "proper" journalism. In turn, this will require investment. Initially, the cost can be met from print and distribution savings previously identified. But, eventually, the real reward will come from the increase in revenue possibilities open to publishers.

For example, advertising could be literally auctioned on a cost per thousand basis to the highest bidder. The outcome could see a car dealer in a town like Taunton being prepared to pay a national newspaper a premium to reach those readers in their target demographic living within a 20 mile radius. Historically, the cost per thousand achieved by local newspapers has been higher than that charged by nationals, so logically our local advertiser would expect to pay more. And, being able to appear in the arguably more credible and authoritative environment of a national might well have great appeal.

It is even possible, should a paper wish to increase readership within a specific catchment area, that the editor might once again think it worthwhile to employ a local correspondent. This would allow the editorial content, as well as the advertising, to change to make it more directly relevant to those readers.

It might also give national newspaper publishers like Trinity Mirror or Associated, both of whom own a large number of local newspapers, an advantage over such as Murdoch, who does not. Conversely, it could result in even more local newspapers going to the wall.

However that's not where we came in. Instead the question remains, will a prediction originally made more than eight years ago, thanks to a combination of economic factors and technical advance, soon enable your network operator to provide you with a less expensive, more fully-featured phone, and in the process perhaps help put WH Smith out of business, or not?