A commuter grabs his favorite sections of a stack of local papers and takes them on the train to read: the unbundling concept has been with us for a long time, but with online content the economic impact of this concept is beginning to take hold. Neil Budde, General Manager of Yahoo! News, outlined a world in which users in control of their content choices is sending news publishers "through the looking glass into the users' world." It's an environment in which the bits are easily assembled at a very fine level for users via portals and tools such as search engines and RSS feeds, but also one in which the monetization models are not yet up to snuff. Neil gave as one graphic example the closing of a newspaper in Hazard, Kentucky, a town near the coal belt that is as of late in the headlines due to mining accidents. The need for quality coverage is there, but the economics of existing news content bundles no longer support this coverage in many instances. Users define their news bundles today just as kids rip and download "party mixes" of favorite songs via tools such as del-icio.us, digg, and Newsvine. The news industry is beginning to "get" that news bundling has been blown to bits, but they're still struggling with how to be effective bundlers in an online environment. Players such as Yahoo are well placed to take an agnostic approach to news aggregation and allow the bits to have highly contextualized advertising for specific audiences across their favorite bits. Where this leaves traditional news companies is still very much an open question, but Neil did underscore Yahoo's news development does not put them in competition with their channel partners (not). Yahoo will be one of the big winners in this evolving environment, and for that very reason news organizations need to think also about more neutral channels for distributing their bits that can lead to the highest margins possible. This will be an exciting year in news aggregation, and tools and deals being developed by Yahoo will be a key part of that excitement.