How much is Google charging the New York Times for “Virginia Tech Shooting” ads? Let’s ask AdWords…

The San Jose Mercury News published an interesting AP piece today about the New York Times, Washington Post and other major news outlets buying search engine ads from Google to pull traffic to their Virginia Tech Shooting coverage. The article's main point is that this situation shows just how dominant search engines like Google and Yahoo have become in the news business.

...for top-tier news organizations to advertise their Virginia Tech coverage this way illuminates the massive power the Web now wields in the traditional media. No longer can the Times or the Post assume that readers would naturally come to them, even when a huge event breaks.

"An increasing number of users go directly to a search engine when news breaks rather than going to a news site," said Peter Hershberg, managing partner of Reprise Media, a search marketing company.

As a result, news organizations need an analogue to last century's newsboys in knickers who barked out "Extra! Extra!" on urban street corners:

The image of Google as the NYTimes newsboy, while funny, doesn't feel quite appropriate considering the big G's current stock price relative to that of his "employers."

Another, more intriguing point, the article makes has to do with the "inherent tackiness" of buying keywords related to a historic tragedy.

One potential problem for news organizations is that keyword ads "can also leave you looking crass - that you're tapping in for a business purpose on a tragedy," said Danny Sullivan, editor of the SearchEngineLand.com newsletter. "It could make some people's eyebrows go up ... `Did you have to go after that particular term?"'

But Sullivan added that if news sites have "substantial information" to share about a search term - even if that information is, after all, a commercial product - "I would err on their side of that - that it's not so bad."

While there are certainly ethical issues for the New York Times to confront in buying search engine keywords from Google, what responsibility does Google bear for selling them? Should they be held accountable for selling "Shooting at Virginia Tech" advertising? If Google's become an intrinsic part of how people get their news, should they have to answer some of the same questions that the more traditional media companies do?

And what the heck are they charging for these ads?

This seems like a pretty important question, particularly if this is how thing are going to work from now on.
To try to find out, I logged into my AdWords account and tried to set up a new ad campaign with bids on a number of search terms related to the Virginia Tech tragedy, specifically:

• Virginia Tech
• VTech
• Virginia Tech Shooting
• VTech Shooting
• Ismail Ax
• Cho Seung Hui
  

When you punch them into AdWords' keyword tool (which shows estimated cost-per-click for specific keywords) here's what I got as around 6pm EST:

So according to this, Google could be charging the New York Times about 80 cents for every "Virginia Tech" search result click.The other terms are considerably less with the exception of "vtech" goes for a bit more (which tends to be the case for specific nicknames of institutions I've found.) Also, let it be noted that I'm not seeing any news ads for "Ismail Ax" or "Cho Seung Hui" as of now.

Am I wrong about the accuracy of this? What other ways are there to see what Google's charging? Anyone else logged in to see a different amount? Do people think this will go up or down in future days?

And how much do you suppose this is setting back the Times? Any back of the envelope calculations?