CJR contributing editor Michael Massing has a proposal for Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose op-ed “How Google Can Help Newspapers,” published in the Wall Street Journal last week, wasn’t entirely convincing.
Massing writes in the New York Review of Books blog that if Google really wants to help, they’ll help fund journalistic innovation along the lines of the John S. and James L. Knight foundation. He writes:
Alexandra Fenwick is an assistant editor at CJR.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.
