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Comment by theli0nheart | Hacker News Reader

I think this is missing the point, which is that the new generation doesn't care about ink and paper news. There are some out there that seem to believe that people will "miss" outlets such as the NYTimes and WSJ, but I don't think that they will. All that really matters to people is getting relevant information and opinions about current events.

Part of me thinks that most of the people defending ink and paper are doing so purely for sentimental reasons. Citizen journalists have proven time and time again that they can stand up to the plate and deliver interesting content.

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I don't think the post was about ink and paper, it was not even about news. It's was about the increasing influence of content owners and commoditization of aggregators and search engines. Finishing his sentence one could say that nothing stops Bing from going after top 500 bloggers and essentially offering them cash to opt out of Google index.

It can actually work: while the Internet is huge, the 80/20 principle still applies - 80% of the population are interested in 20% of the content. I bet that pulling just top 20 NFL/NCAA sites and blogs out of Google will noticeably boost Bing's audience. Heck, maybe even getting exclusive rights to index Wikipedia may do the trick.

Alternatively, strategies like this could segregate users on search. Football and Nascar on bing and an entire class of citizens have left Google. Makes me think of Myspace and Facebook.

The real question is how much would of a deal would you have to give WSJ to convince them to leave all of google's eyeballs behind? A bigger cut of a smaller pie is not necessarily a better deal.

Smart people get their news from aggregators and feeds. Normal people go to sites directly for their daily dosage of drivel. Both Google search for individual stories. It just so happens that the same news story is linked 10 times down the page, some often pointing to the same page due to blogs and aggregators.

I predict nothing consequential will come of this drama.

Well, maybe. Actually I probably agree. But here is the test.

If "real news" disappears from Google, will people switch to Bing. Bing works too. If it bothers people at all, they might switch.

No speculation about what the new generation cares about necessary. Trial by fire.

As I understood the article, is not about ink and paper. The suggestion was, that Bing will pay NYTimes and WSJ to index their content, if/when will they go out of Google index - the intention behind is, that if people want to have those sites in the search results, they will have go to Bing.

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