“Google CEO Eric Schmidt to newspapers: Innovate your way out of it” via the  Los Angeles Times

In order to move themselves forward, he said, newspapers will have to get used to the idea that they are not just generators of trusted, professional content, but also aggregators of the new kinds of information the Web has enabled — the collectively edited knowledge structures like Wikipedia, and user-generated information like blogs, images and online video.

“In that model, newspapers become platforms for the technology to use their services,” Schmidt said, “to build businesses on top of them, and also to interlink — hyperlink — all of the different information sources that end-users will take.”

(…)

“One of the fundamental problems with the Internet is that it doesn’t respect traditional scarcity structures. It’s very hard to hold information back.” In order to create value from content that can be difficult to control, he said, “We think the answer is advertising.”

Update: Greg Sterling, over at SearchEngineLand, has the verbatim of all questions that were asked by the audience.

Mini-what it means: newspapers have to become curator of content, they have a trusted consumer brand they can use to keep readership. Newspapers have also the opportunity to become news “platform”. Many newspaper groups are playing with the concept of APIs but it needs to become central to their strategy.  Finally, as Schmidt said, because of the lack of scarcity online, advertising will probably be the best way to monetize news.