Publishers follow Murdoch threat to block Google

Rupert Murdoch's threats to pull content from his News Corporation websites off Google News have been echoed by the publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News. As The First Post reported this week, Murdoch has been in talks with Bing, Microsoft's search engine, about a hook-up that would see News Corp newspaper stories displayed on that site. In recent weeks the Australian media mogul has railed against the "parasites" of the internet who "steal" content from his titles.

Now MediaNews Group, publisher of the Post and 53 other newspapers in 11 states, has confirmed it will block Google when it moves content behind a paywall for readers in California and Pennsylvania, according to its CEO Dean Singleton. Likewise, AH Belo Corp is looking at the move for the Dallas Morning News, the Providence Journal in Rhode Island, the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California, and the Denton Record-Chronicle in Texas, although its initial strategy will focus on introducing subscriptions.

MediaNews Group's Singleton told financial network Bloomberg that: "The things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic."

While admitting that such a move was not yet imminent for his company, James Moroney of AH Belo dismissed the value of Google News to their company's model as it currently stands, claiming readers who come to his sites via the search engine possess little commercial value.

"This is traffic that's not being monetised to any great degree," Moroney said. "It's akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer.” At present there are less than 100 publishers who block Google News, but if a trend develops then the company could find themselves in trouble. 

"We do worry about it, and we think it would be a bad outcome," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said earlier this month. "We would encourage them to stay in our program." His colleague Josh Cohen, head of Google News, claims that newspapers do gain from being on the service: "You can point back to the traffic that we’re sending and the fact that so few of those publishers have opted out as a pretty strong case that there's value being delivered back to these publishers."

All eyes are now on Murdoch and News Corporation, who have announced that they plan to roll out the paywall across such sites as the Sun and the Times in 2010. ·