Eric Schmidt believes the economic model for high-quality journalism is under great stress. He hints of a future of fewer voices. And he's not merely a bullish new-media-replacing-old-media guy. He laments the loss of quality and the arrival of unmediated, frictionless publishing.
The Google CEO sees the Internet as a "cesspool" of unfiltered, inaccurate information, and he suggests brands are an antidote to the whirl of anything-goes information and opinion. In the end quality will win, he believes. Of course, that quality can exist alongside ads served up by Google, which he repeated has no interest in entering the content business.