Transparency is a wonderful thing – at least according to Mike Darcey, pictured, News Corp's designated Master of Wapping (soon moving to be Sheriff of the Nether Shard). He has helped construct some fantastically buoyant figures behind the great paywall, as ordained by Rupert. He wants to propagate them equally buoyantly now – and put his critics and rivals in the shade. So transparency works for him – at least, up to a point.

There is much to admire in the latest Darcey report. He confirms the Times and Sunday Times have 150,000 paying digital subscribers now. He claims that losses on the two papers have dropped from £72m to £6m in just four years. He reveals that people read tablet editions of the Times and Sunday Times for an average 40 and 55 minutes a day respectively – not so far adrift from the 44 minutes and 90 minutes that print readers spend. He argues that it's high time to put all paper-reading statistics – print, laptop, smartphone, tablet – together to give a true picture of overall reach. And, quite specifically, he reserves an honoured place for print in this future mix: "All the evidence is that it will endure for some time."

But, just as the applause begins, elbows come out. For the way of the total paywall, as ordered long ago from New York, has to be maintained. Thus, when Darcey looks round, the free online access offered by the Mail, with 160m unique browser visits a month, and the Guardian, with more than 80m, offer only refuges for the deluded.

The Guardian, he graciously concedes, "remains an undertaking based on professional journalism". But it's "systemically loss-making", vaguely hoping that a global presence will eventually pay the bills while caught "in a deadly spiral of falling circulation and rising price". As for Mail Online, it's a "very interesting experiment in operating a global, free, celebrity website". However, for all those 160m visits, the level of engagement is "somewhat shallow". It employs an "astounding" 450 staff. Personally, he doubts whether revenues can ever outstrip cost creep here. And even if it does eventually turn a profit, it's merely a distributor of secondhand stories, "a minnow" against the likes of Google.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this Wapping version wins few friends and fails to influence Guardian or Mail people. Darcey didn't help himself by using old, and increasingly out-of-date, figures for Guardian losses, and failing to acknowledge that they look set to halve this year. Nor, perhaps foolishly, did he check Mail versus Times digital engagement rates as recorded by Hitwise and comScore, two of the weightiest measurement forces in the field. Both of them show Mail Online notching up twice the engagement time – weekly or monthly – that the Times can claim, and easily outpointing the paywalled Sun as well.

So much for the "old parochial, walled-garden newspaper model", growl Mail hands derisively, citing results, out last week, which show digital ad revenues up 48% year on year (to £14m for the three months) – a boost that sent shares jumping nearly 6%. Transparency, by these lights, is solid money and solid research quoted in detail, not selective facts lifted from the mists around a hand-me-down thesis. Sharp elbows swing both ways.

Yet the most solid message of the lot is that jousting away in ancestral Fleet Street fashion is a reflex way out of time.

With increasing perplexity, there is no single model – walled or wide open – that everyone can follow to find salvation. Paywalls come in many shapes and sizes – sometimes porous to let a number of casual readers through, sometimes not. Major newspapers can get together – as they have just done in the Netherlands – to launch an app that allows readers to move between their websites seamlessly, paying small sums of click cash as they go. ABC, the great auditor of circulation in Britain and America, is beginning to meld digital and print statistics to demonstrable effect. The National Readership Survey is adding smartphone and tablet reader data. The New York Times subscriber base is up 19% in a year. Darcey throws free Spotify into his mix.

The world is changing, almost month by month. It will be good for news – and journalism – if the Times and Sunday Times can turn digital subscriptions into a revenue stream that equals print cover prices. It will be similarly excellent if, in the UK or further afield, other papers can make online profits from advertising and related initiatives. It would be terrific if the press could find fresh ways of co-operating for mutual benefit.

For the moment, and probably forever, there is no one true way. What works for the FT can't work for the Star. What works for the Times may not work for the Telegraph. And transparency? That's seeing the new world whole, and honestly.

■ Twitter catches the curse of Facebook – facing stock market interrogation – and sees its share price drop 20% on one set of slowing growth (and rising loss) figures. But there is another way of testing social market maturity: the moment the dark side comes calling. Just ask Mahir Zeynalov, a correspondent for newspaper Today's Zaman in Istanbul. One moment he's blogging away; the next, citing state law 5863, the interior ministry deports him back to Baku for "posting tweets against high-level state officials".