Continuing the debate over how Google and online news publishers can, or can’t, work together in the future, Editors Weblog has a short article based on an interview between Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and the Wall Street Journal.

The overall message is that the future of digital news will lie in using advertising to “tell people what they should be doing” and capitalising on the movement of news searches to other platforms – namely mobile.

Once again, Schmidt promises newspapers a profitable place in Google’s future. “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetisation, and the only way I know of to increase monetisation is through targeted ads. That’s our business.” Newspapers have always answered questions that people were not aware they had to ask, and they simply have to continue doing this to fit in.