[westurner]

If you don't want them to index your content and send you free traffic, you can already specify that in your robots.txt; for free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

There are no ads on Google News.

There is an apparent glut of online news: supply exceeds demand and so the price has fallen.

[dehrmann]

> There are no ads on Google News.

This is the ironic part of the policy. You're right about the glut, and there was a glut in print 20 years ago, too. Google's definitely hurt businesses, but it's usually though disintermediating them (think Yelp). Google News and search don't really do that for news--snippets and headlines aren't the same as an article. I find it hard to believe that ABC's brand isn't strong enough for them to pull their content from Google and expect people to go to abc.net.au; I just don't think than can sell enough ads to give the content away.

[chillfox]

I find that a lot of news articles these days don’t amount to much more than what’s in the headline/subtitle.

[westurner]

By hurt, do you mean competed with by effectively utilizing technology to help people find information about the world from multiple sources.

There are very many news aggregators and most do serve ads next to the headlines they index. I assume that people typically link out from news aggregation sites more than into vertically-integrated services.

Perhaps the content producers / information service providers could develop additional revenue streams in order to subsidize a news aggregation public service. Micropayments (BAT, Web Monetization (ILP)), ads, paywalls, and public and private grants are sources of revenue for content producers.

I think it's disingenuous to blame news aggregation sites for the unprofitability of extremely redundant journalism. What happened to journalism? Internet. Excessive ads. Aren't we all writers these days.

Unfortunately they killed the "most cited" and was it "most in-depth" source analysis functions of Google News; and now we're stuck with regurgitated news wires and press releases and all of these eyewitness mobile phone videos with two-bit banal commentary and also punditry. How the world has changed.

So, as far as scientific experiments are concerned, it might be interesting to see what the impact of de-listing from free time sites X, Y, and Z is.

Do the papers in Australia and France now intend to compensate journal ScholarlyArticle authors whose work they summarize and hopefully at least cite the titles and URLs of, or the journals themselves?

[wutbrodo]

Yup, Australian media companies are just resorting to the high-overhead alternative of passing a law equivalent to specifying the robots.txt of a handful of companies. And for some reason the Aus govt is dumb enough to do it for them.