NYT has an op-ed piece called ‘dynosaur at gate’ about google and the newspaper industry.
The 53-year-old Schmidt is soft-spoken, exuding the calm knowingness of a therapist as he explains why privacy is passé and why passé newspapers are not going to pry more money out of Google to save themselves.
The therapist tone works with me because my profession is in a meltdown. Firms, like Google here and Craigslist in San Francisco, have hijacked journalism, making us feel about as modern as the Tyrannosaurus rex model that sits on the Google campus.
Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy.
Robert Thomson, the top editor of The Wall Street Journal, denounced Web sites like Google as “tapeworms.” His boss, Rupert Murdoch, said that big newspapers do not have to let Google “steal our copyrights.” The A.P. has threatened to take legal action against Google and others that use the work of news organizations without obtaining permission and sharing a “fair” portion of revenue. But what’s fair will be hard to prove.
“So,” I ask Schmidt in a small conference room that, disturbingly, has an ejector seat. “Friend or foe?”
“We claim we’re friends,” he replies, maintaining equanimity even when a cartoon stuffed doll on a desk behind him falls on his head.
Why can’t Google, which likes to see itself as a “Don’t Be Evil” benevolent force in society, just write us a big check for using our stories, so we can keep checks and balances alive and continue to provide the search engine with our stories? After all, Schmidt acknowledges that a lot of what’s on the Internet is “a sewer.” He told me people don’t come to Google for “crap,” but for what’s “useful.”
He declines to pony up money, noting that newspapers could opt out of giving their content to Google free and adding, “We actually like making our own money for obviously good capitalist reasons.”
He says: “The best way to get out of this is to invent a new product. That’s the way Google thinks. Incumbents very seldom invent the future.”
He admits that it’s harder for newspapers to target ads as precisely as Google does. If you’re reading about a murder with a knife, he says, you can’t show a cutlery ad. He’s talking to newspapers about a new ad model that “understands your history” and your interests.
“They’d know enough about your demographic to know male, female, age group, what have you,” he says. “The whole secret here is the ads are worth more if they’re more targeted, more personal, more precise.”
To save journalism, Google has to know my most intimate secrets?