I suppose dinosaurs were pretty disoriented in their final years roaming the earth so maybe we shouldn’t be too critical of the newspaper industry today.

Still the fact that the WSJ publisher is lashing out at Google as the cause of the newspaper death spiral is unsettling. Sure, Google has been a prominent player in the online world and has helped attract both eyeballs and advertisers away from the newspaper industry. But even if Google had never come into being, the newspaper industry was still going the way of the typewriter.

Lots of websites and online advertising suppliers have played a role in pulling viewers from physical newspapers - increasing the supply of online advertising inventory, driving down advertising rates, and luring advertisers to cheaper and more effective online channels. All this was set in motion by the development of the Internet and Web technologies and would have happened without Google. The newspaper industry got caught in a technological disruption. Rather than lashing out at Google they should be either figuring out new business models (tough, but not impossible, and we’ve made some suggestions) or just recognizing that it is time to rationally wind down a lot of newspaper properties.