Its not like the alternative is better. They have the choice of slowly bleeding to death vs severing the hand. Its not clear which is best.
There are upsides, eg google news will stop being an option for news
There are upsides, eg google news will stop being an option for news
They times have changed, and it seems going back is not an option. Before Google big publishers were the default for many people, either on paper or online. Now publishers are in the headline business. Also if they write good things, people will read it still.
They lost some/much of their network effect. And sure, we can say G is sucking up revenue, but they also make it possible to advertise for whatever keyword you want, much more effectively, than publishers did. In this sense G is just a better paper, truck, road, printing press and ad-sales-house in one. Pretty hard to beat it.
An aggregator is an option for getting news.