Do I have to come right flat out and tell you everything?

There is a lot of interest in news, and a lot of money generated by it. But:

$4,700,000,000.

It’s more than the combined ticket sales of the last two “Avengers” movies. It’s more than what virtually any professional sports team is worth. And it’s the amount that Google made from the work of news publishers in 2018 via search and Google News, according to a study to be released on Monday by the News Media Alliance.

The journalists who create that content deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion, said David Chavern, the president and chief executive of the alliance, which represents more than 2,000 newspapers across the country, including The New York Times.

“They make money off this arrangement,” Mr. Chavern said, “and there needs to be a better outcome for news publishers.”

That $4.7 billion is nearly as much as the $5.1 billion brought in by the United States news industry as a whole from digital advertising last year — and the News Media Alliance cautioned that its estimate for Google’s income was conservative. For one thing, it does not count the value of the personal data the company collects on consumers every time they click on an article like this one.

To state the obvious:

“Why is my local paper so thin now?”
“Why aren’t there any statehouse reporters now?”
“Why don’t they do more investigative reporting?”
“Why did all my colleagues get laid off?”
Well you see, https://t.co/DfNC9c2krg— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) June 10, 2019