To many outside the media community, this statistic may not seem like a big deal. But to those within it make no mistake; this is a bombshell. Whilst it wasn’t unpredicted it’s a media equivalent of a Thames Barrier breach or a visit to central London by space debris. December is often a tough month for newspapers, but that can only come as cold comfort to The Sun’s executives. They’ll be painfully aware of the significance of this watershed number.

This week’s events with Barack Obama hint as to why this is happening. On Wednesday morning UK newspaper readers didn’t wake up to news, they woke up to the best bet on the outcome as it stood on the previous night. UK newspapers ran generally non-committal, hedge-betting pieces alongside other unrelated headlines. For example, The Times ran a “Cannabis Clampdown” main headline under a picture of Obama (the pollsters’ safest bet at the time) with a sub-head reading “Obama magic lures record number of voters.”

It’s now an inescapable reality that newspapers are no longer newspapers. There was a time when they were the purveyors of the latest events from the last few months to the last few hours around the country and around the world. During the last century and before, that was enough to satiate newspaper buyers. But in 2008 however, with TV, radio, online and mobile able deliver the news as it actually happens, newspapers are left in an increasingly uncomfortable space. Being confined to running only what they can muster to their presses the night before puts them effectively in a non-news position. Something akin to what Michael Porter called being “stuck in the middle” and described as “an extremely poor strategic situation”.

What next for newspapers? Expect an increasing supply of celebrity gossip in the populars and an increasing commitment to analysis and comment in the qualities. But watch out if any of the comment and analysis is based on polls. The New Hampshire primaries provided a case study in how appallingly inaccurate market research surveys can be.