There’s been a lot of talk about how Google will be the death of newspapers and how – at this moment – there isn’t really a good, practical use for Google Wave, but I’ve been thinking about it and with a little plug-in, I think Google could save newspapers and give itself a competitive advantage over other search engines at the same time.

Google Wave is hailed as a collaborative working tool and one of the most collaborate mediums is that of making a newspaper – journalist working on the words, sub editing the words and crafting headlines, pictures being tweaked and adverts being added.

Now we live in an age where newspapers are spending fortunes on systems like Contentwatch, Quark and Indesign and having various mixed results with the systems they implement (I hear of one Scottish paper that the staff are going mental at over their new system they have installed, despite months of beta testing).

Now imagine if Google turned round and offered a plugin for Google Wave that offered:

• DTP – text input, page design and picture embedding
• Clean code for web and mobile conversion

That suddenly gives Google Wave a reason for being. If Google offered this for free – and perhaps tied in some form of cloud storage system – then what would there be to stop papers signing up, saving millions in licencing fees.

Now before someone says that creating a DTP package isn’t easy. I never said it was, but look at the vast number of engineers Google has, the projects it buys on a weekly basis. Compared to some of Google’s achievements, creating a DTP package that carried out the majority of functions required by most newspapers would be a relative breeze (it wouldn’t be a Photoshop replacement, purely a DTP package).

What’s in it for Google

Now while the altruism of saving newspapers a fortune – while indexing the world’s news in a Google-friendly format – may be a start, there could be more benefits to this:

• Free newspaper advert pages (Google’s now advertising outwith digital space so given the company’s recent expansions this could be a profitable move) in paper and print
• The news is only available online via Google search engine and Google News
• Free archive of the world’s news
• Tie in for Google cloud storage
• Increased revenue from Google Ads used on these sites
• Google creates an area where it could create a monopoly like Quark more or less did for many years and builds up considerable goodwill with the press – handy in terms of positive PR and the goodwill could be handy in the years to come (just as Apple benefitted for many years from being the darling of designers and media)

So Google spends a few hundred thousand pounds, makes an offer to the world’s press that saves papers hundreds of thousands of pounds (if it wanted to be really bold, it could open source the software too) while gaining more control and access to the world’s news.

Where’s the downside (unless you run another search engine)?