Two more US publishers threaten to join News Corp and quit Google

 

NEW YORK - Two more US newspaper publishers, MediaNews Group and AH Belo, have said that they are considering pulling their content from Google in the wake of News Corporation's threat earlier this week.

The decision by the publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News respectively have said they might pull their news after it was reported that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp was in talks with Microsoft about an exclusive search deal with Bing.

MediaNews Group, which publishes 54 daily newspapers in 11 states, said it would block Google News from the content it puts behind a pay wall early next year, beginning with newspapers in Chico, California, and York, Pennsylvania.

However, CEO Dean Singleton told Bloomberg that it would not block Google completely as traffic was still an issue.

"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."

AH Belo, the smaller of the two news groups, said that it was considering the move as it looks at implementing online subscriptions, but that no decision was imminent. 

Its paid content strategy will first focus on subscriptions at either the Dallas Morning News, The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California, or The Denton Record-Chronicle in Texas.

If News Corp, MediaNews and AH Belo push ahead with their plans they will join around 100 publishers, mainly outside of the US, who do not allow Google News access to their websites.

Most notably, in 2006 a Belgian court ruled Google must stop publishing stories by French-language newspapers or face fines of €1m (£675,000) for every day the content stays live.

The court ruled that Google's publishing of newspaper content online contravened copyright laws.

The copyright rulings were before newspapers realised that advertising alone would not pay for the content they are freely publishing online, but it means the list of media owners barring their content from the search giant could grow dramatically.

Google might well be forced to act in response to rival Microsoft. If the software giant offers millions of dollars in payments to newspaper firms Google could have no choice but to swiftly follow suit.

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