Has Google News killed the newspaper?

So, is the mainstream newspaper industry on its way out? If you're used to reading your daily news on the web each morning, throughout the day and at night, you may already know this answer. When news happens, most folks now immediately turn to the web for instant coverage -- from mainstream websites to blogs. What is this doing to the newspaper industry, you may ask?

This article over at Forbes.com tells of a generation (and many behind them) that have abandoned newsprint for online publishing. The best example I can think of here is Google News, probably the best ... no, positively the best news aggregation site on the web. It brings together stories in any category from online news sources the world over, in 20+ languages to boot. How can a newspaper compete with this scale? It can't and the newspaper industries know it.

A quote from this story sums up this move rather well, as it has many other moves in business history: "it is in the creative destruction of capitalism that industries evolve in a ruthless, Darwinian way" -- and that's all she wrote. Just like Wal-Mart's infiltration on the retail mom-and-pop landscape using superior logistics and information, so has online news against stodgy industries like the newspaper. While local newspapers will no doubt continue to live on (if not thrive), the large newspapers will soon be extinct, or will have to move circulations to the online version -- and not charge 50 cents a day as well.