[octokatt]

1) Sometimes yes, especially to be able to pull down large banks of data and sort through it. [1]

2) Besides "Google can afford it", Google is making money off of the snippets they're displaying along side ads in searches. Given a lot of people read the first two lines and move on, the effort of writing those two lines is not awarded money to the writer before this deal, only to Google.

3) The best thing news can be is the fourth estate that prevents disinformation and provides a means for honest discourse. They've gotten chopped up from disruptive business models. We need to reverse that if we like having nice things like democracy and facts.

[1] There are practical reasons not to pay for information, mainly to prevent "witnesses" from making up stories that will be interesting and bring fame. A huge amount of journalism is sorting through claims, which is a major investment of money and time. Coincidentally... that's something not happening in Google results a ton, with terrible results (pun intended).