Maureen Dowd tried to write an interesting column today about her interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Link

Unfortunately, she still succumbs to a mental mapping that has vexed me for more than 25 years. Several times she equates and conflates newspapers and journalism. Newspapers have little to do with journalism. Newspapers are a delivery vehicle. Journalism is content. Journalism can occur in all sorts of delivery vehicles: newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, blogs, newsletters, the town crier, stone tablets, semaphores, or smoke signals. We owe no allegiance to newspapers and newspapers are NOT the journalism industry as much as the record companies, such as they are, are NOT the music industry.

When I was at MIT in my senior year, 1983-84, I got the chance to use some brand new windowing (using Xwindows) workstation computers, something that would look very dinosaur-ish by today's standards but were some of the hottest, most powerful things available at the time. These windowing systems allowed people to display content and somebody had designed an application which displayed content in a format remarkably similar to newspapers. I remember thinking at the time that this would be an amazing advancement for newspapers, not needing to use paper anymore, not destroying trees. Newspapers could deliver content to people on their computers. Who knew 25 years later that newspaper companies are going to be destroyed, not freed from the limitations of paper, by this same technology?