Next month's Atlantic magazine includes a long and well-sourced piece by James Fallows on what senior people in Google think about the online threat to newspapers.
Fallows reports that Google execs are almost as anxious as journalists to find a way to make news pay on the web, and that they believe it can be done by rethinking the basic assumptions of journalism.
Here are some thoughts of senior Google staff, as quoted by Fallows ...
Eric Schmidt: "The growth of the online audience is dramatic. Newspapers don't have a demand problem; they have a business-model problem."
Krishna Bharat: "Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time. Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing."
Chris Gaither: "We believe in making information accessible. The surest way to make it inaccessible is if it doesn't get created in the first place. That is why it is in our interest to deal with the problems of the industry."
Nikesh Arora: "We are willing to support any formal and informal effort that newspapers or journalists more generally want to make [to come up with new sources of money]."
Neal Mohan: "The audience is there, and the dollars will follow. I would argue that publishers will ultimately do better in the digital world. That bodes well for everybody who is going through this shift."
But what do all these warm words add up to in Google's business plan?
Well, it's more the promise of salvation through a thousand experiments than a single eureka moment.
So there's already been Google's Living Stories, a way of assembling coverage of a single subject over a period of time (now discontinued by Google, but available as software for other organisations to use). Then there's Fast Flip, which lets users see a range of complete news or magazine pages quickly. And YouTube Direct provides a simple way for news organisations to select videos for presentation on their own sites.
None of these initiatives looks like changing the face of journalism, but the next idea, or the tenth one after that, might turn out to revolutionise news online.
Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, reminds Fallows that, even in newspapers, news hasn't necessarily been profitable: it's been the writing about holidays or cars or clothes that has attracted the advertising that's provided, typically, 80% of a newspaper's revenue.
Fallows concludes that the work and the concern he found inside Google are "major and encouraging developments".
Others beg to differ. One comment under a piece about the article by Jeff Jarvis describes it as "one of the most vacuous 12-page puff pieces I have ever read". Indeed, Fallows acknowledges his personal connection with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and the feature is undoubtedly positive in tone.
But why not hear Google's view on the subject? Fallows allows his readers to assess Google's take on news in enough detail that, I think, we can sense a distinctly techie approach to the subject - optimistic, searching, energetic, and a little unconcerned with income - that contrasts with the usual gloomy economic analysis of those in the newspaper industry.
With its massive income from search advertising, Google has long been able to experiment with original but unprofitable services, while newspapers can't afford that luxury. But if Google at least wants to help create new models for news, that's got to be better than a cold shoulder for the news business. And a dose of techie open-mindedness about change can't do journalists or news industry execs any harm either.
