Go to Glastonbury and it is tempting to conclude, while watching bands perform in the Somerset countryside, that this is the real England. It is easy to believe that you have found the essence of a nation when there are large crowds around, a hint of rain in the air and hills in the distance.

George Orwell, no mean writer on Englishness, might have made much of the scene (if he had not been listening to Tony Benn at the Left Field), although he wouldn't have missed that people paid £155 for their tickets - a price not within every citizen's reach.

This, after all, is BBC England - Glastonbury is extensively covered, if not colonised by the corporation - a musical partner to its coverage of the equally middle-class Wimbledon.

Even Jay-Z triumphed, not perhaps because of an immediate love of his hip-hop music but because he played the crowd smartly - opening with Oasis's Wonderwall - and because the crowd, in their good-natured way, wanted him to succeed. Glastonbury has become a globally credible event, able to attract the likes of Jay-Z and showing the power of BBC England in the world.

It is not hard to see the culture of BBC England exported. It is done most obviously and directly by the Beeb in the form of Strictly Come Dancing, costume dramas and Richard Curtis films (The No1 Ladies' Detective Agency may have been set in Botswana, with an all-black cast, but it bears all the hallmarks of BBC England values).

But it's bigger than just BBC export sales. You also find BBC England in Working Title films and, of course, in the influence of big festivals, like the one last weekend.

ITV England is a bit different, though. It is the country of Coronation Street and Emmerdale, obviously, and of the half of the country - aka the North - that the rest of the world is less willing to buy because it does not fit so easily with the Queen-and-country image of the nation.

Wallace & Gromit, no ITV property, but somehow resonant of the commercial broadcaster's cultural values, is loved in Britain, but did not quite lift off in the States. DreamWorks, its US studio backer, was forced to make a writedown after disappointing cinema revenues from The Curse of the Were Rabbit. As with Arctic Monkeys and Oasis, the mass American audience does not take to it as they do to Harry Potter and Hogwarts.

Keep thinking about the difference, though, and it is easy to conclude that this can never change.

It is nice to believe that you have discovered the character of a nation, even in a muddy field, but such stereotypes restrain good ideas. How much, after all, is the world image of Britain down to the fact that ITV has never built, or even dared try to build, a large international business?

Meanwhile, the BBC - not to mention MTV, Disney and CNN - has gone global. Whether ITV has the commercial clout to succeed is debatable, to say the least, but it is showing some signs of trying by launching a portfolio of international channels. There has to be more than exporting posh BBC values to the world.

It was back to reality on Monday. Sly Bailey, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, broke ranks and revealed that newspaper advertising was in meltdown in the UK, off 12 per cent to 14 per cent in May and June. Nobody will be immune, of course, and newspapers look as if they are about to go the way of the music industry, where growing digital advertising revenues fail utterly to offset a deadly slump in traditional advertising.

It could get worse, too, when the supermarkets stop their heavily marketed price war and if the economy contracts.

There is probably worse to come. Johnston Press may need another fundraising, just as it has completed a £212 million cash call, which doubtless will hand control to its Malaysian backer. Trinity Mirror has no debt problem, but it is grappling with a £1.5 billion pension fund that is so large relative to its size that a big increase in liabilities could cause trouble.

Nor will it be fun at the highly geared Telegraph Group, which was bought for £665 million in June 2004 but is worth £100 million today (less than the value of its £222 million borrowings) if you assume that its value mirrors Trinity's share performance since the purchase.

Even owners with a modest exposure to UK newspapers, such as News Corporation, the parent company of The Times, have seen their shares drop significantly this year.

The newspaper business is over-optimistic about its commercial prospects. It is too easy for papers to believe that advertisers will return when the economy recovers. By then they may have found that Google is more effective.

Yet, there is one trick left. Unlike the music business, where Apple sets the price of downloads, newspapers still retain control of their cover prices.

Perhaps we shall soon have to get used to the £1 upmarket newspaper. After all, we got used to paying more than a pound for a litre of petrol.

dan.sabbagh@thetimes.co.uk

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