In a previous life Jeff Jarvis was a big-city newspaper editor and TV critic who became the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly magazine. Today Jarvis is best known as the father of BuzzMachine.com, a smart, Internet-loving blog about the dramatic and often damaging affects the digital revolution and new technologies are having on "the old media."

An associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York's new Graduate School of Journalism, Jarvis has been brutally critical of the newspaper industry for refusing to embrace and adapt its business and journalism models to the Web until it was too late to avoid the severe financial trouble it's in today.

Jarvis recently wrote a book called "What Would Google Do?" (Collins Business) that explains how the business strategies and worldview Google employed to take over the digital world - such as openness, collaboration and trusting and relying on its customers - can benefit other industries and companies. I talked by phone to Jarvis on Thursday, April 16, from New York City.

Q: What does Google do and what's so revolutionary about it?

A: The idea behind the book was not so much to write a book about Google as about the changes in our world - and trying to figure them out by viewing them through the lens of Google's success. I believe the changes in our world are huge and profound right now and we're operating under different rules.

We can see that in Google, for example. Google did not grow to be, according to the Times of London, "the fastest growing company in the world" by trying to buy and own and control everything. Instead they created platforms and networks that enabled others to succeed.

Another example of a new rule is that we operated before in a scarcity economy - where controlling a scarcity was your way to success: I control the press, you don't. I get to say what goes on it. I get to charge you whatever I want to charge you - nah, nah, nah, nah.

That's not Google. Google operates under an abundant economy. They could have had a scarcity with search and charging as much as the market could bear to people who for search for pizza in New York. Instead they charge for performance and they were motivated to put ads everywhere across the Internet. That's another example of a changed rule, so that indicates changes in the world in the Digital Age after the Industrial Age.

Google also shows the way to having a new relationship with the public, your customers. For one thing, Google trusts us. Google respects us. It thinks we're smart. Unlike Yahoo -- which tried to catalogue the whole Web, which when you think about it now is pretty funny -- Google said, "No, the people who are using the Web know what's good and what's relevant. We're going to make a system to listen to that and feed it back." There are other examples too, but I think Google just sees the world differently because it is a different world and it learned how to exploit that.

Q: If there is one thing you could say to try to persuade someone that they need to read your book, what is it?

A: It's that "My kid has to go to college."

Q: Besides that.

A: We're going through something much bigger than a financial crisis and something much more fundamental than a recession or a depression. The world is changing in critical ways and you have to start to understand that and change your worldview and act around that. That's what I try to bring you by understanding Google's success in this new world.

Q: In a way the world is being turned upside down yet again by Google and that sort of bottoms-up, sharing, cooperative, linked world.

Q: Right. Just look at the fact that Google releases betas of all their products. When they do that what they are really saying to the public is this product is unfinished, it's imperfect, help us finish it." That's not the way that companies worked -- or could work -- before. If you spent years tooling your auto factory or hours writing your newspaper story, the myth was that it was perfect - finished. But in the Internet, and especially in how Google's used the Internet, releasing betas is a way to actually be humble and, more importantly, to be collaborative.

Q: And to tap the intelligence of the crowd and the whole world rather than just your in-house experts.

A: Right. To respect the intelligence of the crowd and then you want to try to tap it. I think those are both new.

Q: How has your book been received? I noticed that Publishers Weekly reviewed it and said you were kind of "acerbic" and "condescending" and that you had assembled a bunch of "rants." What's your reaction to that?

A: I'm a blogger.

Q: You can't help yourself?

A: I've got to write in a blogger's voice. Everyone reacts to it differently, but the book was really written through and with the blog. I've been thinking through these ideas over the last two or three years. My readers helped me by arguing with me and correcting me and adding to what I had to say. In one case, the readers even basically wrote a chapter in the book. So it's very much in a blog voice, and I suppose that might have irritated a couple persons.

Q: Newspapers haven't taken kindly to your tack about the new media and what's going to happen to newspapers.

A: Some haven't, but I think that's changing, too. Clearly, I respect journalism greatly. I'm teaching it. I did it for my whole career. I'm teaching it now. I believe in the future of journalism. I'm optimistic about the future of journalism. But more and more, I see newspapers trying -- at the very last minute before the gallows - to throw their Hail Mary passes (sorry for the mixed metaphor there) and trying to save themselves now; meanwhile, they've squandered the last 20 years since the Web really was invented, 15 years since the release of the commercial browser and craigslist and 10 years since the birth of Google and blogs.

There has been plenty of time for newspapers to reinvent themselves for a world past paper - and they didn't. And now at the last minute they are trying to come up with desperation moves like charging for content, or cutting their content off from the world, or trying to get subsidies -- and it's their fault.

But I believe strongly there will be a market demand for quality journalism and information and the market will find a way to meet that demand - in some cases with newspapers that have transformed themselves and in some cases with new entities that replace newspapers.

Q: Do you worry about the future of good journalism from local papers and the electronic media? Is it going to disappear? Is it going to reinvent itself?

A: I don't think it's going to disappear. It's going to reinvent itself and I think it can even improve itself and grow and become more targeted and deeper in the community. But it's going to be very different. I think we bring a lot of assumptions to what journalism is. Journalism came from newspapers and from full-time journalists. And journalism was stories and journalism came out once a day. There are a lot of inherent assumptions that are hard to get passed. Continued...