Here’s the thing about the TV business: It’s only as profitable or as valuable as the people who watch it. And if the only people who watch it are senior citizens strapped by debt, it’s not worth much–not to advertisers, anyway.

When Viacom posted second-quarter results yesterday, the company admitted its TV business hit a snag. Global advertising sales grew just two percent, and U.S. ad sales only eked out one-percent growth. Ad volume “dropped off” mid-quarter, according to Viacom president and CEO Philippe Dauman.

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When I saw Edward Roussel, head of digital for the Telegraph, on my last trip to London, he said over breakfast that he’d been thinking about my book title’s question—”What Would Google Do?”—in relation to newspapers and he came up with a radical notion:

What if newspapers handed over much of their work to Google? Edward reasoned that Google already is the key distributor online. He said that Google is great at technology and newspapers aren’t, and for the future, where are the best technologists going to go? Google. Google is also brilliant at selling ads, and Edward even wondered where the best sales talent would go in the future: there or to a newspaper? So why not hand over those segments of the business to Google and concentrate on what a newspaper should do: journalism?

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