Not a bad idea. Michael Massing proposed it in the New York Review of Books. He says Google has both the resources and the moral responsibility to do it:

The fund would seek not to subsidize existing news operations but to support creative ideas and new programs aimed at reinventing the news as Schmidt suggests. It would support start-ups and fledgling enterprises engaged in investigation, international reporting, policy analysis, blogging, and other forms of probing and provocative reporting and commentary undertaken by the independent journalists who, given the severe retrenchment taking place at traditional organizations, are making up an ever-larger part of the field. More and more journalists are becoming entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs need start-up capital, and who better to provide it than Google, itself a product of, and tribute to, the entrepreneurial spirit?

But the Innovators’ Fund would not be restricted to independent operators. It would also be open to ideas from established news organizations aimed at helping them adapt to the Internet. Newspaper Web sites are currently home to some of the most creative digital experiments out there, and an outside source of support could help incubate them. Earlier this year, for instance, The New York Times and ProPublica jointly won a two-year, $719,500 grant from the Knight Foundation to develop Document Cloud, a data-archiving technique aimed at making the huge quantities of information contained in government, corporate, and other kinds of documents easy to search and analyze. This typifies the new forms of collaboration taking place between old and new media; Google could play a key part in fostering them.

Via Romenesko.

WHILE ON THE TOPIC, Forbes looks at When Google Runs Your Life:

Your day begins with a wake-up call from your Google Android phone. As you run to the shower, you hit Google News and check headlines, then Gmail. Your first appointment of the day has been moved to a new location; Google Maps will direct you there. Quickly update your expense report–including the printout of that sales presentation using, say, Google Template–and shoot them to the back office in India (in Hindi, if you prefer, with Google Translate). Your boss wants to discuss your group’s contributions to some marketing documents? Lean on Google Groups. You’re not even out the door yet. You have the rest of the day to search for work-critical information on the Web while you’re at the office–to say nothing of snatching a few moments to download a game, check stock prices, organize your medical records, share photos and pick a restaurant and movie for the evening. How convenient.

And a little creepy…