> Considering all the places where they voluntarily put their content (Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc...), is the loss of Google News really a problem?

You should read up on the german Leistungsschutzrecht-Saga from a few years back. The media industry was lobbying for years to get Google to pay for showing links and snippets to their content in Google News. When the legislation finally passed Google offered publishers the option to delist them from Google News (not search) or keep showing their results while waiving their right to get paid. They all chose the latter thereby rendering the very same legislation they have been pushing for so long useless. Absolutely absurd.

Presumably the publishers intend to strong-arm all those sources into paying them.

They are referring to news snippets that show up in Google Search (not the Google News app on your phone). Those are one of the most significant sources of traffic for publishers.

Even for a web search, Google News doesn't show snippets at all anymore, just headlines and thumbnails. (This is in the "Top Stories" widget and on the "News" tab.)

It looks like the snippet is still there for generic web results, but that's further down the page for a news search and probably not a big driver of traffic.

> Is Google News really that big a deal for publishers?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-...

https://www.aeepp.com/pdf/InformeNera.pdf

The NERA analysis found a 6 percent overall drop in traffic from the Spanish Google News closure and a 14 percent drop for smaller publications. Those numbers are slightly smaller than a GigaOm analysis from last year, which found traffic drop-offs of 10 to 15 percent.

This was addressed in the article. The shares of other sources are down, and the shares of Google sources are steady or rising.

Apple News is awful. Worse, you can't uninstall it on MacOS. Since when is it OK for machines built for professionals like the MacBook Pro to come with crapware, let alone uninstallable crapware?

Far more important is the search traffic I'd guess, but it will obviously go dark in concert with Google News.