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January 7, 2009 | 6:00 pm
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In an interview with Fortune Magazine, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about what role his company could have in helping to save or prop up the newspaper industry, which Internet companies like Google have hurt.
From the interview:
Maybe their time has just come and gone?
No. They don’t have a problem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news. They love reading, discussing it, adding to it, annotating it. The Internet has made the news more accessible. There’s a problem with advertising, classifieds and the cost itself of a newspaper: physical printing, delivery and so on. And so the business model gets squeezed.
Read the full interview here and Dan Froomkin’s response here.
I found this part of the interview interesting:
“The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don’t think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question we’re in this uncomfortable conversation.”
Why doesn’t the Rocky pitch Google to buy? Sure, it’s a long shot but if someone could properly convince Google that the Rocky could be Google’s next great “lab” experiment and give Google the chance to set the standard for the future of newspapers.
Schmidt said, “We have a mechanism that enhances online subscriptions, but part of the reason it doesn’t take off is that the culture of the Internet is that information wants to be free. We’ve tried to get newspapers to have more tightly integrated products with ours.”
Well if paper’s aren’t helping themselves by taking advantage of this, Google buying the Rocky would be a great opportunity to develop a working model and show other paper’s how it’s done.