Looking Back

As he heads out the door of The Wall Street Journal and on to Pro Publica, Paul Steiger takes a look at the state of journalism. Check out the slideshow that accompanies it.

Read All About It

How newspapers got into such a fix, and where they go from here
By PAUL E. STEIGER
December 29, 2007
It was the fall of 1999, and the newspaper I edited, The Wall Street Journal, was awash in money. Thanks to the dot-com boom and the lush advertising it generated, we were running the presses at full tilt nearly every day, yet had to turn away ads for lack of space.

Even as the good times rolled, two non-newspaper names kept coming up. I recall being stunned to learn that the main place where our own readers checked stock prices was the finance section of Yahoo. A couple of kids from Stanford had launched a search engine called Google. Already, many of my colleagues were using it.