Is there some grand gesture Google can make to solve the newspaper industrys problems?
It’s not obvious what the grand gesture would be. Google can’t make the cost of newsprint go down. We also can’t materially change the way consumers behave, and consumers are in fact moving their lives online. We have been able to send clicks to their Web sites, which they can monetize. So that provides some revenue. The problem is that doesn’t provide enough revenue to offset the loss of the other revenue. 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. So what else can Google do? 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
