No plans to buy a newspaper: Google CEO
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 21 May 2009, 21:39 IST
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No plans to buy a newspaper: Google CEO
Washington: The internet search engine giant Google, which was planning to buy a newspaper, has dropped the idea, said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and Chief executive officer of Google. The company had planned to buy a newspaper organization, but concluded that potential acquisition targets were too expensive or carried excessive liabilities on them. The California based company had also considered using its charitable arm, Google.org, to support news businesses seeking non-profit status but was now unlikely to do so. Instead, the Google is working with The Washington Post and other newspapers to improve their online editions and make their websites "work better" for the advertisement online, said Schmidt. "Clever ideas" about protecting newspapers in a non-profit structure has been suggested to Google.org but "are unlikely to happen without some massive set of corporate bankruptcies," he added. Schmidt denied to comment on the reports about Google being approached by New York Times owned by hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners, to buy it?s 20 percent stake. He also played down the industries? calls for the Google to increase the amount of revenue it shared with the news organizations, whose content appear on Google News. For which, he said that it would make them to take money from "another pocket" to do so. The Google CEO also said ?It was highly unlikely that people would pay for general news on the Web when so much was available for free.? World?s richest news agency owner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, is among the media groups which have announced plans to charge readers for the news on the internet.

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