Google: We Have 'Moral' Duty to Help Journalism

Google not only wants big news organizations such as the New York Times to survive, it has a "moral responsibility" to help them do so, says CEO Eric Schmidt. He tells Search Engine Land "there will always be a market for people who read the newspaper on a train going to New York City." But that market won't be anywhere near enough to sustain the industry, which must adapt. In a decade or so, for example, he predicts that most people will be getting personalized news from mobile devices.

It will be "very targeted. It will remember what you know. It will suggest things that you might want to know. It will have advertising. Right?" He says Google—which he complains gets "blamed for everything" bad associated with the Internet, such as changed reading patterns—is committed to helping figure out new ways to deliver news. "We need these content partners to survive." Without "well-funded" investigative journalism, our democracy is in trouble. And while the world has no shortage of free bloggers, only today's established news organizations have the knowledge and "support structure" to produce it.
(More Google stories.)