News Corp Vs Google

An epic battle is brewing between Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and Google, as early as next month we could see News Corp controlled websites disappear from Google’s search results. It all started when Google began to index News Corp websites such as the Wall Street Journal / Fox news and returns to the minute results in Google News Search.

There has been a lot of commentary and discussion between the News Corp supporters and Google supporters, the case has been made by News Corp that Google is stealing content from their websites and basically not paying them for it,  Google has not provided an effective business model for these websites to benefit from having their content on Google News.

What has baffled a lot of people is, why doesn’t News Corp simply block access to its websites from Google? Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineland describes in this great post.

Any webmaster worth a decent salary should know how to implement robot.txt and rel=noindex, I can not believe a large corporation like News Corp can’t just set this up. The reason? because News Corp doesn’t want to loose out on the massive free traffic from Google!

The problem lies in the failure of News Corp not been able to monetize the traffic effectively, and this problem has been a thorn in Mr Murdoch’s pocket for a long time, perhaps now its really starting to hurt? It’s now at a boiling point, and we will see some major development in this area very soon and actually I do think it would be a very interesting case study for the future if News Corp does decide to block Google, it may end up been the golden bullet to solve their problems!

Personally I don’t understand what the big fuss is about, but that could be due to my lack of interest in News Corp, sure I watch Simpsons and Family Guy, but I can’t recall the last time I needed to visit Wall street journal, Fox News or any of News Corps digital news websites.

However I do see the bigger argument here, and one News Corp is using to leverage its case; without enough money to support professional journalists it could spell the end of professional / investigative journalism. What do you think? Here are some recent video’s that talk about this topic, so grab yourself a coffee, sit back and make up your own mind.

( read more for the videos and a copy of Marissa Mayer’s Testimony regarding Google and its commitment to create economic opportunities for publishers.) Sphinn this post

Update: The FTC will be hosting a “Journalism & Internet Age” Workshop on December 1st & 2nd, which will be streamed live from http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/index.shtml , the workshop will feature Mr Rupert Murdoch, Google and Yahoo representatives and Danny Sullivan on the panel. Full program here.

Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal on charging for content from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

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