Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Wednesday that the World Wide Web search leader hopes its recently acquired advertising service DoubleClick will aid newspapers as they struggle to corral more online revenue.

“It’s a huge moral vital to help here,” Schmidt said during a question-and-answer session at an event hosted in San Francisco by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Without providing specifics about how it might be accomplished, Schmidt said DoubleClick’s system for serving up online display ads could generate “significant” revenue online for newspapers.

Still, he acknowledged the boost probably won’t be sufficient to restore the hefty profit margins that newspaper publishers historically have enjoyed from print advertising.

Mountain View-based Google completed its $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick in March after an extensive antitrust review that focused on whether the deal would give the combined entity too much capability by the $40 billion online ad market.

Google additionally has a financial incentive to bolster newspapers

considering the stories, pictures and other subject matter that they distribute online invents more opportunities for the company to compose money from short advertising hyperlinks that seem on millions of Web pages each day.

But footing the bill to gather news and other data has become a more daunting task in recent years as advertisers have shifted more of their budgets to the Net in an effort to connect with consumers who are increasingly eschewing newspapers and other traditional media.

The shift has been particularly painful for newspapers, which have been laying off hundreds of workers and trimming other costs as their revenue crumbles.

Newspaper publishers plus are boosting their online revenue, but so far those efforts haven’t been nearly sufficient to offset the decline in print advertising. Last year, for instance, the U.S. newspaper industry’s overall ad revenue fell by 8 percent to $45.4 billion, according to the Newspaper organization of…

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