Is Google a newspaper killer? Not by a long shot, says Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt. Nor does he want it to be.

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Citing the decline of science coverage in the mainstream news media, thirty-five of the country’s top universities have banded together to launch their own “news channel” for publicizing their best research.

In March, the consortium created a Web site, Futurity.org, to showcase edited press releases and stories written by member schools. Founded by the senior communications officers at Standard, Duke, and the University of Rochester, the project has grown and evolved since then, with Futurity now on the verge of inking syndication deals with Google News (GOOG) and Yahoo News (YHOO).

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Google (GOOG), which been pruning some early-stage products amid slower growth and the downturn, introduced two experiments Monday: a service that displays news search results in a chronological timeline and a way to find more relevant images.

The first of the two, called Google News Timeline, presents the globs of content already in Google News–including articles, blogs, photos, scanned newspapers, magazine covers and more–in a draggable timeline. Users who search for a topic like the Iraq War will see a history of articles, photos and videos arranged by date, week or month and can scroll through them quickly with their mouse. Users can refine their search to specific sorts of news, like newspapers or blogs, and search some non-news sources like Wikipedia or movies.

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The news that Google (GOOG) is placing ads on Google News has sent a renewed wave of hand-wringing through the newspaper industry. How dare those Googlers make online news a profitable business!

Of course, Google is planning to keep most of that profit. If Larry and Sergey plan to share anything more than links with the newspapers whose headlines it displays in Google News, they haven’t signaled their intentions.

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Here is a hard cold fact of the Internet age. Any content creator whose sole business is selling their content à la carte will have a hard time surviving. In a world of unlimited digital choice, the cost of creating and marketing content that generates a profit is expensive and difficult. Which is exactly why the successful sites have been aggregators.

It’s also exactly why newspapers are having a hard time making it. They sell papers one at a time. They sell home subscriptions one at a time. When they charge for monthly subscriptions online, they sell them one at a time. That’s a tough business.

It’s not that the newspaper content is not worth it. The problem is that it requires prospective buyers to first value the content, then decide whether they want to go through the hassle of going to a newsstand, calling the home delivery department of the paper, or putting in their credit card information to buy online. This may be beyond a solvable problem when much of the same content is available online for free.

So what to do?

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Beta, as it pertains to Web sites, has seen better days. Not long ago, saying the word as part of your Web development cycle could help land venture capital even faster than claiming “community,” “paradigm shift” or “disruptive technology.” Now, the term is dissipated and confusing.

While the specific origin of its use is unknown, beta as a tagline was popularized by a Google (GOOG) with the release of Google News in 2002, and later, Gmail in 2004. From there, start-ups quickly followed suit. By 2006, it seemed like every new Web site was “in beta.”

When confronted about the phenomenon, Google co-founder Larry Page told investors, “It’s really a messaging and branding thing. If it’s on [Google News and Gmail] for five years, that’s fine.” Google News unceremoniously left beta a year later. Gmail, which is more reliable than most nonbeta software, has yet to do so.

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Metaphorically speaking, Google (GOOG) is killing the newspaper industry. Online news is quickly hollowing out the traditional paper–the Christian Science Monitor eliminates its print edition, Tribune Co. declares bankruptcy, Detroit’s two dailies slash home delivery to three days a week–while Google rakes in advertising profits. Turns out that Google CEO Eric Schmidt professes a passionate desire to lend a hand.

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Early every morning, I open my Web browser and load up a half-dozen “aggregator” sites: Techmeme, Memeorandum, Real Clear Politics, Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post. This is my first sortie into the day’s news, the way I orient myself to what’s going on in the world now that I no longer subscribe to a print newspaper. After picking clean the smorgasbord of links, I dip into a second set of sites, these pulling in quirkier tales from around the Web: Digg, BuzzFeed, Fark, Hacker News, Boing Boing, and Kottke as well as my personalized Web aggregators at Friendfeed and Google Reader. During the course of the day, I repeat this process often; in my manic hunt for the freshest stuff on the Web, I reload some of these sites 10 or 20 times each.

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In its first major upgrade ever, Google Blogsearch just relaunched and looks radically different. Instead of the blank page look of Google.com, Blogsearch now looks like Google News (but uglier)–with the hottest topics from the blogosphere aggregated on the front page. Readers can drill down in 11 different categories, including technology, business, sports and entertainment. Google says you can use Blogsearch to see what the world is talking about.

The user interface isn’t nearly as nice as leading tech blog memetracker Techmeme, but the new Blogsearch has some major advantages.

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I just switched all my home pages off of Techmeme to FriendFeed.

I find that Techmeme has become a Google News killer. All I see on it is big media companies (including me, who works at Fast Company).

On top of my FriendFeed right now are people I don’t know. No A-listers. I’m not there.

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