We Are Googling the New York Times to Death

This morning brought Eleanor Clift's reminiscence about 50 years at Newsweek to my Twitter feed. Those words alone seem to tell the story: Newsweek was a phenomenally successful product designed for a world that no longer exists. It was an amazing world for journalists, to hear the great Clift describe it. But it couldn't survive the new financial realities.

In the Washington Post last week, my friend Tim Lee argued that we shouldn't mourn the old world; we should celebrate a vibrantly competitive market. Newspapers made so much money in the late 20th century, he points out, because they effectively had a monopoly on most local markets (ironically, because competition for television and radio meant that most markets could support only one newspaper). That allowed them to charge a lot for ads and spend a lot on reporters. Those days are over, he says, precisely because there are now so many ways to get news: