As if news companies need another reason to dislike Google news. But here it is. Google News has become a powerful arbiter of your news brand, and it is walking off with the most valuable asset: user trust.
Have you started using Google News to see how legitimate a source is? I started doing it a few months ago – if I wanted to try to verify something I saw on Twitter, I would first turn to see if the source is Google News, since Google already does some work to check the legitimacy of the sites inlcuded in their search.
This is terrible for news orgs, because the brand I’m trusting is Google News.
There are a few standouts of course, like the New York Times, my local news brands the Seattle P-I and the Seattle Times, USA Today, and other national papers, but by and large my barometer is becoming “is it in Google News?”
This is one aspect of the AP’s googlefreakout that (although I’m not sure they understand why) makes perfect strategic sense: the new news portal. When one of the few “uncopyable” commodities on the internet is trust, it should be well protected.
The real questions seem to be: Can you share content without sharing trust? Can you gain trust from only small bits of content? Should you be able to charge for that transfer of trust?
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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It seems interesting that Google is making money providing searchable and synthesized news while the newspapers are losing money. If the newspapers all went under so would Google News. I am not sure what the answer to all this is, probably a whole new business model. Maybe separating the production and distribution of news. No matter the answer the people that actually produce these stories need to make money for Google News to continue to be successful, which I hope happens as I too use it very regularly.