Here’s the scoop: the Telegraph’s great strength is that it has a lot of older readers

Last weekend the Observer media page published a photograph of the Daily Telegraph news conference. It looks to me a pretty standard affair. The camera shows the back of the editor, Martin Newland, who is hunched over his desk and appears energetic and keen. There are eight other senior executives in the room, all of them apparently middle-aged, if by that we mean between the ages of 35 and 55. Two of them are women. Everyone looks dutiful and alert.

It is a scene such as one might imagine in any newspaper office, though in some you would be lucky to find as many as two female executives. But to Alan Geere, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Westminster, who was asked by the Observer to analyse the photograph, the news conference illustrates all that is wrong with the Daily Telegraph. He points out that four of the men are grey-haired and that two of them are bald.