The Times and Washington Post have, rather pathetically, started buying search result ads from Google to funnel traffic to their VTech shooting coverage. Whose bright idea was this? But more importantly for us here at Digital Point, what's Google charging per click? I looked into it using my AdWords account and came up with an answer...but I'm not so sure how accurate my result was. This could be a real service we DPers provide... Take a look at the methodology in my blog post and lets see if we can't narrow this down a bit more.
The most accurate way to check is to recreate their ad with the same text and destination URL...that'll give you the minimum CPC, which they are usually setting their bids to. This is not completely accurate, of course, because it's based on only the initial quality score and the QS gets refined while the ad is running. But I think this method is better than using the keyword tool, which can be way off sometimes.
but if you type in anything else, just pick anything--something mundane, "japan news" or "moscow news," you'll still see the major news outlets advertising in AdWords. So I'm not sure how morbid it is; more like business as usual.