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that’s a good thing,” he said. Unlike Karmazin, Google engineers don’t make gut decisions. They have no way to quantify relationships or judgment. They value efficiency more than experience. They require facts, beta testing, mathematical logic. Google fervently believes it is shaping a new and better media world by making the process of buying advertising more rational and transparent. In its view, the company serves consumers by offering advertising as information. It invites advertisers to bid for the best price, and invites media companies to slim their sales forces and automate part of their advertising and to reach into what author Chris Anderson dubbed “the long tail,” in this case to those potential clients who rarely advertised but would if it was targeted and cheap to do so. Google also invites users to freely search newspapers, books, and magazines in what it sees as both free promotion and an opportunity for publications to sell advertising off this traffic. It invites television networks and movie studios to use YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006, as both a promotional trampoline and as a new online distribution system for their products. It invites advertisers to use DoubleClick, the digital advertising service company they acquired in 2007, for their online ads.
    Still, Page told me, he does not see Google as a content company. Google’s computers can “aggregate content; we can process it, rank it, we can do lots of things that are valuable. We can build systems that let lots of people create content themselves. That’s really where our leverage is.” That leverage, inevitably, makes it easier for audiences to migrate away from old media. This will cause some distress, but satisfying everyone, including traditional media companies, is not Google’s goal, he said; serving users is. “You don’t want to do the wrong things in a way that is causing real damage to the world or to people. But you also need to make progress, and that’s not always going to make everybody happy.” Armed with this conviction, Page and Google’s engineers have made many media companies very unhappy indeed.
    It wouldn’t happen all at once. In the early days of the new century, few old media companies had yet lapsed into panic mode. Newspapers saw their circulation and ad revenues slipping. From a peak daily newspaper circulation of sixty-three million in 1984, circulation slid an average of 1 percent each year until 2004, when the drop became more precipitous. Publishers did speak of moving aggressively to create digital newsrooms, and in the nineties the Tribune Company and Knight Ridder, among others, made digital investments. But the chains that owned most newspapers were predominantly interested in getting bigger in order to gain more leverage. There was little urgency to move to the Web; online newspapers were usually stepchildren of print editions, not allowed to break stories or employ their own separate staff, not allowed to look or feel much different from a print newspaper.
    Network television viewing had similarly been eroding. On a typical night in 1976, 92 percent of all viewers were watching CBS, NBC, or ABC; today, those networks (along with Fox) attract about 46 percent of viewers. The networks responded to the decline by cutting costs, buying local TV stations and cable properties, producing and syndicating more of their own shows, and—like the movie studios—putting their faith in hits like NBC’s Seinfeld, to save them.
    The media buzzwords were convergence and synergy. The common credo was that the advantage accrued to vertically integrated corporate giants—to Viacom, AOL Time Warner, News Corporation, Disney, Gannett, Tribune—those able to control every step in the process from an idea to its manufacture to its distribution. The synergies would come not from partnering with other companies but from owning content and the means to distribute it. With that in mind, media companies