In an interview with Fortune magazine, Google CEO Eric Schmidt professes concern for the state of the U.S. newspaper industry.
Dan Froomkin at the Neiman Watchdog Blog offers some suggestions on how Google can help:
- “Adopt” a handful of newspapers, and help them build technologically-sophisticated Web sites, with an emphasis on micro-local and business-to-consumer relationships. For instance, local papers need ways to database local advertising, local content, and information on local readers — then serve up ads based on psycho-graphic and geographic information. Newspapers can’t seem to figure this out by themselves. Then make the technology available to others.
- Create and endow an independent nonprofit; put esteemed journalists on its board; let them buy newspapers from owners who are wringing them dry and run them as nonprofits.
- Create an open-source journalism wire service, hiring excellent laid-off reporters to do great narrative and investigative work that’s free for the picking.
- Fund a short-term project to hire laid-off journalists from across the country, connect them virtually with hot programmers, and see what they come up with.
- Create a journalist-mediated repository of citizen journalism. Hire professional journalists to “accredit” excellent citizen journalism and train citizen journalists.
- Create “endowed chairs” for bloggers who can then quit their day-jobs and do actual reporting as well as blogging.
- Contribute to nonprofit journalistic ventures and foundations, i.e. ProPublica, NewAssignment.net – and NiemanWatchdog.org.
I left a comment:
If Google could help newspapers deliver kickass classified ads online, that would go a long way to helping save them as businesses. Right now, newspaper classifieds are obsolete both online and on paper.
But in general, helping news companies understand tech would be a blessing.