In short, he doesn't expressly say it but what he proposes is the re-introduction of the distinction between broadsheets and tabloids, where a small number of media outlets drive towards quality, segregating those who want to know more, and more in depth, from those satisfied with the superficial.

I don't decry tabloids - I've written for both broadsheets and tabloids and writing for tabloids is by far the more difficult. To explain something to readers who, generally, do not have any pre-existing, or who have pre-existing but wrong, background information in less than 400 words is hard. Even in the print days, in broadsheets I had much more room to explain properly. Broadcast media engaged me to explain background to journalists who then framed questions so we could inform and educate. That was before "news" became entertainment. 

Today, online media has, largely, removed the constraints imposed by space restrictions defined by word counts. That has led to a new problem: more words, less import and far less clarity. Writers just don't have to think so hard about what they are saying and how they are saying it when they don't have to distil it to less words, more meaning. 

IF we look at the output of those newspapers and broadcast media that once led the knowledge and intellectual development of nations, they all made the same mistake: they dumbed down content on the false premise that in the internet age the only thing that matters is eyeballs. That thinking, which was the root cause of the dot com crash remains prevalent and that is one reason why the established media is on a crash course. But there are other reasons. The problem with that thinking is that newspapers are not like high-street shops: window shopping is fine for shoes but no use at all for information but the filtering mechanisms have become the same and more and more people don't buy the shoes and, mostly, they don't even try them on. They are satisfied by seeing them as they walked by. 

In a drive for global markets, the things that are important to people were sacrificed to an illusion that for purveyors of information one size fits all.

An example is the BBC which makes the error of trying to be a global news service competing with online newspapers and, in doing so, has driven down the quality of its writing and, importantly, diluted its purpose and fragmented its audience to the point where a) it is no longer the first choice of people seeking accurate, unbiased, reporting and b) it is almost indistinguishable from the morass of ordinariness that even computers can generate.

What Mr Malik proposes is exactly what the world needs: a handful of properly researched, well written, broadly national but with international sections, of media that caters to the educated, and educates the others; a media that is not driven by the promotion of what the masses have viewed but by what the masses need to know; a media that is not shaped by hashtags and partisan interests led by pressure groups but by brave, independent reporting.

Companies advertised in The Times to be associated with The Times, at least as much as to be associated with its readers. Why bother when The Times is no longer markedly differentiated from everything else?

The irony is this: that reporting is "out there", but due to the way search engines have developed, and because of their manipulation which is now choking them on a cess-pit of results that have little and often negative value, it's almost impossible to find.

In the 1700s and 1800s, those wanting to publish reasoned (and sometimes unreasonable) articles self-published pamphlets that were sold, usually, in cities in coffee shops and distributed in the salons of the day. Today, we would call them blogs or podcasts or vlogs....

Out of that pamphlet culture was born The Thunderer. Characterised by advertising on the front and back pages, the newspaper formally known as The Times wasn't the first newspaper but it was the first of such stature. It combined reliable news with well reasoned opinion. The place for argumentative comment was the letters page. What went wrong was simple: 200 years after it was founded, it sought to please everyone and in doing so pleased no one. It has been followed on a path of self-destruction by every major newspaper around the world.

In the pursuit of everything, everything has become fragmented. And providing access to mass markets via a single point of contact which provided a curated mix of views and an opportunity for widespread debate has been lost.

The internet is not the enemy of good reporting; underestimating its audience is.

This is the difference between newspapers, etc. and entertainment.

In the media, it IS possible to lose money by overestimating the stupidity of the audience.

Good quality media needs to bring back into the fold that good independent writing that has been shunted off to blogs in silos. The journalists who wrote extensively researched articles and the opinion writers who presented arguments not dogma need to be part of a cluster and it is newspapers that can provide that cluster, as they used to.

Print media got too big: when Sunday Newspapers became bundles of special interest magazines, they thought they would take market share from specialist media and they did, at great cost to themselves and to their competitors.

The great investigative reporting of The Sunday Times, The Guardian and newspapers of similar stature has been taken over by activists and agitators, turning them into politically motivated blogs which gain vocal support from those who agree and lose the goodwill of those who want to learn and understand the full story. They have polarised their markets into those that know they are going to agree and those who know they will disagree. Why read The Guardian when you know everything in it is viewed from a single viewpoint? In marketing itself to a coalition of the disaffected, ironically some of the most literate, but poorest educated, newspaper readers in the world. Why? Because education means broadening the mind, not funnelling it to a pinpoint.

That leaves the singular problem: how to make generations of people who have been led down the path of soundbites and tweets as whole news and full information recognise that their reading/viewing/listening habits need to change.

Not only for their own benefit, and not for the benefit of media companies, but for the benefit of a future in which they, as society, are participants not spectators.

What can be done?

Newspapers once succeeded because of their reputation for being up to date as of print time; magazines succeeded by concentrating on narrow interests where current affairs was not so important.

Newspapers should, as Mr Malik says, stop trying to ride the tide of live news. The world, outside financial markets and gambling, does not need live news on everything all of the time. What the world needs is reasoned, clear, explanations: journalism over mere reportage.

We do not need to know, second by second, the conduct of a prosecution and resulting court case.

We need to differentiate between the right to know and the need to know and that means good editing. We need to recognise that the USA's approach of "the public has a right to know" does not mean that the public - i.e. you and me - has an actual right to know everything and a need to know it now.

Newspapers can fix this but first they have to realise that they are a very long way down the wrong highway to hell. They have to realise that their two and a half-decades long obsession with data analytics has served them poorly. Newspapers used to have a broad idea who their readers were. Now they chase fine-grained data and try to contact each reader individually: they call it "personalised delivery" but actually it's manipulation. Newspapers provide total anonymity for readers and readers like that.

Let editors, not algorithms decide on the most important - and therefore promoted - stories of the day on merit, not on popularity: bandwagons do not serve the public well. Stop producing thin rewrites of the same articles on the same day. Fact check. Bring back subeditors who can ensure consistency of style and, even more importantly, language. Stop trying to be blogs and become newspapers again. And, most of all, abandon "news agendas" and partisan interests in favour of balanced and fair reporting and rejecting Public Relations, lobbyists, pressure groups, activists and agitators as primary sources. And stop reporting what politicians say they will do until they actually produce something they intend to present to parliament.

We need good newspapers. And we need bad newspapers, too.

Sadly, today, we don't have that choice as clearly as we should have.

Nigel Morris-Cotterill is the owner of Vortex Centrum Limited, publisher of World Money Laundering Report, one of the first emedia companies, founded in 1999. In he 2010 founded the portmanteau website PleaseBeInformed.Com which he regrets did not set the epublishing world alight.

In real life, he is a pioneer in the field of financial crime risk strategies and the founder of financialcrimetraining.com, the first e-learning system to approach financial crime training from the twin perspectives of risk and critical thinking.