Newsweek and Vanity Fair are just two magazines that have recently reported on Rupert Murdoch’s fight against Google, which won’t give him any money for the throngs of visitors it directs to his NewsCorp Web sites each day. So Murdoch is considering pulling all of his content from Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and other news organizations out of Google’s search engines and carving out a new future with Microsoft’s rival search engine, Bing.

As Newsweek writes: “Now all Murdoch and Microsoft have to do is convince us to start using two search engines every time we go to the Web to look for news. First Google, which most of us already use; and then, oh yeah, I should now go to Bing in the hopes that one of Murdoch’s properties also has something to say on that subject.”

Gawker humorously illustrates that Google News wouldn’t look much different without NewsCorp’s content, even when NewsCorp has the semi-scoop. But try telling that to Dean Singleton, the Denver Post publisher and CEO of MediaNews Group.

According to Bloomberg, when MediaNews begins charging readers in Pennsylvania and California for online content next year, it will block some content from Google News.

“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,” Singleton says.

Posted 11/25/2009 at 2:00 pm by Michael de Yoanna
Business, Media, Panorama, People :: Permalink :: Comments

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