0 is. and still today. but when i got there in 2009 the atmosphere was unreal. it was like a funeral. that's because there were these little funerals happening across the newsroom all the time. you would hear somebody tapping a microphone and speeches and clapping and then everyone would get a piece of cake and some 15-year veteran of the industry would walk out the doors for the last time onto 15th street. and this would happen sometimes four or five times a day. the recession when i came had just destroyed print advertising and the internet had disrupted the whole business and we were in our fourth round of buying out these really great journalists, giving them money to leave so we didn't have to pay them to do journalism anymore because we couldn't. one of my first weeks there i was in the elevator with one of the managing editors and i nervously made some dumb joke about all the cake around the newsroom. and he told me that in the last round of cost cutting we'd had to cut the cake budget. we'd cut the cake budget because >> the pressure got very, very tough. they would attack our credibility on every level, and they wouldn't answer phone calls from "the post." they were told not to speak to our reporters. what was rather ludicrous they were told not to come to dinner at my house. >> that was katharine graham herself speaking about the pressure coming from the white house during "the post" reporting on watergate. and she wasn't exaggerating. here is president nixon giving some of those very marching orders to his press secretary ron ziegler in 1972. >> i want it clearly understood that from now on no reporter from "the washington post" is ever to be in the white house. is that clear? >> absolutely. >> never in the white house. no church service. you tell connie, don't tell mrs. nixon because she'll approve it. no reporter from "the washington post" is ever to be in the white house again. and no photographer either. no photographers. itself and using it to fund this incredible, dangerous, high-flying history changing journalism. the money that macy's was giving us to advertise sale on dresses was sending reporters to vietnam. it was weird. and with the advent of the internet and craigslist and all the rest of it, it began breaking down. but here's the thing. what wasn't really sending anyone to vietnam were subscription fees, and this is kind of the dirty secret of not just the news business, which is we don't pay for it. the consumer doesn't pay for it. it's not like the business model for candy bars or tvs or purchases of candy bars and it tv fund the production of candy bars and tvs. it's paid for typically by advertisers or by rich people. either because a rich person owns it directly or a rich person donates to the nonprofit that owns it. this is true for newspapers, but it's also true 30 for magazines and it's true for radio. it's true for cable news like this program. you'll see it when we go to commercials in a few minutes. it's true for search engines like google and yahoo! it's true for facebook. think of how often you use a search engine like google. isn't it odd that you've never sent them a check? they're woven into the fabric, if not your life, certainly mine and most of the people i know. i don't think i would survive ten minutes in my job if i couldn't search the net. it's vital to me. perhaps the most vital services in my life and i don't pay a dime for it. it's not free. they're just selling me and you to advertisers and on some level god bless those advertisers and god bless the families like the grahams and the family that owns "the new york times" and maybe jeff bezos who funded this. but for all that when you back up, when the machinery comes clear like this and you begin to see it break down, when you have to see and hear about the business model, it's not exactly comforting or pretty. it means the directions in which our informational services evolve from our news to our search engines, those are the directions of appealing to advertisers or to rich ben factors. >> a number of years ago eric schmidt, the head of google at the time, the ceo, was here talking. and i said, well, it's going to be on your tombstone that you killed newspapers. and he said, what do you mean? i love newspapers. and i said, well, you've taken all of our money. all of our ad revenue and like a good ceo he said it's our money now. and this is all about money and "the post" used to be this cash cow from the advertising revenue. it shifted to the internet and we can't compete. >> that's bob woodward, of course. and we don't know, i think, what our informational commons would look like if it was supported by the people who use it or support it through some other mechanism than the ones we have. you can take this one example wikipedia supported by the people who love it. they don't pay many employees. look, i'm not coming here to you tonight with some big solution. i don't know how to fix it. i work for "the post." i hope jeff bezos is as good as don graham thinks he'll be. i trust his judgment on this. i think a lot of us do. this is a fragile foundation on which we've built our informational world, a foundation built on a business model that never made all that much sense. it was unique in its own way and it is now kind of failing and then the foundation of rich people who have maybe a lot of good intentions but their own interests and their own quirks and it's on this foundation, it's on this foundation that we've chosen to place almost all the information that we need to operate as a society. what does it mean for the future on how we get information when they are being bought up by all your important legal matters in just minutes. protect your family... and launch your dreams. at legalzoom.com we put the law on your side. the beach on your tv is much closer than it appears. seize the summer with up to 50% off hotels at travelocity. vietnam in 1972. 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