Sorry about destroying the American newspaper industry

Now that Warren Buffett has said it, it must be true: American newspapers are dead, at least as a money-making proposition. If anybody’s wondering about the killer — you got me.

In the early 90s I was part of a small band of editors working at Prodigy, then the world’s largest consumer online service with a whopping one million members. Imagine that: Nearly one-half of one percent of Americans could get news, stock quotes and even lumpy, stick-figure-like illustrations from the comfort of home. The service was available a solid 18, sometimes even 20 hours a day, for a reasonable monthly fee, and all you needed to get started was a few K for a computer, a dial-up modem capable of transmitting several words a second, and the willingness to go without phone service.

We were a motley gang: Emmy-winning TV producers, experienced magazine editors, young freelancers like me unable to land reporting jobs — for even then the traditional media were doing a fine job destroying themselves. We refugees shared none of our bosses’ evangelic zeal for what were coming to be known as new media. We’d have been perfectly happy if the fad had passed, and newspapers, magazines and TV stations started hiring again.

One of our jobs was helping newspapers “repurpose” their “content” for reading on a computer screen. Editors from the LA Times, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun and more trouped through our little newsroom in White Plains, N.Y., puzzled and awed that home users could access literally five or six articles in a matter of minutes. Pretty soon we had dozens of newspapers online. I was present at the revolution, and I’m here to tell you, it was executed by a handful of people, all of whom had a vague sense of destiny but a willful inability to think through the consequences of their actions.

One day an executive went to a conference and came back screaming about something called the Web. Nobody else in the building had seen this Web, and for a few months we tried ignoring it: what do you mean, content would be free? That doesn’t make any sense! With Prodigy’s closed-network model — also in use at our small upstart rival, America Online — at least there was subscription revenue to be shared.

But the rock, having been pushed from its ledge, couldn’t stop rolling downhill. The newspapers that went online just kept going.

The results were perfectly predictable, yet nobody wanted to predict them. Being a lowly journalist I always assumed that the suits upstairs knew how to run a business. Boy, was I was wrong. It turns out, just like Mr. Buffett tries to tell people, the fundamentals of business are simple. You cannot give stuff away for less than it cost to make it.

Did I mean to kill the American newspaper? Honest, officer — I had my finger on the mouse and it just went off. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. But like everybody who loves words, I sure am sorry.