Schmidt's NAA Speech Focuses on Innovation, But Can Newspapers Afford It?

Thought we here at BNET Media would be remiss in not linking to Google CEO Eric Schmidt's speech to the Newspaper Association of America earlier this week. (Couldn't find an embeddable version of it, but you can view it over at the NAA Web site.) The speech has made headlines partly for what didn't happen; the crowd at the NAA, debating what role Google may or may not play in the industry's substantial woes, did not come at Schmidt with pitchforks.

In listening to part of the speech, I could conjecture one reason they didn't come at him is that he was talking over their heads at various points -- in addition to the usual algorithm talk, he mentions "traditional scarcity structures," "cloud computing" and so forth; a second reason is that he bent over backwards to say nice things about print, describing it as "a wonderful experience" and describing "the online experience as terrible."

The solution, says Schmidt, isn't to promote the joys of print, but to reinvent the online experience. Schmidt makes a good point, certainly, but the biggest problem in his innovation message is that the audience he's speaking to here doesn't have the cash lying around to innovate. A more likely scenario is that innovation will be thrust upon them.