newspapers bleeding: bad time for NYT to go paid walled-garden, perhaps

mar 17th, 2011 CE

from the san jose mercury news's good morning silicon valley:

“I killed newspapers.”

— What Bob Woodward says should be on Google CEOEric Schmidt’s tombstone, bringing up the old finger-pointing about who’s to blame for the troubled state of newspapers. (Tough week for Silicon Valley CEOs. Didn’t Bon Jovi just blame Steve Jobs for killing the music business?) But it’s been an even tougher week for newspapers, which saw extra! extra! bad news about the industry: Ads in print newspapers are at a 25-year low as marketers shift spending to cheaper online ads. And aPew report said that in 2010, more people got their news online than from print newspapers for the first time. In atalk plus an interview at the Poynter Institute this week, Woodward, the Washington Post journalist who along with Carl Bernstein reported about Watergate and helped bring down President Richard Nixon, shared other thoughts on journalism and the Internet, including: “Mark Felt, who was Deep Throat, didn’t have a Facebook account. He wouldn’t have had one. The news of Watergate came from human beings who were reluctant to talk.”