Good Morning Silicon Valley
Schmidt: Google can help drowning newspapers if they'll just stop thrashing
By JOHN MURRELL
In the midst of the latest rhetorical assaults led by News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch against Google and other news aggregators, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has given an op-ed platform to the search sovereign's Chief Executive Parasite, Eric Schmidt, for a rebuttal. And in the spirit of the holidays, Schmidt delivered a message of peace and goodwill, asserting once again that Google stands ready to help the newspaper industry in creating digital-age business models — free, freemium, subscription, micropayments, whatever.
Schmidt expressed empathy for the industry's plight and its instinct to lash out in pain. "With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame," he wrote. "Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise." Those facts, he said, include the billion clicks every month that send Google searchers to publishers' sites and the willingness of Google to accommodate many options for content display and access. "We also acknowledge that it has been difficult for newspapers to make money from their online content," Schmidt wrote. "But just as there is no single cause of the industry's current problems, there is no single solution. We want to work with publishers to help them build bigger audiences, better engage readers, and make more money. Meeting that challenge will mean using technology to develop new ways to reach readers and keep them engaged for longer, as well as new ways to raise revenue combining free and paid access. I believe it also requires a change of tone in the debate, a recognition that we all have to work together to fulfill the promise of journalism in the digital age."
Ultimately, Schmidt said, he sees a promised land dotted with multi-tiered services and nourished by multiple revenue streams. "Just as we have seen different models of payment for TV as choice has increased and new providers have become involved, I believe we will see the same with news," he wrote. "We could easily see free access for mass-market content funded from advertising alongside the equivalent of subscription and pay-for-view for material with a niche readership." It's a hopeful message, but given how firmly the industry has seized the Google-as-enemy premise, not one likely to change any minds.
In other news from the Googleverse:
* One day after Yahoo announced a deeper integration between its services and Facebook, Google allied itself with Twitter, allowing users of the microblogging powerhouse to use their Twitter IDs to sign into any of the 9 million sites that support Google Friend Connect logins. An identity war looms, says ReadWriteWeb.
* Google's Webmaster Tools now include an experimental feature called Site Performance that displays information about the speed of a site and suggestions for making it faster.
* Google's already minimalist home page just got more so. Now the initial view shows only the logo, search box and two buttons, all set for quickly typing a query. Move your mouse, though, and the rest of the page's options come into view.
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