Video: How to save papers (and make money online?)

The former managing editor of Time magazine, Walter Isaacson, has appeared on The Daily Show to discuss his article on “how to save your newspaper” – in which he concedes that publishers made mistakes in the early days of the web, and explores whether an iTunes-like micropayment approach to online content might work.

“We made a mistake. I was there back in the early Nineties when we started putting everything on the net. We probably should have said it shouldn’t be just ad-supported.”

From Isaacson’s piece in Time:

“This is not a business model that makes sense. When web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.”