Jon Stewart talks to Walter Isaacson about how to save newspapers

Jon Stewart talks to Walter Isaacson author of the Time cover story “How to Save Your Newspaper.”

In the interview Jon points out how hard it is to convince people to pay for something when they’ve been getting it for free, which leads to a 1981 report from KRON in San Francisco about The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle’s forays into online news.

(via boingboing)

2 thoughts on “Jon Stewart talks to Walter Isaacson about how to save newspapers

  1. “Hey, Chief, why don’t we put our newspaper content on the interwebs, for free? It’s the future of newspapers!”

    “Great idea, Jones! Then we’ll reduce the size of our paper by half and get rid of most of our staff!”

    “Perfect! We’ll phase out the print version of the paper and cut our overhead by 15,000%!”

    Ten years later:

    “Jones, we put our content on the web, shrank or knocked out most of our unique content, brought the paper size down to letter size, fired half our staff, but we’re still not making any money off the interwebs! And in the meantime, we’ve fouled up our paper so much no one is interested in reading it! Got any more great ideas?!?”

    “Yeah, Chief! Ever hear of digital paper? It’s the future of newspapers!”

    “Great idea, Jones!”

    Another ten years later:

    “Hey, Chief, you want fries with that?”

    If one could think of more effective ways to sabotage his own medium, I don’t know what they could possibly be.

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