The traditional print media business model is “economically bankrupt”, newspapers face a leaner future with fewer staff and the industry needs to shed its pointless, egotistic obsession with dead trees. This cheerful critque of the news biz came from David Montgomery, CEO of UK-listed European newspaper publisher Mecom and former CEO of Mirror Group Newspapers, at the Association of Online Publishers summit in London on Wednesday.

For nearly 20 years, he’s been telling journalists why they need to get more efficient to save their jobs. If anything, his cause is now more urgent: he says Mecom’s revenue will this year plummet 20 percent, or €200 million, thanks to the drop in print advertising.

But don’t expect that money to bounce back in an economic upturn: “We have a traditional workforce, it’s an aging workforce and it’s facing the worst ad recession in history. I would be fooling you, I’d be fooling our shareholders and staff, if I said we would get all that back - the rest of it has to be replaced (by online).”

—Online ad growth: Mecom has put growing online ad revenue at the top of its agenda: for its Norwegian titles, 18 percent of total revenues are generated online; in Denmark it’s 14 percent and in the Netherlands six percent. Montgomery says that, if the rest of the Mecom national divisions made as much as Norway does online, it would contribute an extra €50 million in revenue a year. By his own maths, that’s still not enough to wipe out the €200 million deficit—but it would be going in the right direction.

—Built for print in an online age: Montgomery says the newspaper industry needs to direct resources away from print: “We still have these hierarchical structures… We still have people in offices the size of football pitches, with lots of different people reading headlines… All because that’s just the way it’s done.” So how many journalists do you need to run a newspaper these days? paidContent:UK asked Mongomery from the summit floor. “It’s not about numbers, it’s about tailoring content,” Montgomery answered. “You shouldn’t be thinking of it as a print business.”

—Death of the editor: Having predicted the death of the print sub-editor (via PG), he now has the editor-in-chief position in his sights. “They are going to go out of business… they will be replaced very shortly by (multi-platform) content directors,” he says. “None of the demarcations that exist in newspapers exist online… we need to sweep away all these old roles.”