• The Atlantic, Friday, May 14, 2010 12:10 AM

Because newspapers -- newsprint, creation, delivery -- is so expensive, publishers would be overjoyed to stop such costs -- if the new readers they gain for their online editions were worth as much to advertisers as the previous print ones. Google may be actually help to save newspapers. Here is a crucial part of the Google analysis: The news business, in this view, is passing through an agonizing transition -- bad, not dying. The difference lies in the assumption that soon readers will again pay for subscriptions, and online display ads will become valuable.

"Nothing that I see suggests the 'death of newspapers,'" Google CEO Eric Schmidt says. "Today you have a subscription to a print newspaper," he said. "In the future model, you'll have subscriptions to information sources that will have advertisements embedded in them, like a newspaper. You'll just leave out the print part. ... As print circulation falls, the growth of the online audience is dramatic," Schmidt said. "Newspapers don't have a demand problem; they have a business-model problem." Many of his company's efforts are attempts to solve this, so that newspaper companies can survive, as printed circulation withers away.

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