As the Telegraph plunges deeper into digital, cutting staff may save money, but will there be a product worth buying once they are gone?

At least one argument about the future of newspapers would seem to be over: in America, if not yet in Britain. Do you build a subscription paywall around your paper in digital mode or give it away for free and hope that internet advertising (plus a few extras) will somehow pay the bills? Overwhelming answer: start building that wall, damned first.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Daily Telegraph announces that 80 print-based journalist jobs will be going while 50 digital posts are created. There’s no escape, its boss wrote to staff. “We must … urgently diversify our revenue streams to guarantee our position in the longer term …”.

So £8m of extra investment goes in and 80 writers and subeditors head for the door, passing a new “director of content” who will apportion resources between the daily and Sunday papers on a 24/7 basis. But what are these “diversified revenue” streams that Murdoch MacLennan seeks?

Look west. Four months ago, the Telegraph unveiled a porous, very cheap (£1.99p a month) subscriber wall for its digital readers overseas. Results: excellent. Only one in 10 users have failed to sign up for the charge. How long before the Telegraph treads the same path in Britain?

Of course paywalls around non-specialist news sites don’t solve the crisis, they just ease the pain of print advertising loss. But they can swell. Ken Doctor, one of the hardest-nosed US analysts, predicts paywall programmes will bring in $300m overall this year and help nationwide sales revenues get back above $10bn. Is that something to shrug away?

Not when you can see the level of such subs, once established, rising by as much as 40% in a year. Not if you have editorial content people are prepared to pay for. But there’s the rub. Specialist papers such as the FT can make tracks with specialist content. Very good local papers can major on local news. But if you’re Gannett’s pride and joy – USA Today – you can’t charge, because you’re average content in shiny packaging. And if you’re the Telegraph with 80 journalists gone? Cutting staff is a standard way out of despond. But can you do that without cutting the original content – on screen, on paper – that’s your one big chance of paying the bills?