These days, many of the largest print news publications are either moving entirely online or dying altogether.  This bleak outlook really comes into focus as advertisers increasingly funnel their ad revenue online.  This trend has forced the publishers of several large city newspaper chains to close their doors.  Among the losses have been the Tribune Co., Philadelphia Newspapers, Vancouver, Washington's The Columbian, and Denver's Rocky Mountain News.  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, meanwhile, has moved entirely online, while The Boston Globe only narrowly escaped bankruptcy in past months.

However, while the print news business may appear a dying breed, the online news business is flourishing.  And when it comes to online news, perhaps the biggest player is not a news site itself, but rather Google News, a news aggregator site from Google.  Many major news providers including The New York Times, The Associated Press, CNET, and more are published on Google News.

In a special meeting of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet this Wednesday, newspaper representatives met with Congress about the ailing state of the print business according to Information Week.  Some like David Simon, noted author and the creator of HBO's The Wire, complained that online news and news aggregators are killing the business.

He states, "High-end journalism is dying and it won't be reborn anywhere else without a new model.  The parasite is slowly killing the host.  High-end journalism is a profession."

He dismisses bloggers, stating, "A neighbor with a garden hose is not a firefighter."

He acknowledged, though that his industry perpetrated the move online, stating, "My industry butchered itself and it did so at the behest of Wall Street."

Others, however, don't share Mr. Simon's views of the journalist as erudite minority elite.  Among those who take the opposite stance is Google, whose VP of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, delivered comments.  Ms. Mayer pointed out that Google delivers over 1 billion clicks to print publications a month, while allowing newspapers to block it from crawling their articles.  She points out that many of the sites featured on Google News practice a respectable brand of journalism that is akin to their proudest offline competitors.  She goes on to suggest that competition in the online sphere leads to even better articles than those available offline

She states, "Today, in online news, publishers frequently publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with identical or closely related content, each at their own URL.  The result is parallel Web pages that compete against each other in terms of authority, and in terms of placement in links and search results."

She adds, "Much like Amazon.com suggests related products and YouTube makes it easy to play another video, publications should provide obvious and engaging next steps for users.  Today, there are still many publications that don't fully take advantage of the numerous tools that keep their readers engaged and on their site."

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a liberal aggregated weblog that help launched the aggregation movement, concurs.  She states, "The future of journalism is not dependent on the future of newspapers."