Will Newspapers Survive Online? The ailing newspaper business

In a world of where the person next to you has a Twitter and Facebook account and where people get their latest updates via social networks, it's not hard to imagine that newspaper businesses are falling fast! Time wrote an article about newspaper tycoons looking sideways at technology companies to solve their problems, and make money online. They sent 10 tech companies (IBM, Microsoft, Google etc.) letters asking for proposals and would eventually save the newspaper business. Several of them responded.

The Google solution to the Newspaper Business?
Google responded with a plan to save the newspaper sector. They said they have the capacity, technology and advantage over their competition and will be able to step in and provide the right solution to this problem. Historically speaking, Google is not in good relationship with the news business because of their distribution process wherein news are aggregated to their site instead of forwarding the users to the news sites. But Google quickly took action on this by implementing a new technology where news sites are allowed to participate and eventually sharing the revenues from ads.

The Other solutions
Other companies responded as well (Microsoft, Journalism Online, MyWire) proposing pay-per-news solution. They all have the technology to implement this (except for Journalism Online which is still in development).

What's the Payoff?
For now, the newspaper businesses are leaning toward the Google solution. Google has proven their track record in generationg revenues in ads and content, the same model on how the newspaper businesses generate their revenues offline. It's probably too early to tell what will be the payoff to this new competition especially if most users online don't want to pay anything for news. But whoever can implement this fast, they will be King of the Fourth Estate.