Google Says Don’t Blame Us

In an opinion piece published on Thursday in the Wall Street Journal - Eric Schmidt wrote, ”With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame.” Essentially, Schmidt explains that Google is not to blame for the failing traditional media platform. Newspaper executives must evolve their thinking and embrace the inevitably that the future of content is digital.

In large part, the digital content evolution has been sponsored by the mindshare that has been shaped by companies such as Apple, Twitter, Sony and yes – Google. These companies have evolutionized, even revolutionized, how content is produced, distributed and consumed. It has been argued that within the next ten years print will be extinct. Content will be brought to you digitally – by way of an eBook, ePaper, podcast and yes the Internet. Consumers are being gradually introduced to these digital platforms and they are embracing it. This is self-evident in the popularity of gadgets like the iPhone, the Motorola Droid and the Kindle.

Schmidt, explains that he envisions a future where consumers can flip through the pages of a digital newspaper like they do with today’s broadsheets. Consumers will have the option of receiving some articles through paid subscriptions – while others will be free. This is being done today, to various degrees, but the revenue model is not as lucrative as some would like. Instead newspaper executives, like Rupert Murdoch, embracing the future and building new revenue models for digital newspapers – they would rather play the blame game. Murdoch and executives like him are the true problem with the industry - not the industry itself.