Denver, Dallas Papers May Join Murdoch's War on the Internet

That a handful of newspaper companies are indicating this week that they want to join forces with Murdoch and Microsoft (MSFT) and make war on the ethos of the world wide web may not yet indicate a trend, exactly, but this development, as reported by Bloomberg yesterday is worth noting for a number of reasons.

First the details: The publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are reportedly considering blocking Google from indexing “some of their stories,” much like Murdoch’s News Corp (NWS).

The CEO of MediaNews Group, Inc., which publishes the Denver paper, told the news service that his company intends to start blocking Google at the same time that it starts charging its visitors for accessing its online content next year.

“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,” Dean Singleton is quoted as saying.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that Singleton is commiting to implement the simple Robots Exclusion Protocol that would actually opt-out of Google Search, since erecting a paywall, such as that used by the Wall Street Journal doesn’t by itself prevent search engines from crawling the pages.

Overall, publishers continue to exhibit poor understanding of how Google works or of the many options they have for dealing with the search giant. One of those options is the “First Click Free” program, which allows them to have both a paywall and the traffic sent by Google.

In a recent interview with Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, Google News exec Josh Cohen explains how it works:

“If a publisher understands that quality, original content does best and therefore tries to create more, great. But there is still a lot of those discussions that take place where people will say … ‘I have to make this content free or Google won’t index it,’ and that’s not the case.

“First Click Free is only one example of the ways that publishers can make subscription content available. They can do previews, they can block it in different ways. I think there are a lot of those questions about the nuts and bolts of how you can work with us, subscriptions just being one of them.”

Of course, this still doesn’t address the “leaky back door” issue, whereby knowledgeable users copy the headline and paste it into Google Search and obtain the entire article placed behind the paywall for free.

But it does address the confusion over “either/or” when it comes to paywalls and search.

Personally, I remain unconvinced that any publisher, from Murdoch to Singleton, will:

1. erect a paywall,
2. exclude Google from searching it, and
3. stick with that decision.

I have no doubt now that some will try, however. There are too many rumors and reports out there to this effect, and the publishers are in too much economic pain.

Adding in the reported possibility that Microsoft will pay publishers to do this, while embedding the forbidden content in Bing, simply strikes me as too bizarre to make business sense, not to mention a violation of everything Internet culture stands for.

Microsoft may have the cash to pay publishers to do this, for a while, but how much market share will it actually wrest away from Google in the process?

No, from a business perspective, all of this is a wrong-headed strategy. Meanwhile, working more closely with Google to fix what’s broken about their old publishing model remains, to my way of thinking, a more attractive option.

And down in Mountainview, if I’m not mistaken, the door remains open…

Earlier Bnet post, plus long list of relevant links:

Murdoch and Microsoft Talk About Ganging Up on Google