The Wall Street Journal extracted pretty much everything there is to extract from Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO, on the direction and challenges of media. Holman W. Jenkins Jr.'s extensive feature gives over much:

1. Google's focus is ensuring it doesn't lose its strangehold on Web advertising when searching is no longer as necessary.
2. It doesn't mind giving away the operating systems for Android --- if you get a billion people using a device, Schmidt notes, you can do something with it.
3. Brands will matter in the time ahead, which is good news for an otherwise lamentable situation for U.S. newspapers.
4. Targeted ads are the only way Schmidt sees salvation in what ails media economically.
5. Serendipity, that great surprise factor for the media consumer, now can be replicated electronically.

Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO, spoke in London on Thursday and offered several media forecasts.

Mobile, cloud computing and networking are where the action is, he suggests, and newspapering will before long move to digital devices --- although they need to be more sophisticated and useable than the first ones.

The Internet was the most disruptive technology of all time, offering abundance and essentially turning everything on its ear, but Schmidt isn't ready to write off paywalls or suggest the algorithms that produce Google results are the end-all.

Indeed, he has been stating lately --- and did again Thursday --- that personalized news doesn't leave open serendipity. Advertising, though, will be much more personalized.

The CEO of Google was the keynote speaker Sunday to the American Society of News Editors. Not surprisingly, Eric Schmidt had laudatory things to say to the crowd. By his estimation, more than half of the news content Google carries emanates from newspapers.

That said, Schmidt acknowledged the economics of abundance have created a problem --- not a news problem, but a business model problem. On that score, he suggests the answer will come in time, that the new devices with their mixture of subscription and advertising models, will eventually find a working model.

Schmidt said mobile is where the action is at, where the landscape is open, and where the development needs to take hold. As for customized news readers, he had an interesting point: He wants things he doesn't want or like in the mix, things that will challenge him. In other words, he wants an experience much closer to that of conventional media. Having said that, he also wants a site or a device to know much about him.

The Wall Street Journal carries an essay today from the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, and it strikes a conciliatory tone around how the search engine can help the newspaper industry.

Schmidt notes the "atomic unit of consumption," namely the one-set-of-eyes-on-one-story digitally as a break from many eyes on many stories in the paper, and suggests there are opportunities inside this new model.

There is no magic bullet, though.

 Rather, Schmidt expects to see several models emerge, some free and some paid, with the spoils going to those who collaborate on making journalism better in the transformation.

"I certainly don't believe that the Internet will mean the death of news. Through innovation and technology, it can endure with newfound profitability and vitality. Video didn't kill the radio star. It created a whole new additional industry," he writes.

It is not quite a putdown, not quite a criticism, but Google's Eric Schmidt is raising the question of whether press baron Rupert Murdoch's plan for charging for content online is viable.

With so many freely available sources of content, it's more likely that the specialized content will be the candidate for a paywall, Schmidt told a conference in England.

"In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity," he said.