Diablog

I propose that Google set up a Journalism Innovators’ Fund with an initial annual budget of $100 million—less than 0.5 percent of the more than $20 billion it takes in annually. The fund would seek not to subsidize existing news operations but to support creative ideas and new programs aimed at reinventing the news as Schmidt suggests. It would support start-ups and fledgling enterprises engaged in investigation, international reporting, policy analysis, blogging, and other forms of probing and provocative reporting and commentary undertaken by the independent journalists who, given the severe retrenchment taking place at traditional organizations, are making up an ever-larger part of the field. More and more journalists are becoming entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs need start-up capital, and who better to provide it than Google, itself a product of, and tribute to, the entrepreneurial spirit?

But the Innovators’ Fund would not be restricted to independent operators. It would also be open to ideas from established news organizations aimed at helping them adapt to the Internet. Newspaper Web sites are currently home to some of the most creative digital experiments out there, and an outside source of support could help incubate them. Earlier this year, for instance, The New York Times and ProPublica jointly won a two-year, $719,500 grant from the Knight Foundation to develop Document Cloud, a data-archiving technique aimed at making the huge quantities of information contained in government, corporate, and other kinds of documents easy to search and analyze. This typifies the new forms of collaboration taking place between old and new media; Google could play a key part in fostering them.

Google has not only the resources but also the moral responsibility to provide such help. More than any other institution, it has unleashed the creative destruction that is transforming the news industry.

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