Of course the quality and quantity of German news on Google would worsen, but the point would be to see if it is Google benefiting more from the newspapers, or the other way around.
It would be interesting to see an official statistic from the big papers where they get their traffic from. I get my news by surfing directly to their homepages. I think I read somewhere that they get most of their hits through the google search although I cant really belive that.
I would imagine the bulk of traffic comes from headline news. Some people check the paper every day, some people catch a bit of news on the bus or TV or whatever, then google it.
I think the rest of the traffic historical articles, looked up by people trying to win arguments on the internet. I don't know how many times i've been pulled to the NYT because of that sort of behavior. I would guess all of that traffic comes from google.
