A couple of weeks ago, Fortune carried a surreal conversation between editor-at-large Adam Lashinsky and Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google.

The subject was the future of the newspaper industry.

Schmidt started out –- as he has done a few times in the past — by suggesting that there’s plenty of demand for news. (‘People love the news.”) But there are terrible difficulties, too: ‘a problem with advertising, classifieds and the cost itself of a newspaper: physical printing, delivery and so on.”