Neil Henry’s recent op-ed headlined “The Decline of News” has sparked some criticism in the blogosphere.

For background, Henry is a former Washington Post reporter and now a journalism professor at the University of California - Berkeley. He wrote the rise of the Web and circulation and advertising declines at U.S. newspapers is leading to staff cutbacks and, ultimately, the decline of quality news coverage. Henry also wrote, “I see a world where corporations such as Google and Yahoo continue to enrich themselves with little returning to journalistic enterprises, all this ultimately at the expense of legions of professional reporters across America, now out of work because their employers in "old" media could not afford to pay them.” At the end, Henry wrote that because journalism is “a public trust vital to a free society,” Google and other major Internet companies should support journalism schools to ensure future quality.

In a response piece, BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote Google is doing their own job and journalists need to do their job. Earlier in the same post, Jarvis wrote, “First of all, I don’t see how Google is directly making a fortune off news. It has no ads on GoogleNews. Yes, it includes headlines now in its universal [search] results and there are ads on those pages. But those headlines all link directly to the journalistic institutions that produce them. They should only wish that Google would put more headlines on that page.”

Jarvis continues, “Second, these companies actually help news organizations: Yahoo pays syndication fees for the content it runs. And Google is far and away the most productive means of sending audience to news sites. Even more than Drudge.”

Late yesterday, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise blogged, “Google News fell behind Digg.com in share of UK visits to News and Media websites. Yahoo! News UK & Ireland ranks at #4, Digg.com at #6 and Google News UK at #7 among News and Media websites. However, looking at website visits alone tells only half the story. Google News UK refered five times more traffic to News and Media websites than Yahoo! UK & Ireland News.”

Dan Gillmore of the Center for Citizen Media is working on a response piece to Henry’s op-ed, so keep your eyes out for that in the coming weeks.

So, do newspapers need Google? Yes, for a few reasons. Search of all kinds is still very, very important. Local search, particularly, is becoming more important as people look for products and services in their area. And newspapers have lots of information on the local area, so it seems search and newspapers are a natural pairing.

Besides, ignoring Google would be like ignoring a large pink elephant in your kitchen.